He's definitely still in protection mode. He's coming out of it but it's taking ages and he has a few steps backwards sometimes. I think it's complicated: he has a huge fear of abandonment which has taken me nearly 30 years to understand properly (it might have got worse I think as ds1 reached the age where dh was abandoned). So rather than face the fear of abandonment he's abandoning us first. The teens getting older is hard for him, he sees how much he's missed of their childhoods and that's hard (it was hard for me too, I felt like a single mum all their lives). I think he suffers from huge anxiety which he never expresses other than in anger towards me. He has some big career decisions to make: he has nearly earnt enough to retire early in a few years if we're careful with money (and if he doesn't get divorced), he's reached as far up the career ladder as he might get but he still wants the very top job but also says he doesn't or couldn't. He suffered a huge blow at work with something which went wrong (not his fault) which he ended up taking the fall for and his ego is still struggling with that, and with me 'not being supportive' (I was the one listening and saying 'the sky is not falling in, you will survive this' but now I see it wasn't really what he needed, I should have been validating instead of correct). So he has this big void in front of him if he stops working and he has no idea how to fill it, his job has been all-consuming and increasingly so as he's got more senior. He knows he drinks far too much but it soaks his entire working culture. His body is starting to let him down, and he's always been quite vain. He's panicking about his life running out but also not sure what to do with the rest of it, he's also not that happy in his job and it doesn't align with his values. And because I'm the one who is inextricably linked to his life, somehow in his head it's all my fault. Maybe he needed this separation to work out that a lot of this isn't my fault and to disentangle this stuff in his head.
Well, that's my take. He probably sees it entirely differently. I have also not been the best or most understanding wife for many, many years. I haven't appreciated him the way he needs, I haven't paid him enough attention or listened to him enough, and I've kept myself busy with other people and other activities and distanced him a lot.
