Counselling for lateness

I'd like to share a lengthy and self-indulgent note about my history with the Baha'i community and the impact it had on my family and me. It's worth noting that I'm sharing this using a throwaway Reddit account that I generally reserve for browsing porn. I find funny to imagine a Baha'i apologist reading this, becoming angry and judgmental, and then, investigating my profile and ending up jerking off. With that said, let's dive into my story.
I want to share my experience in case it resonates with someone else, a lot of the stories on this Reddit helped me, and perhaps my story will give some comfort to someone else. It has taken me a while to write this down, and I'm glad I finally got around to doing it.
My parents emigrated from their homeland for reasons of principle and value. Upon their arrival, they were greeted by Baha'is who met them. And so, lovebombed and lavished with love, praise, and celebration for moving countries due to values that they portrayed as being closely aligned with the Baha'i faith, my parents fell for this validation and worked very hard once they became Baha'is in the mid-1980s.
My dad got rid of all of his whiskies, and swiftly, my parents began hosting potlucks and fireside chats, diligently working to integrate into the Baha'i ecosystem. Back then, the atmosphere was fairly light-hearted, with devotional gatherings, prayers, and a somewhat 1960s-esque hippie vibe. There was live guitar music, and joss sticks.
However, I remember Baha'i classes having an interesting edge. We were taught that Buddhists were not following a religion but merely a way of life, and that Hindus had become pantheistic because they had lost the core of their faith and religion, which had become corrupted over time. Thanks to Google, I can discover that yes indeed, this is from Lights of Guidance.
There was a significant emphasis on the importance of gender equality and the oneness of humanity – because, hey, the eighties. I feel sad there isn't anything anymore about the Virtues project - even if the Virtues project was sort of framed like it was created by Bahais.
Even in the 1980s, there was an overwhelming atmosphere that the key to being a good Baha'i was how you presented yourself rather than your actual behaviour. I recall learning an apocryphal tale of a young Baha'i who, while fasting, participated in an aerobics class and nearly fainted (yeah, aerobics, this is a real 80s fable), but was told by another Baha'i to prioritize representing the faith well over completing the fast because *it looked bad*. From a very early age, I learned the importance of putting the right face forward.
My parents then took their relationship with the Baha'i faith to the next level and volunteered at the World Centre in Haifa. As a child, this was a pretty interesting experience. I was suddenly immersed in the Iranian, or rather, Persian community, with its strong culture of martyrdom. Even as a child, every event seemed to feature graphic videos depicting young kids being taken from their homes. It was quite frightening, and I remember being afraid.
I also recall a strong sense of hierarchy within the community. My family lived in a small apartment with a very old, busted-up car from the 1970s, while others resided in nice homes with pleasant views and drove nice cars. I attended a local Israeli school, which was a cultural experience in itself, while my peers my age went to the much fancier American school. It's important to note that, at this point, the conversation about the "great catastrophe" – two-thirds of the world's population dying, leading to a period of peace and the entry by troops – was a prevalent topic openly discussed at the World Centre.
We completed our stint there, even living through the Gulf War. Upon returning to my birth country, my parents chose to live in places with smaller Baha'i communities, as they wanted to support and help establish Local Spiritual Assemblies. Things had changed by this point, not only because I was a teenager but also because the community itself had transformed. There was a significant Iranian presence everywhere, and the focus had shifted heavily towards rules, especially those related to sex, drinking, and drug use. There was also a huge emphasis on financial contributions to the faith, and it was the first time I began to see a somewhat materialistic outlook within the community.
As a preteen and teenager, I engaged in activities like dropping off flyers in mailboxes and soliciting strangers to talk about this great new religion, all in the name of “teaching”. I joined the local choir and sang, inspired by a crush I had on a girl there. This was probably the golden time of the community, with the choir doing outreach and a balance between Western and Iranian believers.
However, things began to accelerate. The Ruhi Institute and teaching became significant focal points. I was encouraged to bring a good friend of mine to a Baha'i camp, and once there, I was pressured to ask him to convert. It was very uncomfortable.
This Reddit loves cringe stories, so here is a winner: I had a birthday party with my non-Baha'i friends, and two older Baha'i girls attended. One of the girls ended up stalking my friend, showing up at his workplace and calling him at home with sexually suggestive comments. The matter was escalated to the Local Spiritual Assembly, but instead of talking to me about it, they basically ended my friendship with this kid. To me, this somehow captures so much of what it was like to be a Baha'i child and how Baha'i adults treat children to this day.
When I turned 15, I signed up for Baha'i membership because it was the expected thing to do. However, by the time I was in my early 20s and studying at university, I had started to interact more with the local, real-world community. This might seem like a small thing, but it was actually quite significant. You see, my parents had always felt a little bit on the outside compared to the average person on the street around them. This sense of elitism was really exacerbated by being a Baha'i because Baha'is would walk around in a cloud of self-assurance, looking at us and thinking, "We don't do drugs. We've got all the answers and solutions, not like you." That was pretty much the attitude. It felt very socio-economic, with a lot of judgment towards working-class people. When the Iranians arrived, the cultural judgments grew even stronger.
But I was working in restaurants and learning about booze from bartenders. I had gotten to know real people. I had lost my virginity, and all that Bahai jazz seemed so much less relevant. I hardly even noticed when the year 2000 arrived without the predicted apocalypse, entry by troops, or any of the other anticipated events. Life went on. I lived in another country and met a girl, and we lived together.
Here is cringe story #2: my girlfriend /fiancé and I hosted a Bahai couple from my hometown. Despite being in my late 20s and engaged, and even though I hosted this gentleman in my house and helped him with his preparations for his business and presentations in the country where I lived, he reported to the Local Spiritual Assembly that I was living with a woman and we weren't married. It was absolutely amazing. The level of judgment still grosses me out.
I started to reflect on what the religion had meant to me and saw how it had changed. The obsession with fundraising was becoming ever more strident and panicked. The gaps in the actual scriptural logic of the religion were becoming more exacerbated as real-world problems still ran rife, and real-time discussions on social media brought these issues to light. It took me a while to start really digging into it, and it was only much later, when I started therapy, that I realized I needed to formally resign from the religion.
Looking back, it's astonishing how this religion, which professes to have such blind equality between the genders, as if other religions have some kind of hardwired sexism, actually had hardwired sexism in how the Universal House of Justice operates. A religion that taught the oneness of humanity, as if all humanity is equal and other religions don't recruit from anyone they can find, places divisors. Although of course, Bahai’s can’t recruit from Israeli Jews, so much for oneness of humanity. But this religion has taught that all humanity is equal, unless, of course, you're gay. Then you can't get married, let alone have sex.
There are other principles I haven't touched on, such as non-involvement in politics, unless it involves things happening to Baha'is or politics in Iran. The principle of independent investigation of the truth doesn't seem to work if you might investigate something that's not in line with the Baha'i perspective. The idea of a universal language? I don't really see any evidence that they're even really thinking about that one. The unity between science and religion? A religion that only allows men to sit on its senior board of a global theocracy probably isn't going to jive with a contemporary scientific perspective…. I mean, apparently you don't need a penis to be a man anymore, right?
In between these moments are my colorful memories of random things, like endless discussions about the boundaries of physical intimacy, people getting married at the age of 16 because they had exemptions for being Persian, and meeting Ms. Khanoom in Israel, feeling some sadness that the lone woman who at least brought some feminine energy to the World Centre is now gone, replaced by 12 boring men.
I've had conversations with my wife where I tried to explain what Baha'is actually do. She just wonders why they aren't doing stuff like normal religions do, like reading to the elderly or supporting schools for the disabled. I explain that's not the target demographic. I remember a wealthy man brought to firesides who obviously nobody else wanted to listen to, but we all sat around and applauded him like he was a great ukulele player and a clever man. He pointed out a hilariously Iranian man who was an alternative healer, and they got into a debate about modern medicine. The wealthy man said, "Well, you should see my daughter and what she studied. She studies Law." And then quickly changed the subject when asked about her name since I studied at the same Law school. Here's this man who's self-aware enough to join the adoration of his crowd but doesn't want his daughter mixed up in it in any way. Absolutely hilarious. Make that cringe story #3.
This reflection was sort of sparked when my wife and I discovered that the writings attributed to Rumi, which Baha'is often quote, is the same guy who started the Whirling Dervishes. We read about Rumi and I realized just how different he is from Baha'u'llah. Rumi wrote poetry, but he didn't pretend to be a prophet of God. He was just offering a different dynamic for how to interpret spirituality. He didn't say he was part of some sort of cycle. There's something beautiful about that simplicity. And needless to say, Rumi lived long before the Baha'is ever started.
It makes me wonder, will anyone ever watch the equivalent of a whirling dervish dance for the Baha'is?
The obsession with appearances sounds like a joke, but it isn't. It wasn't for me. Some bad stuff happened to me on my trip to Israel. When we got there, my parents didn't understand why I was so upset about everything. It was a culture shock, attending a government school, not speaking Hebrew, and being together with Russian kids who got beaten up in the toilet. It wasn't a very good time for me.
So, I was sent to counsel with a local Israeli counselor. After several sessions, she instructed that I had to sit down with my parents and tell them what I needed to tell them, particularly about the shadow that had come over me since coming to Israel. My parents were enraged when I said, “I wish we never became Bahai”.
And so, we returned from the Holy Land and moved to a tiny community that was struggling to get members. To this day, my parents are still members. I've resigned so I'm never dubbed a "covenant breaker." I'm pretty sure my parents know that I resigned because they literally never raise the topic of the Baha'i faith with me. I wish the religion had some interesting cosmology, something mystical, some interesting new take on the universe, or provided my family with tools to handle being migrants or raising teenagers. At the very least, it could have given us a common language we could have used to bond together. It did none of that.
But to be fair, if it wasn't the Baha'is, some other rinky-dink cult would have love-bombed my parents back in the 1980s. Of course, it would have been so much more fun if it had featured more sex and drugs 😊

Feeling confused
So I posted a few days ago about my situation, how do I feel? Was I the cheater or was I cheated on?
To make this short we had a 3 way with someone. Fast forward a year and the fantasy about me with the other person we a constant in our bedroom. On both sides back and forth even though we agreed several times to stop the talk.
One night I got drunk and asked if it was OK to be with the other person and I got told that would be hot. We kept talking back and forth about it for months so my drunk ass thought it was OK.
I didn't know my partner instantly regretted giving me the ok to do it. They saw us on cam and got crushed. That's what I was told.
They confronted me about having an affair a month later and I told them to check my phone because nothing was going on nor were we talking about it.
At first I said it was OK to branch out and after a little while I couldn't go through with that. It was not immediate. I said I didn't want to know. We discussed it and I said please don't because I cannot. The sex of the person was not what they told me they would be interested in.
I regretted my encounter for so many reasons.
The ended up having a ons with their ex f buddy.... they came home late af from work one night and I felt something was not ok.i left to work a few hours early and confronted them about their transgression later that morning.
Fast forward almost half a year later and we are working on things and it's been hard. I had realized I have several issues to deal with when it comes to me like pa and hypersexuality. I am a trauma victim from my childhood and these obviously have not been resolved and lead my pa to get worse recently.
My partner has been a honest as I can believe about it and the other person because I spiraled and asked 1000 questions, even the ones I didn't want to know about it. The first day they crushed me and told me it was because I couldn't give them what they needed. That was before I knew how they felt about my transgression. It was really crushing in so many ways.
They later told me they expected me to leave them. That's why they went full nuke on the first talk.
They have been sending me screen shots of clock out times etc even though I told them I don't need or want that. We are working on it as best we can as we don't have the resources for counseling. I've always shared location even before when I was out late after hours working for safety reasons so I can see why that's shared.
I'm kinda spiraling a little and I know they are trying to make up the the revenge they felt they needed. They said it was enough to get them there but really not what they expected and their idea of how it would be was not what happened.
Idk what to believe..
Any and all thoughts are welcome

