@comebacksun
Yes we have two children and I'm going back to work in November.
Obviously I've only spoken about his negative characteristics. He's very well liked by his colleagues. Anything I can say to express myself better?
I agree that this isn't about you expressing yourself better.
You're expressing yourself well enough he is choosing not to understand.
I was married. We separated 10 years ago. All of the problems in the marriage were caused by me... if only I expressed myself differently. Why hadn't I just said X instead of Y? That would have been different. Everything I said caused an argument. I spent hours painfully trying to expressing myself in the approved language/manner he'd provided for me but still I got it wrong. I spent any more hours frustrated and crying because I still couldn't make him see what I was saying...
Our daughter is now a teenager and only yesterday he and I had a conversation where he was saying exactly the same things to him about her.
"But she isn't going to say the same as you because she's not you," "You sound like you think there was only one way to have that conversation and it's yours. You need to understand that she isn't you so she's not going to say what you said," "But in the past, she's said Y and you told her she should have said X," He's upset because he thinks she doesn't communicate with him much any more and doesn't share things with him. She doesn't because she's sick of it.
He used to do the same with our son and then accused me of poisoning his mind against him. I had to explain the same then too.
But the explanations don't work because he wants everyone to say what will make him feel good about himself; what will make him sound like a good father and, sometimes, most of the time, whatever any of us says to him is wrong.
I thought he was well liked by colleagues. After we split up, I became good friends with a woman who he'd previously worked with, although we didn't know it at the time. When she first realised who my exh was, she told all of his positive qualities at work. How people had liked his sense of humour and how focused and outcome driven he was. He was brilliant.
It was only after she and I knew each other better than she revealed that her colleauges/bosses thought he was the most difficult person they'd ever worked with - only interested in his own ideas; unwilling to take on board other people's greater experience; there was only one way of doing it and it was his...
He was also well liked amongst our mutual friends, until we split up. Some of them are still friends with him but it became very clear to me that they also saw this side to him - it just impacted on them less and, yes, of course he has good qualities - no one is all bad.
Point being that, sometimes people don't reveal what they really think of a person publicly.
And people don't really change.
Oh and he had therapy after we split up and he admitted toe afterwards that he expected the therapist to 'side' with him and tell him what an awful wife I was. Instead, he apologised to me because he was made/able to see what he had been like with me. Yet, it hasn't stopped him from being exactly the same with our children.