I used to be on the db board quite a bit when I was trying to rebuild my relationship with my then separated H. DB worked for me to an extent. It lead him back, but it did not lead him to treating me much better. It changed my behavior but it did not change him.
So, after I confronted him about a PA he'd had in the past that I found out about a couple years after the fact (that had continued as an EA), he told me we were over and he wasn't in love with me, blah, blah, blah.
This time I couldn't see any reason to continue dbing. It would be humiliating. I ended up filing myself because he hadn't taken care of it as in the past when he insisted we were over, and he started threatening to control me with money and the house. I figured I needed to protect myself, so I took care of most of the divorce stuff myself. He didn't change his tune about us until he had moved across country to the East Coast and I moved to the West Coast. Then he sent me a letter a few days before our tele-conference divorce court date. He recanted everything he'd said about not loving me and said he'd never wanted to leave me, etc. But he did not ask to stop divorce preceedings. So I did nothing and the divorce was finalized almost a year ago now.
I raise our 8 yr old son by myself now, while working a lot of hours and constantly worrying about money. I have very little family or close friends near me. I'm working on meeting people, but it's slow going while I'm trying to keep it all together.
So I don't know exactly why I'm back here. Maybe just to hear from others in the same situation. I don't expect that my XH will ever say that he wants me back. Even though both my son and I harbor fantasies about him suddenly finding a back bone and asking for the three of us to be a family again.
I don't have a whole lot contact with him, but my son flies across country to see him 2x a year now. It's scary and hard for everyone, especially my son. When my son visited his dad last I got lots of texts from my XH, some very sweet ones not just about our son but about me, but as I expected, when my son came home, he stopped. I knew I was being pulled back in by him, and I knew the sting and hurt was coming when he would inevitably pull away again. It's his way. And it's my way to take the bait.
Anyway, after a year I am still hitting these vicious walls of depression and overwhelmed with thoughts of XH. Every store I go into reminds me of some time I went into the same store in a different town with him. It's only been a year and the long road to "getting over it" doesn't look like it has an end. I barely keep things together and sometimes and struck immobile by this overwhelming fear. Fear of having all this responsibility, raising my son alone, living in a house alone, working a job that requires so much self-initiative, and having so few people to turn to for help. It's so frightening it makes sleeping very hard sometimes and I'm even more scared that my son will see how scared his sole source of stability is. And there is no end in sight.
