BPDFamily.com

 :help: I have posted mainly on the “bettering a relationship” board, but the relationship continues to deteriorate. It feels like the ship is sinking, and I’m filled with anxiety, fear, sadness, regret, and shame. My uBPW wife of nearly 34  years has been steadily getting more and more dysregulated over the past 10 years since we retired. It seems as if she’s heading into a true mental health crisis, and it’s really really hard for both of us. We have two adult children, and we try to keep our marital conflict out of their lives, so they would be stunned to know what’s really going on behind closed doors. I’ve written about it elsewhere so I won’t go into detail here, but in the last couple of months, her extreme anger and rage has become apparent on almost half of the days, and even on the “good days” she always finds several opportunities to harshly criticize me for at least five or 10 minutes.

Briefly, she considers me a covert narcissist, autistic, financially abusive, guilty of coercive control, a womanizer and flirt, completely untrustworthy, etc. I am far from a perfect husband, and I may be mildly autistic (difficulty with social cues), and there is some truth to financial abuse if you consider frugality in the early years of our marriage. I thought I was creating a great life for her by being the breadwinner while she could stay at home and concentrate on raising the children, and she seemed to be just fine with it at the time, but now she looks at her life as an opportunity wasted to achieve bigger things. I am guilty, in a much milder sense, of some of those things, but one thing that I am not, and she is convinced of, is that I am a flirt, and I’m looking to have another woman. I would say I do have some of the traits of covert narcissism, but I don’t have it at the disorder level, that’s for sure. But as I hear these and many other criticisms over and over and over again, I start to wonder if they’re true. She thinks that I am 100% to blame for all of our problems as a couple and for any of the struggles that our adult children have. She has even reached the point now where she doesn’t want to be out in public with me for fear of how I will behave, either flirting with women or trying to look like an impressive person.

I am an introvert, codependent, with a deep fear of abandonment. I have been as supportive, validating, and empathetic as I know how to be. I have tried not to JADE, although I do sometimes. I have assured her repeatedly of my devotion to our marriage and that I am not looking for another woman, but she doesn’t believe me, and it’s almost a daily threat of divorce now. This is so corrosive to my morale, and I see how much she is suffering, and it is heartbreaking. Lately most evenings we don’t even eat dinner together, and we spend the evening in our separate bedrooms.

I guess I’m just venting. I feel hopeless. I found this website extremely helpful, and I’ve looked at “rage phobia” and the distress tolerance techniques in particular.

I really don’t want to divorce, but I may not have a choice. Should I be secretly planning in the background just in case? I don’t want to follow through unless I’m forced to, say, if she moves out or wants me to move out.

She keeps mentioning finding a therapist, but nothing seems to happen.

Any thoughts or words of encouragement?  Does anyone know how to deal with a deep fear of abandonment?  Thanks for listening.