I guess I'm looking for validation that this is textbook, and I am looking at this correctly. I guess that is the effect of being gaslit - you don’t know your reality is really your reality. But I am here, and asking for help, because I will need to see him for the next 12 years (our kids go to the same school). This will be in passing and at events, but I am traumatized, still recovering, and just scared. I am looking for some insights because I spent about 2 months trying to fit my story into a box of emotional and narcissistic abuse…. But it's not that....I see that now. If you are able to share tidbits of knowledge, or point me in the direction of more clarity, I would appreciate it so much.
I am going to write out the cliff notes. I imagine a lot of you can fill in the parts I leave out as from what I read on here, it’s typical.
I met him walking my kid to school. He walked the same way every day. Over time, we became friends, and I learned he was trying to leave his marriage. Once he did, the relationship happened fast – too fast. He seemed so 100 percent sure of me and it was odd. I often looked disheveled walking to school and tired….I am not sure what he saw in me. But, I felt sure of him too, but wanted to go slower. I tried to slow it down, but at the same time, didn't. I am responsible for that. I felt like a hamster on a wheel after a few weeks and was able to tell him that I need the weekdays for myself, for my work, and for my kid. He seemed to respect that.
But he often romanticized the first few weeks together....even in the last days.
Quickly, I started to notice the emotional dysregulation. There was a lot going on for him: moving out, going through the divorce, parenting, work….so I understood it. I was also still getting to know him. Then severe trauma responses and triggers started happening. They would lead to these large child-like reactions with a lot of tears and anger. I didn't understand it but knew enough to know he had trauma to work through, and perhaps was feeling it for the first time. Each time this happened, there was nothing I could say to help or get him out of it, he would blame me a lot and say I was the cause, and he expected me (without saying it) to be there for him 110% even though I couldn’t. And truthfully, I didn’t want to….I wanted him to be able to handle that for himself or realize it was an issue. I didn't have the tools to deal with it and suggested he try deeper therapy. He agreed.
When he first met with the therapist, she told him it is like a virus takes over his brain and he is convinced in those moments. That was music to my ears at the time. But that is the last time I felt that way.
After a few months of this cycle continuing, I started detoriating. First my mental health, and then my physical health. I couldn’t breathe. I felt like we couldn’t go a few days without him reacting to something small. I wrote in my journal many times “there's no amount of validation I can give this person.”
I didn't point it to excessive adoration and validation, I could not see that really, but if he texted me 5 things and I responded to all 4 logistical ones and ended with "love you too" I was chastised. If I was driving and did not respond to an “i love you,” I was called out for it. At the end of October, I told him I needed the weekend to clean my apartment. It happened to be 60 degrees that day and of course, I would have preferred to be outside, but I am an adult and could not blow off my commitment to myself to clean. That day he messaged me 18 times that me missed me. He kept inviting me out. I kept asking him to stop, because clearly I would prefer to do something else than clean, but needed to. The missing was excessive. I didn’t even know what he meant. We lived next door to eachother. That night, I had to work, and he was upset with me because to him, it was optional and I should have chose to see him.
There were so many moments when he wanted so much comfort I couldn't provide. We were both single parents. That kind of affection goes to my kid....and I couldn't give it to him in that way. He would even want the affection when he hurt me.
He would see my daughter freak out at me and then say that I don’t love her enough, and he would joke they are the same….
It wasn’t a joke?
As time went on, and his therapy went on, and he felt validated by the therapist, the blame came on more and never left. It started in August, and even when I'd get an apology, it would be for the impact (what I'm responsible for) and not his intent. He'd argue with me over seeing his intent clearly. I'd say I don't care about your intent, you're killing me. It didn’t matter, nothing did.
I never felt like we could repair any incidents. As the blame went on, I really questioned myself. I wondered if he was right. What if I don't love enough? What if I don't receive love well? I've been in therapy for 20 years and know I have limitations but I'm not an asshole…
I felt coerced a lot of the time.
I felt he wanted me to change a lot....he wanted me to be less blunt, more loving, more balanced, work less even though he was awful with money, have sex when sick, injured or mentally dead from the day, always be happy to see him, don't be affected by the trauma responses and don't try to talk to him about it, don't take space and if I do, prepare for some kind of punishment, love him and miss him endlessly, do everything together, if I am dysregulated, he wanted me to regulate with him….
I noticed I started taking precautions to keep myself dafe. I didn’t realize I was setting boundaries to prevent the abuse but I was. I’d say I was busy when I wasn’t. I wouldn’t accept or ask him to get me from the airport, knowing I would not be 100% happy after a flight and that would cause a fight (as it did). I didn’t ask for help, and when I did ask for help, I would expect the help to not happen. I did not communicate anything he did “wrong” (like, you said you would drop off quarters for laundry on monday….do you have them?)
There were a lot of moments we would have deep conversations and I felt like we were getting somewhere, that he heard me.
I'll fast forward to the end because this is already way longer than I wanted….and it’s sad that I know it could be so much longer.
In the last month, he reacted and blamed me for everything. There were at least 5 major incidents. After the last one, I told him I was done. It was really bad and left me spending $50 to uber home in the snow, when I could barley walk as is (I had a herniated disc in my back and could barley walk). That month, I lost health insurance, and after begging for time to just take care of the injury, he told me we need intensive couples counseling. I had asked to just continue our therapist until we could change. That wasn't enough. The next weekend he asked me to go to a Gottman weekend. I said I couldn't leave my kid to do that right now and needed to take care of my help.
After that snow episode, that was really bad, laced with blame in the unpacking, I said I'm done, I can't do it. I was crying uncontrollably. I was scared. I really did not know who I was speaking to. After an hour, right when I needed to leave, he snapped out of whatever mindset he was in and told me he'd do anything, that he would work on anything, to please stay. I had to go, I could not think anymore. So in desperation, the only thing I asked for was to go alone on a trip with my daughter. He was scheduled to come with us. I said I needed time just with her. He agreed.
And honestly, he held up his end of the bargain....until he didn't.
3 days before the trip everything fell apart. I worked 12 hours that day and at the end of the day, went to pour water in a cup at home. It was the only time we had together before I left for the week. He hugged me from behind while I was pouring the water (....remember herniated disc in my back). I asked him to please stop and just let me have a second to pour the water.
He said "there's no turning back from this" and got his stuff to leave. I was floored. I was so upset because I knew where this was going - the blame game. He left, wouldn't come back, and then continued to blame me for the next 2 days about how I was an asshole the days before, only spent time with him out of obligation (not true), and rewrote history. I had a stomach bug all weekend and could not eat, but still tried to hang out as much as I reasonably could, and that was not enough.
The water incident was Wednesday, Thursday he had therapy and reinforced the blame, and I ended up leaving without saying goodbye. It was a week. I wanted to believe this relationship could survive a week. But I was clear with him days before: I am working up until I need to leave Friday so I can have real time off with my kid. He was upset I did not find him to say goodbye, even though he made no attempt to make peace earlier. But of course, my fault.
That night, he claimed down. Was nice. But it was a trap. After 12 hours of him being nice in text he said he was only doing it hoping I felt remorse and realized how wrong I was. He told me over and over he wouldn't see it differently. He said he read the transcript of our texts to 2 therapists and his friends and it’s clear: I am wrong. May be important to name here that we are both in our late 30’s.
I said that I want to work this out and I'll talk when we can actually discuss it and I'm willing to hear his side but not willing to blindly take all responsibility. He nailed me on every response, telling me how wrong my response was and what I should have done differently.
I was with my kid and could not talk. When I said "why are you doing this now, you know I can’t really respond" he told me to stop avoiding.
That night, he ghosted me for the first time in the relationship and I panicked. I called him a few times. No answer.
The next day, despite him never doing that to me before, he called me controlling for calling.
At 7am the next morning he told me our relationship was over in a text. This man, who 7 days before was professing his love and understanding of me ended the engagement in a text. This of course continued with a back and forth. I asked him to please stop. To please pause and talk to me when i'm back in 5 days. He told me to fight for the relationship or it was over. I said “I am just waking up with my 7 year old, in a hotel, please stop.” I asked him to attend couples therapy in 3 days to talk this out. He said “you accept all responsibility and change your behavior or we are done.” I asked if he was willing to talk and he said the problem was my perception and that it's wrong, so unless I change we are done. I knew this wasn't ok but I was so blindsided I did not know what to do. He agreed to go to couples therapy Thursday. We barley talked. There were a few more messages of him telling me he needs to know I can live a drama free life and celebrate his love and see it all as beautiful (almost verbatim). At this point, all I wanted to do is keep the dial down. I pushed back saying, “I cannot teach my daughter that someone can just tell her that her emotions and feelings are wrong, I hope you will be willing to talk and we can get on the same page.”
He agreed to go to couples therapy, and then didn't show up. He texted me 10 minutes before saying he was not going. I begged and pleaded. But he had the couples therapist to tell me he wasn't going to go. He had her tell me. I lost it. I lost my mind. I had been reeling for days. Not sleeping. Putting on a fake smile all day with my kid while I was dying inside. Staying up late to cry, process, read, figure out wtf was going on…
I called him about 10 times and of course, he told me it was inappropriate. He then picked up and gave me 10 minutes. He again wanted me to take all responsibility for everything. I was so shaken, I just fawned. I said ok. When I'm back I hope we can talk but if you want me to accept blame for now, fine.
Everything was calmer for 2 days until we were heading back and he texted me something along the lines of "don't fool me" I was like wtf? He said "there's no turning back. There's no other chances." I was like wait what? And then it was "don't make me look like a fool" I had no idea what was going on. I was like "um what is this?" He essentially was reinforcing his stance: I am to blame for everything in the present and past. If I try to talk to him about his side I'm wrong. I need to repent and one wrong move (defined by him) is a misstep and there's no room for error (his words). I was like....I will be in a relationship based in reality, and I will own my part and parts, but i will not be in something that i'm to blame for everything. That is not healthy. I have also been in abusive relationships before.
He then stopped messaging me. Didn't care that we got into flight issues. Didn't care we made the flight back. That night he came over and was a victim. Claimed in the 5 days I was gone he found himself. That he wasn't focused at work because of me and now he is. He wanted to try to be together. I had no idea what reality I was in. We slept together. He left. And told me we'd talk the next day. All of this felt so weird but I was just hoping he would snap out of this and back to reality and we would be able to talk. But I also knew this had to end at this point.
The next day, he didn't answer me all day. This was the opposite of behavior I ever experienced from him. Did not respond to texts or pick up the phone. We had a training appointment and he had the trainer tell me he wasn't coming. I broke down in tears. I begged him to just answer a text. He didn't. He drove by me while walking the dog and did not stop. I emailed him, expressing my confusion, telling him this is not what we agreed to. He blocked me. That night I got an email from him letting me know he was moving 10 min away. He lived next door in another apt building. He actually assured me the day before he “was not going anywhere.” In that email, he listed out the calls and texts I sent and how inappropriate it was. He never said we were done. He said taking space, needing space…so in my head I was confused but see it now.
I was inconsolable. I didn’t respond.
But here is the issue I am still in: I needed to see him dropping his kid at school the next day. I will need to see him for the next 12 years unless I move.
The following Friday he stood next to me at a school event. I purposely stood in the back to have space and be able to leave if I needed to. He went next to me. When I told him he should sit, he said he didn't want to make it obvious to his ex wife. I asked him to speak that Friday. He said ok but he was moving. I cried instantly. Already? I said ok.
On Saturday am, I saw the truck pull up and left the house. I called him that Saturday. I was blocked.
The next wednesday he asked me for a series of logistics in a text. None of which I handled yet. Wanting me to cancel flights and settle up money spent together. No mention or responsibility for all the money wasted on tickets we will never use. But then…in the text, asked for my engagement ring back.
I responded to logistics. Not the ring
He then called me 3 hours later because something went really wrong in his legal case. He wanted me to understand and validate him. I did....I just turned off my feelings for a moment. At the end he said, so about the flights. Can you handle it? "If i cancel it for you and your son i also have to do it for me and my kid. It's all on the same reservation" "well if you can go and not make sexual advances on me then we can try to go together.” I was like wtf? I could not have sex for months due to my injury. But he wanted to. Was this way of setting up blame that if we DID sleep together I would be to blame? I was like “I will cancel it for all of us.”
He then ran down more logistics and I said honestly you didn't seem done. I don't understand what you're doing. He said "im done" i hung up the phone.
He asked me for the ring again that night in a text. I said no, I need time to process this.
Everything since then has been a transaction. If i have a genuine emotion, he gets upset that i have it at all. He continues to sit next to me at school events because he claims he does not want his ex-wife to think we are done (this is insane to me….). I realize now that if it is a “good” interaction he is happy. If I am sad, then it is a “bad” one.
He never told his son we broke up, and shamed me for telling my daughter.
Recently he asked me a question and I was annoyed, and he said "can you not be mad at me?" I said “no, I can't not be mad at you…”
In the last 3 months, he’s said "I don't want to confuse things" has come up a lot. I don’t know if he is saying that to me or himself.
I have been so stuck trying to understand how I could not take space at all from him, to being totally discarded. I know he went back to spending, and drinking, but I don’t think he is seeing anyone.
He only responds when he wants to. He ignores other things. I never was able to get an MRI for my back because the claim went through a DR he set up for me and he never sent me the info when I asked.
I got the money back he owed me, but still lost so much money.
He told me he missed me one time.
I don’t know who this person is.
I will have to see him for the next 12 years while the kids are in school unless I move. I am not going to move just to avoid him, but I need to heal so I can be strong enough. I don’t know if he is going to try to come back. I have been in therapy and am getting clearer about what brought me into this in the first place.
Any clarity you can help me with, on this, and what may come from here, would be really helpful. It will help me direct some of my searches and begin to piece things together to process in therapy. I have severe anxiety when I run into him at school.
I have never had to heal from something like this before. At first, I thought it was healing from a narcissistic discard….this feels like so much more.
Does it sound like he will want to come back?
Is there ever closure?

