Long story so will try to get to the point. I love my DH, he loves me, we have a wonderful marriage in which we have always felt like partners through thick and thin.
When we got together DH was part of his family business, as this developed he got more and more involved. It is a very specific type of work and largely reliant on the skills and experience he built up. As with many family businesses I think as conversations about succession etc came in, so did lots of conflict. We all lived within close proximity to one another and so avoiding each other was impossible. In short we ended up in a position of being subjected to a lot of bullying, manipulative behaviours and constant conflict. This attitude from family members was then aimed at our children - really nasty, aggressive and passive aggressive stuff and they were then both pre-schoolers. The constant and ongoing exposure to this was affecting the well being of myself, my oldest son (to the point of him being afraid of certain family members and wetting the bed every night) and my husband. Eventually it reached a crisis point in which I said enough and that we had to walk to away. Walking away however meant DH giving up this line of work, essentially there is little call for it as an employee, and to start up on his own would take a huge investment which we don't have. As the business was essentially still owned by his parents (and I imagine they will hold the reins for a very long time to come) he basically walked away with nothing after a lifetime of working for what was essentially a pittance.
Now I don't regret the decision to walk at all but the fall out of that was us being in a very difficult financial position and me working what pretty much averages out to a 6.5 day week across three different contracts to make ends meet and my DH being in his mid 30s and struggling to find employment for which he has the skills for. He has had odd contracted work which has helped hugely. But aside from the money which isn't really my main worry, my DH is getting increasingly down. He is a worker and happy to try most things but can be unconfident in himself. He can't find anything to apply the skills he has in and other bits pay so poorly it is not worth the childcare costs. I can keep us going financially but my key worry is he seems lost, he doesn't feel 'useful' and that he is a drain on us and not contributing. Now I know these are very old fashioned ways of looking at it, but for him these feelings are real. I keep trying to reiterate the role of us as a family unit and would it be different if he was out working all the time and I was at home but he is just getting more and more down. with a strong history of mental health problems and depression in his family I am increasingly concerned. He hates seeing me working so hard but practically I have to, to make it work. But also I don't want to push him in taking something that is going to make him desperately unhappy. I won't go into the anger I feel towards the family as that is a whole other post!
I feel like I've let him down by basically being the one who said we had to walk away from his family, and hence his career. I truly believe we had too, and we are a 1000 times off better that we did, but now I feel he is paying the price and I don't know how to help him.