Dealing with (stuck)? MLCer many years later

[elfie]

Sorry I'm writing this in chunks but I have to dig through the maze of memories and events and try to avoid too many details.

So my H had to burn the last important bridge of his life, the one with his wife and children. It was fortunate that when he decided to leave both of them were at school away from home and they were spared the experience of watching my falling apart and their father's madness. Our separation was announced to them in a civilized manner 2 months later when they came back home for the summer. Two weeks after he had left I managed to pull myself out of the dark tunnel of grief and despair after I allowed myself to feel the anger. It was the acknowledgement of my anger that made me stand on my feet again. My refusal to feel victimized. And then bomb #2 came. I found out there was an OW. Not just any other OW. Somebody I knew socially and who was pretending to be my friend. She had taken advantage of his depressed state that had long preceded his departure and she had befriended him behind my back. The rest you can guess. It came as a ton of bricks on my head. That I was unable to handle. From hurt you can heal. How do you overcome disgust? Our marriage -with its flaws- had been a long one. There was a lot of love, respect, total devotion from both of us. Looking back, somewhere along the road prolonged stress with life's problems but most of all another factor which I will elaborate on more later made us lose each other.

Familiar theme. We had the love but not the tools to fix it. I remember my H gradually morphing into someone else. The MLC thing appeared as an explanation after our children and I watched him becoming obsessed with his appearance, changed his tastes, was acting like a teenager, spent money like there was no tomorrow, etc. All in all I was riding a roller coaster for a long time trying to understand what he was doing and why.