TL;DR! I just found out a few days ago that my husband hasn't paid our mortgage in 11 months.
My husband (41m) and I (34f) have our finances pretty separate. We each have our own accounts and the only thing in both of our names is our house and his car. He makes about 2x what I make and we split expenses up in a way we both felt was fair and manageable for each of us while both working on our own personal credit card debt we brought into the relationship. One of the things he covers is the mortgage in full. He works in accounting and I work in education, I have never been great at managing my money so he does my monthly budget for me and has access to all of my accounts and knows what my debts are. There has always been a veil of secrecy around his situation but he has always assured me everything was fine on his end, money was always tight but he was always almost caught up. When I would ask specific questions he would get kind of defensive and I felt it wasn't worth digging for more info and took his word on things.
Taking his word on things was pretty naive of me considering our biggest issues in the past had revolved around him lying. When we first started dating he told me he was taking classes towards his masters degree. I found out that he was actually in a Bachelor's program when he had told me he had already had his bachelor's degree. When I confronted him he apologized, told me he was embarrassed and felt ashamed that I was more educated than he was at the time. I let it slide because he seemed genuinely apologetic and I felt bad he was embarrassed.
More recently about a year after our son was born I had mentioned that he smelled like cigarette smoke a few times and he said "that's weird." A few months later I found a lighter and spray under the seat in one of our cars. He told me the lighter was in case the locks froze in winter but didn't know what the spray was. A couple months after that I found a pack of cigarettes in his jacket pocket while I was looking for his keys and he confessed to smoking the whole time. Then again, about a year ago I was clued in that he might be having trouble when I had a notice for a late payment on my credit report. I checked immediately and saw he didn't make his car payment. When I asked him he got defensive and stated that he has the account auto pay and he doesn't know why they wouldn't have taken it out. I asked him to please call them to have it straightened out as I didn't want the hit to my credit and he was frustrated and said he would but nothing came of it and I let it go because the conversations were so unpleasant. I asked him to please tell me if he was struggling with the bills and his money situation and he said it was all fine.
Flash forward to a few days ago I got a notice that we were behind on daycare payments. I asked him what was going on why they were only getting partial payment I could tell he was lying. He was immediately defensive, said he put in a form months ago for them to do automatic withdrawal from his account but they never did so while he was waiting he would bring them "however much the ATM would let me take out at a time" in cash. I couldn't let this go as I felt in my bones he was lying and I asked him if things were ok and did he need help, was the mortgage current? He said yeah it should be. Then I asked again and begged him to tell me the l truth and I found out he hadn't paid the mortgage in 11 months.
He says he is sorry, he feels bad. He didn't know what to do. About a year ago his health insurance costs increased dramatically and he could no longer afford the mortgage. Instead of asking me to take on the insurance through my job or talking to me at all he decided to just not pay it. I was pregnant at the time so he didn't want to drop the insurance. He didn't tell me any of this because he didn't want to stress me out. He tells me about a week ago he applied for some kind of relief program, so waiting to hear back on that. If that isn't approved we go into foreclosure.
I keep talking about it I feel betrayed and angry, he just says he's sorry he doesn't know what else to say. He maintains he did it to protect me but it certainly doesn't feel like it. Then he tells me he was just scared to tell me. I asked for full transparency and to see all of his accounts and he was first angry and said "so now I'm being babysat? That sucks" but later he reluctantly let me see his bank accounts. As far as I can tell no gambling or drug addiction or anything crazy just living beyond our means and an alarming amount of door dash charges.
I always knew he would lie about things that weren't super important but thought he was overall a responsible, reasonable person and I never in a million years would have imagined he would do something like this to our family. Is this something we could come back from? How big a deal is lying like this? I know we need counseling for the abysmal communication in the relationship, but the lying at this scale makes it hard to believe I'll be able to fully trust him again. Also, possibly homelessness I'm sure will place another strain on the relationship.

My wife and I have been together for almost 15 years. I’m early 40’s and she’s late 30’s. Our marriage is in a funk right now. We don’t have kids, money issues or crazy family. It’s just a lot of communication issues at the end of the day. Nothing horrible like cheating or big lies like hiding financial things. We both want it to work, but are struggling so we decided to see a marriage counselor. Just curious to those who have been in our situation or worse. Has counseling really helped get your marriage back on track?

