My therapists are not talking to each other, this is the shortcoming of my stay-at-home treatment plan. I am the go-between. I know it’s not ideal, but I also can see progress being made so am willing to accept that shortcoming. They may talk to each other periodically though.

I agree that I have a lot of anger, and I don’t seem to be able to let go of it. I want to forgive people, especially myself, and move on with my life, but I am stuck. As you know, anger that gets held onto runs in my family. I am sure some of that anger is directed towards my son. I don’t want it to be there, I totally see that it is not his fault. I hate that I resent him, but I know that I do. I have done some good work around this in therapy. I badly want to repair the relationship with my son.

The manic phase was good in that I wasn’t in pain, but bad in that it represents instability. Deep down I find manic phases fun and exciting, and they’re way better than depression. But they come with poor decision making, which often has negative consequences for my life. They almost inevitably lead to a crash afterwards. What I want is to be stable.

The issue with my husband on the emotional support thing is that he is deeply disconnected from his own emotions. He maintains that he doesn’t actually have emotional needs. He doesn’t understand what they are, how they work, or how to address them in him or anyone else. This leads him to behave really coldly towards me without realizing it. For example, when I get really depressed, I go to bed during the day and watch TV. When I told him that it would make me feel loved if he came to see if I was ok, he said, “But I know you’re not ok. Why would I ask?”. He genuinely doesn’t get that people talking to one another has a purpose besides transmission of information. It has occurred to me (and him) that he might be on the autism spectrum.

I told my husband last night that if we don’t start making real progress in the next 6 months – a year, we need to split up for everyone’s well-being. I wasn’t going to come out and say it so straightforwardly, but when I was more subtle about it, he was distracted and not fully listening to me. I realized in family therapy yesterday that he doesn’t even get how bad things are. When asked what his low point of the last two weeks was, a two weeks in which we have almost not talked at all, he said it was getting stuck in traffic on the way to the appointment. That really shocked me. I know he’s not depressed the way that I am, but for the worst thing about his last two weeks to be traffic when our relationship is in crisis and I am falling apart – it just astonished me.

The more I think about leaving, the better I feel. We have been waiting for ten years to go back to a happy place we were in for only 3 years. Those are terrible odds, and I fear that the model we’re showing our son of a relationship is toxic. I don’t want him to struggle with relationships the way that I do.

We’ll see what happens. Maybe our conversation from last night will be a catalyst for real growth. That would be nice. But I don’t think that’s how it’s going to go down. I think we’re too incompatible – I’m way too emotional for him, he must constantly feel like a failure because he can’t support me, and I constantly feel alone and abandoned. I think we could actually do divorce and co-parenting well together, and I think our son would benefit so much from having happier parents. I think we could even be friends.

I don’t know. I know for now that the best thing I can do is work on myself and encourage him to do the same. It’s not time to pack my bags yet, but I do hear a clock ticking in a way I haven’t before. I don’t want to assume that ending my marriage will solve all my problems, and I know it will create many new ones. I worry about the impact it will have on my already struggling son. But I feel that it will be very hard to learn to accept myself from within a relationship in which I feel constantly rejected and isolated.

Thanks for your thoughts.

Ilyana