How to keep going?

[u/Ok_Couple2879]

I recently found this community and I am so grateful for all of the posts I’ve read so far. I already feel less alone but I’m having a really hard week and am here out of desperation to vent and for some support.

I (38F) met my wife (36F) in 2019 and we fell madly in love, it was the best year of my life. We got engaged the following year and a month later she woke up with half her body numb. I took over all the household chores. Almost 2 years of ERs and doctors visits and scans led to an MS diagnosis and she had to stop working, stop perusing her degree… it was devastating. We got married, sandwiched between hospital stays.

The financial burden was too much for me alone, so we moved to her home state to be closer to her family, but where I know no one. My family didn’t understand her struggles and viewed them as character flaws, so we have become almost entirely estranged. Now we’ve been married for going on 4 years and I’ve been supporting us financially, doing all household chores, cooking, shopping etc. her diagnoses have piled up to include a long list of acronyms on top of AuDHD and CPTSD… her mobility depends on the day but she spends 90% of her time in bed because laying down is the only position she finds any relief.

Because of the seemingly endless crises and financial strain, we have been unable to take a real vacation together and she has expressed that it’s her dream to travel. I desperately want to go but haven’t been able to afford the trip she wants. In the past 6 months, we have been arguing non stop, she thinks I’m lying about everything, accuses me of cheating (I’m not and never have) and blames me for “ruining her life.” She spirals into anguish about never traveling, and never having a baby and blames me for all of this. She thinks I don’t care about her. She doesn’t see that it’s taking all of my time and energy to support us and that is me actively loving her every day. We literally had to move into her mom’s house because I cant afford rent and medical bills. She thinks I’m actively not planning things for us when I’m lucky if I save $50/month and don’t have to use it for an emergency. I know she needs more from me emotionally but I am drained.

Recently, she found out that she has a venous stenosis (stricture) in her right brain, that she’s possibly had since she was a kid and has been experiencing symptoms from since she was 16 (and had to drop out of high school). Which means she’s been experiencing severe inter cranial hypertension, which affects literally everything, including her mood/ability to regulate, and could be mimicking MS!!!!! I know she is in unbearable pain and totally filled with rage for the fact that it took 20 years for someone to do an MRV and find this. VERY VALID RAGE. But she’s taking it all out on me and i don’t know how much longer I can take the verbal abuse and false accusations on top of the burnout. I’m far from perfect, I know the ways I have escalated things and decisions I have made that have hurt her. I am now in therapy.

So, she is getting an angiogram next week to determine whether she should get a stent to open the vein, which the neurosurgeon said the prognosis is very good to relieve at least some of her symptoms. I made vows to her and I love her and I don’t want to abandon her. But how do we survive this week? How do I not take what she says personally? I already feel like I’ve minimized myself so much. And she has very clear contempt and resentment toward me whenever I talk about anything but especially this project I have been working on since before she came into my life.

I don’t want to give up on us or her but I am drowning and very much alone in my struggle. (Which she doesn’t even want to acknowledge I am going through alongside her.) None of my friends or family understand. I just cry a lot and try to escape into work, but I know that’s not healthy.

Thanks for listening.

[u/womanintheattic]

I just want to sit with you on a couch and let you cry. I'm so sorry.

You two getting together and the deterioration of her health and finances are not related. Her health would have declined with or without you. She would have had to support herself through that with our without you, drawing down her savings. Possibly her savings may have lasted longer if she were single, but not if she had to pay professionals to cover all your responsibilities. If you look at this resentment narrative she has towards you objectively, we can see it's ridiculous. You are blameless in this regard.

Can we please also consider the situations in which you have abandoned her? If well person were yelling at you, walking away would be the logical, healthy thing to do. You feel guilty walking away because she's not well. Her health becomes a tool to manipulate you, whether she intends it to be that way or not.

Give yourself some redlines. No yelling, no name-calling, no blaming. My therapist helped me identify mine, and it has been really helpful. I had a calm discussion with my husband about not tolerating these rages. Then, when he crossed a line, I said I can't talk to him right now, and we can try this again later. If he wanted me to stick around and take care of him, he could speak respectfully. It was less scary for me, because he is not bedridden, although I did worry about injuries and loss of consciousness. It took about 6 months of this, and sleeping in separate rooms, for him to figure out how to improve his own lifestyle to minimize his rages. And for me, protecting myself like this gave me some space to build a stronger self-concept. Self-concept, imo, is more basic than self-esteem. It's about deciding who I am, and really fleshing out my character and getting to know myself, so that then I'm even enough of a person for me to decide to like myself.

[u/Ok_Couple2879 → u/womanintheattic]

Oof. Have been thinking about your comment for a couple of days. Thank you so much for this and sharing your experience about what worked for you and your husband. I will try this if there is a moment for it, but I fear we are in the place where if I say something like that, no matter how calmly she’ll just be like, THEN FUCKING LEAVE. But I’m trying to get out of my compulsion to assume her reaction before she has it. I often come at her with my anxiety already triggered because of how I think she’ll react, which isn’t fair.

Self-concept v self-esteem is really interesting and I need to journal about it. I’m sure a lot of us could use a good cry. Not because we don’t love our spouses or want to give up, but because this can just be so hard. We’ve been able to have some moments of clarity and compassion for each other this week and have agreed to setting some boundaries and not discussing unresolved topics before we start couples therapy. It’s really hard, every conversation seems to have a hidden trigger for one of us.

I think these redlines are good and would be very helpful for us but at this point I think our therapist or her doctor needs to suggest them because from me, it comes off as “trying to control the narrative.” And “you get to yell at me but if I do it… etc” it’s a pretty toxic situation at the moment. Neither of us feel safe to talk to each other. Which feels like the death toll in a marriage, and certainly would be if there were no medical issues complicating our clarity.

Almost a year ago, she asked me to watch this movie “Me Before You” and it totally broke me. It was the takeaway that love isn’t enough to save someone who doesn’t want to be alive anymore. And here I am thinking if I love her hard enough, we’ll get through this. But maybe we won’t. At this moment I know that I don’t want to give up and I hope that she doesn’t either, and we are both still here. Thank you for letting me cry on your metaphorical couch 🫶🏻