There's a "dad joke" I heard that goes: My therapist told me to write out a big long rant letter to everyone I have a problem with, burn them all to ashes, and scatter the ashes into the wind. I did all that last weekend, but now I'm not sure what to do with the letters.
This post feels like that big, long rant, but I genuinely could really use some help/ideas beyond "go to marriage counseling." I provide so much to the family and household that isn't reciprocated, but trying to set boundaries to feel more balanced gets passive-aggressive and/or silent treatment. I'm not writing all this here just to vent, I've actually edited this down pretty significantly to summarize what I'm going through and giving some examples.
Thanks for giving me the space to share this.
Me (50/M), Wife (45/F), two kids 15 and 13. We have no family who live anywhere close to us. We're in the middle of America, her divorced parents are on the coast, and mine's in Canada where I'm originally from (in case my username didn't give that away).
TLDR at the bottom.
Trigger warnings: a ruined birthday, shared/not-shared finances, me losing my cool and walking out on my family and getting the silent treatment since, and apparently being the only parent/grown-up in the house.
To this family, I feel that all I am to them is the income/paycheck and personal chef, and I'm ready to walk away. My wife won't communicate, gets defensive and angry, and doesn't contribute to the marriage or teach our kids about responsibility, so I look like a jerk all the time. If I speak up and ask her to help, I'm treated like a jerk. If I don't speak up, she does nothing.
Background about physicality, work and finances
I work in tech, typically 50-70 hours per week, and take on occasional (< 5 hrs/week) contract work as a side business to pay for my 3D printing hobby that I'm also trying to turn into a side business. She works part-time maybe one full day of work throughout the week on an as-needed basis.
My job pays the benefits, and I've established a retirement fund for us, plus a 401K and Roth IRA, plus a 529 account for each of the kids that I've been investing in since they were born. I paid off both cars. We're debt-free except for our mortgage, and we have enough assets to pay off the house if we choose to.
We each have a bank account for ourselves, plus a joint bank account. Her part-time paychecks and other money from an inheritance, goes 100% into her account only, and I use my account for my 3D printing business to maintain an LLC. Just about everything financial is paid for from my paychecks. I've always treated this as "our" money. All bills, mortgage, memberships, subscriptions (Netflix, etc), things the kids need (clothing, shoes, school supplies, etc), furniture, medical bills, etc are all paid from a joint account that is funded 100% by my paycheck. She makes no contributions to this account, but she does withdraw from it for fast food, snacks she buys just for herself, her own crafting hobbies, and she'll pick up maybe $100/month for some groceries.
I promised her before we were even married that if she wanted to be a stay-at-home mom or, at any point, go back to work, she'd have my full support either way, and I've kept that promise. She worked full-time for about 2 years before we had kids and worked a fair bit of part-time work before the kids started school in 2013. She's been at her part-time job for 2 years, so quite a span where she didn't work at all.
She works as a 1099 contractor and, despite repeatedly being asked to, won't reserve money for tax time. So, not only does she spend 100% of her paycheck, but I have to be sure that we save enough to cover her tax bill every year. She's never offered to contribute to tax payments we have to make.
I had gallbladder surgery and bariatric surgery, so I've had pretty restrictive dietary needs for the past 5-6 years. She often made comments about me being heavy and having a shortened life span, but since my bariatric surgery, she's expressed resentment about my body changing (I lost 120+lbs) and now doesn't care to learn what kinds of protein/carb/fat balance I need, and gained about 80lbs herself. As such, she does not contribute to any meal planning, which means I'm doing 95% of all meal planning, groceries, and cooking.
When it comes to cooking, I'm a damn good cook, and it's 100% because of YouTube. She grew up in an environment where she wasn't encouraged to cook or even learn to, so she lived on PBJ through college until we started dating and I would cook or take her out. When the kids were in their "picky" stages of 4yrs-9yrs of age, she got frustrated with cooking but years later still holds to that "NOBODY likes what I cook". So she makes maybe 2 or 3 meals per month now, and it's always the same meals. Last night, she cooked 10 people's worth of macaroni with a single pound of ground beef and more than a pound of cheese. I had to pick out the meat to get my protein and then drink a protein shake afterward, and then got offended that I threw away the noodles/cheese. (My diet needs high protein, low carbs, and almost no fat, she knows this because I tell her quite often, but she won't do anything about it; she's bought maybe 3 shelves worth of cookbooks and won't even open them or go take a class or anything.)
Our oldest kid has shown an interest in cooking and will maybe cook one meal per week and ask me to help him out, so I share what I've learned, things I've tried, experimented with, lessons learned, etc., and we have a good time, and they really appreciate the learning opportunity. On the rare occasion I do see my wife making dinner in the kitchen, I show her that I'm really happy about what she's making and ask if she wants help chopping or anything and I only get "no" as an answer and completely shut down like I'm not supposed to be in the kitchen. I'll try to have conversation with her but then she can't concentrate on cooking, chopping, etc, and then "ruined" dinner is my fault.
"Her" money versus "our" money, and how we spend our days/weekends
My wife had a relative die quite a few years ago and in the fall of 2018 was given a $250k inheritance. She has always referred to this as "her" money, "her" retirement, in case "she" needs a nursing home later. I'm not in her future plans, apparently. She gave $50k of it to a cousin who was deliberately left out of that relative's will. My wife's will leaves any remaining inheritance money to the kids. No mention of me anywhere whatsoever.
Once the inheritance money hit her bank account, she decides to buy a horse from halfway across the country and put it in a boarding stable 20 minutes from the house. It was a childhood dream of hers. Apparently, she's allowed to pursue her dreams and interests, it's "her" money, I'm not allowed to tell her what to do with it, but she complains when my 3D printing business makes enough money to buy another printer to keep up with demand... And my hobby takes up less time per week than she spends at the barn.
When she's not working her one-day-a-week job, she's at the boarding stable for a few hours per day, playing with her horse, taking selfies, taking him on walks, not actually riding him. With her remaining time at home, and when she gets home with the kids, she's lying on the couch, acting worn out and tired like she just bench-pressed the friggin' horse. (And yes, I know horse training CAN be exhausting, but she's not doing anything exhausting with him. She literally walks him on a path, or walks him in circles in an arena enclosure, or she's brushing him down and bathing him to look nice for Instagram)
In the summer of 2018, right before she got this inheritance money, she spent $50k of "our" money on a kitchen renovation that she insisted she designs herself, and then felt guilty about the bill and me having to take on more side contracting work to pay off the HELOC in a reasonable amount of time, and contributed back $10k to the whole project from "her" money afterward. "Her" money paid for the kids' orthodontics, about $3k each. But she literally contributes NOTHING else financially to the family.
If I had to guess, she's got about $150k left of that inheritance money, maybe less, she won't ever tell me about it. And we don't get a notice from the bank about interest gained at tax time every year because she put it in an account that makes ZERO interest. She sees my investments with 25%-40% gains, but won't ever ask for my help or input. Instead, she asked 3 other guys at work who told her to at least get a Vanguard account, but almost 6 years later she's never done it.
I work full-time as mentioned, and work from home. Work is typically 50+ hours per week but I try to cap it at 60-ish if I can. For the past month I've been on a project with a tight deadline, and working more like 10-14 hours per day 6 days per week. It's like that in tech, she's been understanding of this in the past, and I'm sure to take jobs where this is NOT the norm. Still, I'm always happy to help drive the kids to/from school or to music lessons or doctors, but I'm usually treated like "how dare you," that's "her" job, like that's her contribution to everything.
She works a part-time job doing marketing. Maybe 2-3 hours a day, one or two days per week. Sometimes busier in Q1 as they prep/plan most of the year, but then very low-lift afterward. She spends maybe 40 minutes per day taking the kids to/from school. Other than that, she's at the barn or on the couch. (have I mentioned we've gone through several couches that "our" money pays for??)
The marital imbalance I'm dealing with
She won't enforce chores for the kids, remind them to do laundry, or clean their rooms, or even shower. She'll text me "one of the boys smells" after taking them to school, but won't insist they shower, or back me up on the whole "c'mon guys, brush twice a day at least, and shower at least every 2 days with actual some soap on your bodies and actual shampoo on your hair, and use deodorant..." She'll make remarks like "Didn't you wear and sleep in those clothes for the past 3 days?" but won't make them change, or tell them to do their laundry.
She might do dishes 2 to 3 times per month, it's normally a chore we give to the kids, but she never enforces it. If they stack up for 3 days she'll do some of them but not all of them. One kid was born on an odd-numbered day, the other on an even-numbered day, so the rule is if today is an even or odd day, we know whose turn it is to do the dishes. And if the month has an odd number of days, I do the dishes on the 31st/29th day. But they're teenagers, they'd rather be in their rooms being teenagers, so I have to constantly remind them. Neither of them checks that the dishes are even clean before putting them away, something she specifically called out being embarrassed about when we were dating and visiting her mom's house where half of the dishes in the cupboard still had dried food all over them.
And then garbage day, or yard work, or vacuuming, cleaning a bathroom, cleaning their room, shoveling snow. She doesn't help enforce ANY of the chores that we agreed on. So I'm the sole disciplinarian around here, which makes the kids grow up thinking they better avoid me or I'm the jerk who's gonna put them to work.
Nothing happens around here unless I ask the rest of the family. I've purposefully left chores undone for "that's almost a health hazard" amounts of time and still nobody takes the initiative, nor will she ask the kids to help. They all see the work needs to be done, but they won't choose to help, and they're probably learning from her example of just sitting in some other room/area of the house and someone else will do it someday.
Even asking them "what kind of meals do you want this week, what haven't we had in a while, what's your favorite meal," you'd swear I was asking them to cure cancer every Saturday so I could start to plan meals for the following week and get groceries on Sunday, which has been our routine since the kids could talk.
Their cop-out is to skip the 3 shelves of cookbooks and flip through a binder we kept from a few months of Hello Fresh meals but then it's the same 10-12 meals that get kinda old after a while.
I feel like I have no help from anyone.
I reached my tipping point, and recently walked out on my family
A little over three weeks ago, I'm on this tight deadline at work, getting maybe 3-4 hours of sleep at night, pulling 10-14 hour days. It's a Wednesday, I remember about 430pm that I should commit my code, as I usually do 'cause I need to make dinner because nobody else is gonna do it. Oh, wait, tonight was grilled cheese and tomato soup -- literally, ANYONE ELSE in the house, including our 13yr old who has never shown any interest in cooking, could heat a can of soup and melt cheese between bread, right??? Surely SOMOENE else in the family will handle dinner, so I keep working (note, without asking anyone else to help with dinner), hoping someone else will handle the meal. (and yes, I know this is typically against my diet, but I indulge in this low-protein, high-carb, higher-fat meal about once a month.)
At 730pm my wife comes STOMPING into my office area, "I can't make the grilled cheese like you do." No politeness, just turns and stomps back to the kitchen. I follow her to the kitchen, where the tomato soup is on a RAPID boil, yet she hasn't even started making the grilled cheese sandwiches. I turn the soup off, take it off the burner, and start to describe what to do for the grilled cheese. It's honestly nothing special; I put shredded cheese in the pan to get crusty on the outside of the bread, then stack up the the grilled cheese, put break on top, let the inner cheese melt, and flip it onto more shredded cheese. Highly recommended.
She says "Oh" and ... LEAVES THE KITCHEN, leaving me there expecting me to make dinner... and I'm pissed. I should have just gone back to my work area, but she parks herself back on the couch.
I get everything made, and of course nobody sets the table, ever. Now I'm seriously pissed off, so I slam some dishes in the middle of the table and go back into the kitchen to get the pot of soup and plate of sandwiches. I get back to the dinner table, where my wife and youngest are just standing there, STILL not setting the table despite me standing there with food that I can't even put down. So I drop the food on the table wherever I can, soup splashes everywhere, and I start setting the table while they stand there and watch and ... I lost my cool. I flung bowls and spoons in the general area where they're supposed to be at the table, and I walked out of the house. I returned 4 or 5 hours later once they were all in bed.
The ONE meal in my busy schedule that ANY of them could have made, and her contribution was putting a can of soup in a pot.
She still didn't make any meals for the rest of the week. That Sunday she put a meal plan together for the whole following week. Again, all super carb-heavy when she knows my own diet can't handle that. And then she stopped planning ANYTHING ELSE SINCE THEN. The following week's "meal plan" was just a list of who was home on which night because of end-of-school-year events going on. No meals, no grocery list. Meanwhile I'm still on my deadline... Last week, no help at all. This week, zero help.
So this week's meal plan I finally set a boundary for myself that was VERY clear to them: I'm planning to cook 3 meals for the whole week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and left the rest open with no meal planned. Last night at 6pm she made her "hamburger helper" and plans "ramen" for tomorrow (again, all noodles and broth, very little protein), but no other help from her for the rest of the meal plan for the remainder of the week.
My recently ruined 50th birthday
My birthday was a little over a week ago. I turned 50. Send me your favorite dad jokes, please, I beg of you.
My wife asked me 2 or 3 months ago if I wanted any kind of party, etc. to which I said yeah, I'd love to have a few friends over, named several of them, all of whom she either has in her phone, or are guys married to women that I know she stays in regular contact with. I mentioned some all-you-can-eat places that we could go, just the 4 of us, where I could pick out good proteins etc. and they could eat whatever they wanted.
I got nothing. No dinner out. No party. No friends.
The night before my birthday, she was too lazy to get off the couch, so I went to bed alone. I woke up in bed alone. I told the family the day before that I wanted French Toast for breakfast, normally something we'd do on Christmas Day, but it was my 50th birthday gosh darn it, and I was even thawing bacon. I even bought all the groceries needed. Nope, had to cook that alone too, so I only made enough for me, and ate alone. Showered alone, 'cause we haven't been intimate in ... 3 months? 4 months? And who cares that it's my birthday.
Nobody asked if I wanted to go out anywhere, go see a movie, go for a hike with the dog, nothing. So I went out with the dog, alone.
That night I had to make dinner for the family, again, on my own friggin' birthday. Alone in the kitchen. AND I had to remind the kids to clean up the kitchen afterward 'cause they won't do it unless they're told. She bought tiny pieces of cheesecake for dessert, which she knows I don't like and can't eat because of my diet. I had one tiny piece, she and the kids ate the rest.
No cake, no candle, no balloons. It was my FIFTIETH birthday ...
We have some serious communication breakdown going on
Since I walked out of the house a few weeks back, she only talks to me when she wants something, and that comes across more as a demand, "I need you to pick the kids up from school, I have to be at work" and walks away She won't say good morning or even hi, unless I say it first. Lately, I say "hi" or "hey" as we're passing in the house and I get no response at all. I get literal one-word responses when I ask her a question. A few nights ago, several nights in a row, I'm in the living room on my laptop trying to get more work done, she'll come in the room, not ask me what I'm doing or if I'm working, and blast a TV show on her phone at near-maximum volume, and fall asleep on the couch.
She gets mad and offended any time I offer constructive criticism of any kind. And it doesn't matter how delicately I try to phrase things, I'll agonize for days over exactly which words to use, she'll get super defensive, angry and lash out, and give me the silent treatment for weeks.
Last Tuesday was an end-of-year awards show for our youngest, who's finishing 8th grade. He's really into music and he stayed after school to practice for the event. She comes home to get ready then decides to leave for the event by herself. I only noticed when the garage opened and closed. She doesn't say anything to me or our oldest kid about what time she wanted to leave or if we're ready to go, she just ... left. Well of COURSE we both want to go, but now we have to drive there separately. And he wins a TON of awards, one from his classmates, one from his teacher, and one from the school. I'd have been PISSED to have missed that. "Oh, I thought you didn't want to go..." was her reason later.
This past Saturday, I do ALL the yardwork 'cause she won't tell the kids to help and I'm frankly tired of having to ask for help. A few hours of yard work later, I tell my youngest to vacuum 'cause nobody vacuums around here unless I tell them to and honestly it's gross. I hop in the shower to clean up and cool down from the yard work. Youngest decides it's "too hot in the house" and sits in the kitchen to eat a popsicle instead of vacuuming. No backup from my wife at all on this, who's still parked on the couch. So I get upset with him, he does a half-assed job, says he's "tired' (from watching YouTube all day) and goes back to his room and we don't see him again the rest of the day. Again, no help or backup from my wife.
It's now 7pm in the house Saturday night, and -- shocker -- NOBODY has bothered to even ASK about dinner much less put any kind of food together. 8pm rolls around and my oldest finally emerges from his own room, starts thawing some chicken, and comes to ask me for help to make a meal, which I happily do. Until I get grumbly comments about "why are we eating so late." And my wife makes her way back to the couch. Not so much as a "thanks for cooking" or offer to clean up. And of COURSE nobody is doing the dishes, because DAD didn't remind anyone.
WHAT DO I DO??
19 years ago when we got married, this felt like a marriage. We did stuff together, we split things evenly, shared responsibility and chores, we both cooked, we bought groceries together. The first few years with kids were rough, but it at least FELT like a partnership once we figured out how to be parents. But something has shifted over the past decade, and this feels less and less like a partnership, much less feeling like a marriage. This whole relationship feels very one-sided, I get no appreciation for any of my constant hard work and being a provider. Instead, she's accused me, twice, of having an affair, once to the point of giving me anxiety/panic attacks for which I was almost hospitalized.
Now, she and the kids are noticing and talking behind my back (like I can't hear them) about the fact that I'm not wearing my wedding band anymore. Of course, the kids won't ask me directly, and I'm not bringing it up myself, and my wife's not talking to me anyway. Maybe she's still mad that I got mad a few weeks ago and walked out? Hard to know when the person won't talk to you unless they want something from you.
I'll put the damn ring back on when it feels like a marriage again. But then the next time it comes off, I think it'll stay off.
TL;DR! To this family, I feel that all I am to them is the income/paycheck and personal chef, and I'm ready to walk away. I can see why parents stay together "for the kids." As with most marriages, it started great; we've had bumpy times, but we always got through it together. Nothing like this, though. My wife won't communicate, gets defensive and angry, and doesn't contribute to the marriage or teach our kids about responsibility, so I look like a jerk all the time. Something has shifted over the past decade, and this feels less and less like a partnership. This whole relationship feels very one-sided, I get no appreciation for any of my constant hard work and being a provider.

