I have been with my husband for almost 6 years. We met and, as I'm sure many of you are familiar with, it was an instant explosion of feelings. He professed his love within a month. He told me he really felt like I was his soul mate in less than a year. We had met while he was traveling on a hippie bus around the country and I was volunteering at a hostel in New Mexico. We hitch hiked around the country, we bought an old RV and redid the inside, traveling around for over 3 years. It sounds so romantic, so great. Except for the glaring red flags that I unceremoniously ignored and the growing instances of volatile, unstable behavior. At first it was just jealousy - he was upset that I didn't save him cigarettes that I had bought with my money and had stolen from me by someone else after a month. A few months after that, he was angry because I assumed he wasn't making sandwiches for a group of our friends and gave the supplies to someone who had offered. 8 or 9 months later, he was upset that I interrupted him and paced around the garage of my parents house for 2 hours telling me he deserved better than that and he was a great guy. Around the same time, I made pea soup even though he didn't like it and he stormed out, slamming the door because I shouldn't have made something that I knew he didn't like. This was year one. It was relatively mild. Mostly, we were enamored. He told me of his past issues. Childhood trauma, his father died, his ultra religious family kicked him out when he was 17, his step father was verbally abusive, his mother had depression or bipolar (he wasn't sure, now it looks like probably it was BPD), he started making meth at 18 and was arrested at 20 for it. He was in prison for nearly 4 years. Then he got out, straightened up, became religious again. He got married and had two children. His awful (his words) wife left him in the middle of the night one night and took his children back to their home state, which they now lived several hundred miles from. She sang him songs of reconciliation until the day she served him divorce papers and he never saw his children again. She was evil, as were all his exes according to him. I said I would never hurt him like that. I was going to be the one to love him like he deserved!
We both drank a lot. After a few months, he stopped offering amazing confessions of love and devotion unless he was drunk. Selfishly wishing to hear these things again, I would facilitate drinking as often as I could. Eventually, he stopped offering them most of the time. Instead, there were criticisms and blame. He told me to freeze a fish he caught then when he tried to defrost it, told me I didn't listen and I didn't give a ___ about anyone else but myself. I was constantly too loud, too overbearing, interrupted too often. I was a drunk, out of control, and rude. I started formulating conclusions about interacting with him. I called him Dr. Jackyl and Mr. Hyde to my friends. They all started to note that his behavior was sort of problematic. I started to notice that I could never ask for help without being met with relentless criticism and shame. I couldn't ask him to cook or feed himself, that was my job. He hit his dog when he was angry. He tore me apart whenever anything went wrong, regardless of whether or not it was within my control. Both of our tires on our van blew out and he screamed at me. I hit a pothole and he told me I couldn't drive (but he refused to drive himself). I stopped sharing my feelings with him, settling in my own anxiety and depression. Wondering what I had done, why it was so hard for me to make him happy, how bad I was.
He would threaten to leave me during every single fight. It got so bad that I started joking about. Oh here you go, breaking up with me again. He would tell me I was disgusting and he hated me. He would say I was a bad person. He would tell me he was sick of me and wanted to never see me again. Sometimes I'd beg him, sometimes I'd fight back. Sometimes I'd ignore him. Literally nothing worked so I just gave up. Eventually he'd calm down and we'd never talk about it. He started to drink so much more than me and would get angry at me if I drank at all. He'd call me a drunk and tell me I needed AA. I quit drinking completely just to be sure it wasn't the truth. I haven't really drank since and that was almost 4 years ago. Once, while he was screaming at me, I tried to call my mom and he tore my phone from my hands and smashed it against the wall. He did it again a few weeks later.
We stopped traveling in 2015 and had a baby the following year. He eventually calmed his drinking, though never quit completely. He'd still get into fights with me when he did. He isn't as volatile now, but he still has those episodes. In May of 2016, we started couples therapy. He was great for a while, really seemed to care again. I married him in August and he immediately quit therapy. Then he lost his job in September. With his job went his sanity. We moved out of our house in January. During the move he slipped on a box on the stairs. I didn't apologize so he spent the entire move berating me. I'd invite people over just to not be alone with him. While I was in a cold house (we're in New England) alone with our 18 month old daughter who had an ear infection, trying to wash the carpets with one hand and hold her while she screamed with the other, he started to berate me. He came up the stairs and cornered me, yelling in my face about how he was the only one doing anything. So I said if he didn't back off, I'd call the police. He left me alone then but chalked it up to "oh what were we thinking?" not long after and we never spoke of it.
