I just went back further and caught up more (been away too long!). I read about the breakthrough you had with H. That must have been so great after all the work you've done! I practically stood up and cheered. All your theories about his guilt seem like they were right on all along. He said things like, "after all I've done," etc. Sounds just like my H, too. Plus, getting out of limbo is a HUGE RELIEF, for both of you.
But I was also struck by something else, reading about the financial shenanigans that were going on by your H, and hearing your disbelief that he could do that stuff, and other posters talking about their own WAS screwing them over financially, and it totally reminded me of something.
Ok, so I'm a huge dork and LOVED Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV show back in the day. I've been rewatching episodes on DVD from Netflix, and I recently watched Season 3 where one of the good characters accidentally kills a human instead of a vampire, and then for the rest of the season she spirals out of control and ends up becoming evil for a time. And I had one of my eureka moments(TM), and I realized that I could apply this scenario to my marriage! (Hey, I've applied more farfetched ones before).
Watching that season actually made the whole "alien WAS" phenomenon more clear to me, like a visual aid. If people can't face the pain they caused, that pain has its own momentum. It quickly becomes, "well, the LBS is this way or deserves it, I don't care anyway" and can escalate into greater and greater justifications for worse and worse behavior. The more the WAS hurts the LBS, the more it justifies hurting them in the first place. It's all in service of justifying the original, main action.
Crap deal for all involved. The book Mistakes Were Made...but Not By Me puts self-justification forward as one of the main reasons humans do so many evil things to each other.
/Buffy rant
It is in the shelter of each other that people live.--Irish proverb
