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