Okay, I've posted before about my ex husband from whom I've been divorced three years. He has three domestic violence felonies, has been in jail three times and now after his last stint in jail two years ago, he wants to reconcile with me. This is the problem: I feel guilty that he's lost everything, our marriage, his job, and his social standing. His own family won't have anything to do with him.

When he was indicted for domestic violence this last time around, he tried getting aquitted by pleading mental illness. He's extensively researched PTSD, bipolar illness, and anxiety disorder as well as some other conditions and then proceeded to demonstrate the symptoms of these disorders. I believe he has fooled the mental health care professionals, but not the court. He still had to do go to jail for his violence toward me.

But now that he's free, he went to social security with his newly documented mental illness and has successfully gotten himself on social security disability. He hasn't worked in three years, lives in a free apartment provided for him by community mental health while working under the table for an auto shop. So I know he is able to work. Meanwhile, I am working my butt off as a substitute teacher trying to make ends meet. At sixty-five, I am ten years older than he and have the sole responsibility of taking care of myself financially. While most people my age are retiring, I have to continue working to keep a roof over my head. I believe he wants to come back to me primarily, not because he loves me, because he doesn't want to work and he could slip right back into a comfortable life with me taking care of him.

It seems he's turned the table by making himself out to be the victim who only beat up on me because he had PTSD and bipolar illness. He doesn't want to even address how he's hurt me, and how to this day I still have flashbacks to his violence against me as well as my family. Yet, I can't seem to say goodbye to him. I still have a strong attachment to him and feel as though I should make his life all right again--despite him being the one who violated me with his physical abuse.

If I tell him, I may not want to reconcile with him because of everything that happened, he begins to cry or get angry and tells me I'm mean and cold like everyone else who turned their back on him.

Am I wrong in thinking that he may really not be mentally ill and just using the symptoms of mental illness to avoid being financially responsible? Is it reasonable for me to expect him to at least look for a job if he wants to reconcile with me, or am I not sympathetic to a man who really has mental problems, and if so, should I stand by my man because he is sick?

It just seems to me he's manipulating me to get sympathy so I will make his life easier? He probably does have some kind of love for me, but the sixteen years we were married he did nothing but physically and emotional abuse me as well as my children.

Why can't I break away from the man who hurt my family and me so badly? The guilt and loneliness I feel is killing me.