Afterall..... This IS my life V

[Stigmata]

Heather,

I hope you are able to steel yourself and gather up your emotional energy following this latest draining from your H. As for a pep talk, I think you have come a long long way in understanding that you need to guard your own emotional energy, keep it for yourself, and let H burn his own emotional fuel in his own chaotic way without you internalizing his BS, which is what it is, BS. All sturm und drang, fluster and wind.

I have seen over your posts over the many months that you are listening to your self-respect voice more and more and slowly giving her your warrior strength/will that you display in your every day non-R-based life. Good going. Don't worry. It will take time. Don't rush it and it will come to you. The good news is you are not in a dangerous environment so you can afford to grow your budding self-respect each day.:)

So many women never get to this point. And, even worse, they are getting the sh1t beaten out of them by their H's/SOs on a daily basis; some even ending up with recurrent hospital stays. And they cannot nurture their self-respect since they are too busy being afraid for their lives. They cannot detach. They have given up.

Detach from the outcome. Detach from listening to your reactionary "blurting out" inner dialogue every time H pushes your buttons. You've come a long way in catching yourself in this. Again, WTG.

IMO he is testing you and testing you hard. Then, each time you fail it's like he sticks his siphon in your boundary hole to sap your emotional well being. There are two ways I see you failing most dramatically:

1. You get angry, your brain editor goes down, and you blurt out a variation of, "That's it. It's over. I'm done. This time it's for good. Perhaps some personal low blows are hurled in his direction via hurtful words where you know his emotional weak spots are. It's now a pretty entrenched pattern with years involved.

2. You actually take off for any period of time and H circles the kids like wagons around him and shuts down into complete and total shut down. Ie, the silent treatment, sneers, thumbing his nose at your opinion of his porn, ignoring you, and devolving into full martyr mode. Getting him back into even neutral mode can sometimes take weeks.

Either way, both responses are total failures of his BS tests since you lose hold of yourself and your emotional energy and you fall into his pit with him.

It's like watching a car try to free itself from a rut. I see you both rocking your R back and forth, back and forth, and just as it seems like you're both free the tire slips and you are both left exhausted... stuck.

I can't forget H's email to you. He was being very vulnerable and scared in his own right. And definitely love there. Rock goes the car up the rut. Your decision to get rid of the truck rocks it some more and it starts looking good.

IMO his email verbalized his most terrifying insecurity, the one that all of his tests, the bed, truck et all hinge upon: that you will abandon him and his family since you have a pattern of one foot out the door threats.

Your A IMO was the equivalent of dropping a 50 megaton nuke on his biggest insecurity. Now not only have you shown the capacity that you can leave him physically but you also can leave him emotionally to another man. This is nothing short of disastrous to the psyche of a very codependent person. Worse, for a man it feels like complete emasculation. Even worse, it threatens his ultimate image of protecting his family as the leader of your household since he attaches all of his self-esteem into being the highest, best example of what a family is to your kids.

It seems to me he really has no other concrete examples in his life of his proudest accomplishments from what you've previously posted. At least nothing really beyond your M and his pride in overcoming both or your F'd up FOOs and actually reaching the outward appearance, anyway, of the all-American family pursuing its own version of its all-American dream.

This seems awfully important to him IMO. Important enough that if he should lose it he has nothing positive left to show for his life, which may tip him over the edge into full blown alcoholism if he finds himself alone... no W and no control over the on and off visitation schedule of his kids -- especially his son. Maybe this bleak future is what is fueling his irrational fears that cause him to flail around in misdirected stabs at controlling you.

Do I think he needs help? Oh yeah. Do I think your sitch is hopeless? Actually, no. But you can't go on burning valuable emotional energy on his sht tests and drama.

Something is going to shove that car out of its rut and IMO it's going to be a wake up call to him. God helps he who helps himself so they say. I don't believe those are merely jaunty little words lobbed about. Words for you, yes, but a real message to him to seek outside help understanding what he is doing to his family before it's too late.

Seems to me this will come in the form of one big MFing Heather boundary. Delivered either via major vulnerability from you or unblinking calm gravitas. I'll try to address this perhaps in another post.

All I know is if H doesn't respond in a proactive way to this final boundary, he is going to be kicking himself mercilessly in the future when it suddenly dawns on him (and it will) that his misguided efforts at control and inability to forgive you cost him the best things to ever happen to him in his life.

-Stigmata-