# I wish I could Help Him



## vegbox

Hi all,

my husband lost his dad when he was 17, approx 15 years ago. It was a long, slow decline due to cancer.

He's going through a really nasty delayed grief period at the moment. This does happen periodically and we've always tried to work through it, but he's never really dealt with it.

Now he is saying that i don't understand (which is true) but that he can't talk to me at all, and because of that our marriage is wavering. There is this huge wide gap between us that i am desperately trying to close but i just dont know how else to help. He did try to talk to me, out of the blue one day, but he approached it by saying (without any warning) "by the way i'm having these flashbacks about my dad so you've been saying the wrong things", which i obviously didnt react well to, but this seems to have totally put him off ever trying to talk to me again.

He says that, because the worst thing in the world has happened to him, i can never mean as much to him as he means to me. 

He is going to try and have a good talk with his mum, which i think will help him, but he cant do this until after christmas. i think he thinks that this talk will make everything ok, but i'm not quite so sure. in the meantime, i just have to wait and carry on and give him space until he can talk to his mum, then he'll supposedly be able to decide if our marriage is worth saving. 

I'm a person who needs to talk about everything and i dont cope with insecurity very well. I hate seeing him in so much pain and knowing that i cant do anything about it. i want to just hold him and pull it out but i just cant reach him. I have suggested that he sees a professional grief counsellor, but he thinks this conversation with his mum is going to make everything better.

I need to put my own anxieties and pain aside, but then i feel like i don't exist as a person anymore. how on earth do i do this? how do i get through to him?


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## Blanca

vegbox said:


> I need to put my own anxieties and pain aside, but then i feel like i don't exist as a person anymore. how on earth do i do this? how do i get through to him?


Putting your own needs and anxieties aside is the worst thing you could do, for him and for you. If you do not let him experience the consequences of his behavior he can never heal. He needs to know how he is affecting you. Is he still having problems with porn and discrete sex websites?


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## vegbox

no, we dealt with all of that and it really did seem to make us a lot stronger together. but now all of this has hit. i feel so sick all of the time.


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