Wife wants to move

[stolencrumbs]

Some brief background: My uBPDw and I moved to a new city a little over four years ago. She has hated it here since we moved. The move was certainly a trigger for what has been a four-year downward spiral/crisis. I have not lived at our house for most of the last 2.5 years. We are not separated in any legal sense. The only real separation is that I don't sleep in our house. In the four years we've been here, she has broken more things in our house than I can count, including destroying our counters, refrigerator, and stove with a hammer. A few weeks ago she threw a(nother) dish and broke a window. She blames me for all of it. She screams and cries pretty much every night.

Obviously, there's a lot going on. But the bottom line that she has settled on, along with a therapist she has been seeing, is that she cannot be here and we have to move. Okay, I got that. I have agreed with that for a very long time. For the first year I did urge her to give it a chance here and see if it got better. Things did not get better, and for the last three years, I have agreed and affirmed that being here does not work for her or for us and that we need to figure out how to get out of here.

Now, at this point, I feel like us picking up and moving somewhere together is not a great idea. We haven't lived together in almost three years. She can't be in the same house with me for any length of time. She can't look at me most times. She is dysregulated almost all the time. She has lots of suicidal ideation. There is lots of verbal abuse. And there is the property destruction. So, yeah, a lot going on.

I do think her being in another place would help. I don't believe it solves everything, but I think it would help her be more stable. I guess at this point my fantasy vision (amazing how my fantasy life has been stripped down to this) is for us to live in separate cities. We find a place she wants to be, we get a house, she gets a job, and I visit on weekends while staying where we currently are and in my current job. I don't have any issues with supporting her financially and otherwise. I think there's a chance that getting her to a better place and giving us some distance would allow us some space to improve other things.

My wife is openly hostile to the idea. She is insistent that WE need to move, and that nothing else is a possibility. We had a session yesterday with her T, and she (the T) said to me that what my wife needs if for me to be the knight in shining armor who swoops in and tells her we don't have to be here another week. So, this seems to me counter to everything I read and everything I've been working on with my own T. She's basically telling me to jump in and be the rescuer. This seems like a bad idea. But now my wife has her T on her side, and now has that as ammunition.

I'm not sure what my position is. I'm pretty sure I don't want to move with her under the current circumstances. I am willing to move. My only attachment here is my job, so I'm not wedded to being in this place. But I'm not comfortable with picking up and moving as the way to deal with what seem to me to be much deeper issues my wife has. We've done this before. Things have gotten bad before, and we've moved. It worked out for the better once, and this time made things much worse. It's just not a solution in my eyes. At some point we have to deal with the underlying issues.

On the other hand, I don't really see that being possible while she is here.

Anyway, this got long and my thoughts are a bit jumbled. Basically, I don't know what to do, and I don't know if I'm being a jerk by not being completely on board with picking up and moving wherever she wants to go. Also not sure how to handle her therapist telling me to jump into the role of savior. 

[Cat Familiar]

Wow! That seems like pretty terrible advice coming from the therapist. Trying to fix someone who is emotionally unstable by changing the externals doesn't seem like a good strategy.

You sound very grounded about how you're contemplating this advice. And apparently you're already the white knight. You can't live with her as she dysregulates when in the house with you, yet you support her financially.

I'm not sure what you're getting out of this relationship, other than broken objects, bills, and an angry unstable wife.

[stolencrumbs]

Wow! That seems like pretty terrible advice coming from the therapist. Trying to fix someone who is emotionally unstable by changing the externals doesn't seem like a good strategy.

You sound very grounded about how you're contemplating this advice. And apparently you're already the white knight. You can't live with her as she dysregulates when in the house with you, yet you support her financially.

I'm not sure what you're getting out of this relationship, other than broken objects, bills, and an angry unstable wife.

Yeah, at this point, that's pretty much it. It stopped being about what I'm getting out of the relationship a while ago, and is more about how much is this relationship taking away from me.

The T really threw me off. It's discouraging. It took a long time--years--to get my wife to see a T regularly. And she managed to find a T that appears to me to be reinforcing my wife's active passivity, which seems to me to be a huge, long-term problem in our relationship and in her life. But I am the one that pushed hard for each of us to be in T and to see someone together. And now this T is telling me something and I'm not on board with the advice. It's not a good look for me in my wife's eyes (though, to be fair, nothing is a good look for me in my wife's eyes.)

[defogging]

Wow! That seems like pretty terrible advice coming from the therapist. Trying to fix someone who is emotionally unstable by changing the externals doesn't seem like a good strategy.

You sound very grounded about how you're contemplating this advice. And apparently you're already the white knight. You can't live with her as she dysregulates when in the house with you, yet you support her financially.

I'm not sure what you're getting out of this relationship, other than broken objects, bills, and an angry unstable wife.

Oddly enough, I've had similar advice from a T.  (My wife wants to move too)  I was told "I need you to move.  She is so stuck on it that I can't help her right now.  Once you move I can help her with her issues".  The T lost my trust at that point for obvious reasons, but it was already waning.  I actually think she was just trying to get us to stay with her longer because our sessions weren't going very well.

I'm not telling you whether to stay in the relationship or leave, but one thing that sticks out to me is you seem pretty sure it's not a good idea to move back in together.  I would just suggest that you worry about YOU first, and make the decision that feels right.  You can't be afraid to say no to something, no matter who is telling you it's a good idea, or else you're not being true to yourself.

[stolencrumbs]

That's interesting, defogging. I think the T has that same perspective--that the house and being here is such a central focus of everything that my wife isn't going to be able to work on anything else until that is off the table. And I actually think there is some truth to that. I'm just not on board with her white knight solution.

To be fair to the T, she did try to suggest a range of possibilities, including us living in separate cities for some time, which is, at this point, a non-starter with my wife.

I don't really know what I think about living together again. I can't imagine it right now, because mainly what I imagine is my wife screaming, crying, raging, etc. I think the T's idea is that that will stop, or lessen in intensity, if we have a plan to move. I am very reluctant to make concrete plans to move (for us to move together to a different place with all the stress that comes with that) while the screaming, crying, raging, etc. continues. I have said as much, and I'm then told I just put all these conditions on things, and she has to check all the right boxes, and if I cared I would just say yes, we'll move. And on some level, I get that. I get that what she needs is a commitment to leaving, and to feel like I understand that she can't be here, and so we can't be here, and so we will do whatever we have to do to get out of here. I get the need for that. I just don't know if I can satisfy that need.