My heart is broken

[skippy84]

Warning this could be a long one.

My partner has moved out, we were due to get married next September but he raised several doubts about going ahead and I felt backed into a corner and had to cancel everything.

We have had many problems since a termination early in our relationship. I have been depressed and drinking to self medicate and I realise this is a massive issue which I am trying to address. We have identified that he has many of the charcteristics of a classic co-dependant. Had alcoholism, infidelity and abuse in the family growing up which has left him with a need to fix things and take care of / control people.

I cannot believe what I have become in this relationship, there is a large age gap between us and I was in many ways a carefree 21 year old when we met. I have lost all my independance and become incredably dependant on him. Up untill recently I was so angry and resentful because I wanted for him to make me feel better and he couldnt. In addition he is frequently passive agressive. When I am having a good day its like he feels he can unleash his pent up agression towards me. This is normally done in passive and snide ways which he then denys doing. This further drags me down and makes me more low and upset because I feel so depressed and hopeless that things can ever get better. He is also quite cold towards me in other ways frequently pusing me away if I try to be affectionate and does not display any interest in having a sex life with me.

I recognise my part in this fully, I have become massivly needy and overly emotional and refused to take responsibility for my own happiness. This is something I am trying to work on and something I realise is ultimatley down to me and me only.

We have a two year old son and I want to badly to keep things together for him to grow up with both parents. Though I realise how poisionous a model of relationships this is for him. My heart feels like it is genuinely broken for the first time in my life. My question to you all is, is there any way this can be salvaged. Is it even worth trying. I am doing counselling myself and working on my drinking problem. My partner says he needs individual counselling but was not receptive when he saw my counsellor individually. He says he does not want couples counselling as he feels the things he has to say will upset me too much.

At the moment he has moved out. I am trying to keep working on myself and rebuilding my strength. Is there any hope for this relationship or is it my dependancy that keeps me clinging on?

Thanks for reading

I do not really have any advice but wanted to bump this for you x

Appreciated, I imagine its my compelling writing style

Who can possibly say? Just work on you. Keep having terapy and put your little boys happiness before your partners.

Yes, keep on with that therapy, but also this uncompromising honesty, it will be your best friend and will teach your son how to work out problems.

I know I can't really know anything from one Internet post, but are you sure it's not him that is the root of the problem? You said that when you met him you were a carefree 21'yr old and now-well, the amount of negative words about how you are feeling says it all...& you say that when you have a good day he drags you down - on purpose. Do you think he might be controlling you in some sense and keeping you a bit beaten down? Like i say I might be well off base but it did occur to me after reading your post.

Oh love, none of us including you and your dp can know how it will end up. Sounds similar to my marriage and its not worked out in our case. Also have a two year old so I know how much work that involves, he can still grow up with two parents even if you are not together. It is a lot to get used to, a different life from the one you imagined.

When did he move out? Are you just in that panicky getting used to being alone stage? Give it time and continue with your counselling so you feel happier in yourself whatever happens between the two of you.

To be honest it has occurred to me but it seems to be an easy way out for me - dodging responsibility for the situation. When I have been reading about codependancy there is an element of him not wanting me to get better or to be able to 'survive' without him because his low self esteem tells him that if I get stronger I won't need him anymore and will leave him. He agrees that this may be the case on some level.
Nonetheless I can't slip into the trap of thinking he made me this way because that just feeds into the trap of powerlessness.

Sorry that last response was to henrys, Ima he's only been gone a fee weeks so am still very panicked, a few months ago I was choosing my wedding dress and now I'm crying myself to sleep every night. I've never felt pain like this before and I feel so desperately alone.

You will get used to being alone, mn is great for company. Try and keep busy, meeting up with people if it gets too much.

There are good things about having the place to yourself as well.

Look - wanting stay together for your child is crap, really it is. He is not worth struggling for. You sound very unhappy and messed up right now, but I promise you that within 6 months of leaving the bastard you'll be sorting out the booze, putting your life back together and not worrying about all this navel-gazing analysis of crap relationships that you should frankly have grown out of by now.

Life WILL get bette for you. Very soon. Just have faith in yourself.

He has a need to fix things and take care of / control people

When he met you, you weren't broken and you didn't need fixing. To him, this meant you didn't 'need' him in the way that he needs to be needed in order to validate himself as 'caring' and always' 'in control'.

So he 'broke' you by sucking the joy out of your life and emotionally draining you. When you had a good day, he did his utmost to bring you down.

When you were being affectionate to him, he withheld his affection from you.

Self-medicating with alcohol? Whose idea was that? When you turned to the bottle, did he suggest counselling or other ways of alleviating your depression? Or did he facilitate your drinking?

Unless you're willing to waste your life stay with a man who doesn't truly care about you and who has a vested interest in keeping you unhealthily dependent on him, you're relationship can't be salvaged because he won't change.

