Withdrawal, The Worst Stage Yet?

[Rita]

Brubeck and sjohn6, thank you for writing to me. It actually means a lot to me that you are both men. It's hard for me to imagine there are men who would be faithful and true, though I do see many here and in my marriage ministry. Not that I think it's about men -- I have even more trouble trusting women since some woman took my husband all these years while still having her own husband and kids. It is surely a lonely venture. It means a lot to me that you read my story and think that I sound kind. I am so full of doubt in my house, about myself. I feel so ugly too, and aging.

I feel very blessed in my relationship to God and am totally sustained by that. I am grateful for this journey that brought me to him. But I am very very tired and at the end of my rope. Lately things are so very awful that I don't think my answers to your questions are going to be as accurate, because for a while it wasn't like this. He is back to being a monster but all is being presented as his new unconditionally loving powerful self who has to protect himself from my control of everything (e.g.,money) and become a man again.

For the last couple of years,I was pretty strong and hopeful. Right now, though I keep returning to faith and hope in prayer, I am drowning and afraid in my own house -- not of physical violence but of his words. I hide in my room and avoid the house a lot. He has slept on the couch or in my daughter's room there are two twin beds there) since 2013. I have been alone and chaste the whole time.

Now he is obsessed with leaving us but in this really wacky spiritual way where he keeps talking about the God of his heart. But I guess he is no longer a Christian, it's some spiritual mumbo jumbo, and I get the feeling he is seeing some counselor who told him to leave me, I guess because he has painted me as such a monster.

That is what I find hardest. I doubt myself when he says these horrible things to me. I know I wasn't a perfect wife before, spent the first year changing myself and apologizing, and then when he went crazy I had to keep him out of the bank accounts and everything else, so it is true that I did end up blocking him, but I kept giving him money out of my own meager salary all the time, whenever he needed it, so that he could finish his dissertation. He still hasn't finished it and I guess has forgotten all the money I gave him, or thinks it was just part of my controlling plan.

Before that, we shared everything, even a cell phone and e-mail address. We really were very in love. Looking back, I guess he had the seeds of this. He had a few small breakdowns, including one in our first year together.

After BD, before I understood what was happening, I tried to share all the bills and give him all the credit cards because he said was I was controlling everything and I thought that must be true. But he couldn't stop spending, so I cancelled the cards and blocked him. If he got a hold of my credit cards once MLC hit, he just started spending. He would take money from my wallet a lot too. But now, even tonight, we had a huge fight and he denies all that from the past, says I kept him down our whole marriage before he snapped, and says that he "showed people the books" and they said I am a chaotic mess and I am not so great with money but just keep blocking him from everything. I am not sure what he is talking about but I think it was something from five years ago when he first went crazy and took all the bookkeeping stuff to show to some friends. He wanted to take over everything then too, it's like we're just on repeat of a horrible movie.

I do not think it would be possible to stand for your marriage in my circumstances without God -- and specifically without Christ. There would be no way to make meaning out of the extremely intense and constant suffering. I have a lot of peace in prayer, and clarity. But by the world's standards, what I am doing is insane. And I am really struggling. I don't want to divorce or ever remarry, but I want to be alone. I am very scared of him being with my kids; he has ignored them all this time but it feels even scarier to have him alone with them without me nearby. Again, not because of violence, just because he is so intense and says such crazy things.

I don't usually do this and will probably regret it, but I thought I would paste the two letters I got from him today so you can see what I mean. I guess I want confirmation that he sounds totally crazy. He is trying to make me sell everything so that he can have "his half." We have a house with a business in it and selling it would be extremely stupid, we'd lose so much to capital gains tax and have to buy a much less valuable property as we have no cash and huge debts; but it's especially stupid because he wants to sell it so that he won't have to work. He makes very little money and gives me none. In between semesters, he makes nothing and that is what is scaring him now, because he knows it's coming and that I am done supporting him.

Here is the first letter I got today. Most of them are like this or way worse. I changed my real name but used "Gerds" because he was using a very intimate nickname for me.

Gerds, This is a personal letter.

I loved that — despite the current unfolding — we were able to be kind and civil with each other this morning around D9 and around (my friend) last night. It fills me with immensities of peace and hope to know that love can abide in the context of deep differences between persons. And so I write because I want no ambiguity or false-sentiment in-between us but only reality and truth in-btween us, specifically the reality and truth (for me anyway) that love can coexist even between persons [i]separating.[/i]

I am going through with this. I am moving out of (our house). But, for my part, I have zero intention of moving away from you or from my children on the level of what I understand and what I definitively feel as love. Possibly for the first time in my life I believe I am capable of true unconditional love— love for myself, love for all human [i]others, love for nature, for work, for career, for all things.

I'll enlist a mediator, yes, once (his friend) provides me with a name. And in light of my final commitment to the reality that the nature of our relating with each other is irredeemable, I am motioning to claim my half of our total shared assets. I won't, Gerds, face another summer in poverty and humiliation before my kids, and I won't face the humiliation of often having less than 20 dollars in my account for about 5 days before my next paycheck, and I won't face the humiliation of debt collectors breathing on me from all angles—[i] I won't defile the renewed image that I have of myself as worthy of love and life by living anymore like a beggar, when, partly owing to my own initiative, I am a man who can claim arguably a 1.5 million dollars in assets (this is an inflation of half the equity).

Ambitious, pragmatic, practical, business-like I am?

No.

I am nothing short of a man who is investing everything he has in his commitment to construct for himself a healthy, loving, redeemed image of self, of home, and, most importantly, of "Father."

I finally now, as of the last year, live no longer, Gerds, with the "old-man" in me, with the image of incompetence and servility and gross dependency that my old man put in me and which — even if its by the felt-life of my account only — you did very little to overturn and a lot to strengthen. By my account — and I freely grant that possess an opposed account — I feel that I was very wrong to allow myself to remain complacent before all the forces under our roof that potently reified my readiness to remain servile before your exorbitant power, ambition and heft with regard to the basic unfolding of a shared life; and I feel that you were very wrong to kindle my latent readiness to be servile and adolescently dependent, for whenever I dared to trespass the old-man in me by exerting initiative I was silenced, for too many years in a row.

I can live no longer in the image of a victim, and under the assumption (erroneously held by you, by my kids, by parents, others) that I am incompetent on matters fiscal and economic (and should therefore never in 15 years have the slightest bit of final control over bank accounts, over how our money was channeled and used), that I am incompetent as a caregiver, that I am incompetent as a father, that I am incompetent as the overseer and final decision maker of the very nooks and crannies of what a home and a family looks like and what its destiny may be.

Gerds, I know it may hurt you to hear it but I have to justify and public voice my present choices: you have to know that you have an inordinate amount of power and ambition and control on matters practical and pragmatic and domestic that in the end — for the last 4.5 years — functioned to first cripple and then put to death my desire to recover myself as a father and as a husband and as a home-maker. So, finally my present choice to leave (our home) constitutes the image of man who is for once being truly practical, and for once being courageous enough to face the truth: that love can coexist even between persons separating.

I do nothing more right now than give expression to my painstaking commitment to an evolved image of love, of family, of home, of father. I genuinely — without the slightest bit of equivocation or apology -- exist painstakingly to put love between us, and between me and everyone I know. That — the lover — is the image of myself that I am going on — and no other image anymore.