agonyaunt | (no subject)

Dear Amy: I suffered an injury that caused internal bleeding. This gave me severe anemia, which I was unaware I had. I was unknowingly battling its symptoms of depression and anxiety before being diagnosed. I had no idea what was happening to me. I had no mental health struggles my whole life (I’m 45) until this medical condition changed my behavior considerably.

My wife of almost 20 years left me before I was diagnosed. After diagnosis, doctors were able to stop the blood loss. The anemia and its symptoms went away, and I returned to my normal self. I was sure my wife would reconcile with our family after my diagnosis, but instead she said I was using the illness as an excuse for my behavior. She does not understand it was the cause.

She doesn't understand these symptoms went away once the illness was successfully treated, and believes I am permanently mentally ill. She believes the illness brought out my true personality, when that is not true at all. What happened was a complete accident. My wife and family are my whole life. I never would have gotten this medical condition on purpose.

We have a 4-year-old daughter who I am a great father to. My wife is throwing away our family and is trying to take me away from our daughter because I had a curable illness, which I no longer have. How can I save my family from this tragedy?

– Heartbroken Husband

Dear Heartbroken: I understand that depression and anxiety are possible side effects of anemia, but you don’t note precisely what considerable changes in your behavior emerged during your illness. If this change in your behavior had a significant and direct impact on your wife and child, then it is important for you to acknowledge and own any specific episodes that might have been alarming or harmful to them.

This falls under the “sickness and health” portion of the marriage contract, and your wife obviously does not have the fortitude to stick it out.

You should find a couples therapist as soon as possible, in order to discuss this in a calm and controlled environment, with someone who could help you two to communicate your concerns.

Sadly, people leave marriages for all sorts of reasons – and sometimes for seemingly no reason at all, despite the life-altering disruption to the lives of children.

Once a spouse has decided to leave, there is not always a clear path toward saving a marriage, and if your marriage is ending, therapy (and the advice of a good attorney) could further help you to accept this, and to clarify your own choices moving forward.

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As Amy quite correctly notes, it's pretty telling how LW carefully dodges explaining what "battling the symptoms of depression and anxiety" meant for his wife and child. And what it tells me is what the entire rest of the letter tells me - his mental illness may have been caused by a physical illness, but if that's cured he's still pretty self-centered. He shows *no* sympathy whatsoever to his wife, it's all about him.

And, listen, Mr. "I'm a great father". Almost all child custody agreements are settled outside of court. If your wife really makes a stink about this and forces a judge to settle this, modern courts tend to default to approximately 50/50 if nobody wants less time than that. So at the very worst your wife will get your child half the time. Nobody is taking her away from you unless your illness-induced behavior was actually extremely abusive... and even then, men mostly get the custody they ask for.

I felt like it was unclear if the missing reasons were "the wife wanted to leave for her own reasons and LW's illness gave them an excuse" or "when I was sick I was a mofo" but they were obviously present.

I disagreed with the advice of You should find a couples therapist as soon as possible because no matter whose the missing reasons are, Wife doesn't seem interested in reconciliation.

I wish the implicit "she'd have been right to leave me if I were permanently ill" hadn't gone unchallenged but I understand that wasn't the key point.

You can go to couples therapists as a single person

Today I learned!

Mum got sent to relationship counselling as a single person which is how I know, because it explores how you relate to others and your identity in a relationship

Sometimes couples therapy helps a couple resolve their differences in order to have an amicable divorce. I don't know if that's what this guy needs. Of course, he can't have the happy marriage of his dreams if his ex doesn't want it.

Yeah, the deliberate vagueness about what exactly he did and the absolute refusal to accept that her perspective on events is valid in any way (it's all wiped away by the diagnosis! including any harm done to her, of course! she just doesn't understand!) do not make a strong case for LW being a good husband or father.

His ex is right that he's using the illness as an excuse. He wants to pretend that period of his life had nothing to do with the Real Him and he's not accountable for it. Some of us don't get to leave our depression and anxiety behind us with one treatment, and yet! We still are responsible for our actions towards others.

