Hi Allison,

I’ll be brief as I think TinyBuddah is eating my posts today!!

You guys have been with each other half your lives. You were mean to him, and sometimes that kills the love. Him feeling nothing could be an emotional defense mechanism. Switch therapists. Shake it up. Do something positive and outrageous to make him view you in a new light.

Good Luck,

Inky

Dear Allison:

You didn’t mention what his PTSD is about, but reads to me that you have been part of the T in his PTSD, that is, the Trauma, the injury. You attacked him with physical and other violence and you did so repeatedly over years. You attacked him, you wrote, for anything he did or didn’t do. The fact that he eventually lost his romantic or loving feelings for you and those feelings remain lost is understandable. A healthy individual loses feelings that motivate him to reach out to a source of injury, of pain.

You asked: ” Do feelings just go away?” –

your anger didn’t go away for the nineteen years of this relationship, is it gone now? If it is gone for now, do you think it will stay gone if you and him were back together?

anita

*… and didn’t get submitted correctly…

Dear Allison:

Your last post indicates to me that you are indeed still angry at him. I think that this relationship should stay in the past. It has been a bad relationship for too long. I hope you do cooperate well co parenting. I hope you focus on the emotional well being of your children and let each other go.

anita

I think what Anita is saying in her last post is not that the relationship is in the past, but that there are too many years of negative feelings attributed to the other person to walk back from.

You mentioned the fact that when you met you were dealing with some pretty intense emotions from your son’s bio-dad and that your husband took the brunt of that anger. So i ask you this, what was your relationship dynamic? And is it possible to get something back that maybe never really existed in the first place? My point here is simply to say that there are layers and layers of hurt that both of you have contributed in building, and at some point peeling back those layers becomes too painful and raw, re-opening old wounds and picking at scars and scabs. Perhaps the best thing to do wouldn’t be to peel those layers back trying to un-do the hurt, but focus on the fact that there’s too much pain there to salvage and try and move forward into a friendly co-parenting type arrangement.

Perhaps the two of you are better off seeking happiness without each other?

Dear Allison:

I re-read your posts. In your original post you wrote: “One day I woke up and I think I had an epiphany.  I looked at my husband and I saw a man I didn’t know.  He wasn’t happy and I wanted to make him happy.  He is a great father, great provider and good person.”

I think that empathy was part of your epiphany. At the moment of your epiphany, you did not feel (as you did before) that he is your enemy, the source of your hurts and distress, one to fight and punish, but instead, he seemed like a hurting fellow human being, one you wanted to help, to make happy.

You evaluated him at that moment as a “great father, great provider and good person”, one deserving your empathy.

In your next three posts you wrote: “I’ve had a lot of soul searching and changed my behavior. I’ve let go of the past and moved on…  I’m not angry and I don’t focus on the past. I’m focusing on the now…  I’m just trying to focus on the now”.

It is fine for you to focus on the now. But the past is part of the now, in his experience and in yours. The past has to be dealt with and he is dealing with it in counseling

The fact that you are not currently angry at him does not mean, that if reunited, you will still not be angry at him. The fact that you focus on the now does not mean that if reunited, you will again focus elsewhere and see him as the source of your hurts and emotional injuries of past.

The fact that you are focusing on the now does not mean he should reciprocate, that he should forgive-and-forget as you believe you have done. He is angry at you (“He is so angry at me”, original post)- present tense.

The loving thing you can do for him now, present tense, is to give him the distance from you that he needs, to evaluate the past and make healthier choices regarding his future. If you want to make him happy (your epiphany) let him be, leave him alone. He needs the space, the time and the work that he needs to do, in order to heal.

His healing is in your best interest as a mother to his children (a healthy man is more likely to be a good father than a sick man), and it is in your best interest, if he heals, to know that your past abuse of him has been dealt with by him, and that he too, at some point in the future, will be able to focus on the now.

anita

You are welcome, Allison. I hope you post again.

anita