Hi everyone

i have posted here a couple of times and find myself frequently seeking comfort and learning on these pages. 

So here I am again, and that can only mean there's been yet another drama with the ABH. Promises, promises. All broken. I kicked him out of the house a month ago after his abuse went beyond being directed at me, but started to be vented at the children and my mother. Obscenities, threats, and knives being waved around. 

He promised he would stop drinking, because HE wants to, he wants a family and he wants to be loved.  He lasted a month. I knew what was coming but said nothing, the little lies, the growing agitation, the bubbling rage and overt aggression growing all the time within him. Last night he went on a binge and now it's all over for me and he knows it. He is raging again, threatening and vicious. No contact from now, it's over, I don't need this.

He has only one way to go, and that is down. He is 52 years old, a full blown alcoholic for 35 years, a string of devastated lives behind him. No real friends, just drinking buddies. His own kids are lost to him. Divorced twice because of his serial drinking and adultery. He is a corporate lawyer, and has lost many jobs because of the drinking. He is violent and beats people up when drunk. He suffers from memory loss, and slurs his words when sober, his muscles are wasting away. And yet, Jekyll/Hyde, some of the time he is super-intelligent, loving, committed and thoughtful. 

How did I get here. That is my job now, to be alone and understand how I have allowed this to happen to my family.

My own life, like that of so many here is a catalogue of fear, abandonment and betrayal. My childhood was spent in war-torn countries, moving every three years, living in some of the poorest countries in the world. Earthquakes, hurricanes, shootings, civil war, uncertainty and fear left me with PTSD and a desperate sub-conscious quest for someone to protect me. I met my XH at University and spent 20 years working very hard and building a successful business and a seemingly secure life. When I was 30, my father had a massive stroke that left him paralyzed and mute. it revealed a secret life of debt and affairs that left me, my sister and my mother devastated, traumatised and destitute. He lived another 18 years entirely dependant on my mother and I, and died suddenly and horrifically in our arms 3 years ago. It has destroyed my mother who was only 50 at the time of the stroke, totally screwed her up.

My XH in the meantime, has turned out to be a cruel, vicious narcissist whose favourite hobby is to obliterate me. it all started when I got pregnant with my first, and was bed-ridden for 9 months with severe hyperemesis. I vomited every time I moved. XH disappeared. He hated me, my helplessness, my weakness. He would leave early in the morning and come back late at night. After my daughter was born, I went on to have a miscarriage, and then a son, all with extreme sickness, married to a man who despised me and beat me up while pregnant and in front of the kids. I kicked him out when the children were 1 and 3 after finding out he was having an affair with one of our employees who is 20 years younger than him. In the last 8 years he has used every ploy imaginable to torture me. We are now divorced, but it took 7 years, he refused to engage with the legal process, while cutting me and the children off from friends and family and starving us out of the matrimonial home, and forcing me out of the business. The children and I are now homeless, penniless and about to go to court again.

i have found very recently out that in the last 5 years he has embezzled £500,000 from our businesses and not paid tax on it. He has committed massive fraud that has put me at risk too. He lied in the financial declaration of the divorce and has spent moneys that legally were mine. A mess. 

3 years after XH left, after being alone and licking my wounds I met a man who spent two years conning me out of all my savings and setting up an elaborate fraud for which i have ended up endebted for the next 10 years.

So, a pattern of serious ongoing abuse, from the XH who has put me and the children on the street, and penniless, (we are going to need help from the state for housing and survival), to the psychopath who saw my vulnerability and fleeced me, and the alcoholic nutcase who wriggled into our lives promising salvation under the guise of being a lawyer. 

I get it....they can spot the terror in my eyes and they move in for the kill. I have spent the last 10 years bringing up my babies in an emotional nuclear war zone. Making mistake after mistake, in permanent fight-or-flight mode, living as refugees, damaging me and my children more and more with every fatal choice I make. I didn't know it, i was doing the best I could. I was raised with old-fashioned values, and I tell the truth and I behave properly. I cannot for the life of me see the bad guys out there until they have beaten me so hard I cannot ignore it.

All this is very very bad news, you don't emerged unscathed. I have treatment for PTSD and Complex PTSD, and a year in therapy. 

I feel like total crap. I am highly educated, and there was a time when there was nothing I couldn't do. Nothing prepared me for the battering of the last 10 years. I want to die so badly, it's like an alcoholic giving up drinking, I go one day at a time, one breath at a time, thinking of my 10 and 12 year old needing their mother. If it wasn't for them I'd be gone by now. It's a fight to stay alive.

 ma'am... what a story...! We do look for the similarities and not the differences. We are all in the same boat.

My Hp nudged me- I do not often do this- it breaks some of the Alanon rules. But take this as a possible coffee-time chat after a meeting. What you describe resonated with this book I read. I could not put it down!

I am biassed because Marianne is a countrywoman of mine...

http://www.examiner.com/review/zen-under-fire-a-beautiful-informative-memoir

take care out there,

DavidG.