Originally Posted by
StarCat 
Like how "detaching with love" doesn't work with an abusive relationship. Trying to detach was something I had control of, and while I recognize that his reaction to it was wrong, and that whatever he did it wasn't my fault, I also began to recognize that certain things I couldn't allow myself to detach from, because his reaction would be so much worse for me in the long run.
StarCat, so what do you do if detaching with love makes things worse? That's where I'm at. My AH has been out of our home for two months, he does not want to live with us because he is using. In his absence, my mental health has slowly started to return (long way to go) and I got to a point about a month in, where I felt detachment for the first time... ever. And it helped me SO much when he would come over to see the kids. But it seems like it has **infuriated** him. I think it incenses him that I am not giving him any attention (negative or positive); that I was seeming unaffected by his very presence. And it **has** ramped things up quite a bit; he is getting nastier and nastier, making ridiculous attempts to intimidate me and belittle me, etc.
It seems like it requires a crazy amount of mental gymnastics just to deal with these people; like anything you learned about human relations from being on this planet for a few decades does not apply and you have to unlearn all the "normal" ways of interacting and replace them with being some sort of psychological samurai. It's exhausting.
~emp919