Wow, the support and encouragement is really wonderful. You are all causing me (in a very good way) to have to directly face reality and the last post inparticular about the impact this will and is having on my kids (no matter what I try to tell myself) really caused me to pause and think.
My husband is very high functioning. He is a well respected, adored member of our community. No one has a clue what he is like and my pride (and my ability to be brainwashed for a long time into believing it really has been my fault) has kept me here. I grew up in this community, the oldest of a large family with a mother with borderline personality disorder. She is notoriously known for her crazy antics and my husband has more than once spread rumors about me to his colleagues, friends etc... to solidify his "case" that I am the problem.
I have stayed (and I haven't EVER been this honest about this so be gentle with me!) because I don't want to face the consequences of being painted as the crazy one (just like my mother-- except she really was). I spent my whole childhood being told by my mother that I was awful and crazy. She was abusive in a number of ways and I sometimes don't know how I made it out sanely. And then I married a man who is both a HF alcoholic and himself was diagnosed last year with BPD.
So, for as bad as things have been, and as much as I don't want my children to grow up in a toxic home, I have selfishly stayed in large part (though there is love in my heart for him as well) because I don't want to be viewed negatively by our community and he has already demonstrated that he will destroy (or try to) my reputation if I leave...
None of this is an excuse for staying. I know what would be healthiest but I guess I don't feel ready or strong enough or willing enough yet to do that.
I keep thinking that I will figure out how to be happy with the good times and not be impacted by the bad times and be able to have an okay life together this way... It's pathetic that I am lowering my expectations and low balling what I am willing to live with largely out of fear of the unknown.
Tonight I am full of resentment and hurt. I hate my mother for destroying my spirit from birth onward (literally on the day I was born she wrote a letter to me which she gave me years later telling me she regretted having me and that I'd already stolen my father away from her simply by being born). I hate that I never had a chance growing up and that no one stepped in to help (bc of fear of my mother's wrath on them- grown adults who knew she was abusing me turned a blind eye). And then when I left home and gained some self esteem over many years, I wound up falling in love with someone who IS my mother but in a younger, male form.
I guess maybe I deserve these circumstances since I was stupid enough to leave the frying pan (my mother) and jump right into the fire (husband). Thinking I would ever be happy, find someone normal and that I deserved any of that was just plain foolish of me...
Thanks for letting me vent...