Dear Indigo:

You are married with a child and about six months pregnant with a second child due in December. You’ve been sleeping in a separate room from your husband for about a week.

You wrote that your husband is “not a bad person overall”, but “something is fundamentally different” about him: he is “emotionally unavailable… speechless, loveless, and monotone in all ways throughout life”, and you’ve felt “completely alone for the last couple of years”

You asked if anyone has experienced what you are experiencing. To understand your experience better, I ask: how did a man who is  “speechless, loveless, and monotone in all ways” connect with you long enough to date you, to marry you.. does he not interact with anyone at his work place (if he works), does he not interact at all with his child?

* I am wondering if being about 6 months pregnant is behind the severity of your recent subjective experience. Psychology today. com, reads: “Between 11%- 20% of women develop postpartum depression after giving birth, and 20%suffer from mental health disorders during pregnancy… It’s easy to write pregnant women’s mental health concerns off as hormonal in nature, but the picture is rarely so simple. Most women who develop mental health symptoms during pregnancy have a previous history of mental illness, suggesting that a complex cocktail of hormones, anxiety about becoming a parent, and life circumstances conspire to contribute to mental health issues”. The article then states that according to research, a few factors that contributes to women’s mental health issues during pregnancy are:  lack of social support, an unhelpful, uninvolved partner, health issues during pregnancy, having stopped taking psychiatric medications during pregnancy, and financial distress.  There is another website, women’s mental health. org, with lots of information on the topic.

anita