obiswife, a lot of what you have written reminds me a lot of myself and my experience. But you have a lot more self knowledge. I think you will be able to figure out some of your questions and what path to take with the help of your therapist.

I am going to share with you that it was very very helpful to me in my healing from the marriage that my therapist be male. I would not have predicted this and in fact, the first therapist I saw briefly was female. But the one who really helped me was male and that was an important component of my healing. I'm just sharing that with you because some things you wrote reminded me of my own experience and so I thought maybe a male therapist would be helpful to you too.

Good luck.