Alimeg & anon 1968
I'm a struggling single dad that was completely devastated by the worst ever behaviour from my ex-wife.
It has totally destroyed my life. and I can understand your current emotional states completely.
It is impossibly difficult - rather like being required to keep your hand immersed in boiling water; uncontrollably painful and so impossible to do. But in this case of emotional pain, you HAVE to keep that hand in that boiling water because there is absolutely no way of being able to take it out.
But, because that hand cannot be taken out of the boiling water, you just gradually get used to it.
People say it takes about five years to 'get over it'. And I think they are about right.
But I can offer some advise that will really help.
Talk about it - a lot. Find someone to talk about it to. This is difficult because usually no one wants to know; unless you pay a psychotherapist to listen.
Find people with similar experiences and talk to them. I promise you it will help.
I am well qualified to know about this subject because not only did my ex-wife give me nineteen years hell living with her, followed by more hell to this very day, but when I met a really fantastic women after my ex left, this other women became exceedingly mentally ill when our son was born, leaving me a full time single parent with a by now comprehensively trashed life.
You think you've had a hard time. Talk to me and I guarantee I've had a worse time. that will definitely make you feel better - a bit.
I have the experience of my much loved and pampered wife being a psychowreck emotionally due to her upbringing.
After her weird affairs and several trial stomping outs in various degrees of pointless, meaningless, without any cause or reason huffs over 19 years of marriage, she finally ran off with another man permanently.
It wrecked me for years.
There was no warning, no visible signs etc, at all times it seemed the marriage was OK & I loved her, looked after etc. She had no cause to complain and the problem could only have been her inner demons - which gradually became crystal clear over many years and a huge amount of our exposure to top notch psychotherapy etc.
Then, wait for it. From giving me the appearance of a loving relationship she just suddenly flipped & left overnight. Then she became the angriest person you could ever imagine; being angry at me as though it had been me being the vilest husband imaginable (when I was absolutely not).
It became impossible to talk to her. She refused to cooperative with any divorce issue just in order to be spiteful and angry. She completely ignored the fact that as I agreed unequivocably with her obvious desire for divorce so she could carry on with the professional philanderer and serial family wrecker slob she ran off with, all the legal issues could have been settled with minimum legal expense.
Instead, she encouraged her lawyers to make a meal out of what was a nothing legal issue as I disputed nothing, agreed with everything and just wanted to minimise the legal nonsense.
this cost us both tens, and tens of thousands of pounds in legal fees alone. then lots, lots, more was lost in other ways.
But, the truly astounding thing about this was her utterly, utterly false claim of domestic violence. I am constitutionally an unviolent person physically, and very definitely unviolent emotionally too. I cannot hurt people close to me at all.
That kind of thing really makes me cringe because of my own childhood of emotional abuse from a truly wicked stepmother and the most bizarre of unloving, emotionally nonexistent and distant fathers.
That childhood & my knowledge of psychology & myself, makes me the absolute opposite of my wicked stepmother and distant totally unloving father. My whole focus in life has been to create the happy Dickensian myth of the perfect marriage & happy family etc.
That is what I gave my ex-wife. But she trashed it completely because of problems she obviously had when she was growing up. But she had no insight at all and had been brought up to echo the immense self-centred selfishness of both her parents (who both provided a number of discernable and very, very serious traumas for her).
But here comes the real killer. On leaving me this women was as grossly abusive as any human being could be. She screamed repeatedly how she was going to deliberately alienate my two daughters from me and make sure they learn to hate me and never have anything to do with me.
I was very close to both of them and my ex-wife was totally aware of this and knew it would be the thing she could do to hurt me the most.
So she did it. My youngest daughter was 12, and was easily manipulated by her mum to think she should live with her mum purely on the grounds that she was conned into thinking she would be going to a better school.
If my ex hadn't deliberately used that school scenario to manipulate that chlld she almost certainly would have opted to stay with me because both kids were well aware of how their mum was completely wrong to do what she was doing.
The eldest 15 year old daughter wanted to stay with me (without me ever even asking her or even discussing it).
After two years of constant emotional pressure on my daughter from her mum ( I cry myself to sleep every night because you are living with your dad, stuff & more), my eldest daughter had been sufficiently brainwashed into disappearing without telling me to go and live with her mum.
I still had a brilliant relationship with this daughter, and did not question what she did or even really disagree or discuss it. I just accepted it and I never, ever produced the slightest ripple of conflict into any aspect whatever of any part of the divorce or toing and froing or custody of the two kids.
So, no custody battle then.
But, cutting a long story short, my ex-wife eventually succeeded in so thoroughly brainwashing my eldest daughter, that she now refuses to communicate with me at all.