Dear Broken Man:

I am ready with my best understanding of your situation:

My first point: I am about your age and I met in-person only one individual, my mother, who displayed a combination of the symptoms/ behaviors that your wife and my mother displayed. I read about such people in True Crime books and saw a superficial depiction of such in a movie. Online, on this very site, I came across only two individuals, out of hundreds, who described such rare people in their lives. Those two people are you describing your wife and another person describing her mother.

My second point: your home life before you met your wife did not prepare you for dealing with such rare people. This is obvious. And so, you were unprepared.

When you met her, you were a young adult living separately from her, not a child or a disabled adult who was dependent on her financially or otherwise. The speed by which you became stuck in that “prison without bars” as you called it is puzzling.

The fact that while suffering almost immediately from your then girlfriend’s extreme behavior, you did not reach out for and/ or received counsel from any of your parents is also puzzling. And then years and decades of a torturous marriage, separate bedrooms, extreme distress- and no mentioned counsel, support or help by your parents.

This is what I figure at this point: you had a quiet, peaceful home life as a child. You were raised to play by the rules, to be polite, to say Please and Thank you. Your mother taught you those things as she taught the young children in her classroom. If she was as effective in the classroom as she was with you, then her pupils behaved nicely while in class with her. What her individual pupils experienced outside her classroom was not her responsibility.

Unfortunately for you, what you experienced outside the home as a child was her responsibility (as well as your father’s of course). I am assuming that outside the home, as a child, you experienced conflicts with peers/ other people who did not behave by the rules. And I assume you came home to your parents (perhaps more to your mother because “She was the leader of the two.”

And she, your mother, taught you how to deal with people who broke the rules of good social behavior. What she taught you was probably effective in dealing with minor infractions. When the rules were broken in more severe ways, she probably told you to ignore those people and keep going.

It is possible that your mother did not want to deal with any … unnecessary stresses and discouraged you from coming to her with real problems. She wanted life Nice-and-Easy, Please-and-Thank-you, smiles and no frowns and so, you learned not to bother her, not to reach out to her or to your father.

When you met the woman who you later married- did she break the rules! In big ways! What a misfortune for you. You were unprepared and you had no one to reach out to for help or guidance.

It is a natural instinct for a living thing, an organism, to turn away from pain. But you moved in with the pain. Why? What makes a person make residence with pain?

This leads me to think that you were already used to living with pain. Before meeting the woman who became your wife, you were already living with pain. Otherwise, you would have naturally turned away from that woman (pain) instead of moving in with her.

What was the pain you lived in? The child that you were, in that calm home- you must have been alone with distress- distress that you experienced maybe in school. Distress that wasn’t welcome at home; distress that wasn’t allowed because home.. had to be calm, pleasant, polite and what happened outside home (like what happened outside her classroom) was not allowed to enter the home.

Your thoughts?

anita