Yesterday I formally retained a lawyer.  So, yeah.  I have all these fantasy conversations with my husband where I get to tell him off for all the selfish, delusional, manipulative stunts he's pulled on me and our daughter over the years ... and then I know I'm only ever going to have that conversation in my head, because the level of self-delusion he's built up is something I'm  not equipped to penetrate.  Ever.

He continues to talk as if nothing's happened, making plans for Christmas, etc.  I feel like if I don't speak up I'm "leading him on" but on the other hand, what am I going to gain by speaking up?  At least now, with him oblivious, he doesn't know enough to cover his footsteps.  I can't teach him to be honest ... I'd just be teaching him that he needs to be a better liar.

Baffled, I second your concern for the way straight spouses so often talk themselves into staying, and rationalize it all as "revolutionary" or "caring."  It is a coping mechanism, but the sooner one gives it up and moves on to the realization that we are traumatized and scared to death the sooner one can get free and get to healing.
 I just read, today, a very short primer (book) called "Boundaries," by Adelyn Birch, on how to avoid getting entangled in another relationship with a manipulative and disordered person.  To the point and clear, and helpful.  
 Violated, I'm so glad things are clear for you, that you are determined to free yourself, and have gotten an exit plan formulated.  You can do this.  Just this morning I woke up and thought, "It does get better."  Compared to where I was a year ago, or even three months ago, I am in a much better place/stage.  The only way through it may be through it, as someone here said, but you do get through it and on to something better.

Yes, the stonewalling and silence, the ability to wall us off and themselves off from themselves and us, the future faking and planning as if everything would just go on the way it was, with him not talking and having manipulated the situation in such a way that any time I raised the issue it was "an attack on him."  It's what finally convinced me, after two years of it, that it would never get better and he would never change. I realized that he was willing to sacrifice me and my health and all my relationships for the rest of my life to his closet, and if he was willing to do this, he didn't have my interests at heart and couldn't possibly love me. If I was going to have a decent life and future, I was going to have to make it happen, because making my needs smaller and smaller was not anything that would, when he realized just what I was sacrificing (a realization he never would come to, I realized finally), push him to change.  He was just fine with things as they were.  When I finally told him I wanted a divorce and had already seen a lawyer, his face was a study in confusion and disbelief.  I'd taken so much, allowed so much, let every boundary fall--that I had a limit and that he had reached it was a complete shock to him.  

Last edited by OutofHisCloset (August 2, 2018 4:50 pm)

delete

Last edited by Lynne (February 3, 2019 1:02 pm)