I truly don’t know what to do anymore. I feel at a complete loss. My partner has been struggling with what was initially diagnosed as BP1 for around 7 years. He believes he was misdiagnosed, but I can tell you some of his symptoms—he is often depressed, has issues waking up in the morning and can barely handle working two days a week. He's easily affected by external stimuli—delayed trains or bad weather threaten to derail him. He has severe health/body anxiety—right now he has a pesky shoulder injury that he has complained about for years but hasn’t gotten the right treatment (he’ll say it’s bc doctors fail him, but I believe he isn’t advocating well). Lately the injury has consumed him. He will struggle greatly for a few days, constantly talking about the injury and what it could be and his frustration about it. He will repeatedly feel his muscles on both sides of his body and stare in the mirror and ask me if he looks uneven, even when I try to talk to him about other things.
Like many people in a relationship (often women, but not always), I do a lot of invisible or emotional labor around my house (almost everything). I pay the bills and worry about the cats and the loans and our taxes and our groceries and I clean and cook and provide financial support (I work over 50 hours a week). This has always been a bone of contention between us—my partner believes that we have built a problematic relationship where he feels incapable of anything. We discussed this in therapy months ago after a depressive episode of his caused me to have a breakdown and cheat. From my perspective, he can barely handle the few things on his plate now, so why would I give him more to do?
Anyway, I tried to tell him how stressed I was feeling last night, after a string of days of him only really talking to me to complain or get help with appointments led to me feeling pretty empty. I wanted to talk to him bc the last time I felt so empty, I was unfaithful, and I didn’t want to do that again. Naturally it became a major fiasco. He accused me of calling him useless and attempted to try and end things under the guise of ridding me of worrying about him. I repeatedly tried to reason with him, but it continued to worsen. When he is angry he repeats things constantly, and doesn’t retain anything other than a sentence or two of mine that were negative. I must have tried to clarify a dozen times—he continued to repeat the same sentence I said (that he didn’t do anything and couldn’t work and was useless) until I began to get angry. As soon as he saw me get angry, he upped the ante. He began to remind me I was a cheater and pathetic and a c*nt and mocked my reactions to those words. He said he was going to leave, that we were always doomed, and that I should go sleep with someone else about it. We argued for hours. It ended with me getting very, very angry and exploding.
Now i feel desperate to fix things and scared of where it’s going to go—am I trapped in an emotional abuse cycle? Why do I feel so desperate to fix things after he acted in such a manner? He is not always or only this man, he has so many layers and can be so genuinely kind...but why am I okay with what happened? He seems like he’s going to be the one to cut the cord right now and that petrifies me—what is wrong with me?
R Frosk > Alyssa
