YOU ARE NOT ALONE - A companion online community discussion board for The Mental Illness Happy Hour podcast with Paul Gilmartin

I appreciate this board and the people on it even though I've just been here for a few weeks. However, I feel like I have the same problem that I run into in therapy and in trying to open up to friends. My situations feel so fucked up and convoluted and require so much explanation and background that it is exhausting trying to explain them so that people understand and get the context. I have serious marriage stress, work/career problems, family of origin issues past and current all over a backdrop of awkwardness, shame and self-doubt that makes it hard to be the real me even to myself.

All of my stressful situations have been amped up lately, and I have posted a bit about it. I had a really bad week and a horrible weekend with my wife. Lots of anxiety and unpleasant discussions. We probably spent 10-12 hours this weekend talking about our relationship between Friday night, Saturday, and Sunday. I was able to get to the point of opening up and being honest about some things that I have been struggling to say, but it was painful, draining and I felt destroyed by the end of the weekend. And there is still so much that I don't have the courage or understanding to say or do yet.

I think my wife feels a lot better after this weekend, and she has been a little more pleasant and functional this week, and that makes me feel a little better. I think I also feel better because I have been getting support and supporting in turn a friend from my therapy group that is also going through a tough problem by text this week (although that has triggered another issue, which I just posted about on the Do Other People Feel Like I Do board). But I feel like we've been through this cycle before - her anxiety about whether I love her and whether we will stay together reaches a peak, it explodes in a horrible weekend of fighting and intensely emotional talks, and she gets enough reassurance to get down to baseline but I am a complete emotional wreck afterwards. Things are calm for a while, but we're not talking and things aren't moving in a real forward direction and then her anxiety builds and we repeat the cycle.

I don't want to deal with her chaos anymore. I love her, and I have compassion for the fact that she has problems and challenges. I am trying to have compassion for myself, too, though, and it is really hard sometimes to have both. Sometimes if I am being compassionate to myself and I feel like my self-esteem is starting to climb, I become really positive I need to leave her and be with someone else. But then I feel guilty and ashamed, the self-esteem deflates, and I am stuck again.

I could really use some help sorting all of these problems out. I know I need to find the answers inside, but it's really hard to shut off the noise in my head, and most of it is other people's feelings or how I should feel, not how I really feel. I'm confused about what I want and what I need and what is possible and reasonable. On some level I know the answer to those questions, but I don't have any confidence in them.

I actually posted a long rant on here Saturday morning after my wife and I were up until 3 am having an intensely, excruciatingly emotional discussion, followed by a few hours of relative calm, followed by an anger/sadness/anxiety breakdown on my part because of being emotionally drained from the prior discussion, which led to another intensely emotional several hours.
Then I deleted the post Sunday morning because it hadn't gotten any replies and I was a little embarrassed by the post.
I'm not proud of that.

I don't know your exact situation, but just from how you feel right now, it sounds very familiar. It was a bad place to be. Something I was lacking then was a clear vision of the future. A goal, and a path. After so many years I didn't even know what that kind of clarity could be like, or that I was missing it. I didn't know what was going on in my relationship. I didn't understand the situation I was in, the dynamic between us, and there was no way for me to do so because of the never ending barrage of drama.

