Coming back from my emotional abuse

[GoRoPo]

Hi all,

Been lurking around for a while.

My wife and I have been together for almost 20 years, married for almost 13. I'm 37 and she's 36. Two amazing daughters, 8 and 5. We have only been with each other both physically and serious relationship wise.

My wife first dropped the bomb via a letter in May 2014. Said she couldn't be with me anymore, that I had become very angry and negative, that I had refused when she asked for help to fix our marriage via counselling or otherwise, that she doesn't know if counseling would even help because she is so checked out and not feeling the same way about me, she never wanted a divorce but her heart has become numb and stopped loving.

Other than her internal feeling that I can't know, all of the above was true.

It was a huge wake up call to me, like a light switch flipped. I FINALLY SAW it. I was completely oblivious, secure in the fact that, yeah I was unhappy and angry all the time at her, but we were married and things would work themselves out. I had totally taken her for granted and was angry all the time. I can't explain it other than the light switch analogy. I just saw it, and stopped. I was able to see her for the amazing person she was (despite the fact that the house wasn't always clean or all the other millions of little nits I picked constantly).

I would estimate by poor behavior had started right around the time our first daughter was born. Maybe further back, but not as intense. I would be the first to admit that most of the time through our relationship it revolved around me. As in, she was always the one who was just more in love with me than I was with her.

She agreed to stick with me and see what happened. Seemed like things were on the rise, but really she was just acting so I wouldn't be a pouty baby, as I found out later. I finally got it together to begin counselling with her a month or two later.

Things were going along, no real progress one way or the other, but she wasn't leaving, when I snooped on her Facebook one day and discovered that she had been having an EA with a dad at school (let's call him Ron). I knew he was her good friend, but I was so secure in the mythical "us" and "solid marriage" that I never once thought twice about their relationship. In fact, I'd often tell her to have Ron help her with this or that, when I just didn't want to or wasn't interested. Which was a lot (not me pushing her to him, but not being interested).

It hit me like a ton of bricks. Aha, I thought. HERE'S the reason she wants out! I confronted her on it later that day. Without getting in to the dirty details, it did really open us up and was the beginning of what was a climb back (until recently, more on that later).

I also confessed to a porn habit I had, masturbating every night often to the exclusion of making love to her, even when she asked me to. I was in a very unhealthy lifestyle pattern of staying up super late, waking up only as early as I absolutely had to. Usually on the weekends I would sleep in super late, and generally miss out on most of the day that I could have spent with her and the kids, if I'd wanted to. Mostly then I'd just not be interested in doing anything, often just watching sports and whatnot all day. But, hey, I was there, right? (sarcastic)

So, there in a neat bow were the issues that plagued us. Her EA and my porn "addiction". I put that in quotes now because I am not sure that it was truly an addiction, or just a symptom of other issues.

Then, we truly did begin the journey up. I had read DR as well as books by various other authors. I did a complete 180 in so many aspects of my life. Completely stopped consuming porn and masturbating, totally changed my lifestyle and schedule -- getting up early with her and the kids, taking active interests in her interests, etc. We were talking future, going on little weekends trips, trying to figure out how to buy a vacation home, etc. Things were feeling really great. In retrospect it might have been too much, but it felt right and we both seemed to be responding well and seemed really happy. This was about November 14 until (almost) the present.

She wasn't quite back to full "I love you" mode, in fact she still wasn't really saying it. Jumping ahead for a moment, for the first time about a month and a half or so ago she DID actually say on her own, out of the blue. Wow! We were in the clear. Things so great.

The Ron (EA guy) issue had come up time and time again in therapy. She had originally clean broke from him, but as our kids are basically best friends it wasn't really possible, nor did she want to lose him as she was truly a dear friend of hers before any EA stuff started happening. Needless to say, I was uneasy at best about this. I wasn't fully trusting of both her and myself at this point -- her in that she wasn't secretly pining away for him still, and myself that I'd be able to spot it and act on it if she was. It was definitely a control issue on my part, and we discussed that at length in therapy.

I went up and down as far as how I felt about her continuing to see him -- one day would be totally fine with it and trust her (when I told her this her eyes literally welled up with tears because she was so happy and relieved), then the next totally upset by it.

For her part, she had agreed and was more or less keeping up with her end of the bargain -- not going to cut him out my life, but I will be totally transparent with you about it. All texts, interactions, etc. She felt it was ridiculous, but for my sake was OK with doing it. Her always letting me know slowly faded as interaction with him became more and more commonplace, and frankly I was mostly OK with that. I was learning to trust her again. Both her words and her actions indicated no reason not to. And, spoiler alert, that situation is NOT what the gist of this thread is about.

