I'm looking for help for me (43F) and my husband (45M) of over 20 years. Right now, I am looking for resources for curing broken marriages and positive outcomes for people who decided to stick it out through abuse.
For some background, my husband grew up in a very unstable and abusive household. He was always a partier and had a temper. Over time, this grew to full blown substance abuse and verbal, emotional and (very limited) physical abuse. It all came to a head and he decided to quit drinking.
Great, except without doing any work to heal his childhood trauma, he had no outlet and took it out on me. After about a year of dealing with progressively worse abuse, the final straw was a death threat. I finally gave an ultimatum and honestly it worked -he did therapy, medication and has literally made a 180 degree turn. I was 100% ready for divorce and had my head wrapped around leaving, I had my lawyer/money/therapy situations ready. I was not however ready to dive back into a full loving relationship with my abuser, as much as I want to.
My husband has recently become pretty depressed, and its kind of my fault. He's done a lot of work, but I still am in a "trauma response mode" according to my therapist – I am a little uncomfortable around him, and I physically recoil at his touch. I don't want to do this, I really can't help it. It's especially bad at night, he will put his arm around me and I will shove him off, pretty much involuntarily because I'm either asleep or not totally lucid.
He gets really upset when this happens, and is placing blame on me for rejecting him, which is fair – but its not like I am rejecting him for no reason. I explain to him how I am working through things and that I am really sorry. I also try and tell him things that might help, like putting his hand on my shoulder instead of my waist, so I feel a little less vulnerable. These conversations don't go well and now we're almost at another impass in the relationship. He is putting up some major walls, moping around and not talking to me. He tells me that I don't love him anymore, that he knows I think he is a terrible person, that he is terribly depressed because of this, etc. I feel terrible but I also can't just wave a magic wand and fix things.
I want to be more loving, it just is not coming naturally. I want to reconnect, but don't know how to get there. Where is the playbook for this?