I was with a Borderliner for a very long time. The constant drama served the purpose of keeping me confused about my place in our relationship. My happiness inside that relationship made her afraid. If I was happy, I might reach clarity, I might find the strength to leave, so she couldn't have that. I remember this one time, I had this really great day at her daughters wedding. A woman 2 years older than me, but it wasn't weird at all, as I had been afraid of initially. I was a guest of honor, I met a lot of good people, I got a little drunk, talked, danced, laughed. Connected. When we got back home, my ex started a fight over how I had closed the shower curtain that in no time at all escalated to "YOU RUINED THE MOST IMPORTANT DAY OF MY LIFE!". Loud enough so her parents, who had no idea what the fight was about, could hear it. Was I such a bad person? Nobody there to tell me otherwise, so, maybe. Probably. Yeah, probably my fault. I'm a piece of shit, really, doing that to her. I was so confused about what was going on that when I first tried to move out, and she then called the police, and went from crying and begging to coldly telling them flat out lies with me standing there, and them then forcing me to either leave all my things behind or stay... I just didn't understand that at all. Rather than my mind going to "Hey, what she just did, that is total bullshit" I just thought "... I don't get this... what just happened here?". We fought a lot, and as I was waiting for dawn to leave we fought that night, and it wears you down, the crazy making manipulative arguments. Bringing reason to a fight like that is like bringing a knife to a gunfight. Next to resignation in the dictionary, a picture of me, back then. It took me ten years before I realized that this woman was just really, really, really bad for me. Fucked up and evil in her own victim way. Suddenly, her two previous husbands having both killed themselves, I saw that in a new light. Suddenly that made sense. And a lot more. It took me reaching rock bottom, being at the end of my rope, past any capacity for endurance before this veil of stupid was lifted from me. Some of the stories from that relationship are so fucked up they are ... I couldn't process them. Example: I had managed to move out, but hadn't yet cut contact. I didn't yet see her as something toxic. I think I just lacked a reference in my experience for what a healthy relationship could look like. How a good relationship could feel. I lacked a reference by which to compare that this was just really wrong and bad. In any case, I had managed to move out, and for a year I kept contact with her. And her life was just falling apart without me. The cats got cancer, she had to be hospitalized, had been near death, her son had been doing drugs, one disaster after another. I was just heartbroken about that. How could the universe do this to this poor woman. I felt for her and it hurt like a "enculé de sa race". 'scuse my French.

Then she told me that the last time we had slept with each other she had gotten pregnant, but not wanting to use this to hold me back when I clearly wanted to go she had kept it a secret. She had delivered a child in secret. Raised it in secret. The happiest moment of my life. A child that was "of me". Out of nowhere, completely unexpected, and in an instant-> unconditional love. And then she told me it had died "AND I CAN'T DEAL WITH THIS WITHOUT YOU!" Worst moment of my life.

I believed her. I grieved for this child of mine. Went through all the stages, if there is such a thing. Some really, really heavy stuff. Deepest, darkest depression of my life. I didn't eat, didn't get out of bed, just wanted to wither away because it was too much to deal with. It was then that I cut contact because I had no other choice. I had nothing left to give. Any more demands on me could have pushed me over the final edge. Without her influence I worked through that grief, came out OK. Then I find out that this child had never existed in the first place. That doesn't make the experience go away, or the feelings. How do you explain that to someone? How do you deal with that? I can see someone play with their kid and feel a sense of loss even though I now know that I never had this something I had thought I had lost to begin with. How does that make sense? How can you really communicate something so alien, so messed up. I couldn't. I couldn't begin to understand it, or to reprocess that. An experience so intense becomes a part of you in such a way that knowlage about it makes very little difference to the effects it has. But... in time... stuff gets better, once you find some stability, are away from constant drama. Find time and a place to be kind to yourself, surround yourself with kind people. Compassionate people.

Maybe you want to work things out with your wife. I don't really know what's going on between the two of you. I just know how it felt for me, being unable to figure out what I needed, what I was missing, what the actual situation was, where the problems lay. That the problem wasn't me. And what I needed, then, was distance, calmness, peace, saftey, experiences with positive people, and before I knew it... I could see clear.

Whoa.

Thanks for sharing that, Bestia. That sounds awful to have gone through that. And there was a lot that rings true for me.

