The Mother of All Midlife Crises!!!

[LALost]

Hi Everyone,
How about this one for an exciting MLC? 6 kids...14 years of marriage...been through three marital therapists (2 in the last year alone)...

I've been on the roller coaster of my life since Jan 2016...and it never seems to end...just when I see a ray of hope - the gun comes out and the divorce threat rears its ugly head...

My wife and I have been separated and nesting for about four weeks and I'm coming apart. I've been battling the absolutely horrible feelings for rejection from my wife for so many months. She has turned down all my attempts at being intimate (even hugging) for over a year, at every turn, my wife has a cold face and if there is an occasional thaw, it is back to ice a day or two later.


My wife and I seemingly had it all - money, home, community, pillars of our community, and 18 months ago it all started crashing. There are so many factors at work that started the long descent, but my entire life started to unravel back in Sept of 2015, my only sister got diagnosed with breast cancer, I got into two lawsuits at work, one which involved her family (ultra high net worth), I started fighting with a business partner, and my wife started going through menopause. She is 4.5 years older than I am. I am 45, she is almost 50. So between spending time at the hospital with my sister for her chemo visits and surgery, the lawsuits, my wife complaining, we went to the same marriage therapist we had been seeing since 2012, and she basically says to my wife, after my wife lists all the complaints about me - my wife's position at the time was, "I know what I want, and Im going to get it. If you cant give it to me, Im going to get it somewhere else, because I deserve it and am entitled to it" I don't know what "it" was - but clearly she had something in mind. She swears 1000 ways to one she was not having an affair with anyone. So our therapists tells my wife, "listen, you have to stop acting like donald trump with your husband. your position with him is that he needs to get it right or you are going to fire him. frankly, i am afraid to work with you like this - you even make me nervous with trying to help you. you need to grow up. You need to be intimate with your husband, its going to kill your marriage if you cut him off."

And my wife flips and fires her (this is a woman my wife idolized so much for years - she sent two of her sisters to see her and many of her friends). I've remained in touch with this therapist, she says she is so sad to see what is happening to us, she cannot believe who my wife has chosen to see as her individual therapist (a well known feminist marriage buster) and even sent my wife an email a few weeks ago saying that the husband she always wanted was right in front of her. But my wife is shut down.

They caught the cancer very early in my wife. Her prognosis is absolutely excellent. She is on femara (anti estrogen medicine) for 10 years, which does cause hormonal changes. She has hot flashes. Her doctor wanted her to take lexapro an anti depressant but she refused because she doesn't want it to dull her feelings (this drives me NUTS!).

This is my second marriage. My first marriage ended in divorce with no children when I was 28. I didn't want that marriage to end either. It was to a girl I had met in college, we dated for six years and then married for two. She demanded out. A year later, she married one of my closest friends in the world.

Met my second wife 2 years after the divorce, and we got married and things seemed good at first. I had started a business which was relatively high profile and was high risk, but after two years had to shut it down...was pretty depressed for a while and floundered starting several businesses throughout the years. Couple have worked nicely. Wife is independently wealthy so financial resources are not an issue.

The only thing I really enjoy is my children, and seeing them grow. My wife and I obviously had a tough time raising 6 kids born so close together, at one point we had 6 kids at home under the age of 4.

My wife now swears the marriage has been bad since the start, she has gone over and over and over all the negative things in our marriage, literally bringing up things that happened more than a decade over and over. Each time I try to explain, or just to validate her feelings. I'm trying all the tactics, read the DB book, working with a coach.

Our latest therapist is telling W she has to learn to see both sides of the our problems, but she cant seem to.

I am not playing the victim here, i'm sure I've had major failings as a husband. . Not at all. Started taking anti depressants back when I was 21, I occasionally used marijuana or pornography to numb the pain of my life, and compulsively used the internet to escape.

I got into 12 step recovery back in June of 2015, recovery work was really liberating, I enjoyed the meetings, sharing my feelings, working with a sponsor, and even got sponsees to work with.

The problem was, as my wife now sees it, she was upset in the marriage, begging for my attention, and instead of turning to her, I turned to recovery and put all the 12 step work in front of her. This is not my experience at all. In fact, my wife had completely shut me out when she saw I started working on addiction patterns in my life. It turns out, she has a father who is a sex addict and alcoholic, and her first husband and boyfriends all struggled with similar challenges, so my getting into recovery I believe forced her to confront what she was dealing with for much of her life.

Unfortunately, she got totally caught up in the "label" of having an "addict" for a husband, and I tried everything to be totally honest and open with her. This past summer, we even did a three day intensive "disclosure" where I disclosed my entire history with acting out (I have never had an affair or EA in our 14 years of marriage).

So there is the recovery piece, which I have now kind of gotten fed up with myself. I am glad I worked the 12 steps, greatly value the fellowship I developed, but after seeing that most of the guys I knew in recovery had gotten their marriages back on track, I realize my situation is a little different.

I started to work intensely on myself back in September I went to a program in Arizona for 2 weeks two work on myself, during this time, my wife called into the program and said she wanted a divorce. I was devastated and went into shock. I proposed we have a therapeutic separation to try and work the marriage out and see if we could salvage things. She refused.

I returned home for a week, her therapist and my therapist agreed we would have a joint session to at least discuss this. During the session, both my therapist and I were blindsided by her therapist, who said bluntly - "Its time to give up hope, its hard to do, but your marriage is over."

