Elaine:
My thought is this: ask yourself what you get--genuinely--from these relationships. Because there IS something. I've asked myself why my mom married my NF. It wasn't that she was stupid, or that he hid all of who he was (though he certainly hid some, don't get me wrong). But. She WANTED to hand over control. She wanted that perfect 1950s fiction, to stay home, have children, have beautiful clothes and nice cars and social position and a boyish, silly, innocuous husband who helped out and we all kinds chuckled at from time to time, Oh dad, what a goof, so goodhearted. NOT that there's anything inherently wrong with that, please don't misunderstand. We all have a right to want what we want.
I'm saying when we ARE what we DESIRE. That's what we move toward, that's what our actions serve. This is going to sound incredibly superficial, but when I was 23 or so, I decided the most important thing I could do was cure myself of needing to feel sheltered by my background. The fact that we had STUFF made me feel protected growing up, but I was not safe. I tried twice to kill myself. My father tried to kill my mother. And this is just physical danger, we aren't even touching on emotional/psychological danger.
So I moved across country to a city I'd never set foot in with $2,000 dollars to my name (20 years ago) and lived in the Salvation Army. It was cold and raining and I had no job and no friends. Cried like a baby for two days and nights, sitting on a sagging bed with a bathroom down the hall. There's no place lonelier than a metropolis as the holidays set in. On Thanksgiving I wandered up the avenues and looked in glowing windows where families were eating dinner together. I didn't even have the proper clothes, coming from a hot climate--I was cold inside and out. Day after day, I kept walking. Miles and miles. I started to love that little room and that sagging bed. It was MINE. I started sleeping, and realized I'd never slept well before. I felt safe, really safe. I got a job. Not a good one, but I'm still friends with the people I worked with, two decades later. Then, after a few months, I realized I'd begun smiling for no reason. Just walking around the city, people would smile at me, and it was because I was smiling at them. Had NO IDEA! I had no money. And it didn't matter.
I just needed to break what had been the one thing TYING ME TO MY ABUSER, not because HE insisted on it. I'll tell you what: I know now that money made me feel safe, may father's daughter, under his wing. But even then there was a part of me that knew at some level he would always yank whatever I needed or wanted or cared about away, that the more I depended on him the more pleasure he would have gotten from keeping me off-balance and fearful.
Leaving was one of the happiest and most transformative times in my life. Granted, I had only myself at the time, it was something I COULD do and nobody else--no kids, no pets--would go hungry. I'm just using it as an example from my past of saying: here's what tied me down. I'm not saying you don't have the right to want something from this man in your life. I'm saying that and....oh, say, $1.50 will get you a small Starbucks. If it's possible to identify what IN YOURSELF ties you to him, could you then take specific deliberate steps to walk away, and replace what he seems to offer with something you provide for yourself?