Amy says "once a spouse has decided to leave, there is not always a clear path toward saving a marriage," as if there was usually such a path. It's more like "once a spouse has decided to leave, it's usually too late to save the marriage."

This isn't even "decided to leave," the LW's spouse left some time ago, and says she isn't coming back, because she no longer likes or trusts him. That's "get thee to a lawyer" and _maybe_ ask his therapist for advice on how to maintain or heal his relationship with his child.

However, I suspect he doesn't have a therapist, since he's framing the problem as purely medical, and seems to think nothing he did had a serious or lasting effect on his wife or child, or anyone else. His non-anemic "normal self" is someone who thinks that no amends are needed for hurting people he loves.

"I did this because I was ill," especially, "I did this to you because I was ill," may be a reason but it is not an excuse.

I am struck by the statement that LW's wife doesn't believe anemia was the source of LW's mental illness. Perhaps it doesn't matter, but I wonder whether LW is an unreliable narrator or something else is going on. Maybe she wanted to leave anyway.

Like some of the preceding commenters, I also noticed how self-centered LW is. I would feel a lot more sympathy had he said something like, "I don't even recognize the person I was and feel so much guilt for the pain I caused."

Yeah, that's a very unreliable narrator there.

Also, genuinely curious, does anemia actually do that? I have experienced acute anemia (I lost half my blood supply when my son was born), but not chronic severe anemia, so it may be very different, but my experience wasn't like that. Being ill can of course be depressing and anxiety-provoking, but that doesn't seem like the same thing as what he is describing.

Severe anaemia can =

Anxiety

difficulty finding words

difficulty putting words into a sentence

being nonverbal at times

poor short term memory

not thinking clearly

not good at problem solving

I was on AD meds for about 10 years when I developed the anemia. The anemia-induced mental state was far worse than the depression was. It took me so much longer to get anything done between the exhaustion itself and the exhaustion-caused apathy and anhedonia. The partner I lived with didn’t leave but I wouldn’t have blamed him if he had.

"This falls under the “sickness and health” portion of the marriage contract, and your wife obviously does not have the fortitude to stick it out."

She has the fortitude to see that marriage is not, actually, a requirement that she stick around for whatever Mr Poor Little Me decides to dish out to her and the kid and has removed herself and her child from a harmful environment, probably at great cost and difficulty.

I think there's two different questions here. The wife is fairly clear she's not interested in resuming anything. Most likely the LW was more awful to her than he admits. Very possibly she had already lost investment in the relationship. It's less likely but possible that the experience hurt her disproportionately. It's entirely plausible that she might be wrong, even if the other explanations are more likley. But whatever the case, whether it's painful for him or not, he can't make her want to be with him. The most he can be is polite and respectful and not force anything on her, and accept that it's very likely he moves on.

However, even if he was awful, it's still quite plausible that he might be able to be a good parent. Maybe that would require a lot of building bridges or maybe the problems didn't affect the daughter that much. Most likely somewhere between. If he really wants that, and can be reasonably sure that he won't do any more harm, he should make sure to be reliable, responsible and loving whenever he is with the daughter. He should be realistic about the problems he may have caused the daughter, think honestly about how he can make sure they don't happen, and be prepared to talk about that if necessary. It sounds like the wife and daughter have been living apart for some time. If so, he should be in his daughter's life if they already have any arrangements for that. If that's been intermittent, but the wife is happy with some contact, he should take advantage of it, while showing none of the problems he had before. If he wants contact or shared custody and the wife doesn't want him to, he probably needs to talk to a specialised solicitor and determine whether the father-daughter are likely to have any legal rights to be together, or whether a court would not believe him to be safe to be with her. Or he may not be interested, if so that would be very sad (and incidentally a reason why the family may not reconstitute the way he wishes).

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Huh, thanks

Re: Huh, thanks

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massive understatement?

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