My wife thought she was borderline for a while. Her Dad probably is. Her therapist is under the impression that if you think you're borderline, you probably aren't. She does have extreme anxiety and low self-image, and she has sleep problems and PTSD from childhood violence. I have walked on eggshells with her for years. In the early years of our marriage we didn't fight much (we are both very accommodating most of the time - two people who are conflict avoiders with low self-esteem!). But there were a few fights about a year after we got married in which she threatened suicide. I don't think she meant it, and her Dad used to be violent and threaten suicide when she was a kid/teenager, so she knows the effect it has. It had a severe effect on me for a long time. She hasn't worked outside the home in almost 10 years (we've been married 13), we don't have kids, and she is very emotionally needy and wears her anxiety and depression on her sleeve. She became practically agoraphobic, and still has serious anxiety about going places by herself (the grocery store, for example), but she usually buckles down and does it, and is a lot better than she was 5-6 years ago, when she almost didn't leave the house without me for a year or so unless she was just going for a walk.

Her schedule is chaotic (including when she sleeps or not). She is disorganized, and our house is a cluttered mess, partially due to her disorganization (most of the clutter is her stuff all over the place), and also due to the fact that she doesn't do a lot of the housework and I am too exhausted and overworked to keep up with it all. Again, I probably shouldn't complain, because she does more chores than she used to.

I don't want to get sucked into her chaos anymore, but I don't know how I can avoid it unless I leave her. She means well. She is trying. She has a good therapist, she's started taking classes to get a second bachelors degree and she is planning on applying to grad school. I just don't know if I want to wait forever to see if she can get her shit together. I don't like seeing her suffer, and I don't like suffering because of her problems. I also feel like my ability to work on my own problems is hindered by her problems. And to be fair, my being unfaithful to her devastated her and set her back quite a bit and triggered a lot of anger and anxiety that traumatize both of us to this day.

The part of your post about the child was heartbreaking. That is one of the central issues with me. I want kids. She says she wants them too, but she is afraid - of the physical effects of pregnancy and childbirth, and of being a parent. I'm afraid of it too, but I know that I want it. She has a lot of things that she would have to straighten out just in how she takes care of herself physically to get pregnant. I'm turning 40 , she is turning 39. Not much time left for that. That is really what first got me to the point a few years ago to realize that I might be happier with someone else.

Same here. She was 38 when we met. I was 18. Eventually it was this desire to have a child of my own that I used to pull myself away from her influence initially and move out. That desire turned out to be stronger than this mutation of guilt and resignation I used to call love back then.

Hm...

If she never changed from how she is now, would you leave her then? If your answer is yes, my next question would be if it's really her you love, or the potential you see that she may or may not have. The person she might become. And the question after that, if you don't think that you deserve to give your love to someone for who they are, rather than love something that doesn't actually exist.

There's this quote from my borderline survivor group I may as well have burned into my brain flesh at this point: "Adult love is built on mutual interest, care and respect - not on one-way emotional rescues. And mothering is for kids. Not grown men."

But I'm biased. When you pour a decade into a psychological black hole of need it's possible you can come out of that rather... well equipped to sever connections, and might be prone to do that, and recommend others do that, sooner rather than later.

Grr.

I was at that point with my last therapist a little over two years ago. I would talk to my wife about something, and I was getting better at starting to assert my needs. She would agree with me but say that she didn't know how to do it, or it was hard for her to do, but she was committed to changing and I had to be patient. At the same time, her therapist was working with her on just being "good enough". And if she was "good enough" for herself, it didn't matter what anyone else thought. And me growing meant I had to tell her that things she was doing weren't good enough.

Anyway, I digress. At that point, my therapist asked if I could live with it if things stayed the same. And I thought about it and painfully said no. But she's going to change, I said. And he said, what if she doesn't? Examine the evidence. Does it seem likely? It certainly doesn't seem likely that the change I need is going to happen in a reasonable amount of time. How long am I willing to wait. Six months or so after that I was contemplating leaving my wife for or at least having an affair with a married stripper with four kids, and to this day I doubt myself about whether she actually cared about me or I was just a customer being manipulated.

