As I grow tired of continued nightmares and flashbacks, one thing is becoming painfully apparent: I stayed way too long with a toxic person. I felt all of those years like I was trapped financially, also wanted to be able to see my kids and she couldn't take care of herself. All of which were legitimate concerns and by waiting for the kids to grow up and her to finish school, I don't have to deal with her any more. The problem is when you stay, you are being traumatized by having the toxic person in your life. Their demands, the abuse cycle, and the lies and the fact they are stealing from you by betraying your wedding vows, makes for a lot of harm. Now that I have healed a bit, I can look back and see what a mistake I made by staying.
I think a lot of my suffering was due to a lack of emotional intelligence by primary caregivers as a child. I was conditioned to being treated poorly by a woman and sought that out in my marriage. Also, the Christian faith I was raised in gave poor counsel regarding sex and marriage. I had the understanding that if someone was a Christian they would become more Christlike and they had the ability to become a new creature. All of the marriage seminars we went to never addressed emotional abuse, or toxic controlling behavior. In my opinion, the church condones it, as it is the hook that keeps believers devout and narcissistic leaders from having unhappy spouses leave them. I always found it amazing that as a man, I had the same issues in my marriage that the unhappy women were having. It took years for it to dawn on me that my ex was probably on the cluster B spectrum and so were most of the men that these seminars and books were catered too.
I knew fundamentalist Christianity was false but still tried to get it, instead of just trusting my doubts and leaving for good. I knew early on dating my ex wife that she had issues and I stayed and tried to make things work. Both were toxic situations that traumatized me and still haunt me today. The take away from this is, is to leave a toxic situation and not try to fix something that doesn't work for you. It's unfair I had to waste so many years of my life realizing this and terribly expensive lesson. I get it now and hope my body is done with processing all of the trauma it stored over the years.
