Originally Posted by
emp919 
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
It is a crazy amount of gymnastics just to deal with them.
And the more distant they sense you're getting, the more they try to reel you in. They'll alter tactics trying to find something that will work, and unfortunately frequently that includes escalating the abuse as well.
Each person is different, so I can't provide a recipe for success, the most I can say is that you need to find a way to detach emotionally for your own mental health, without him feeling your true level of detachment.
I was fortunate in that XABF was in rehab when I was finally starting to figure things out on my own - he couldn't get to me, but he kept trying to control me over the phone - and I did change the locks (the apartment was in my name, his name was never on the lease, and his address was never legally changed).
I didn't have to try and juggle my fully-detached-self with his presence, since the one time I saw him during that was in rehab during visiting hours (and besides, he was too busy bragging about how I was his girlfriend to listen to a word I said, so he didn't notice I was distant, or that I grimaced after he kissed me).
Is there a way you can "act" like you're still doing what you used to always do, without slowing down your own recovery, or making him feel it's okay to move back in?
It's a tricky situation, unfortunately, and I wish there were an easy answer.