How should I proceed now? Is there hope?

[NotCrackingUp]

Pinhead,

I read a good bit of your story last night. How it hurts to hear your spouse tell you he/she doesn't feel love or desire for you anymore. I was crushed and still am as a result of what happened to me, I could identify with your feelings too. On reading your posts, I thought about the fact that a lot of the anger and rejection our spouses showed is probably not addressed to the right target at all. I know I was partly at fault in what went wrong, and you too acknowledge some faults, but I'm sure now that my H was also exploding over problems that went away back into childhood and adolescence, issues between himself and his mother and brother and sisters that had nothing to do with me. Roles he'd taken on, jealousies and frustrations he'd never outed.That's not a cop-out, I'm not saying I'm an innocent victim, but I'm realizing that there were other forces at work of which I'd no knowledge or control. Your W seemed to have similar anger directed towards you but springing from outside you too.
I read in one of the many books I trawled through this summer (after the H had bolted, sadly), that in a domestic row, the angriest words shouted by one spouse to another are really directed towards the parent of the opposte sex. Sounds strange, but think about it.

I live in the same yard as my mother-in-law, a nice woman I love dearly. She used to see her son every day I was away at work, cook his lunch for him, etc. When he split from me, he very quickly also split from her, hardly speaks to her, never goes to see her when he comes here. He'd always been close to his own family, now avoids them like the plague. I sometimes feel he took out an easy target, but was actually aiming at something else much wider, a way of life, a role he didn't care for. If he still felt a "child", living in the childhood home, under Mum's eye, did he suddenly want out of a "package" of which I was just an element?Maybe I became like a younger version of "mum" and he couldn't feel sexual about me anymore? I'm convinced he's got lots of growing up and addressing issues to do, and many of the issues in question have nothing direct to do with me.

I'm glad to read that now you and your W are talking and listening. How did you get to the stage where that was again possible? Beyond anger and silence to dialogue? Has she revived her feelings of love for you? Has prayting helped you? Please give me a few pointers. Was there any action you took that was decisive? I hope you're out of the woods, or at least in a very wide clearing from which you can see the sky.
NCU