And two+ years later here I am still. My wife found out about the stripper, and more importantly, went through my journal and notes from therapy and picked apart everything I wrote to try to process all of the confusing thoughts and feelings that were so terrible that I could not trust anyone with them (not even my therapist). So there were a lot of angry confrontations over my most private of feelings and thoughts. And they still resurface, though not quite as often.

The thing is, I do love my wife, very much. She truly cares about me with all her heart. Intellectually, I couldn't ask for a better friend. She is smart, we have a lot of common interests but we diverge enough that we are always stimulating each others. We are very compatible on many levels. But we haven't functioned well emotionally for a long time, and I recognize that I am partially to blame for that. And it's not really that she's irresponsible exactly, but I have no way to make her follow through on things and make her accountable for things. She has reasons for the things that she doesn't do or doesn't do well - she does have problems and she is working on those problems. She is sincere about wanting to change and wanting things to be better, but she has been working on things for so long and she can't seem to close the deal. I don't want to deal with her chaos anymore, and I don't want to deal with the feeling of loss and sadness from the needs that I have that aren't being met. But I am afraid of ending it. Afraid of the guilt and shame, afraid for how terribly I would hurt her and what would happen to her, afraid that I couldn't bounce back and not only would I never have another relationship and ever have a stable loving partner and kids, but that I would get even more isolated and withdrawn and not even have any friends any more. I was really isolated with her for a long time.

Our love was built (I thought) on mutual interest, care and respect, but I feel like it drifted away from that. My major complaint is the fact that it does seem so one-sided. I don't want to be always giving, always the caretaker. The feeling I had with the stripper was that we actually could rescue each other. That's been a hard fantasy to let go of, even if it was only the fantasy. But that's the thing - I don't want to rescue someone and be a caretaker, and I don't want someone else to take care of me - I want a strong, responsible woman who is not afraid to be vulnerable and open up to me but who can also support and accept me, and someone who can work together with me for us to achieve our common goals and we can support each others individual goals. My wife swears she is still that person and I want to believe it, but she also thinks that she was that person during times when I really felt like she wasn't, so who knows.

I have zero advice, but I hear you. What you're looking for is the exact same thing I'm looking for. I left a woman I loved a lot because I thought our relationship wasn't going to get better, and we had some bad boundary issues. I only learned about boundaries while in that relationship. What a novel concept

I was very happy with her, for the most part. The bad times might have been catastrophes but the good times were fantastic. She might have been incapable of growth but I loved her for who she was. Even at her worst. Her avoidant, paranoid, neurotic, dependent, fearful self. I made the choice with my head, rationally, and told my heart to shut up. "I totally know what I'm doing, this is for the best, for everyone involved". It's been 6 months now, and I still miss her. I've since dated a couple of women not my usual type. Comparatively cold, stable, pragmatic, successful, independent, intellectual, but so far all of them, in short order, ended up seeing me as some kind of father figure, too. A pillar to lean on. Either I'm taking something that's working and just by being me enable dependence, or I'm trying to find a theoretical ideal, some kind of unicorn, a mythical creature that might not actually exist. I dunno.

I don't think what I'm looking for is a mythical creature. I think I've met her. A few of her. And it scares me. Especially since I think I might be deluding myself.

I really want my wife to be her again/still.

I don't want to be a parent/caretaker, and I don't want someone to take care of me. I want a partner - I want us to be able to have our own lives but a life together - to be vulnerable to each other and strong for each other. To want each other, even need each other, but not be dependent on each other. I want it to feel balanced and fair.

I get scared, because I really want kids, and the biological clock is running out. And if I do end up starting over with someone else, I'm getting older too, and the idea of a relationship working with someone 10+ years younger than me seems very unlikely, especially since I don't want to be a parent figure to my spouse. There are a whole bunch of failed and failing marriages in my support group, and all of the ones with a significant age gap seem to be in really bad shape.