I have been married to my husband who is dianosed as having paronoid scizopina.
He ,and I love each other alot .
Yet everything I do is not good anough for him .
I can not give any more then what I can.
There is hardly any talking to me by him so its very lonely.
Through the years ,my husband could not keep a job so we moved a lot .
I'm 55 years old ,and worked to raise the children ,from a prior marriage .
I feel scared and quite helpless when my husband gets in to a angery mood ,it used to be physical ,now verbal and condenming .
I can not have family set at the table to visit and he gets mad .
He has not been interested in intamacy ,at all .
I made all the things of everyday life as easy as possiable for him .
Because ,I feel so alone with out him and with him the same way .
I start a conversation ,he says I talk and don't let him .
Believe me I have sat for an hour at a time waiting for him to talk to me .
sometimes he just gets up and goes in the basement sets there all day .
He doesn't talk only comes up to get cigerettes and coffe then down stairs again .
I feel so confused ,and so rejected It is realy hard to look forward to getting up thinking I would have a good day .
Hoping does not get it any more ,he has a very deep lack of energy .
I feel that he does not love me ,and just has walked out a couple of times and to come back to times 8 months later because he no's I love him and wil llet him come back .
I fell in love withhim at first he used to talk and laugh we would take walks and wacth tv .
All that faded away ,after the first 5 years .
Moving has worn everyone out .
I worked hard when I could and ,Now that I have artheristis it is very difficult to do much .
I 'm going to online school .to try to get a degree in something I like to do counseling .
These past few years of ,totaly lack of emotion has put a burden on this marriage that no one should have to keep taking .
I love my husband but it seems he is not the same person ,I can not rightfuly keep putting myself through this .
Yet I love him and still try to hope for the best ,the best never shows up ,when hedoes talk its amzing and we have a few great days out of the month .
Then all of a sudden he starts going downstairs or changes into the emotionless slilent ignore person he ,shows quite often to me .
I just do not no where to go from here I ,guess I just do not want to let go but my physical and mental health is at stake to ,cause its causing me to go into a down right rejection depression state .
One can only feel rejected for so long ,and it hurts to not now where to turn or what to do .
I have not been able to go out much and make friends sense I have given most of my time everyday to my husband to keep him from thinking I don't want to spend time with him .
He does not seem to want to spend his time in talking or thought sharing with me and no intamacy not even a hug .
Hello,
I understand you are hurting and grieving.
You have seen firsthand that not everyone with schizophrenia has an easy time of it. You have done so much for your kids and your husband.
If I hear you right now you feel you need to make a decision. That will be yours alone to make. I will support you in whatever you choose.
I will ask other community members here to also respond to your SharePost.
You have not had an easy time of it and I feel your desire to go to school online is a good thing for your own health and self-esteem. You deserve to carve out a life for yourself.
You alluded at the end of your message that your husband might not be taking his schizophrenia meds although possibly you did not say this and I misunderstood that sentence. However to me if someone is not taking their schizophrenia meds that is a deal-breaker and you are already at the end of your rope as you so clearly expressed.
What I want to say I'm sure I'll get flak for because what I want to say is that you have options. I realize your husband has schizophrenia so I'm going to say what I'm going to say in a hopefully delicate way. A person with schizophrenia might be having symptoms however that is not an excuse for acting out towards their loved ones. Someone wrote in to this web site before and wanted to know if a guy she knew who had schizophrenia had any control over his behavior or was it part of the illness.
This is a delicate line. I believe a woman who is a frequent contributor to this web site gave the best answer back then so I hope she is able to speak to your question right now and reply to you as well.
My personal take on this is that you can give and give and give of yourself only so much before you're exhausted and have no more to give. I'm going to get flak when I say that someone with schizophrenia like your husband owes it to you to work on the relationship and contribute to it.
Some community members are going to read this and claim he's doing the best he can given the fact that he has symptoms. So there. You have my take on this and I'm going to ask for other people to give you their own feedback.
The fact is your husband will have to want to change his behavior. Each of us gets a payoff from our behavior. We get some kind of benefit from this so we often resist making changes.
Something has to change though and I'm not sure exactly how you can go about enlisting your husband in making those changes. I would suggest that sometimes the motivational interviewing technique can be effective to use however I wonder if your husband actually has an incentive to change.
At this point in time I would pursue all avenues to get feedback, including your local NAMI affiliate that hosts weekly or monthly family support meetings for people whose loved ones have mental illnesses. Call (800) 950-NAMI (6264) to find the name and number of the affiliate in your city or town. This is if you live in the United States.
I cannot shake the idea from my head that your husband gets some kind of payoff from his behavior and that if you enable his behavior things will never change. So I feel you must speak up to him.
Again my intent is not to give advice or tell you what to do, however I feel I can give you my impressions of what's going on and you can decide on your own.
This really is tough because I feel that if someone with schizophrenia is having symptoms that's no excuse for treating their family members poorly.
At this point I'm going to sign off and urge our other community members to please write in and give you their suggestions as they might have a different take on this.
Regards,
Christina