You, on the other hand, are capable of becoming all that you can be and you're certainly more than capable of getting back the equilibrium you possessed before you met him.

Life's a learning curve. Keep learning about yourself, and learning how to recognise undesirable traits in others, and you will become a strong and confident woman who will provide an excellent role model to your dc and, more importantly, an antidote to the model that will be set by his df.

As for the pain you feel - no pain, no gain. Sometimes growing through challenge and adversity can be painful but personal gain makes it worthwhile and, much like childbirth, any pain is soon forgotten in the presence of a new life.

Make a new life for yourself and your ds. There's an infinitely happier future awaiting you than the past you've just left.

I know this is a minor point in among everything else but it may be a key point too - who wanted the termination, you or him?

It was a joint decision possibly even more me than him. As I said I was only 21 just finished college and not ready.

I am not willing to lay all the blame for this on his shoulders. I genuinely think that if he posted here from his perspective you would all tell him to get the hell out and don't look back. I have so many regrets about the way I acted towards him

Please read izzy's post and reply? My instinct is telling me she's right

Everything that Izzy said.

I used to vehemently defend my controlling abusive exh. I somehow managed to end up in the relationship for over 20 years. I couldnt accept l was so low because of him, l thought it must be me, life is what you make of it etc.and it's not fair to blame someone else.

I finally realised l would never be happy with him (plus he was getting increasingly violent) and made my escape.

Never looked back, am now the happy, confident, outgoing person l should have been all along. Plus a lovely new DH, who builds me up at every opportunity (instead of knocking me down like exh), respects me and loves me unconditionally.

But more to the point and l know it's an old cliche but l love and like and respect myself now and not just because my DH does.

You/everyone deserves to feel this way. x

It sounds like an extremely unhealthy relationship. You might feel broken right now but as time goes on you will get stronger. I suspect the split will be for the best long term. Perhaps when you look back on your relationship in a year or so you will see it quite differently.

Thank you izzy, that is a very powerful post. I think on some level you are right but as I said seeing him as this manipulative controller, responsible for all my problems is not a road I want to go down and not one I can go down with any honesty.

You are right in that he was unwilling to discuss with me that he felt uncomfortable about my drinking, like all the other problems it was ignored unroll after I had cancelled the wedding and he cited my drinking as the reason he didn't want to go ahead. If only he had said something sooner, in my self pity I just assumed his silence meant he didn't care.
I genuinely don't think that he has been operating at any kind of conscious level in our relationship and I think he is ultimately a good person with a bad approach to relationships brought about by what he witnessed as a child.

He says he can't trust me and that's a major problem. In the immediate aftermath of the termination I was drinking a lot and kissed a work colleague. I stupidly told him in the name of honesty but only last night he said this was the reason he was so angry with me. It was eight years ago and nothing like that has happened since but he can't let go. I wish it hadn't happened so much it was literally a few minute kiss.

I have made so many mistakes here and I suppose that's where the pain is really coming from. If I didn't have so many regrets I would be able to get all self righteous and angry but really I'm just so disappointed in myself

I have been living in a relationship, where I had a similar role to your husband. My X was depressed, alcoholic, codependent; I was so very angry, and codependent. We were both enmeshed and reliant on each other. And the relationship was unhealthy.

My feelings are, yes a relationship like yours could survive, but it depends entirely on the amount of work each partner puts into it. Both halves need recovery. Both need therapy. Both need to make changes.

Living with an alcoholic is absolutely soul destroying. It makes you angry and miserable. I am in no way putting blame on you, just that is the way it is, or the way I experienced it.

You need to put all of your effort into stopping drinking, and show him you will do whatever it takes. You also need to work on your codependency (often strongly linked in with drinking, on the part of the drinker too). Go to AA and CoDA, go to therapy. My X did not one of these things, even when we split up, he still couldn't. For me that was the end.

Things your partner needs to do, well, things I did. I did a lot of therapy, working on my issues, I went to Al Anon, I went to CoDA. They helped me. They can really help the relationship too. There is also Recovery Couples Anon, which is for the couple, and is for working on the strained relationship - I know people who do this and it helped them. I agree that couples counselling, before all the above issues are being dealt with is pointless. But I would have done that, if we both had made progress in recovery.

I wish you all the luck in the world. And even if you can't fix the relationship, work on fixing you so you can have a happy life!

It sounds as if you still have left over guilt (am absolutely not saying justifiable btw) possibly about the termination, because you keep saying l have made so many mistakes. Can you get any counselling about that specifically ? I mean kissing a guy when drunk 8 years ago should not still be making you feel guilty. It is your partner who needs to let go of that one imo and for him to harbour that for eight years and still not be able to forgive and forget and trust you again is bad enough. But without even letting you know all this time that's how he feels is pretty unreasonable - again imho.

