Back56, thank you so much for sharing your experience with boundary setting. Xh can be emotionally abusive and I've needed to bar all contact so I could start to recover and get a better sense of myself. Xh is an expert "gaslighter" and that abuse left me questioning who I am and what I am capable of.
I have started allowing communication again, but I have found that trauma is easily triggered even from a benign email. I just need to be away from him. The boys feel the same way for the same reasons. The psychology in my sitch is complicated and deep.