We moved in with his friends in February, which is something that I had originally pushed for but he had also been excited about after the fact. His friends both had issues with his attitude and how mean he could be to their children. They told me he was being awful to me and that I shouldn't take that from him. I sent them a private message saying that they should share his issues with him directly because I'm too overwhelmed with dealing with him myself to be any help to them. He saw the message over my shoulder and lost his mind. He accused me of cheating, told me I was liar, that I had stabbed him in the back. I begged him to forgive me and trust me again. I told him he could read my email, check my phone, that I'd never cheated (I hadn't) and never would (I wouldn't). He agreed and took my information. He went home to my home state for 2 weeks to work a job with my step dad (his employer now) and started to read my emails, berating me for things I'd said and done long before I met him. Telling me that this was sad and I didn't deserve trust. I had enough. I hadn't actually done anything wrong! I was terrified to upset him and EVERYONE said he was being abusive. While he was home and I was 1000 miles away, I told him not to come back. I changed all of my passwords to everything. He lost his mind on me. The splitting was amazing. He begged me to forgive him and sent me flowers. He tempted me with sex (I was lucky to have sex with him once every couple of months) then when I talked to him on the phone, he'd scream at me. He lied about things his friends said about me, telling me they hated me and thought I was trying to make him angry. It was now, 5 years later, that he mentioned his diagnosis.
LIGHT BULB! There's a diagnosis? Well then we can cure you! He promised to get a therapist, to get help, to do all those things. But, he didn't. His friends couldn't handle us anymore and it was awkward so we left. In June, he asked me to never speak to my friends about him again or he wouldn't be able to trust me. I agreed for a time but... god what the heck was I agreeing to? I told him days later I wanted a divorce... so he went and did LSD with a friend. The next day he begged, said he'd gotten a therapist and we'd go to couples. Okay, fine. He did go to couples therapy, though he canceled a lot. He said he didn't understand why we needed to go. That I was too sensitive, even my mom thought so. That I just didn't want to forgive him and I was waiting for him to mess up.
Fast forward to the end of September. He had been mostly okay, though I still held most of the tasks for our family and it was exhausting. I still had to come straight home and cook daily or else he'd stomp around and be angry because he's so hungry and he needs to eat. I still did doctors appointments, finding day cares, finding appointments, most drop offs, most of the cleaning, any and all socializing our child, etc.
So it's cold out now and we had been staying n a very old, very leaky trailer while we got back on our feet from moving and losing jobs, etc. We both work full time now. I had been frustrated and resentful because of the amount of "outside of work" work I did for us. He canceled our therapy appointment and told me that I was ungrateful, sensitive, etc etc. He refused to help me make appointments and take Aria places and he refused to ever help me with my dog. He refused angrily for hours. I could barely get him to agree not to call me things (even minor things) during an argument.
That night our daughter, who had a chest cold, was set to sleep in a cold, moldy trailer room. I said I thought she should sleep with us. He refused. Twice. Loudly. So I called out of work the next day. While he was gone, I packed our things and I left.
I'm sure you can imagine the craziness that followed. I said we needed boundaries, space, etc. I said we were separated. I didn't want to talk to him. He called me constantly. He begged, he cried. He started his own therapist twice a week. He started picking up our daughter and dropping her off. He is taking her to the park, he is trying to get medication, he is reading DBT work books and promising it's different now. But he is still getting upset with me when I say I need more time. He still won't not talk to me when I say I need space. He guilts me over how sad our daughter is and how she is acting out at school because of the change. He says he will never stop trying to get help and he didn't know he was so abusive and awful. He says he knows now but ... .I'm still afraid if I go back, it will be the same. My friends all think I absolutely should not. I'm just not sure what to do. He is good with out daughter most of the time. He is never mean to her, just me. She loves him and she is really shook up by all this.
Could he really change? Should I give him the chance? Will my daughter suffer? This is so hard.
