Leaving the Hive

Lol. Tell him it sucks to live with someone who doesn’t care about

i think I would just tell him that he broke a boundary so these are the consequences…. Life has consequences. Unfortunately, since he’s still deep in his addiction, he won’t see it. He will think he is the victim and you are unreasonable.

 

Addicts are very good manipulators and use a lot of coercive control. If one way doesn’t work they will switch to another method, this is part of the personality changes, he wants what he wants and he will try different tactics to get you back where he wants you. Very few addicts recognize what they are doing( at least I don’t think they recognize it like you or I would) because it’s so ingrained, they have done it for so long that it’s just who they are as addicts.

 

Yeah, I haven’t done my husbands laundry in over 20 years. First dday I was doing our laundry! Lol. I also shared the food I cooked for myself for the first time over 20 years just recently. He was incredibly grateful.

 

I remember when I stopped, he asked me when I was going to do his laundry, I said “ I’m not, you do it or take it to the cleaners, I’m not your mom or your maid”. Every once in a while he would ask me to take something or pick something up from the cleaners and I would just say “ I’m not going to be by the cleaners you will have to figure it out”. I had a fairly easy time detaching. He rarely wanted sex, so no connection in the bedroom, he worked 70 hours a week, so not much help at home. I managed our finances so I had free reign of where our money was spent ( oh man did I save!)

 

Watching your story unfold is rather painful to watch. We've all been there. Detaching is one of the best things we can do in these cases. I think you're on the right track here.

I went back and read the past few weeks of your posted journal, and this stuck out to me.

What a gaslighting thing to say. And your response,

was both perfect and true. I think our counselor called it crazy making, so it's not something that is foreign to us.

The thing that I have learned and figured out is that if we're not healing, they aren't. It's because they aren't that we're not. They're systematically killing us ever so slowly. We're attached at the hip, the ring, the children, the home, and we have this umbilical cord between us, that once we can remain viable without them, we don't need them anymore in our life to stay alive. When we cut that umbilical cord, it becomes very liberating and free. The irony is, is that they fail to realize that it is us who is providing the life blood to them. Not the other way around.

If you ever watched Sleeping with the Enemy, that's how I would approach it if I ever had it to do over again. I would scrimp a little here, save a little there, and I would spend the next five years building a rather large nest egg of cash reserves that was untraceable. I would have my private list of things that I needed to do, needed to collect, and when the time came for me to leave, I would leave without a trace without so much as a notice or anything. Just gone. LOL, of course if he ever showed up where I went, I suppose I would have to call the police and say "I just shot an intruder"!

Let the SOB pout. He's going to anyway. I'm so over it, I would buy him a pacifier next time I went to the grocery store to drive the point home. After all, isn't that what PMO is? A pacifier? As for the "I love you"? That is nothing but pure manipulation. I've had too many other women I've known from when we went through this exercise to know that is purely a patronizing manipulative tactic because now suddenly they're not getting what they want.

 

Do you answer him? Understanding that since you haven’t left, he really can’t grasp that this is because of his addiction. My detachment only made my husband more comfortable. How sad is that? Because he had IA, me completely pulling back left him in his comfort zone. Even when he would say “ I love you, or I really like you” me not saying “I love you”, and even better, when I would say “ I dont like you” didn’t make him uncomfortable or unhappy, or really feel anything. Today? If I detached, it would affect him. I did exactly what happenstance lined out. Although it was not secretly, I did have my own account without his name on it, but he knew about it. He didn’t care what I did with our money, lol. Should I choose to leave now, there is enough for both of us to live very comfortably. I couldn’t just disappear though, we have 3 kids together, so we are always going to have a tie.

 

Are you aware that you're flirting with him?