Withdrawal, The Worst Stage Yet?

[Rita]

Greetings from Gerda, long-gone from these threads but still knee deep in MLC.

I stopped posting because I found more peace in prayer but still lurk once in a while. Please be gentle on me as I am very scared to post at all. But I just wanted to know if others have been through the later stages and found them to be worse in some ways than anything that came before.

I thought things would get better after replay, but now my H seems to be in all the stages at once. It's a horrifying tornado of insanity, and a lot of vicious hurtful spewing that I hadn't seen in year or maybe more, it's all a blur at this point. After 5 years of active MLC, I am finding this current stage to be the worst yet, because it seems to be all the stages rolled up into one. I am also getting confused at times -- e.g., when he tells me I am the crazy one, I find myself trying to convince him that it's not true instead of just leaving the room.

The last year or so he seemed to be getting more rational, there were even some downright nice moments of family connection, and I thought maybe things were going to be okay. But then things slid down and have gotten worse and worse. Now he seems to be totally spiraling into bipolar madness. All the irrational monster madness, trying to get me to sell the house again as he did in the early years of MLC (he has not given me any money for kids or house in over five years -- and in fact I gave him money many times -- and now again wants to sell so that he never has to get a job and can live off "his half"). In a weird version of wanting to recapture just the early days of MLC, he was even trying to take back the biz I had to sell when he first spiraled. Unfortunately that sale ended up in a lawsuit mess. When I try to explain that a case in state Supreme Court doesn't go away until it's settled by the court, he rages that I block him from everything, emasculate him as I have "always done," and that's why he could never love me, etc. I just give this as an example, but of course there are many. It is unbearable, the fighting, which he starts only when the kids are present. Honestly I had forgotten all about boundaries and only after this morning's fight remembered that I needed to set some.

He has never left the house but did have a long A, but this is the first time since this started that I truly want him to leave. I find that I can no longer be consistently kind to him or understanding when he starts up for the nine millionth time about how hard his life is -- after 5 years of being sole support for me and my kids and doing everything, even taking out the trash and walking the dog, with no help at all, I have to put up some walls if I am going to hold on to my sanity at all. I try to be civil but I just can't be the friend I tried to be before this latest stage.

That's the background -- but I am not looking for advice on my sitch, I am just looking for confirmation from others who went through this stage, wondering if others found it to be the worst one yet. I've never felt as hopeless as I do lately, despite my total trust in God.