Hello and my thanks!
I'm in the process of creating a new resume; as I intend to rejoin the workforce. While it's a common and accessible lie, there are several gaps of employment where I DID need to take care of both my mother who is disabled and more recently my grandmother(whom raised me) during her decline and subsequent death. After she died in late 2019, I handled her estate (which was hell due to my aunts and uncles). Sold her home, and bought one of my own 2021. Being the sole caretaker for my grandmother while he was in and out of hospitals, and nursing rehabilitation centers while home hospice visited once per week was EXTREMELY draining both physically and mentally on me; and I used the last few years to attend grief counseling and recover. Essentially. I just didn't work; I didn't look for work. I didn't want to work. I NEEDED this personal time to become healthy again.
I don't expect any hiring manager to have any sympathy for a 3 year absence from the workforce, I've been advised by friends to lie and say I'd started a business. . . But I struggle to come up with anything that I'd have derived any appreciable skills to display. I'm also not entirely sure this is the right route to take. Any advice would be welcome and very much appreciated!

TL;DR Mawage. Mawage is what bwings us togethah today. Mawwiage, that bwessed awwangement, that dweam wifin a dream!
Our Chairman and these Regarded APES have come here to make this tweasured agweement in front of their family and fwiends, pwomising their commitment in this holy and magnificent pwace, today and each day fowawd.
We would not be here today without wuv. Wuv, twoo wuv between these two. Twoo wuv will follow you forevah, so tweasure your wuv, Mr. Chairman with your Highly Regarded Apes, always.
My spouse of 21yrs is pursuing her doctorate in Psychology to enhance her Marriage and Family counseling practice. We watched the events in 2021 unfold in real-time on TV and in a recent discussion concerning market manipulations and the media's role in it all she shared some unexpected psychological insights about narcissists, divorcing a narcissist, and the tactics of navigating them in your personal and professional lives.
Miracle Max: “'To blave.' And as we all know, 'to blave' means 'to bluff.' So, you're probably playing cards and he cheated…”
Did you know that there are divorce attorneys who specialize in dealing with cases involving narcissistic spouses? These attorneys are typically well-versed in high-conflict divorce scenarios and understand the psychological dynamics that can arise when one party exhibits narcissistic behaviors. They focus on strategies to manage manipulation, gaslighting, and other tactics that a narcissistic spouse might use to control or prolong legal proceedings.
Specialized attorneys in this area offer guidance on how to maintain clear and documented communication, set firm boundaries, and protect oneself legally and emotionally. Their expertise is particularly valuable in helping clients navigate the complexities of custody battles, financial disputes, and other contentious issues where a narcissistic spouse may attempt to use legal strategies to their advantage.
During our conversation my highly regarded ape-ette, outlined a total of 7 “Acts” in the Narcissist’s playbook.”

1. Denial
2. Minimization
3. Deflection
4. Rationalization
5. Displacement
6. Generalization
7. Victim Blaming

If you have ever had dealings with a Narcissist you know all to well these acts are rarely played in any kind of orderly fashion. Infact, their “playbill” is so well known that a short poem was created by Dyana Craig called “The Narcissist's Prayer”:

1. That didn't happen.
2. And if it did, it wasn't that bad.
3. And if it was, that's not a big deal.
4. And if it is, that's not my fault.
5. And if it was, I didn't mean it.
6. And if I did, you deserved it.

For the purposes of this post and to fully wrap our heads around the manipulative actions by those in the media, the financial system, in government, or our personal lives, we expanded upon the above as follows:

1. "That did not occur."
2. "And if it did, it was not that severe."
3. "And if it was, it is not a significant matter."
4. "And if it is, it is not my fault."
5. "And if it was, I did not intend it."
6. "And if I did, there were extenuating circumstances."
7. "And if there weren't, you provoked me into it."
8. "And if you didn't, others would have reacted the same way."
9. "And if they wouldn’t, the real issue is being blown out of proportion."
10. "And if it isn't, everyone makes mistakes."
11. "And if they don’t, I am under a lot of stress."
12. "And if I did, you deserved it."

These 12 narcissistic acts can be grouped into these stages that reflect a progression in the way responsibility, blame, and reality are manipulated by the media.
Stage 1: Denial

• "That did not occur." - Absolute refusal to acknowledge the reality of the event.

Stage 2: Minimization

• "And if it did, it was not that severe."
• "And if it was, it is not a significant matter." - These steps serve to downplay the severity and importance of the event, suggesting it is unworthy of concern or reaction.

Stage 3: Deflection

• "And if it is, it is not my fault."
• "And if it was, I did not intend it." - Shifts focus from the act itself to the intention behind it or external factors, deflecting responsibility away from the self.

Stage 4: Rationalization

• "And if I did, there were extenuating circumstances."
• "And if there weren't, you provoked me into it."
• "And if you didn't, others would have reacted the same way." - Attempts to provide reasons or excuses for the behavior that justify it or align it with normal responses.

Stage 5: Displacement

• "And if they wouldn’t, the real issue is being blown out of proportion." - This step attempts to shift the discussion from the actions to the reactions of others, suggesting an overreaction.

Stage 6: Generalization

• "And if it isn't, everyone makes mistakes."
• "And if they don’t, I am under a lot of stress." - These steps attempt to dilute personal responsibility by invoking common human faults or personal stress, suggesting that any errors are part of broader, understandable human conditions.

Stage 7: Victim Blaming

• "And if I did, you deserved it." - The final step, which shifts all remaining blame to the victim, positioning them as deserving of the actions or consequences.

These stages reflect a progression from outright denial to subtle and overt forms of manipulation, ending with a complete inversion of blame. Each stage is designed to protect the narcissist’s self-image and deflect any responsibility for their actions onto others or external circumstances.
For those of use that have been around since the beginning and has endured all of the above reminds me of one of my favorite parts in the Princess Bride:
Westley: Aha! Your pig fiance is too late! A few more steps and we'll be safe in the fire swamp. Buttercup: We'll never survive. Westley: Nonsense! You're only saying that because no one ever has. Westley: It's not that bad...Well I'm not saying I'd like to build a summer home here but the trees are actually quite lovely.
We begin unwinding all financial and manipulative aspects of the now very dead relationship that once existed. We document everything and those weary and nervous and we pick back up with…
Buttercup: We'll never succeed. We may as well die here. Westley: No, no. We have already succeeded. I mean, what are the three terrors of the Fire Swamp? One, the flame spurt - no problem. There's a popping sound preceding each; we can avoid that. Two, the lightning sand, which you were clever enough to discover what that looks like, so in the future we can avoid that too…
We navigate the shills, the media pundits, and hedge fund market making Mayo loving thunts, aka the R.O.U.S’s. Through it all, we arrive at the events of the day! Our mascot triumphantly returns and now the Media is pulling a Prince Humperdink as if we are going to fall for it.
Buttercup: We did it! Westley: Now, was that so terrible? Humperdink: Surrender! Westley: You mean you wish to surrender to me? Very well then, I accept. Humperdink: I give you full marks for bravery. Don't make yourself a fool. Westley: Ah, but how will you capture us? We know the secrets of the fire swamp. We can live there happily for some time, so whenever you feel like dying, feel free to visit.
Navigating and enduring the demise of your first narcissist relationship is, in my opinion, the fire swamp. Reading all the DD ( • )( • ) DD and easily recognizing all of manipulations and cheating tactics being used and not reacting to them is what makes apes say “We can live there happily for some time, so whenever you feel like dying, feel free to visit.”
Last but not least… our current marriage to our chairman, is bliss compared to our prior sham marriage where belief in a free and fair financial system once existed.
I hope this helps spur further discussions and help everyone understand the kinds of people we are up against. They will never change, they will never care, and if they are fined or even found guilty of a crime, they will always and forever play the victim.

Hello!
I am fairly new to this sub, and have read so far many stories about how many of you, unfortunately, were emotionally neglected in the most literal sense, i.e no warmth or love in your childhoods. I emphatize with you deeply, but cannot truly relate, because I did receive warmth and love, and will forever be grateful for this. However..
The reason I joined this sub is because I experienced a different kind of emotional neglect, which I now have learned is called ‘emotional parentification’, i.e essentially a parent leaning on their child emotionally and putting the child in a parental role. For me, it started very early on. I remember at around the age of 5-6 my mom would talk to me about marital issues, and eventually details of the divorce, later badmouth my father to me and my brother, complain about her job and colleagues, about her friends etc. I was just going through old e-mails and found one from when I was 23y/o, where my mom sent me an e-mail with the subject line “???” In which she vented about getting some negative feedback from students (she was a professor and the student feedback was a regular thing at the end of every semester). She was super upset and wrote to me that she wants to quit her job, and must be so bad at it, and her self-worth is destroyed etc. Mind you, she also received some positive feedback. She e-mailed me for reaasurance, I guess, because that had always been my role. My reply to her was so calm, re-affirming and constructive - I could not believe my own reply reading it 10+ years later. If she had written this to me today, I either would have ignored her or blown up on her.
I only started detangling myself from this unhealthy dynamic in my late twenties, early thirties. It really clicked once my daughter started talking. I could not imagine burdening a sweet innocent child with adult shit and troubles. Sadly, I am at a point now, where I don’t really want her in my life anymore. She still does not get it. In our last fight half a year ago, she, once again, let me know that she would have unalived herself when my brother died (I was 16), but she kept herself alive for me and now I am the only one she has.. no pressure, right? Plus, you can guess who acted as her therapist after my brother died (because, in her own words, she does not believe in (actual) therapy). I can remember countless peptalks that I gave her in those years. Not once did she consider that maybe both of us could have used actual grief counselling or anything.. it’s as if in her eyes I always was a solid rock that she could always lean on. Now I am so deeply disgusted by her attitude, and that she still does not get it, that I cannot stand to be around her for more than very very short periods of time.
I am wondering, are there others in this sub who joined due to a similar experience/background? How is your relationship with your parent(s) today?

