Not separated, just wounded and depressed.

Hello -

I stumbled upon this forum while using Google to brainstorm the implications of my possible indifference to whether my marriage fails some day.

I suppose I'm just trying to find support and/or a forum where my story resonates.

I thought I had a healthy marriage, then my spouse was traumatized by a severe disagreement she had with her mother and they stopped speaking to each other. Shortly after that, my spouse became emotionally and verbally abusive toward me and remained that way for five full years (mostly insults and name-calling). After 5 years of working with her unsuccessfully to put an end to it while tolerating it, I told her I wouldn't stay in the marriage if it continued and then she successfully began modifying the behavior. It usually only erupts once per month now, and she usually listens to me when I tell her to stop. That's a lot of progress.

So it's now been 7 years since it started, 2 years since she started improving. And for most of that time I've been experiencing and undergoing treatment for PTSD and depression. For the first 2.5 years or so I used to experience frequent, vivid flashbacks to the abuse (the insults and the name calling; apparently her therapist licensed her to treat me that way; I'm still bewildered about that, I'm not aware of any therapeutic frameworks that encourage dozens of months of namecalling, and believe me I researched it)

The flashbacks are rare these days, but the depression remains and seems to be quite treatment resistant. We've been married for 16 years, we have two children, I have no intention of ending the marriage as long as we're both working toward something healthy.

But it occurs to me some times that if she decided to leave me, I wouldn't try to stop her. And if she wanted to take everything we owned, I'd let her have it and wouldn't try to stop her, just content to let it end and deal with the consequences. If she tried to poison the minds of my children against me, I'd let it happen, content to let the truth reveal itself in time.

That seems to me like indifference, and it doesn't feel particularly healthy. I think we still love each other, but at least from my end, it appears to be a very struggling, wounded, slow-to-heal kind of love.

Or maybe it's the depression and finding the elusive One True Pill will make it better by leaps and bounds. Dunno.

Does that resonate with anyone reading this?

In any event, cheers. I hope this message finds you as well as can be expected.

hi sorry to see you are going through a tough time. i think you have answered your own question when you used the word indifference. it sounds like you are doing everything you can to keep the family together but do you really want to live like this till the children have left home.? i cant tell you what to do but just my opinion, divorce is tough but at the moment you dont sound happy and unless you think you can achieve some happiness soon you may have to go down the divorce route.

hi sorry to see you are going through a tough time. i think you have answered your own question when you used the word indifference. it sounds like you are doing everything you can to keep the family together but do you really want to live like this till the children have left home.? i cant tell you what to do but just my opinion, divorce is tough but at the moment you dont sound happy and unless you think you can achieve some happiness soon you may have to go down the divorce route.