It was difficult to break away. Something inside of me kept telling me that I should be able to ask for the support of my H or to ask for information & to get valid information, not just what he thought was valid (his truth, his reality)....but I kept getting bad information from him that I would base decisions on & it just kept getting worse rather than better. I finally realized that the only way I could break away from that was to ABSOLUTELY LEAVE. I had given up control of the finances when my depression got really bad in 1994 when I lost my career & had to put it in his hands & he basically destroyed us.

Initially I didn't buy my farm just for me, I bought it thinking that he might come around when everything was changing then he would have to change also. He actually came with me when I was looking for my farm. I came back a month later to close & then stayed for 4 months working on the house during the summer. I realized during those 4 months that I never thought about him & "absence definitely didn't make the heart grow fonder". It made me realize that I needed to be free from him & for the first time in my life, I felt peace & I could really be ME.

I actually did bring him back to the farm along with our daughter who I had fly in for Christmas that year. Interesting on the long drive here, I found out that he honestly thought that I would "just tolerate" his behavior for the rest of our lives. He never believed that I would leave him because I had tolerated him for so long already. I told him it was a trial basis. Two weeks later I kicked him out & sent him back to California & haven't seen him since. I have had to interface with him because of irresponsible financial messes he caused with the IRS & then again with the house in California going into foreclosure.

I never could understand why he didn't communicate like I thought normal people would but then again, I have come to realize that I never had parents that were normal so I had no idea what normal communication was so I didn't know whether he was being normal or not, it just felt weird. He never bothered to tell me that he even got the first letter from the IRS about the back taxes. When questioned why he hadn't told me, he said that he couldn't figure out what was wrong & so he just ignored them (his way of handling ALL PROBLEMS). I got the second letter 10 months later when I had all the mail forwarded to my farm that Christmas.

I realized that over the 33 years with him, I never had really known him. The more friends I met here & the more good friend relationships I've formed I started to realize that the problem hadn't been mine. It was after about 7 years here, I started to research more details about the behaviors I had encountered with him & finally found the reason that explained the problems 100%. Before that I would read about something & always find something that didn't quite fit the picture....even emotional abuse didn't describe what happened fully. Our pdoc had written a letter to the IRS so I could get the penalties waived & in the letter he said that there was something more wrong with my H than just the adult ADD but that he had refused to have any farther testing done. The first T I went to after moving here suggested the possibility that I had been dealing with a H that had ASD. Sure enough, my research confirmed that. I never came across anything that had explained my H's behavior like that did.

It's like putting a jigsaw puzzle together at times because over so many years, there are so many pieces to put together....but the picture is becoming more & more clear & with the help of my psychologist, integrating my past with my present is wonderful & is really helping me heal from everything in my past.