Husband left six weeks ago-struggling need advice

[Samsaraschoice]

I've never posted anything on here before so please forgive me if I do it wrong. I don't know all the abbreviations etc.
I am also 50 years old so don't even know if I'm allowed to post on here.
The problem is my beloved soulmate, love of my life husband left me six weeks ago. This is following a six year marriage (no mutual children, I have three but they have all left home this year, he has two but didn't see them much).
We are very different. He is a tradesman with no education and a very bad childhood involving desertion by his mum, sexual abuse and violence. I am a post grad educated professional but had a pretty bad childhood too with an abusive mother and alcoholic partner. We met three years after my last divorce and fell deeply into fairy tale love. He put me high in a pedestal as his princess and he was my hero/knight. Until he left we were still very much in love and having regular beautiful sex and were very affectionate. But the big downside was that he had become nastier and nastier and seemed to go into rages at the drop of a hat. We lived in my nice house and had a lovely lifestyle mainly paid for by me and he became more and more resentful and lost his self esteem which I fully acknowledge was my fault for not validating him enough and for trying to improve him re speech manners clothes etc. (which he originally said he wanted, but actually deeply resented). After a year or so, he started to show occasional violence towards me and the children. He would do things like push me from one end of the house to the other, shout right in my face, hold a clenched fist in front of me and he attacked my two sons several times, once picking up my 13 year old by his t shirt and legs and throwing him out of bed into the floor because he had been cheeky to me. He also put him in a hedge when he was 17 and grabbed my 20 year old son by the neck gouging bloody nail marks out of his skin.
In the last few months despite ongoing affection, he has had a hair trigger temper and the tiniest thing I said would set him off.
After telling me repeatedly to fk off in the pub after I had been sitting on his knee watching a band and I disagreed with him about whether they were like another band. He demanded that I get the f*g car and drive him home imediately. I was so shocked that I was crying as I tried to drive and he told me I was driving too slow and he got out of the car and stomped off ahead of me in a rage. Eventually I persuaded him to get back in the car and once we got home he started to pack his stuff. He told me that I had five minutes to admit I was wrong or he was going. I said through my sobs, that I couldn't say I was wrong just because he was telling me to, so he went.
In the next two weeks he was nice by text and said his aim was to get sorted and he begged to come back, but I said he needed anger management first and counselling. He quickly changed regarding coming back and turned very cold and hard and has now said it is definitely over although he can't rule out regretting it in six months or a year and may then come looking for me.
Yesterday he came to mend my roof as I had lost tiles and it was leaking. I was hopeful that this kindness meant he was starting to think about trying to resolve it, but to my absolute horror when I got home, he had left me a bill for his time for £80 and he also took the money from a jar I had told him about (because I thought he would need it for materials).
I felt like I'd been punched in the gut. I had just about got over the horrific endless crying, insomnia, panic attack stages of aching loss and fear and have lost a stone in weight, but last night I couldn't sleep at all and feel really dreadful again this morning.
I am now beginning to think that this man is totally toxic and damaged too much and I should run, but there is another side to me that thinks I'm fifty years old and I have no one left at home and he is good looking and fit and when he is nice, there is no one more loving.
Part of me desperately wants to wait and give him time and see if I can help him, but the other side says to give up, that he is a selfish abuser and any man that sends his wife a bill for helping her is an absolute bastard with no hope. He cannot see that he is wrong in anyway for this and is angry that I have not thanked him for the work.
Any advice would be very much appreciated.

[Lweji]

For some reason and after all he did to you and your sons, you still seem to expect him to be a decent and caring person.

He's not. And I suspect he'll do his best to hurt you and to punish you. At the moment it's leaving a bill, because he knows you'd be hurt.

I can understand that the hurt probably comes from the realisation that your hopes were dashed of him coming to his senses and becoming the loving husband that you thought he could be. Because he never was, but you hoped he was. You thought deep down he loved you, but he doesn't.

For me it came when I saw how exH treated our kitten. I almost threatened to divorce him over it. It was clear then that it wasn't bad temper or stress, or whatever. It was pure cruelty.

It's very sad when we get to that point.

Take your time to grieve for your hopes. For that to happen, for you to heal, and to safeguard you, the best for you is to go no contact. Get the lawyers in and cut all the links.

[ageofgrandillusion]

We discussed them with the counsellor, he apologised to the boys and agreed he was wrong. I do think I was overly influenced by the counsellor, but you go to them for guidance don't you?

Alternatively, one might go on a mother's instinct to protect her children.
There is something deeply unsettling about this whole thread.

[Junebugjr]

You need to forget about this man, and start looking and analyzing why you have carried on in an abusive relationship, and allowed your children to be physically abused, when you had the choice to end it.
I don't mean this in a negative light toward you, I really don't. Only when we understand the dynamics and hold an abusive relationship can have over someone, we can see things more clearly, and break the cycle of getting into another abusive relationship.
This thread is really unsettling, one of the posts describing a poster who seemed to stand back and see her 2yr old son mentally and physically abused has made me feel ill.

[BrandNewIggi]

Why are you talking about a reconciliation?
I'm sorry you don't like mumsnet anymore, but sometimes when you are inside a situation you can't see things with the clarity that those on the outside can. It seems clear that you can't see this situation for what it is yet, I imagine that is characteristic of being abused sadly.
Please value yourself and your sons higher than to return to this life.

[TDada]

Miranda hope u are okay

[TDada]

Some of the posts are on the wrong side of bullying?