Dear Gillian:

I re-read your posts of your thread a year ago, slowly, and I read your recent post. It is amazing to read your intelligent, logical, sensible thinking on your part and to see how you have been unable to extricate yourself from a sickening marriage for no other reason but the lack of emotional/ social support outside this marriage. Indeed logic does not undo fear, emotional and social support are necessary so that we can do  the healthy think in spite of fear.

I understand that you don’t have children with this man. Maybe the stress prevented that, maybe you have been on birth control, I don’t know.  But please notice this: your husband having been the victim  of some sort of sexual abuse by his own father, having not healed and in close contact with his unrepentant father, is likely to sexually or otherwise abuse his own child.

Protect the ones not born yet, this is your primary responsibility, to not bring a child into this marriage, to be fathered by this man and to be in the presence of his father’s father and uncle as well as the others.

There are women’s shelters available for women in abusive marriages/ relationships. These are homes where women live, with counselors at times, being helped and guided toward life away from the abusive household. The husband/ partner must not know about that shelter.

I believe you should make some inquiries, maybe at a police station, look for a secretly located women’s shelter someplace, then secretly pack some clothes and essentials and leave your husband and his family never to return.

There is nothing but sickness awaiting you staying with him. Hope  is elsewhere and in a shelter, so is the social support you desperately need.

Post again anytime.

anita