# Wife Ups and Leaves - Suffers from Depression



## Longingforhome (Dec 16, 2011)

This is a complicated story, like many others on here i assume. I'm going to be very honest because i'm desperately needing some solid advice and maybe answers. 

My wife wakes up one morning after sleeping on the couch (i went to bed early and didn't realize) that she's not happy anymore and wants to leave. I knew something was wrong the day before because she was definitely down, i asked her 20 times if she was okay and she just kept saying it was one of those days. I come home from work that evening and she's taken our son to her mothers and wouldn't answer my calls. She comes back and stays at her friends for the next few days until i finally put my foot down and told her that our son was staying in his home in his bed. She comes back to the house but will barely look at me or talk to me and won't make eye contact. She says she can't get over the past (i'll explain later) and that she wants out. We spend three weeks passing by each other with me desperately trying to talk to her (doing everything your not supposed to do i guess). She stops talking to our friends, and starts buying new clothes and iphones and starts getting very dressed up for work but says she has no interest in saving, working or being in the marriage. We'd recently both just started new jobs and i had definitely been a little preoccupied and busy with the new job so we were maybe a little more short with each other than we'd be recently. 

Just over a year ago we separated because of a drug addiction i had. For two years i actively suffered from addiction and i fully know that the price was high for her. I got help and got clean and stayed clean. As a matter of fact i became a better person and was growing more each day. After three months we reconciled and moved back in together and since then life has been good. We've been healing, raising our son together and genuinely life had been overall good. Wed bought a new vehicle six months ago because we needed a vehicle, she primarily drove this vehicle, we bought a house and renovated it and she was so engaged, happy and in love with the house. Three weeks before she stated she wanted to leave she had just gone off birth control because we'd been planning our next child and she wanted to flush her system for a few months, whether she stopped taking her anti depressants i don't know. Life was genuinely good, you know the normal marriage stuff but good overall. 

After she declared she wanted to leave we attended one counselling session at my request and the next week she got a call saying she got an apartment, she gave me the keys to the vehicle back, said i was on my own to pay for our house and after she pays the bills in the new apartment she probably has less than 200 dollars to spare. Her rent is more than our mortgage. Her mom shows up with her when she tells me and it gets a little twilight zone. they both start attacking me and blaming it on me, i get defensive and yell back. It ends in a fight. 

Now fast forward two weeks and she's living her life out on facebook, completely walked from all of our friends of 7 years and won't listen to anything anyone has to say. Apparently her life is getting filled with drama but i don't know the details. I did find out that apparently there's rumours going around that she's "seeing" or has been emotionally involved with a man from her new work. Which would explain alot. I called her out on this but she says it's not true. Were sharing custody of our child right now and she seems to be out all the time with him (i dont know where) and her drinking has picked up (she wasn't much of a drinker prior). 

She is not anywhere near the person i know right now and i'm so lost, hurt and confused. In august two years ago our son was born and in Oct/November she was diagnosed with post partum depression and was put on meds which she was remained on. Last year in oct she left me (over my addiction and she can't be blamed for that) but she also suffered from severe depression boughts which i'm also partially responsible for, this year in November she clearly goes into another depression bought and this time it's pretty severe. 

I've been doing some look into BPD and she has alot of the symptoms but i don't want to start diagnosing her myself. She communicated to me that she was feeling depressed but thinks it's our marriage (in the past year she's said not only to me but to everyone else how happy she was) so i take this as pretty blindsided. 

How do i approach this? How do i deal with this? If she is BPD when she comes down from this will she realize what's going on or will she still feel this is right? What do i do if she's with another man, it would be incredibly not her to have an affair or go outside of the marriage but it also makes sense. 

Thoughts?


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## Mavash. (Jan 26, 2012)

She's cheating on you.

You need to have your story moved to the infidelity forum. You'll get more responses there.

Depression is no excuse for cheating.


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## ShawnD (Apr 2, 2012)

Longingforhome said:


> She stops talking to our friends, and starts buying new clothes and iphones and starts getting very dressed up for work


Totally cheating. 



