I know how you feel about NOT wanting a divorce. Another failed marriage. Raising young children alone. Hoping that he will change--a belief that there can be redemption. After three children & many years together there is profound attachment & possibly even love.

My N was gainfully employed, did not cheat, and never beat me. The verbal, emotional, psychological abuse was awful. Physical abuse was blocking, pushing past me, throwing things such as all the contents of the sugar container (5-6 cups) at me, and spitting on me. I left before he got a chance to escalate to slapping or punching.

Mine wanted to got to therapy when he felt he was losing control over me. Actually, when I started to read secretly about narcissism. He must have sensed a difference in me. But, also, I was fed up. He wanted therapy to control me, to change me. He even said, he needed somebody to translate to me because he felt that I did not understand him.

When I left him, I had hopes that maybe -- after a break -- we could start over again. Well, the day I left he found a new woman. First date the day before I left the marital home. An instant couple they were. He never told me. Kept it a secret from me, but was nasty to me after I left, but acted like the abandoned victim.

The woman who replaced me, she contacted me. She has an RO out against him. He was physically abusive to her. And, she found what he was doing late at night when he was working preparing his classes as a university professor. She found hard-core, homo-erotic, anal sex websites on his computer. When confronted with these sites which were slightly below splatter and snuff films, he said he was doing academic research into human depravity. Yep.

And, the lies he told her about me. And about himself. He told her x happened to him. He told me the opposite-of-x happened to him. He told her I said BLAH. He told me his ex-wife said BLAH. I realized that everything was worse than I had believed when I left him. When I left I thought he was a narcissist. After my replacement contacted me, I realized that he's a psychopath.

My ex-N is a PhD & university professor. The woman who replaced me is a MD-Psychiatrist. He fooled her for 10 months. She says he's a psychopath & just plain evil. Never in all her years of psychiatry had she encountered such a pathological person. So my diagnois was confirmed.

When I left I was riddled with self-doubt. Maybe I was making a huge mistake. I was afraid of the unknown. I thought I was crazy. (After I left I realized I had PTSD. And after I left the feelings of being crazy left me after a week.) Now, 16 months, and a divorce later, my only regret is that I worked on the marriage for 2 1/2 years. I should have left at one year--when I began to feel something was very wrong & I was so unhappy. I wasted another 18 months of my life & became more emotionally damaged by working on the marriage.

Oh, & after the woman who replaced me moved out of the my marital dwelling -- the N replaced her immediately. Within two months, there was another woman installed in my former marital dwelling. If your N knows you are on to him as a less-then-perfect, possibly-personality-disordered person, he may be trying to get rid of you. Why wait for an affair? And, if this guy is so underemployed, why should he leave you? He can just go off & do what he wants, when he wants, & come back to the family when he feels like it. You deserve better for yourself & the children. This man is NOT an example for young children. Charged with larceny. What if he goes to jail if he doesn't pay back the money?

I went through this too--wanting to have a smoking gun. Like you, I already had many, but was waiting for something that would somehow erase any guilt I might otherwise feel about leaving.

Well that doesn't happen...leave a Narc and they will find many ways to try to get you to feel guilt, so you have to do your own internal work to be strong in the face of that.

You'll know when it's time to go, when you're ready. Once it clicked in my mind it went very fast.

Keep thinking and talking, it seems to me your perceptions are changing fast and your insight about your own stuff is good.

xoxo

In the great scheme of things, is being a theif any less worthy of divorce than being a cheater?

I guess stealing OTHER people's things is less personal to you. But cheater and theives are both equally disgusting low life scum.

If you are anything like me, you have this "hope" that he will suddenly change into a better man. Or, like I did, that I was exagerating how bad he really was, so divorcing him would be wrong.

Three years out from the end of the relationship, I can now see that I was deluded, and THAT is what stopped me from leaving before I did. I was deluded, I had my head in the sand (or when I'm feeling less charitable toward myself, my head was up my ass). Seriously, from three years out, that is all I can come up with.

At the time I was still where you are, it was SO complicated. And it felt so REAL. And it was, because I was feeling it. No matter how real the complications were at the time, in the long run, they were just my own reluctance to take action to save myself. Like Mariline says, I was afraid, but I concocted all these "reasons I couldn't leave" to give myself permission to not take action :( .

It's all so very normal, hon. We all do this. We're all, to a person, terrified of change. And it means big change to get rid of your Narc. You are human.

There's a saying, and it sounds silly but it is so true. "Nothing changes if nothing changes". If you sit there and do nothing different for yourself, you and your child will continue to sit there in this same misery for as long as you refuse to make a change. That is a given.

Making a change is always more terrifying when you are just thinking about it than when you actually DO it.

When you realize that nothing could possibly be worse than living the way you are living with him now, you will gladly and boldly make a change :) .

It is called "fear" and it is the most crippling emotion ever.
You are scared to face what lead you to him, for example. Because we jump to them in order to help them, because we don't want to have a look at ourselves and work on us.

Instead of trying to fix him you should fix you, and stay on your own two legs, in a void, without anyone else. And you are afraid because you do not trust yourself enough. This is why Narcs can reach us.....because we do not trust ourselves and we do not protect ourselves. We want to save the world and them instead.

Why don't you think about you just for a change? :-)))))))

A big hug