The revenge I took on my grade nine English teacher was so petty that I hesitate to write about it. But Mrs. Bristle (for that is the name I will give her) was cruel to me every chance she got, and she made my first year in high school a misery. So when a file with her name on it arrived at my office, my first thought was not that I would beat her (for I was certain that I would) but rather, of the revenge I would take along the way.
I was pushing forty when Mrs. Bristle’s file hit my desk, some estate litigation where a mother’s last will and testament left my clients next to nothing, and gave their sister, Mrs. Bristle, pretty well the entire estate. When I saw the defendant’s name it looked familiar, and after a bit of Googling, I confirmed what I suspected: the defendant, Mrs. Bristle, was my former grade nine English teacher.
I remembered Mrs. Bristle very well. She was supposed to be teaching us the wonders of English literature, but what she really taught us were her rules, by which she meant her arbitrary whims, expressed in vague language, backed up by petty punishments for non-compliance. There was an art to getting along with Mrs. Bristle, and while most of the other kids learned it easily enough, somehow I did not. I have trouble learning unwritten rules, and in Mrs. Bristle’s class where unwritten and constantly changing rules were the order of the day, I didn’t stand a chance. Mrs. Bristle admonished me almost daily for ‘not paying attention’. I did detentions, re-wrote assignments, and made visits to the principal’s office, all because I apparently wasn’t listening, wasn’t doing what I was told.
Many was the time when Mrs. Bristle took me to task for missing some obvious but unstated part of an assignment. One time I handed in a sonnet, and received an “F” because the rhyming pattern was Petrarchan, not Shakespearean. But she would be nice to me, Mrs. Bristle would always say when she tossed my work back at me. She would give me another chance to hand the assignment in with the arbitrary changes she required, in the end giving me a good mark, but then heavily downgraded for being late.
Mrs. Bristle's case worked its way through the early stages, and every time I exchanged an email with her (for she was a self-rep, no need for counsel, she claimed) I thought about the unpleasant time I’d spent in her class. I had a rough time in high school, and I always resent anything that makes me dwell on it.
After a few months, the case was ready for the next stage. It was time to examine Mrs. Bristle, to find out why she thought her mother wanted to disinherit most of the family and enrich Mrs. Bristle alone. I showed up at the court reporter’s office early as usual, to get set up.
“What’s that shit eating grin on your face?” Adam asked. He was a lawyer colleague, about my vintage, and we were sitting in the lounge for lawyers only, the room that most court reporter’s offices have, a place for the lawyers to hang out and shoot the shit, no clients allowed.
“I’m going to examine my grade nine English teacher today,” I said, “and it's going to be fun.” I explained how she’d hated me back in the day, and had done her best to make my life hell.
“What’s the case about?” Adam said. Adam had been around the block, same as me, and it took only a few words for me to summarize everything that mattered in the file. “Estate fight, one sibling against four, undue influence, holograph will cutting out most of the siblings, competing with an older will, a formal one, where the shares are equal.”
Adam nodded appreciatively. “Nice fees, if the estate’s got the cash.”
“It does,” I said. We chatted for a bit, and then sat there in silence as we each did the last bit of prep for the cases we had that day, making notes, reading documents and drinking coffee. My alarm dinged just before ten, and I made my way to the examination room, and Mrs. Bristle, the teacher who’d greatly disliked the grade nine version of Calledinthe90s. I was curious to see if she would like the older version any better.
* * *
The examination started, and Mrs. Bristle and I sparred for a while, me tossing vague questions her way, and criticizing her when she did not understand. I kept her on the defensive for close to three hours, until it was getting on to one p.m.
“Aren’t you in a conflict or something?” she said to me just before the lunch break, when she’d finally made the connection, and understood that the lawyer asking her questions was a former student.
“No conflict,” I said, dismissing her concerns with a wave of my hand. “During the lunch break, there’s something I need you to do.”
“I don’t want to answer questions during lunch. I need a break.” The examination had been rough on Mrs. Bristle. She was not used to being asked questions, to being held to account, to being constantly challenged, and even having her grammar corrected now and again.
“You’ll get your lunch break. But while you’re eating a sandwich or whatever, keep this copy of the holograph will next to you.” The will on which Mrs. Bristle’s case relied was a holograph will, meaning that Mrs. Bristle’s mother had written the will entirely in hand from start to finish. The mother, or more likely, Mrs. Bristle herself, had downloaded a holograph will form from the web, and had completed it in accordance with the website’s instructions. Holograph wills are special. You can do a holograph will without a witness, without a lawyer, without anything at all, so long as you did it right. But if you got anything wrong, if you messed up in any way, it was invalid.
“You want me to read the will again over lunch?” Mrs. Bristle said.
“No. Instead, I want you to make a handwritten copy of it.”
“You want me to write it out? Whatever for?”
“There’s an allegation that the will wasn’t written by your mother, and that you wrote it up instead.” An allegation that I’d made up myself, that morning, while I was sitting in the lawyer's lounge, drinking coffee and munching on a muffin. My clients had not challenged the will’s handwriting; it was obviously their mother’s, totally different from Mrs. Bristle’s own writing. But I had decided otherwise.
Mrs. Bristle was appropriately outraged at being unjustly accused of forgery. Said she could prove it wasn’t her handwriting, could absolutely prove it.
“Then let’s settle the forgery issue once and for all,” I said, “write out the will in your own hand, so that our document experts can examine it, compare it with the original, and make a determination.”
“I don’t need the entire lunch break for that,” Mrs. Bristle said, “and I’d rather eat lunch at the restaurant downstairs.” The will was barely a page long, at most three hundred words, that being all it took for the mother to allegedly disinherit most of her children, and inexplicably leave everything to Mrs. Bristle. The mother had written up the will herself, but she’d been ninety at the time, while living in Mrs. Bristle’s house, and very much under her influence.
“I’ve retained five different experts,” I said, “and each of them will need copies.”
“Five experts? Why so many experts?”
“Each expert needs ten samples, for comparison purposes. It’s going to take you a while, Mrs. Bristle. I suggest you get started.” I overrode her protests and once she started to write, I left her in the room, and went to the lawyer’s lounge to eat their small sandwiches and drink more of the excellent coffee. After a while I stopped by the examination room to look in on Mrs. Bristle. I wanted to check in on her progress.
Mrs. Bristle asked for more time, complained of writer’s cramp, and asked me again if it was really necessary for her to write out the holograph will fifty times in her own hand, and I assured her that there was nothing for it, that it was absolutely necessary. I returned to the lounge to check my emails, leaving her hard at the homework I’d given her.
After a while my colleague, Adam, popped into the lounge. He asked me how it was going, the examination with the teacher, the teacher who had treated me so badly.
“I’m making her write lines.” Adam laughed, and laughed harder when I explained that I wasn’t kidding, that I really was making Mrs. Bristle write lines, and how I was doing it. His laughter attracted attention, and a few other lawyers asked what was up. “He’s making his teacher witness write lines,” Adam said, and the lawyer’s lounge hooted with laughter when I told everyone what was up.
It was one of the pettiest things I’ve ever done to anyone, making my grade nine teacher write lines. But the writing lines thing was just a warmup. The real revenge had yet to come. I returned to the examination room after a while, to check up on Mrs. Bristle, see how she was doing.
“This is taking forever,” she said, “and I really don’t get why you need it.” She had writer’s cramp, and was shaking her hand to get the kinks out. I picked up the stack of holograph wills she’d created, and flipped through it. She was nowhere near finished.
“On second thought,” I said, “maybe it isn’t necessary. I think you’re right. I don’t need any handwriting samples from you.”
“Why not?” she said.
“The will is invalid,” I explained, adding that because her mother had used a pre-printed form off the web, the law would not recognize the will. “A holograph will has to be entirely in the testator's handwriting,” I explained, “every single word entirely in handwriting from start to finish. This will doesn’t qualify, because your mother used a standard form, a form printed off the web, with instructions and boxes and questions and so on, and when you do that, then the will is no longer a holograph will. It’s a regular will, and regular wills need to be properly witnessed. This one isn’t witnessed, and that means it’s not a will. It’s just a piece of paper.”
“Are you trying to tell me that you only figured that out now? What kind of lawyer are you, anyways?”
“What kind of lawyer am I? I’m a lawyer who makes a witness skip lunch, and sit in a small room all alone, and write lines. Sound familiar, Mrs. Bristle?” She said nothing, and just stared at me. I closed the door on her, leaving her alone once more, and left for the Middle Temple Tavern where the lawyers all hung out. It was time to hoist a Guinness and enjoy my petty triumph.

I am not going into detail of what has been happening in my relationship. I am a guy dating a girl and my insecurities have been manifesting in a way that is toxic. I am constantly afraid I am not good enough for my girlfriend, creating a self fulfilling prophecy. I seek validation from her to comfort myself in a sense, give me a temporary feeling of everything being okay when its not.
I really do love her and I am able to see through mistakes I have made that my lack in confidence in myself is poisoning our relationship. This is my first relationship, I am 22 and we have been together for a year. This is not her first, she has been in quite a few relationships. She understood going in that my lack of experience would be challenging and she has been very lenient on me. But I keep letting my insecurities push the limit.
I hate myself for my mindset. Growing up, and even now, my parents always expressed disappointment in me no matter how well I achieved. I was at the top of my class and they still were disappointed in me and found ways to compare me with other people that are doing better. Even going as far as saying they wish they could replace me with a better child. I believe I have identified that as the root of my problem. I don't want this to define me. Why am I letting my strict parents dictate how I feel about myself. I have set goals I would like to complete in a year, hoping that this will increase my self esteem and have been working on them. But it will take time to change myself. I know that my past experiences does not excuse me from my behaviours now, I am 22 and should know better, why is this still affecting me?
My question is, how else can I begin to learn to love myself. I don't want her to carry the brunt of keeping my ego boosted as well as working on herself. It is absolutely not fair and I'm disgusted at myself. I am ashamed that I have caused my issues to bleed into her life. We have been friends for years, and she obviously cares about me deeply and sees something in me. Until this started coming up in the past couple of months, we had lots of wonderful moments, we were excited for our future together. I have put that all in jeopardy. I don't deserve the chances she gives me, but I know I have the capability to change. Even though it doesn't sound like it from what I have said, I have grown considerably in the past 2 years in how I see myself. It is definitely something I can do.
I have sought out counselling but it is still the early days and obviously there hasn't been a lot of time to sort myself out. I am considering proposing a break, not to see other people, absolutely not, but to focus on my studies and self love. I have heard that breaks are normally precursors to a break up. I don't want an ex or a relationship with anyone else. I wholeheartedly want to treat her right and make myself a proper man who is confident in himself and free of negative self-talk.
It may be too late to salvage this. I don’t even deserve her for being so unfair and for hurting her with my jealousy towards her exes. The damage may have been irreparably done. But I am willing to do anything it takes to try and make it up to her, prove that I can let go of my jealousy and negative mindset and insecurities. The way I am is not good enough, not for me, not for her, not for our relationship. I want to be better, I want to be proud of myself.

