Impossible

I am 72 years old and married  to an Aspberger man in denial for 34 Years. We have been going to marriage therapy for 30 years, even Maxine Aston. My guess is we have spent between $300,000 - $400,000 Canadian in the past 30 years on marriage therapy alone. We have gone to world renound therapists for years. At this time we see renound therapists for 5 hours every week.

In all this time our asperger-in-denial relationship is getting worse. I am very ill from multiple strokes creating blindness and recent pneumonia with two operations for cancer scheduled.

I think it is “impossible” to go on. I’m too ill to leave him. He has alienated me from all my family and friends. I’m all alone like a battered wife. One of our therapists calls my husband’s behavior with me, psychological torture. In Canada my therapists tell me there is almost nothing our court systems will do to protect a wife who is emotionally abused, It’s a patriarchal system. Although my husband has become increasingly physically abusive, I am too weak physically and emotionally to report his abuse to the police. I take pictures of brushes and show them to my therapists. I know that is not enough for conviction but it is all I can do. Plus even well documented and reported incidents of emotional abuse never get prosecuted. All my therapists tell me that my health would not be strong enough to go through prosecuting my husband in a court system.

i know this will be hard for many of you to believe, but I assure you that everything is true. I think the greatest problem is that my husband denies there is anything different about him. He has had assessments to prove he has Autistic Spectrum Disorder. He thinks the doctor is a quack who just wants money.

His father took me aside when we were only married 12 years to tell me the “Family Secret”, that my husband had an assessment done when he was 17 yeas old. The doctor reported that my husband “would make nothing of himself and he would never hold down a full time job”. Then I was told that this is a secret and I was never to tell my husband. I was constantly forced to promise to never tell this family secret to my husband. I felt like a bomb had blown up in my heart. I tried to keep my promise but the truth and consequences of keeping this family secret were weighing too heavily on my heart. I told my husband my experience with mostly his father and how I felt like my heart was hurting. I was crying so hard I could hardly speak and it took much longer to relate the whole event . My husband seamed to be listening but I didn’t know much about dissociation at the time. My husband’s response after me taking 10 minutes to tell the Family Secret event was: “ My parents wouldn’t talk about me like that.” He showed no signs of any empathy, support or compassion.

i was and still feel devastated, alone, abandoned and unloved.

There is so much more but I’ll stop here. I beg for your compassion, empathy and support.