So, my marriage has been suffering a very slow and painful death for many years. We've been together 13 years and only the first year was good because he was love bombing the hell out of me. We have been falling apart totally for about 5 or 6 years now. My husband has - in my unprofessional diagnosis - PTSD (from a traumatized family background), ADHD (disorganized, mess, lack of attention), RSD (severe, raging, irrational), and probably also a good dose of NPD (constantly talking about himself, needing ego strokes to feel okay).

He has other wonderful qualities and I have loved him and still love him. But there is no hope that I can see. He is no longer doing therapy because his therapist moved away, and that is a disaster for him because he really needs to be in therapy every week. He is dealing with a lot of personal stresses now, and he is spiraling. His behavior is really unstable and all his triggers are firing - he is like a terrain full of land mines. He is also much older than I am and dealing with health issues. 

I am 48. I feel about 150 after all these years with him. I also have health issues, and menopause. But I might have a few good years left if I can salvage whatever is left of myself which is NOT MUCH to be honest. I am flat, depleted, exhausted, depressed - a wreck. So I decided to finally call it completely yesterday by taking off my wedding ring and letting my husband know that I have done it, and I am not putting it back on again. 

We are now living on the same property but in different houses. Other people also live here on this property in another house. It is something of a community and I am really grateful for the presence of others here because for years it was just the two of us. 

The question is how to continue living here now that we are totally separated. We built this place together, it is both of our homes. I have absolutely no other good options for living and no decent cash income right now. So I have to pull my life together and create something for myself separate from him. I am an artist and I have neglected my art for years in service of our joint projects. So I am going to see if I can revitalize that part of myself. 

He has agreed to see a therapist with me to work through this divorce phase. He really desperately needs to be in therapy so I have all my fingers crossed that he gets something out of it and stays with it. But he is hyper sensitive to anything that smells like "control" right now so I can't push it. 

We did the Internal Family Systems therapy for the past few years and it really helped to give a framework and narrative for his complex presentations of emotional problems. Before I discovered IFS it was clear to me, after many years, that he really had distinct personalities. There was the wonderful guy I married, the wise man, the loving man. Then there was this total asshole who would emerge and really had nothing at all in common with my husband. It was like his evil twin. I truly hated that guy. Honestly I still hate that guy. He is intolerable and I do not want to be married to him, or work with him, or hang out with him at all. 

Over time I distinguished a few other parts to him, none of them good to deal with.

In IFS he encountered his totally traumatized inner child and his very angry teenager who was protecting the inner child. I definitely have to encounter those two constantly. The teenager is the slob who won't clean up after himself and treats me like his bitch of a mother instead of his beloved wife. 

Anyway, I have been thinking lately more about the NPD aspect of all this. I had a NARC mom and in my experience, NPD people generally refuse any kind of therapy or anything that might lead to self awareness. That is not really my husband. He has done therapy and he can actually be totally self aware and cop to what is happening - until he is triggered and his bad parts take over completely. So I have not imagined that he is a full NARC. However, he does have some really NARC tendencies and I wonder about the connection between ADHD and the NARC behavior.  

I have experienced the full nightmare of NARC personalities and maybe I just haven't been willing to see the full NARCness of my husband. Certainly other people see it. It's rather up front. He is a very brazenly egotistical person often and he takes up the full room when he expounds. 

Has anyone else wrestled with the ADHD and NARC interface? Any insights?

Yesterday, after I told him my ring was off and the marriage was over, he told me that he never feels any admiration from me. ADMIRATION?! That is the thing he upset about? Meanwhile, I have very recently been making a real effort to tell him how proud I am of his work which has been successful recently and he has worked really hard. I asked him if those statements I made to him even landed in his head. He said yes they did. So here he is, telling me he never gets admiration, while admitting that I have been openly admiring him a lot lately.

It's just this kind of thing, this irrationality, that defines his emotional relationship to women. 

What a sad, dreary, tangled swampy quagmire this all turned out to be. I thought I was marrying a wonderful, dynamic, loving, generous, worldly, successful, interesting, moral, brave, exciting man. But that was just one part of him - the part he showed me for the first year. He kept the rest of the parts under wraps. I feel this was a huge bait and switch. 

And of course I always feel sorry for him in the end because he reminds me of my mother's old crazy dog who used to bite people and then feel horrible about it later. Hanging his head in the yard. So you bring him back in ... and he bites you again.