TLDR: Trigger warning Suicide Attempt: Betrayed Child: Mom had an affair when I was 6. Dad finds out and shoots himself (lucky he has terrible aim, sick family trauma humor). Mom figures out she made a horrible choice. Dad divorces Mom. 45 years later, my parents started spending time together after a lifetime with Step-Monsters. I got angry seeing my parent happy for the first time I can remember and decided to confound Mom's AP after all these years and blew up his life (He was a Dean who used his power to blow up multiple families). Parents get caught living together (lol), decide to remarry, and everybody is excited about the new normal. I am still numb from a childhood lost, but I am getting better with it daily.
Original story link: Again, I would rather children not read the original story, so I would not post a sub like childrenofdivorce. I was also able to help multiple individuals going through traumatic events and how they affect the kids on another sub in the past. The link below shows the effect of Infidelity on a family (or what not to do in recovery).
https://www.reddit.com/AsOneAfterInfidelity/comments/su3ujv/45_years_after_my_parents_dday_and_eventual/
My question here is that my older cowboy stoic brother (57) just reached out to me (53), which he never does unless something significant happens, and asked me if I would be willing to go to counseling with him to discuss our parent's divorce and the shit show that followed. We both did individual counseling with my Mom, but my brother always refused to do counseling with me. He has been having chest pains, which turned out to be panic attacks. In counseling, they made him start from his past again, had my Mom attend with him and now he wants my help. Let me say that my brother has other issues he is working through, not just my Mom's past affair. I want to be there for my brother, but he would never talk to me in detail about this for most of our lives. We both talked about our hatred for the Dean of Infidelity (Mom's AP) and the BS family trash-talking that we had to live through with mainly Dad's family members, but not the actual trauma of the year of hell we lived through. I was only 6, and he was 10; he had much more detail than I did. When he first asked me, I said, I think so; we just need to get a schedule together because I am going through some significant health issues with my wife. I couldn't for the next few months unless they could video call me. He then proceeded to tell me a couple of things I thought were one-way and let me know that things were different from what I remember and that he was trying to protect me by not telling me the truth. I asked for an example, and he said that the song we both are triggered by was the right song, but I was not in my car waiting for her (Mom was in our house when she found my Dad on the floor, brother and I were waiting in the car which is what I thought); I was actually in the back of the police car with my brother, riding to the hospital behind the EMS vehicle with my Dad and Mom in it. He then tells me that for years, one of his nightmares was around that car ride. The cop put us in the back of the car right after we watched the paramedic put my Dad in the EMS with my Mom hysterically crying. I am sure they would handle things differently these days and have social services or something come out to help with us, but this was the late 70's. They just put us in the police car, and off we went to the hospital.
We get in the car, and I ask him what is happening. He tells me to shut up because the cop is asking him a question. The cop asked him if he liked the f---ing song. My brother said, he panic and said yes. He then looks down at me because I have a death grip holding him, staring up at him, trembling like he never saw a person shake all the way to the hospital. That snapshot was buried in his mind, and he still sees it today. I was like, "Why the hell are you telling me now?". He goes on to say that is why for years after, he didn't want to talk with me much less look at me.
When I was around, it would trigger him back to that horrible ride and my face looking to him for answers when he was panicking himself because he didn't know if our Dad was alive or dead. It explains our relationship a lot through the next 5 or so years. I always tried to make him and everybody else smile, and he was completely shut down to the world around him. I told my brother after all this, I needed to think about how far I wanted to go here. I am finally in a good place with my parent being back together, but I am still battling my wife's health and don't know if I want to know more about the past if it's anything like this part. My brother says he still feels guilty about how he treated me and would like to work through this with me. I am not sure I have the bandwidth for this currently.'
My Mom called me soon after to check on me. She knew my brother called and asked how I felt about it. I just said, I had to think about this, but I am not sure it would be good to re-live this after the crap I did almost two years ago going to see her AP. I am finally in a great place with everything, and I truly enjoy every minute I spend with my parents. Hell, my kids spend more time with my parents now than they spend with my wife and me. It's great to watch. It's sad something so beautiful as parents getting back together after a live time can trigger so much emotions. Sometimes, you really just can't have nice things!
My question is, do I need to deal with it now? I know it could help my brother, but with what cost to me. I am in the best place I have ever been with my parents ever, especially my Dad, after years of not seeing much of him when he was with the step-monster. Will this help me or hurt me once again? Is this fair to my brother after decades of him being closed off to not following through for him? Again, if my wife were healthy, It would be a simple answer, but it's not.
In the past, I posted on AOAI for the last couple of years, and the people on that sub have been great to me throughout the years and have been a big help. After my last post, one of the mods let me know that only the specific betrayed and/or wayward are authorized to post (I posted under flare "Reconciled' and I should have been an Observer), which I respect. I used Reconciled and Healing because I believe that I was betrayed as well from a life I didn't get to have. Again, nothing but good things about the help I received from the people on that AOAI sub, and that helped keep me out of jail. I hope to be supported on this sub. My original story is a snapshot of the effect of Infidelity pretty much over a lifetime, and I would rather not have young people read it in subs like childrenofdivorce. My story was pretty rough.

I am not going into detail of what has been happening in my relationship. I am a guy dating a girl and my insecurities have been manifesting in a way that is toxic. I am constantly afraid I am not good enough for my girlfriend, creating a self fulfilling prophecy. I seek validation from her to comfort myself in a sense, give me a temporary feeling of everything being okay when its not.
I really do love her and I am able to see through mistakes I have made that my lack in confidence in myself is poisoning our relationship. This is my first relationship, I am 22 and we have been together for a year. This is not her first, she has been in quite a few relationships. She understood going in that my lack of experience would be challenging and she has been very lenient on me. But I keep letting my insecurities push the limit.
I hate myself for my mindset. Growing up, and even now, my parents always expressed disappointment in me no matter how well I achieved. I was at the top of my class and they still were disappointed in me and found ways to compare me with other people that are doing better. Even going as far as saying they wish they could replace me with a better child. I believe I have identified that as the root of my problem. I don't want this to define me. Why am I letting my strict parents dictate how I feel about myself. I have set goals I would like to complete in a year, hoping that this will increase my self esteem and have been working on them. But it will take time to change myself. I know that my past experiences does not excuse me from my behaviours now, I am 22 and should know better, why is this still affecting me?
My question is, how else can I begin to learn to love myself. I don't want her to carry the brunt of keeping my ego boosted as well as working on herself. It is absolutely not fair and I'm disgusted at myself. I am ashamed that I have caused my issues to bleed into her life. We have been friends for years, and she obviously cares about me deeply and sees something in me. Until this started coming up in the past couple of months, we had lots of wonderful moments, we were excited for our future together. I have put that all in jeopardy. I don't deserve the chances she gives me, but I know I have the capability to change. Even though it doesn't sound like it from what I have said, I have grown considerably in the past 2 years in how I see myself. It is definitely something I can do.
I have sought out counselling but it is still the early days and obviously there hasn't been a lot of time to sort myself out. I am considering proposing a break, not to see other people, absolutely not, but to focus on my studies and self love. I have heard that breaks are normally precursors to a break up. I don't want an ex or a relationship with anyone else. I wholeheartedly want to treat her right and make myself a proper man who is confident in himself and free of negative self-talk.
It may be too late to salvage this. I don’t even deserve her for being so unfair and for hurting her with my jealousy towards her exes. The damage may have been irreparably done. But I am willing to do anything it takes to try and make it up to her, prove that I can let go of my jealousy and negative mindset and insecurities. The way I am is not good enough, not for me, not for her, not for our relationship. I want to be better, I want to be proud of myself.

Thanks in advance for letting me yell into the void.
My [33F] marriage [35M] has been rocky the past few years with issues related to him being unemployed (and not trying to find work), me paying all the bills and doing the bulk of domestic tasks, and him spending too much money on vices like weed, late nights out, and online subscriptions/DLC. He also had complaints about my part in it, such as my waning sex drive, pushing him (more rudely as time went on) to get a job, and my limited capacity to listen kindly to his internal struggles. There were some stops and starts with efforts related to therapy, but progress was really slow and not promising from my perspective. I take full responsibility for my shortcomings that contributed to our marriage falling apart. I had a hard time overlooking his employment difficulties and spending habits toward the end. While I was not unkind after we started counseling and was made aware of the issue from his perspective, I'm sure I still held some resentment and emotionally distanced myself.
But this last week I discovered what was the final straw for me. He's been having multiple affairs for the past three years, some of which he's spent thousands of dollars on. Guess that explains the extent of our money problems. It's weirdly been a relief to have this "smoking gun" reason to call things off, because all the others building up felt like not quite enough if that makes sense. But I'm truly exhausted by these past few years and relieved that I can stop working so hard to fix this when the other person isn't putting in effort.
Since this situation has come to light with immediate family and friends, I've been kind of shocked by the response. My MIL was more vindictive than I could have predicted, sending me messages from alternative means after I've blocked her, ranting that I "drove" her sweet baby to make these terrible decisions, I'm the worst wife ever, yada yada. She tried to call my work last week and say untrue things to my boss, so I'm going to look into options for some type of restraining order.
I'm also surprised by my own parents' reactions. I would have thought that this degree of financial and sexual infidelity would have been ubiquitously understood as grounds for separation, but my parents are being more conservative than I would have predicted. They ask me a lot of questions about "my role" in all of this (I've been honest with them about the shortcomings I referenced above), and have been pressuring me to reconsider. My mother especially seems to blame me for not sticking it out, and I've pieced together that she has this attitude that divorce isn't acceptable under any circumstances. There's an underlying attitude of "you chose your man, now deal with the consequences".
For example, we were talking about my cousin who got divorced after her husband went to prison (for r*ping a minor), and my mother implied she should have tried to continue working on that marriage (when he gets released in 25 years LMAO). I'm sure this stems from her own unhappiness in her marriage. My parents don't seem to overtly mistreat each other, but they have clearly always been emotional unfulfilled and are just waiting it out at this point. My dad implied that I shouldn't have "dug things up" and ignored evidence of the affairs to keep the peace.
Our mutual friends don't want to "take sides", so I feel weird about venting to them about his transgressions or my feelings. They are sceptical of my reports because of their very positive view of my husband, but also don't want to see evidence I have, which I kind of understand (it's gross and traumatizing). I do have a therapist I meet with weekly who is supportive.
It's just all a lot of guilt and shame to absorb. Even though I fundamentally disagree with it, it slowly eats away at me during low times. I feel like, even though I did my best, everyone thinks I should be doing something differently. And those same people have very little to say negatively about him. They are all very sympathetic to his addiction struggles and poor choices, and seem to downplay the opportunities he's been given to do better. I feel like they judge him like he's a child, but me like I'm some highly skilled adult who should know better. Is this sexism? My outwardly functional appearance? Why does he get so much sympathy, when I've been wronged too?
I'm sure others here can relate. Thanks for listening.

There's literally an attack on all sides to literally everything.
Wanna have a job so you can make a living? Too bad, cause most everything is gonna be automated by the time you gain enough knowledge to be part of the workforce because of AI. You have nothing going for you.
Say you miraculously manage to get a stable job. Wanna retire? - pfffffftt, like that's ever gonna happen. Declining birth rates and inflation is gonna make it so that you're gonna have to work overtime until your bones ache every day until you drop dead just to not go broke.
Oh, you want to just fucking live? Too bad, cause the fossil fuel companies and literally every industry you know has been pumping out carbon at an increasing rate for the past 250 years, which will likely make the earth too warm for any modern ecosystems to survive in by the time you turn 70. And it'll still be absolute shit until then. And there's no hope of anyone actually doing anything about this since the companies have all the world governments in their pockets.
Not to mention that the rise of the far right globally will only serve to delay any action and exacerbate the worst effects of these issues for you and everyone around you.
I would wish you a nice life, but we both know that's never gonna happen.
I know this post is extremely doomerist, but with the way things are going, looks like that sweet spot in time where the average person could have a nice, fulfilling life, will not be made even better by therapy and mental health counseling and a reformation of the education system so that everyone is encouraged to work in jobs which will give them fulfillment, but instead will be uprooted by greed and late stage capitalism.
With the way things are going, I'm astounded that the collapse subreddit isn't the most popular.

