I am beginning to think this whole situation has little to do with your wife and everything to do with you. Yeah, she is a mean, controlling narcissist and no one should have to take her crap, but you keep kow towing to her. I did not know you had divorced her but then came back. She has a right to be major P.O.’d about that. But what is a fair sentence to impose on you? Isn’t 10 years or more getting close to reasonable payment for your sin? She may not think so, but you do have a say in the matter.
And while Lil said you did call her bluff back then, the more I think about it, the more it looks like she called your bluff! From her perspective, maybe she is thinking that you don’t have the guts to follow through with anything. You tried it once and you failed. If you try it again, you’ll come back and then she can really put the screws to you. If you never get the courage to leave, she can still control you.
Your reply basically confirms this to me. I think you have something going on with your sense of obligation. I’ll try not to mention FOO (oops, just did it) but your arguments for not leaving are now sounding a little obsessive and a little like martyrdom to me. I’ll leave it to others to speculate whether this is true and why it exists.
It is not a personal failure to know your limits. It is a personal success to realize there is only so much you can do, and trying to do too much can cause you to fail at all of them. And I believe this is what you are doing. You are even failing at serving your God, though you think you are not. In fact, I could argue that by not taking any action, by not exercising your gift of free will, you are in concert with the devil and harming your own children. Worse yet, you are aware of this and try to deny it only for the sake of your principals and your own ego.
I am not trying to belittle you, but my point is that you have on some extremely tight blinders. You need to open yourself up to more possibilities that the strict dogma you picked up somewhere. It is one thing to hold to a higher moral ground as you suffer under a despot, but to cause your children to do so is crossing over into immorality. I think this is what everyone is seeing and trying to tell you. However your morality argument has effectively kept everyone at bay. To hell with morality when a child is being injured!
This matter is not about your wife. It is about you.