Thank you daff. I can completely empathise with your situation and that is why so keen not to start thinking he made me this way.
I have been doing counselling and cbt. I am a relatively highly functioning alcoholic, managed to hold down a good job and finished my masters this year with a 1.1 but am nonetheless an alcoholic from what I can ascertain.
I have gone to AA but being in my 20s found it difficult to relate to the older members. I can however see quite clearly that that is where in headed unless I resolve my issue with drinking. The think that prevented me from fully engaging was the concept of powerlessness and having to give your addiction to higher powers to resolve. I feel like I have been waiting for someone to fix me for long enough and I want to rediscover my own power.
At the moment I am just reading a lot about rational recovery et and (possibly the key to this) not drinking.
I appreciate what you must have went through with your husband and I am horrified that I have subjected someone I supposedly love to this

Skippy, there is a huge difference between what you are writing there in that post, and the way my X thinks. You are saying very clearly you have problems with your drinking, you are being humble enough to say that you have affected others with your drinking. I know so many people in recovery, and humility seems (to me) to be a key component to getting better .

My X, is still in so much denial about the damage and chaos he has caused. And although I can't take responsibility for his alcoholism, I do see that I had a part to play in the whole mess. I had no boundaries in our relationship, similar to him, and I should have put those in place early on. That would not have stopped him, but it would have stopped my part in the destruction. But I am addressing my codependency now and working hard on that.

I guess from my experience of 12 step groups, I personally like the group-mentality, there is a lot of support in it. The powerlessness is over alcohol (and in CoDA other people), I find it very strong and powerful. As soon as you stop trying to control alcohol, you gain a lot of personal strength and power. It is then all about you and regaining power. With higher power, it is about letting go of self-will (basically that little 'devil' on your shoulders that says goooo on have another, one won't hurt) and replacing it with something bigger, stronger and positive. With addictions (of any kind, including codependency) they say you become spiritually void and empty, and spirituality is important - in whatever form, even if it is as simple as happiness, that feeling of fulfillment, or passion.

I guess I like these groups, because I hit my rock bottom with my X's drinking, and I needed to get out of my immense isolation and despair and into a supportive place with friends, who understood what I was going through, because they had experienced it too. The funny thing is I have gone from anger towards 'my alcoholic' to having lots of friends who are recovering alcoholics, the difference being the 'recovering' part, there is a lot of power in that small word.

Mind I do have guilt over the termination, massively so. I think my partner found it very difficult to deal with my level of pain afterwards and being a fixer I felt under massive pressure from him to get over it and move on. He has said in the past that he gets furious with me when I cry in front of him and even imagines hurting me. (he 100% never would and I would not tolerate it) as a result I have buried so much of my true emotions and none of my pain has been resolved.

Daff thank you for your understanding. My first AA meeting I accidentally went into the al anon room and was too embarrassed to leave. I sat their horrified at people in their 50s and 60s still suffering pain from growing up with alcoholic parents. I do not want my son in one of those rooms in 20/30/40 years time. I know I need to make massive changes personally but I just don't know if my partner can/will/wants to/should be part of my future

Thank you for your input, it would be very easy for you to feel disgust towards someone like me.

Alcoholism is a disease and has no bearing on the person. You sound like you are lovely and really wanting to make changes.

I think you should focus on yourself, and not even worry about whether your partner becomes part of your future - see that is where higher power comes nicely in, by allowing yourself to let go of the control and worry about your (past and) future, you can spend all your energy concentrating on just caring for you today, and making the changes that you need to. Then if there is a possibility of the relationship recovering, it has the best chance; conversely if you don't thrive in the relationship, that will happen naturally too.

Our relationship starting going downhill with a miscarriage, so a bit similar to your situation. I felt guilt over that and had so much pain, and my X could not support me, and didn't want to. If I ever cried, he got angry and they were crocodile tears. I can't imagine going through what you had to, and you need to forgive yourself [hug].

This relationship sounds very unhealthy and unhappy - are you sure you want to hang on to it?

You sound self-aware and keen to change your life and make things better for yourself and your son. Having separated/divorced parents is NOT the worst thing that can happen to a child (my own parents are divorced, so I know a bit about this), but living in a toxic household with one partner controlling the other who drinks to drown her misery, possibly is.

Please keep up with the therapy and sort out your drinking and self esteem issues. When you've rediscovered yourself a bit you'll hopefully see this miserable and unhealthy situation is not the best thing for you or your son.

Out of interest, how much alcohol are we talking here?

My (abusive) ex would tell me I had a drink problem if I ever deigned to have more than a glass of wine and didn't sleep with him... I'm not saying you don't have issues with alcohol, but men like the one you describe DO make us feel that we have a problem to keep us down, subservient and grateful they 'put up with us'

If you DO have issues with alcohol, there is a thread here The Brave Bus IIRC, get on board and they will help you with the immediate drinking, there are also many that self medicate to escape previous hurt/control/trauma.