So my ex-girlfriend broke up with me yesterday. We have been on and off a few times but basically have dated for about 5 years. She broke up with me the first 2 times because I used to be very rude and inconsiderate about a lot of things. However, I improved on those things and always came back better. I realized that given my upbringing that I lacked empathy towards her emotions, and it caused her stress. I did way better this last time around, but it was too little too late. She said she loved me, will never forget any of our moments, doesn't regret anything, and she needs to grow as a person and doesn't feel like she's made progress towards anything in her life. I agreed and stated that I loved her too, would do anything to become the person she needed in her life, I told her how she was the most important thing that's ever happened to me, I'm sorry I'm dumb when it comes to emotions, and that I would keep trying no matter what, I even suggested counseling or giving each other more space(I knew none of this was going to work). However, none of that convinced her, her mind was made up. I don't blame her at all, I understand and I told her that, and I told her that I myself would probably want to be out of a relationship where I felt I wasn't understood too. Part of me feels like I might have been the worst thing that's happened to her, and I wasted 5 years of her life with me. She stated that isn't true at all, but I can't help but feel guilty. I'm not trying to convince her to love me again or even start a friendship with her, at least at this moment in time. I wouldn't be able to get over her if I did. I guess this post is me trying to ask what I do. I hate myself for ruining the relationship with the love of my life because I couldn't stop being a grumpy a**hole, I lacked empathy and was negative about things around me, it was like a disease and most of the time it wasn't directed towards her, sometimes it was. I was a grey cloud, and she was a ray of sunshine. I wanted to be like that ray of sunshine. I always wanted to be like that, and that's why I fell in love with her, but yeah... here I am.
What do I do. Can I forgive myself? Do I deserve to forgive myself for ruining something so great and something I've had so many chances to fix? How do I deal with missing her 24/7. I don't even want to start thinking about her with another person yet. I'm scared and feel so lost. This was my first relationship and love of my life. Any help would be appreciated, please.

I (39m) have been married to my wife (34f) for 7 years. We have two boys aged 4 and 2.
I’m a covid dad, our first was born just before lockdown and I’ve been working from home while parenting ever since and always had an active role. Like most, I started to lose my individual identity while the kids were small and needed the attention.
Last year, my wife started to suffer from depression (she was treated for depression when in school, I knew this before we married) and the year in general was rough. She underwent treatment, got a better, was retrenched and tried to start a consulting company. Financial pressures were high (we were able to break even but not save anything and had to sip at savings sometimes). I took over most of the day to day operations like school, meals and even night time routine to take the pressure off. I lost myself even more; wake up, kids, work, kids, sleep. I felt like a gear inside of a machine; I was being burnt and consumed like fuel.
I was stuck at home, working and parenting while she was out meeting clients and coming home late. This wasn’t her fault but she grew fearful of my irritations and building resentment at home and wouldn’t be motivated to come home early; work was the escape. She understood we were sliding and we made some changes but our marriage had remained rocky.
I wasn’t managing it well, I admit it. But I didn’t seek help either, trapped.
Things got better in October-December and our roles balanced out, although I still did meals for everyone (kids refusing food was a trigger for her). I started therapy to work though things (finding a LOT of old issues surfacing with my own dad). Our relationship improved although some issues remained to be worked on.
She got a new job in January, but the bosses (wife/husband pair) were difficult, narcissistic and micromanaging. Her role was in operations so she tempered upper management’s crazy so the team could work. She quit her job in April once the pressure got too much and was affecting her mental health.
There was no backup job; she worried I wouldn’t support her decision but I did (I saw the messages and voice notes from the bosses). I wasn’t the same person as I was last year and remained supportive.
Our marriage was still a bit rough. We had started couples counselling, with the last “realisation” being we both didn’t want this relationship, but that it didn’t mean the end of us. We could reforge our relationship and save our marriage.
In May (this month) she tried to find a new role and resume consulting but her depression hit again. It was bad, she was admitted to hospital last week Monday as high risk. Ive been handling the kids since (though I have a nanny a school during the week which helps).
The psychiatrist and OT want to meet with me and her mom on Thursday for what I imagine ate details about post hospital care (I’m expecting she’ll be discharged on Friday). I’m convinced she won’t be able to work or contribute financially. I have doubts she can look after the kids for a time too, if at all. we’ll have to see. Maybe it will change but I can’t look after this kids while draining savings and liquidating investments.
We’ll have to transition to a single income, move to a small place near her mom so I can get some help outside of school and nanny. She might live with her sister for a time; no work or child pressure. Someone to help keep her accountable for getting up in the morning, exercise, that kind of thing.
I haven’t slept well this last week. What to do about finances, schools, housing. The future of these boys. My own happiness. Our marriage which we’ve invested so much into while I’m considering separation and the couples therapy that is getting paused until she’s discharged. Whether couples therapy even can resume with her current treatment plan.
I had a mentally disabled sibling when I grew up. Illness in family is hard, it wrecks everything, steals from your happiness. I don’t think I can go through what my parents did, not while knowing what I do from childhood. But how can I separate from someone who’s asking me not to give up on her? How do I know that I want to stay together and not just fall into the provider role?
How do I find identify and comfort with another partner after being with someone for nearly 10 years? Can a marriage recover from unhappiness and illness?
I think I’m becoming a single dad. Maybe it’s too early thinking these things, maybe I’m looking at the worse cases and being hard on myself without giving things time.
What do single dads do? How did you get there? How can you give your kids a future and still have your own life?
I’m holding it together. I’m reaching out for help. I know I have to look after myself. But I don’t know if this is the end and I need to become a single parent, or if I’m just cresting a hill.

A bit of background on our situation, we have a mortgage together and a little boy who is 16 months. We've been together for 5 years and since having our little boy things haven't been the same.
We don't have any support or help from family with childcare so we never get time to go on dates just us and with childcare costs atm money is very tight. Those who are willing to help either live over 100 miles away and equally have jobs/families of there own so it's hard to find a break.
We're both miserable and been stuck in the 'room mate' phase since our son was born but things have got worse since I went back to work in January.
Money is super tight we're just making ends meet each month, so we have no money left over for treats or holidays etc.
I F31 have been overwhelmed with going back to work and struggling with trying to do everything, although I'm currently part time working 3 days a week, on the days I do work I drop my little boy off at nursery for 8am then we get back around 6pm, it's then a case of getting him bathed and ready for bed at 7-7.30pm once he's in bed I then have to sort his nursery bag, make lunch for myself and boyfriend for the next day and also do us dinner and clean up, by the time this is all done it's normally 8.30-9pm. I then feel exhausted and just want to go to bed as know I'll be up again at 6am. Even at the weekend it's always me that gets up at 6am with our son, I do all the washing, cleaning and cooking and pay pretty much half towards all the bills. I have no money left each month.
My boyfriend M29 has a very flexible Job his boss is really understanding and let's him basically do what he likes he works some Wednesday and every Thursdays and Fridays at home and often doesn't get out of bed until 9-10am before he starts work and then finishes at 4pm, equally on the weekends he'll he'll sleep in until 10-11am and doesn't really do alot apart from sit on his phone/watch TV, lately he's made a lot of comments and digs about how we never have sex anymore and I'm always in a bad mood and nagging at him I'm never happy etc he keeps making jokes about before our son came along life was better he had more money and could buy tools and had a camper van which we had to sell. I've explained the money side is only temporary until he's in school full time and we don't have to pay childcare and I can go back to work full-time etc which he knew before we even decided to have a baby. He also gets paid more because he's full time 3/4 of his wage he puts into the joint account for bills but still has money leftover each month yet says he doesn't it all goes on bills but I know he gets around 1700 a month and he puts 1200 in the joint account so where is that extra 500 going? He gets really defensive and secretive with money but tries to make out if it wasn't for him paying for the house and bills and the money he puts in the account I'd be screwed, even though I get paid 1100 each month and that all goes on bills I've tried showing him this and I have nothing left over. I never go out, buy new things literally nothing.
We've had countless conversations about I don't mean to nag I'm just overwhelmed and tired but equally if he helped out a bit more I wouldn't feel so stressed. He has started helping out more but then it's like he wants sex as a reward and tries to make me feel guilty for not putting out. I have no sexual libdo at the moment and I do feel guilty and ashamed I can't meet his sexual needs and I've asked how else can I show you love and appreciation but no matter what he turns it back round to sex and the more pressure I feel the more turned off it makes me.
I do resent him a lot and I know that's something I need to work on and I'm trying my hardest to stop the nagging and being moody and I'm working on regulating my emotions and triggers, but it's so hard when I feel like it's inequal and we're not a team.
I've suggested breaking up as I've said we're both unhappy we clearly can't meet each others needs/wants and it's not fair on our son but he doesn't want to and says we can't break up now we've got a child we're stuck with our decision we've just got to get on with it, yet equally it just feels like he's so depressed and hates his life it's just not nice being around you know and I don't know what I can do to help him as I've tried being more positive and said let's go to the beach for the day or let's go out for a walk in the park and have a picnic but he just doesn't want to. He mopes around and everything just feels so negative.
P.s he won't do counselling or therapy I've also suggested this he thinks it's lame and a con.
Any advice?

I just want to preface this by saying I don't want to leave my husband, I genuinely want to resolve our problems.
My husband has been a handful recently - racking up debt and not telling me until it was too late, issues at work, mood swings, etc. We've spoken at length about the problems, and it's always followed by him crying, seeming like he genuinely realises he's messed up, apologising and saying it'll never happen again (it normally does).
I know he has memory problems, and I try really hard to be patient about it, but I feel like there's only so much patience I have. For example, I'll tell him I'm upset that when I'm having a panic attack (I have PTSD) he'll keep raising his voice to try and tell me to breathe, but that triggers me more. Then the next time it happens, he'll do it again, because "he forgot". I do however understand these memory problems are really hard for him, but it's hard to know where to draw the line. We've been together for around 5 years now, and I'm confident these memory issues were not nearly as bad until these last two years, but I have no idea why.
I'm filled with resentment towards him at the minute, and it's hard for me to tell if it's justified or if I'm overreacting (I have developmental issues and I know I'm incredibly stubborn). He knows this is happening because I've told him, but I think he's forgotten again because he keeps asking what's wrong with me.
I feel like my life is going in circles at the moment because I'm out of ideas. I am willing to try anything - counselling, individual therapy, whatever you can think of - I just need to know what my next step should be.
TLDR; Husband keeps messing up, saying he won't do it again, and forgetting.

Please read I don’t know how to stop the vicious cycle
I’m freaking out. I’ve had ROCD for almost 4 years now, and it’s really taking a toll on my marriage. I love my husband with my whole heart but I literally cannot stop criticizing him.
He has a dark sense of humor, and often makes racy jokes. He really likes comedians like Bill burr who push the boundaries of what’s taboo. I’ve never had an issue with it but lately it’s been really bothering me. It’s gotten to the point where I’m secretly checking everything he says to make sure it’s good and moral and to make sure he’s a good person. It’s absolutely exhausting. He’s a libertarian with an open mind but he was raised in a very conservative household and I think sometimes this affects how pc he is, but he’s the most accepting and loving person and is learning. But I judge literally everything he says or does and it’s really affecting him. Whenever he says something that mildly irritates me, I panic. I criticize him, make him feel guilty, and then I ask him for reassurance a hundred times. And then it usually ends up with us fighting because he feels so overwhelmed.
I don’t know what to do. We’re in counseling which helps but the flare ups are so bad in between. I just want things to go back to the way they were. I often times find myself looking at old pictures of us and getting sad because I didn’t used to be like this.
I know my husband. He’s a good person with a moral compass and we share almost every value. That’s why I married him. We are a 95% match, and that 5% is making me freak out and spiral. He just wants me to be happy so he is constantly reassuring me, but it’s becoming exhausting which I totally understand. I just want it to be better.