Parting Is Such Sweet Sorrow

If The Crazy-Making Husband inhabits your husband's skin, by definition, your sanity is slipping. At some level, you know this.  Yet you stay with him. Why does parting with your husband -- with whom you feel a lot more pain than joy -- feel like such sweet sorrow?

Some experts insist that the primary reason you stay is your refusal to acknowledge the reality of your situation. When you're married to The Crazy-Making Husband, this is not accurate. Instead, the truth is far more tragic.

The reason you stay with The Crazy-Making Husband may well be that he has you convinced you are a pathetic waste of a woman. A woman no man will want. A woman who, on her own, would never survive.

If this blog has caught your eye, take heart. You've already had the courage to honestly look at your life. That sickening feeling in the pit of your stomach as you read these words proves you do realize you're married to a man who erodes you. In fact, your secret, most fervent hope is life without him. Yet you stay.

Where is the disconnect?

When you imagine life without your Crazy-Making Husband, somewhere you trip over yourself, and fall flat on your dreams. So, keeping him close feels, by comparison, safer. Which fuels the crazy-making in your head.

Imagining parting isn't the trouble. It's imagining: you go to what? Because The Crazy-Making Husband has you brainwashed that you need him, that he is the best you could possibly do, and that he is the way he is because YOU made him that way, you imagine your future without him as a far worse future...in fact, you fear it.  Old adages taunt you: "The Devil you know is better than The Devil you don't."  "From the frying pan into the fire." And the most toxic adage of all: "Just make the best of it."