I'm really struggling at the moment to cope and wonder if anyone can help me deal with what is going on in my life. I feel deeply depressed and scared.
The story is I've been trying to reconcile with my DP, we went to counseling yesterday for the first time and it's ending up him just using the session to offload his side of the story, tell everything I did wrong and tell me he wants to separate and just work out a co-parenting schedule. I'm just totally devastated.
The history is that he has been having an affair with a co-worker and left me in August last year. He treated me very badly during this time and we have been on the road to seperating our lives since then. We've had the house on the market and just had a cordial relationship because we have two small children. He's always been planning on starting a new life with her but she is married (now divorcing) and also has a pre-school child so I think it's complicated for them to just set up home.
So over Christmas we spent time together in our family home that me and the children have been living away from. We've been at my Mums and this is because I've been suicidal at times and needed family support - where the family home is is really remote, isolated, I have no friends or family there and impossible for me to find work around. So during Christmas we lived as we did before the affair - a happy, normal family in our family home but me and him just had a friendly co-operative relationship rather than romantic.
When Xmas was over me and the kids returned to my Mums with the long term plan of continuing to rebuild my life as a single mother by me finding work and a new home etc. But he calls and says he realizes he's made a huge mistake and that he wants his family back and wants me. I am very shocked as he has been so definite in his desire for splitting.
Anyhow after some thought and discussion I decide that I should return and we should try and rebuild the relationship. From my point of view it was a good relationships with some problems to do with money and sex that could be resolved over time. I knew we could have a good sex life again because we had resumed it during last summer when he was beginning to tell me about the affair. And I knew I could get a job and help with the money issues.
So when I arrived back only 8 days ago we became intimate again, our sex life becoming excellent and he started to say he loved me again and that we should get married. We have been together 10 years and were engaged but the busyness of kids stopped us planning a wedding. He booked a romantic weekend away and brought me beautiful underwear. But I'd only been back a few days when he started having panic attacks. He started saying he needed to see a therapist urgently and he was prescribed emergency tranquilizers.
I thought this reaction was very strange for someone who had essentially got their life partner back and was starting the beginning of rebuilding the relationship. I knew we'd need counseling and it would take me time to forgive him but I thought the first steps were promising. His bodily reaction said otherwise though.
He was becoming increasingly agitated and booked us in to see a couples counselor, getting an appointment in less than a day. So two days ago we went to the counsellor and he told his side of the story, he didn't want to hear mine at all. He had no desire to listen and build but to just state his grievances against me.
So he said we'd had an unhappy relationship and I had turned him away, that our second child came between us when she was a baby (she's only two now), that I had not allowed him to parent 50/50 (absolutely untrue), complained about my extended breastfeeding. He then went on to say he was incredibly unhappy that I had not immediately returned to work when the kids were one year old so he felt he had all the financial responsibility (I did return to work and worked for a year earning way more than him but when 2nd child came we decided it was too hard to both work when they were so tiny so we moved to a cheaper house away from the city affordable on one salary with the plan I'd stay home until the youngest was 3 then I'd build a freelance business from home).
The thing that hurt so much was him saying that he had met his soulmate in this other woman- he said he was attracted to me but wondered if it was enough. He said she listened and was a true friend that turned into a something more. I didn't know he was unhappy, he never told me. I'm the kind of person who loves to talk about emotions and think I am definitely the person you want on your side if you're facing life problems as I'm practical, pragmatic and hard working but he says I'm impossible to talk to.
He then blamed me for his affair, for having to confide in someone else because life for him was so unhappy. He then was pretty remorseless and said now he wanted 50/50 separate co-parenting and for me to not leave the family home again he would go to his Mums, for me to get a job in the locale and for us to never be together again. He was furious with me. He also said me taking the kids to my Mums was so despicable he'd never be able to love me. I explained I did it because he'd left me for her and I was so sick emotionally it was an emergency. I was on tranquilizers and all my family came from all over to help. It was hell. I also pointed out that I brought the kids back for 2 long periods at enormous emotional cost to me and also interrupted my job search and rebuilding work to do so. All because I wanted him to see the kids. He doesn't really accept this and is still angry.
So that's it now- he has left, he has the kids at his Mums as he wants them all weekend and I am here in the house alone.
Please please can anyone help me?