I originally posted on the divorce thread but didn't get much response.
Is anyone going through a divorce due to emotional abuse?
I'm looking for advice/similar experiences.
I'm currently separated from my husband (soon to be ex). I've decided to leave the marriage due to his continued inappropriate and disrespectful behaviour. He had an affair before we were married, we decided to work through it. We married and things were good. But every so often he told me for a he was unhappy and would talk of a black hole inside of himself, and that he didn't feel loved. Initially he placed a lot of blame towards me for this unhappiness and it didn't seem to matter what I did to make him happy. He told me I needed to change and that I wasn't the best version of myself. This went on for a while. Things would seem to improve and then it would crop back up. By this point we had a child and had bought our first house.
He then had issues with his mental health (PTSD) and pretty much had a breakdown. I did everything I could to help and support him. He feels I didn't. In this period he had another affair which I didn't find out about until over a year later.
I wanted to leave at this point but he essentially implied he was scared of what he would do to himself. So I stayed for his mental health and because we had a very young child. We tried to work through everything but he was never happy. And would say its because I don't meet his needs, abd I don't make him feel loved. He would often speak to me with disdain but then act like nothing happened. We would go through these weird cycles of everything being good and then out of no where, he was miserable and told me he loved me but didn't like me, he didn't respect me and he would never respect me until I respected him. He'd say that nothing truly got better because he just swallowed his feelings abd he would scream at me in his head. He got easily upset if I didn't take his advice or do things slightly different to the way he would. I.e he got annoyed and angry when I would stack the glass jar coffee pots rather than out them in a line. He spoke to me in a harsh way and still does at times. Then tell me I'm too sensitive and fragile.
I got to the end of my tolerance with this behaviour and the last straw was him speaking with the old affair partner for weeks before I found out. All generic stuff but it was the sheer disrespect that I couldn't get past. I just thought he is never going to change.
Since the separation his emotional abuse initially got worse and he blamed me for everything and basically said I was neglecting my obligations as a wife and giving up on the marriage contract.
Does this sound like emotional abuse?
Thanks for reading if you got this far 😅