Op, listen to me. If you were feeling that way, and believing those things about yourself, before you went into counselling, and your counsellor has had to work hard to disavow you of them, then you must have been, and still are, in an extremely abusive relationship for a long time. Only the victims of sustained and systematic abuse feel and believe like that. Only the victims of sustained and systematic abuse could even concepualise of allowing themselves to be raped for another two years as some sort of coping mechanism that benefited their children.
You say that if you do not submit to him, he is horrid to the children. The way to solve that is NOT to submit, it is to leave him.
There is a weird characteristic about abuse victims that people don't like to mention becaue it sounds blamey, when none of the blame belongs to them. But here it is, and it really does apply to you: abuse is so psychologically traumatic, makes you think about yourself and examine yourself so very much, all the time, that even though your actions and decision may outwardly seem selfless, the abuse make you become self-centred... In a non-selfish way. YOU need to minimise, to deny things to yourself, you need to deludeyourself, you need to give yourself time, you need to tell yourself that the kids are fine and ignore every sign to the contrary, every bit of commonsense that tells you that they are being messed up - you need to do all of this to cope. But what you also do is demand that your children do the same, as well as coping with the EA they get from him, and being a used by the family environment and worrying about their mother. Not even the greatest actress on earth could hide how abuse affects her, all the time. Just because they chat normally doesn't mean they are unharmed. You chat normally, and you are allowing yourself to be raped. They can appear okay because you are teaching them the terrible lesson of pretending that appalling things don't matter. Training to accept abuse themselves, when older, is another way of putting it.
Your family dynamic is poor, you admit that. It is abuse for children to stay in that. Their future selves cannot give you two years for whatever bullshit reason you are lying to yourself about being too impossible to leave. Staying guarantees extra layers of damage upon what already undoubtedly exists within them.
Abuse is awful. One of the worse aspects is that because abuse of a mother abuses their children as a result, when women stay with abusers, it makes them collusive, against their will, against everything they really do want, in that abuse to the DC.
You risk them begruding you, even hating you, when they are grown, for staying with this man. Any inkling of prostituting yourself to their father for 'their sake' will probably put them in therapy for the best part of a decade, at least.
I'm sorry to be so harsh, but you really need to see the truth here.