I got frustrated and started to walk out, and her therapist said, "Look, there's that anger again." This is a woman I cannot believe my wife has chosen to see. Our first marriage therapist warned both my wife and I that if we saw this woman, she would blame the man, that is what she always does and is known for. For whatever reason, my wife decided to go see her as her individual therapist. Guess what, that's whats been happening for months.

(Even last week, I saw she was texting my wife - one of the texts said "You are still not being heard by your husband. You told him X and he did y!" I could not believe it, honestly it confirms the feelings I've been having about this whole situation for months.

But there is nothing I can do about it - it's so frustrating. My wife sees her therapist two maybe three times a week. She is the same therapist who her niece and sister see, its just so sad. Anyway, when her therapist said this, I looked at my wife and told her I needed to go out to a recovery place in arizona for six weeks to check myself in and work on her request to divorce. She freaked out. She said I can't do it. I said I needed to take care of myself and I was leaving on Monday.

It was the hardest thing I ever did. I got on a plane and checked myself into a rehab facility - I was totally sober, with a bunch of wonderful addicts struggling to get to sobriety, and I was just there to try and buy time.

Well, after three weeks, my wife unilaterally decided to tell the kids we were divorcing and she sent an email to the facility telling them this. I left the program and had to return home to deal with the madness in my home. My kids were obviously devastated, I was in shock again, not sure how she could do this unilaterally.

Anyway, fast forward a couple weeks and suddenly my wife agrees to a separation. She tried to trick me to get me to move out without telling me she had consulted with the most famous and aggressive divorce attorney in NYC. Luckily I found out about it, and was able to work to show her it wasn't going to be that simple. So we agreed to a "nesting" arrangement, where - get this - each of us moves from our main apartment down to a one bedroom guest apartment we have in our building every other night, and weekends we switch off.



A little about her, my poor wife has had such a difficult life. Her father is a legendary narcissistic businessman, but he treated her and her sisters in such devious ways. They are so enmeshed with him even today - he is in his 90s - and he interefears with his daughters marriages and tells them that their husbands don't know what they are doing. He has been a bully to me. When they were little, he used to weigh his daughters on a scale, used to tell them they had "fat asses" and there was the whole covert incest thing that my wife had to deal with when her parents got divorced when she was 15. Her dad had an affair with his wife's best friend and destroyed that marriage too. My wife ended up becoming her father's surrogate wife, attending all his state diners and high society functions with him and even went to work for him at his company for almost 17 years. My wife cannot stand her mother, who is still a broken woman because of the affair, and she blames her for not being able to get over it.

People see my wife as incredibly strong and tough, she takes care of everyone else, has been an amazing mother for the most part, has a full time staff take care of everything in the home, has a personal assistant to manage our lives (I know how this must sound - but its our life), but she gets everything done. The house is always spotless, she takes care of everything - our special needs daughter therapists, all the girls needs. I do love her dearly, but I am getting so frustrated and angry over these past many months.

The pain of constant rejection is wearing me down. I have had fleeting suicidal thoughts. I have been to a psychiatrist and he put me on meds for depression & add...I have been going through an endless cycle of grieving, crying tears and screaming in pain for the death of my marriage.

So - lets get to the point - what is my wife now saying? She says, over and over, "I don't feel like you know me." "You get angry with me and I shut down" "I'm afraid of you" "You get a horrible look of frustration on your face and shut me down" "You are so tall - I'm 6'4, she is 5'2 (cant change that) and imposing" "You don't know me" "You don't want to connect to me" And I'm sitting there screaming in my mind "ARE YOU CRAZY! IM DYING TO CONNECT TO YOU - YOU ARE SHUTTING ME OUT ENTIRELY, YOU ARE WALLED OFF - YOU ARE CLOSED TO EVEN HOLDING HANDS - YOU CONSTANTLY CRITICIZE ME!"

So, for about two months, we have been seeing this new marital therapist (wife continues to see her therapist who I swear is problematic). She sat with both of us individually, then together, and my wife asked her to give an assessment of our marriage. She did - she said "I have absolutely no question your marriage can be saved. I don't know why you guys would get divorced. In fact, I think you guys are the ones made for each other to work out each others problems." Confidentially, she spoke to me alone, after speaking to my wife's therapist, and said to me, "I told her therapist in no uncertain terms I felt that if your wife choses to end the marriage, it will not be a good thing for your wife."

So, the therapist tried to get us not to separate, but my wife demanded we separate. But my wife agreed we would "date" once a week. My wife claims her own therapist has now allowed her to "Have her voice" and she can now speak up and ask for what she wants. The problem is, she seems to think that having her voice means getting her way in everything she asks for. So there is no compromise.

AND I GET IT. MY WIFE IS IN PAIN!!! I SEE HOW MUCH SHE IS SUFFERING! I SEE HOW MUCH SHE IS DISGUSTED WITH ME. I SEE HOW FED UP SHE IS WITH ME. IT COMES ACROSS IN EVERY INTERACTION WE HAVE TOGETHER.

As I write this I'm starting to think I should just throw the towel in... stand up and say, lets just get divorced and get this over with because I can't take the pain any longer. I just want this to end. I just want to have a wife who cares about me and my kids and sees that I am a good person, I want to be appreciated for who I am, I'm not perfect but I can't take so much criticism. I feel like a punching bag for so long now. My wife means everything to me and I see things coming apart and I cant bear to watch it any longer.