Cut to the last month of us and therapy. We have had 4 sessions since. The first 3 of these had become more and more about what I needed to feel loved, how to fill MY love tank so I could be OK with Ron, how I really wanted her to say I love you back to me. In recent hindsight, classic too much too soon pressure.

Each week I would feel her more and more distant. Not taking my hand like she had been, and more. Just very obviously different.

Finally, the day after the third of those sessions, she just told me she had been feeling more and more DONE. Whoa. I felt as though we had been driving along, maybe fishtailing for the last couple of weeks a little but nothing we couldn't steer out of, and then BLAMMO. Fell off a cliff that I didn't even see up ahead.

She said (and in fairness has been very candid about in therapy) that there were MOMENTS of what she thinks was love here and there, but that the "old love" just wasn't there. And now she wasn't really sure if she was loving ME, or just the circumstances -- that we were planning a future she liked together, working on getting her dream house, I was a good involved dad, etc.

Throughout this, too, she has been very candid that she still isn't/wasn't sure that I really loved her. That I was just too scared of change, too much a creature of habit, to let her go. Both of those things are very true. I'm terrified of life without her quite frankly. But I do love her so much.

I continued my backward slide a bit in terms of all that I had learned. Panicked, snooped again (on and off still throughout all of this, every time I confessed to her and we talked about it), found out (from a text to one of her friends) that she had visited a psychic that dad without my knowledge who had told her that she didn't even need to read her tarot cards, it was screaming off of her that she was DONE. I found another thread to grasp on to, and woke her up in the middle of the night to confront her about this (now obviously almost irrelevant) psychic visit. Quickly followed by me apologizing again.

We are almost up to the present. Thanks for sticking around this long.

So, over the last week I have been doing a lot of soul searching. Leading up to our last therapy appointment (yesterday), I had many moments of clarity(?) about our relationship. Notably, here I was in this burned out shell of a house, with a box of matches in my hands and an empty gas can at my feet. I scooped up the ashes in my arms and said "Here we go, let's rebuild this!"

This much came up at our therapy session yesterday. That I was, at the moment, at peace with letting go. My wife needs to make her own decisions, and I can't do anything about it. She will love me again, or she won't. She will keep sticking it out to work on the marriage, or she won't. She's going to let feeling redevelop and be acted upon with Ron, or she's not. These are all choices that she is going to make on her own.

And I now can see that her getting to the point where she made the decision to end it with me, and to give up everything and more that I have been fearing to give up, was in itself such a huge decision that the relief it offered must have been tremendous. And speak volumes of the pain that she has been enduring for god knows how long.

In short, more clarity that it wasn't all wrapped up in a neat bow with those 2 confessions. I have been up and down with that realization. Sometimes taking total comfort in it and being at peace, then 5 minutes later a mess again.

As of last night, I decided to Google "am I emotionally abusive to my spouse". And, I seemed to be ticking off most of the boxes on the websites I've Googled up. Not all of them, and I know there were good times in there, but damn it's just so hard to remember them now.

It was years and years of ME being... emotionally abusive. I am pretty sure I was. Aloof, unloving, individual, sarcastic, snide, mean, moody.

So now I feel as though we are back at square 1. Or more accurately, that perhaps we never even left square 1 because of this, and that it was just those ashes compacted in to a wall, with only a coat of paint holding it together. Destined to crumble again.

In therapy yesterday she brought up how heavy she sometimes feels it is for her at the house with me there. I'm generally upbeat, just that I am there loving her and she feels bad for not loving me back. Me being kind of needy under the surface, her so not wanting to give me anything. So, for the last week I have been feeling like a separation would be best for both of us.

I don't know if that's the path I should take though. On one hand I am hopeful that time apart could be good, and she can have a break from the heaviness, she can reflect and hopefully see that I am still lovable or that the marriage is worth working on... or something...

On the other hand, I am terrified that she will like it too much. That she will continue hanging out with Ron a lot, those great loving idyllic feelings will rise up, and it will just be another (final?) nail in the coffin of our marriage.

Should I bring up the separation? I would find some place to stay, I wouldn't put her through anything.

The emotional abuse though... I don't even know what to ask about that. I am so genuinely remorseful that I hurt her for so long. I wouldn't blame her in the slightest for never wanting to see me again. It's a testament both to her amazingness, and on the negative side her having grown up with a deeply narcissistic mother and alcoholic father, that I am sure prevented this from coming to a head much sooner.

Thanks for reading. I feel so much better just having typed it. At least for the next 5 minutes.