Dear Charlotte:

You shared that you had a blissfully happy marriage with one child, that your husband was “kind and gentle.. caring, loving”, but following your second pregnancy, which was unplanned, your husband became vile to you: “He became vile to me, it was scary how much he changed,  like Mr. Hyde.. rude to me.. said awful things to me in front of people”. A year after your second child was born, “things became worse”: he forced you to have sex with him (“he forced me into sex after I’d been up all night with my baby.. too tired to even lift my head let alone resist”).

He told you many times that he wants a divorce, especially after you refused to have sex with him. Plus, he cheated on you once, but lied about it for months, accusing you for being insane, before he confessed to it “in a complete state of devastation”. Later, in couple counseling, he “admitted to everything, he’d sob and sob for days saying how sorry he was.. how I was the love of his life and he thought he’d had a nervous breakdown which could only explain his behavior.

A year later, he is back to “the man I married, kind sweet loving gentle”, but you are seeing a counselor to help you “with anxiety issues I’ve suddenly developed, but I get the feeling she is edging me towards the idea of leaving him. Can you ever love someone fully again if they wounded you so badly?”

My answer: if someone wounded you very badly and for a long time, then no, you can’t love them fully again, or love them at all. A person who severely wounds you  on an ongoing basis, he or she becomes the Trauma in your Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, the T in your PTSD. Every time you see him, or hear his voice, your memories of what you referred to as the monster, are activated.

After he acknowledged that he must have suffered from some kind of a nervous breakdown, did he look into what it was that he suffered from, did he share what it was about, that nervous breakdown?

anita