> Three weeks before she stated she wanted to leave she had just gone off birth control because we'd been planning our next child and she wanted to flush her system for a few months


This might be something. Hormonal birth control radically changes a person's behavior. Women on birth control are more attracted to feminine men, and they focus more on relationships. Being off birth control makes women want **** and care less about long term relationships.
birth control and attraction
birth control and the brain

quote from article:


> Further, naturally cycling women showed an increase in gray matter volume in the right fusiform/parahippocampal gyrus when circulating levels of estrogen and progesterone were low versus the phase when levels of these hormones were both high.


So your brain changes as the hormones change. Going on or off birth control can have significant effects, just as being pregnant vs not-pregnant are very different. Not all hormonal birth control methods are the same, so it's hard to generalize how hormonal birth control will change a person. There's more than 1 hormone being screwed with.



> whether she stopped taking her anti depressants i don't know


I sure hope she didn't. Prozac (fluoxetine) is generally regarded as one of the only antidepressants that are easy to stop taking because it has a very long half-life, making it slowly clear from the body. Cold turkey stopping a drug like Paxil (paroxetine) or Luvox (fluvoxamine) can cause extreme depression because they are completely removed from the body in just a few days. This withdrawal depression is significantly worse than the original depression being treated. This is why people are supposed to taper off drugs instead of stopping cold turkey. Not realizing that the extreme depression is only a _temporary_ effect of stopping the drug, some people go off the deep end. They leave their family, kill their family, kill themselves, etc. That black box warning on antidepressants was added after a lot of people died.



> Were sharing custody of our child right now and she seems to be out all the time with him (i dont know where) and her drinking has picked up (she wasn't much of a drinker prior).


For most types of drug withdrawal, alcohol helps a lot. Withdrawal from the SSRI Paxil is often described as being a very anxious feeling. Alcohol would fix that anxiety and ease the withdrawal.


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## Longingforhome (Dec 16, 2011)

Update,

I've confronted her about the cheating and so has a close friend of ours and she says it's not true. I want to believe that to be the case but i'm not so sure. She's never been the type of person to do something like that but she's also never been the type of person to do something like this in this way. 

Currently she's completely alienated from our friends whether it's by choice or not i'm not sure. She's not reaching out to any of them and there so frustrated with her that their not reaching out to her. She's making new friends from what i hear and mostly it surrounds around her new job and the people there. Which is also where the potential new guy is. 

We've been talking back and forth mostly through text messages and it's hard. She texts me almost everyday when it's my days with our son. I've asked her not to because it's hard for me to want to communicate with her. I sent her an email stating that i was here for her, that i loved her but that i didn't understand what she was doing or how she could do this to our family this way. I said that if she wanted to attend family councilling the invitation was there and that i was going myself. Then for the next two days she continues to text me. 

The next day after the email was the first time i actually felt like i got some honesty out of her. She told me a few things that had been making her unhappy. One was that she had been unable to get over our past (my addiction) and that she'd been trying for ten months but couldnt and woke up one day and realized that. The other was that she's unhappy with me i can be testy and moody this is true and she said that i didnt show my love enough. Which can be true, i've felt a divide between us for a while that has made it hard for me to want to open up with her. So while i don't agree these are reasons enough to walk out the door after completely setting up our family with a bright future and leaving me to take care of all of it. I can at least appreciate what she's saying. 

She came over last night and we briefly talked. She made more eye contact than she has, she has a new hair colour and cut, dressing differently more dessed up. But she came to see our son and i couldnt help but bombard her with questions. She didnt say much said she'd consider going to family councilling and that was it. We talked that night and i really felt the need to "lovingly" let her know what i thought of her actions and her. She finally started to open up about things and it was the most engaged in the conversation she'd been in a long time. It didn't change anything but at least she started talking. 

I'm barely getting through a day at a time right now. The shock and horror is agonizing and the realization of the situation she's left me in is terrible. I'm stuck with all the bills on the new car house, loan for the renovations, i just opened a new restaurant and were crazy busy i've got my son half time. I would never have taken this job or bought this house if i'd have had even an inkling that my marriage was in trouble. 

I'm so angry but i know that i love my wife and want my family to be together. Just not sure if that's possible any longer.


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