some very unique stresses in my personal life that resulted in lawsuits in 2016.
is the heart of your problem. You've skated over this issue in several different comments. Lawsuits of a personal nature (rather than professional or financial) sound quite troubling. Three years is a long time to hide away from your problems in a mancave. I wonder how much your wife was trying to reach you during this time before she just gave up.
Thank you scout for having read carefully some of my other posts. The lawsuits were not the core of the problem, they were the final straw. At least that's what my STBXW told me in the first weeks after BD.
I was about to tell the story of it here, and actually drafted something, but deleted the post. If you read over the final posts on the previous thread, I felt that there are several here who I cannot trust so will not relay the story here. [They were talking about me as if I were invisible, and they were expert psychologists or something. I will not play their game.]
Suffice it to say that it was about my biological family members attacking me, as the most successful of the children, and not succeeding. I beat them (lawsuits were dismissed) but the emotional and economic cost was considerable. So was the loss of my marriage, and while my BFS (biological family siblings) had not expected that outcome I know they were cheering it.
My STBXW did not stand behind me, she blamed me, and that was one of the betrayals that I would have mentioned earlier too. I had stood behind her during PPD after the children were born (and the severe SSM that went along with it) and she had also been on Zoloft for a good part of our marriage, yet I never once complained not contemplated leaving her. Yet here I was at the peak crisis part of my adult life and she abandoned me. I know I'm not supposed to dwell on this but it does place my hurt in context.
