Oh love, I really fear that you have so subordinated your own injuries to his that you just can’t see how much he has ALREADY hurt you for years. He has been cheating like this for upwards of 10 years, right? That’s how long he’s been actively hurting you in the most personal and traumatic ways.
If it helps, let’s put aside the idea that he will physically harm you. Because you’re focused on defending him on that front to your own detriment right now.
The trauma that you’re in right now is no joke. It is one of the worst types of trauma that a person can experience. It has been likened to a traumatic loss of a loved one and it has also been likened to the violation of rape. It is literally going to take you YEARS to recover from if you work hard on recovery. If you rugsweep it, you will live in the trauma much longer. Ask me how I know.
You are gravely injured right now. You are in shock and don’t even realize how huge your trauma is. In the early days, it’s really hard to grasp how much damage has been done to you. You are walking wounded.
Imagine that you are hit by a car, seriously wounded and bleeding out. The other driver is uninjured. Now imagine that the person driving the other car demands that you think about how hard it is for him to see you like that, you just don’t understand how much pain he’s in, how much he’s going to suffer because of this, how much he stands to lose, how unfair it is to make him witness your bleeding and pain and injury. When you ask for his help to stop the bleeding and call an ambulance, he says that you are selfishly not focusing on his suffering and that HE’S the one who needs an ambulance and that you should be taking care of him. THAT is what he’s doing right now.
HE HAS ALREADY HURT YOU SO MUCH. It’s not over is it? Aren’t you still struggling daily with the pain? And yet, like so many of us, you are minimizing your own suffering. Making excuses for him (it was just a fantasy. He didn’t mean to hurt me. He’s not a bad person. He would never hurt me.). Why? Because you’ve probably been doing this forever. I know I was. My WHs difficulties were always bigger. His insecurities were more important than any discomfort I had to put up with to make it better for him. His needs were huge, so mine were not important by comparison. I put myself second because I loved him and wanted him to be happy.
But I just couldn’t ever be enough because his problems weren’t about me. And bottom line, he didn’t even see that I needed things or that I had emotions. He saw me as a part of himself. A part that was very helpful and convenient and comforting. But he also resented me and was angry any time that I wasn’t available to be his mom—like when I needed to be an actual mom to our actual children. When he felt that he wasn’t my absolute priority is when he started to get resentful and start indulging himself in behaviors that were absolutely devastating and harmful to me and our family. Does ANY of this ring a bell at all?
We are all worried that you are not prioritizing your own emotional well-being at the very least in favor of being defensive over whether or not he will harm you. Has he at all been similarly protective of you, your reputation, your well-being?
Please trust me that for most of us, the biggest pain came from realizing that our WHs could see the hurt that their actions had caused us and continue to be selfish and self-focused and uncaring about our pain. The biggest pain came after discovery when they continued to show us who they really were, when they continued to be dishonest, when they continued to re-traumatize us by not becoming safe partners. You are not the only person whose WH, upon discovery, engaged in horribly manipulative and self-indulgent moping about how bad it all was for them. So many of us here have commented on how the behavior after they were discovered was even more traumatizing that what they did when they thought you didn’t know. Why? Because they no longer have the excuse that what you don’t know won’t hurt you.
At the very least, this is the harm that he is doing. And he’s been doing it for a very long time. We all have to come to the realization that not only is it possible that our WSs COULD hurt us—in fact, all WSs have ALREADY harmed us in grave, life-altering, long-term ways. If you can get to the realization that the person that you are defending doesn’t exist and try to begin to accept the person that he actually IS, you will be able to begin to move forward in ways that don’t allow for you to be re-traumatized over and over moving forward. There are far too many stories here of those of us who didn’t get this for YEARS. Please believe me, the trauma that comes with that is just compounded.
If you can let down your defense of him to hear the concern for you here, it can only help you. You need a place that is concerned about you specifically. Do you have anyone in real life that you can share this with? I guarantee that they will not be worried about his feelings right now.
One more thing, if he truly seems suicidal, you are not equipped to help him. Only professionals can do that. If he threatens or intimates that, you need to call 911 and get someone who can really do something. If he’s just saying it to manipulate you, that’s just more traumatizing harm that he’s doing.
Sometimes what we least want to hear is what we really need to hear most. I hope that you’ll continue to seek support here. Everyone here knows how hard this is and how impossible it is to navigate and see clearly at the beginning.
Hugs of support to you.