Hi,
Five weeks ago my wife suddenly handed me a note to tell me that she was leaving me and our marriage was over, and a couple of days later she left and took all of her possessions. Although I am used to there being a cycle where I my wife feels she does not love me, this normally resolves within a week or two. Normally her wedding ring might come off for a bit, but when I notice it going back on she soon becomes affectionate with me and she will be telling me she loves me and adores me. Then when you ask her what all that was about saying that she did not love me, she will say she didn’t mean it.
This time was different. We had a meeting with her immigration solicitor on the Monday. My wife was really eager to push her visa renewal as soon as possible, and even got the solicitor to write a letter for her new employer confirming the renewal would be completed in the coming days. Everything seemed to be fine, but she had got covid for the first time. Towards Thursday and Friday she had gone a bit blank, and I was starting to get a bit concerned she was getting sick. However she showed a bit of life when I nipped back for lunch. When I returned home, she handed me a note telling me she was leaving me, which was really just very confusing, putting the blame on me, but written in a very flowery form. She then disappeared for 6 hours and would not tell me where she was. When she came back, the first thing she did was say I was ignoring her. She then said she wanted the crisis team, that she thought she was “heading back into the looney bin” and that she “just wanted to feel normal”. Unfortunately we could not get hold of the crisis team immediately. She shut me out of the bedroom to call them by herself, but gave up when she got an answerphone. That was the last constructive conversation we had. I did call them early the next morning, but by 7.15am my wife had gone out roaming again, and she did not get assessed until the next day, by which time it appears she did not have any insight as she apparently walked away without being admitted.
She asked to meet outside of our home on the Monday, and she told me again, our marriage was over, and that she would not be returning to our home that night. She was flat and cold and display symptoms, very much “the other person” rather than my wife. I asked her to consider marriage counseling and maybe we could meet in a few days. We met again on the Friday. She was moving around the time a lot at the last minute, and I was certainly thinking I was an afterthought. Straight out I could see clear signs of symptoms of an episode. She was even more flat, but also stopped me to ask quite firmly why I had bit my lip. She asked me so firmly, and was so angry about it, I ended up apologising for it. From the start of the conversation she counted out counseling and just said our marriage was over. It was not really a two way conversation. She was hostile and seemed angry with me. She got up to leave in the middle of it, and I said to her “I am really upset about this” and she said “you have got you nice jeans on, your nice shoes on, your nice t-shirt, you have shaved and you have your nice hat on. How can you be upset?”
The reason that I go into detail on this is because that is really all I have to go on in regards to her present state of mind. I know what I saw was illness on those days. Since then we exchanged a few text messages where her reason for the breakup changed to an argument we had two weeks before where she had been extremely jealous about a two sentence conversation I had with my ex (who I do not get on with) in the shop door at Tesco. None of this makes any sense. She said she would get in touch with me when she was ready, but three weeks passed with no contact. In that time she started blocking me from everything, including changing her phone number, and basically living in hiding.
I eventually message her on Facebook last week, asking if we could have a call, and she refused saying “I am moving on” and when I pressed she said “you need to move on”. She then blocked myself and my family from that too.
The hospital told me this happens very often, and people can go for months, but often come back eventually. My doctor has told me that everything I say indicates she is unwell, in an episode, but functioning enough to get by, and most people will probably think she is just down or a bit wacky. He says to keep the home fires burning. When I called her father, straight away he said she must be sick. By the way, she had not told any of her family about this before she did it.
So far I have only managed to get anything out of two of what I thought were our friends, and it turns out they were solely her friends. One of them I saw in the street a couple of days ago, and she looked at me as if I was pure evil. I can not help but think, my wife is telling tall tales about me. She was insistent that my wife was fine, and that she had just broken up with me. I tried to tell her, she can not tell me that she is fine. This friend will have no idea if she is fine. She knows absolutely nothing this illness of my wife’s condition. I need to see her with my own eyes and talk to her. I was saying, how does any of this make sense? She literally seemed to make a decision to disappear in the space of day or two, she has disconnected from me via almost every possible channel, she refuses to speak with me, she really does appear to be paranoid about me, and she is about to lose her right to live here because he visa expires in a matter of days. Turning against those against those closest to you is a symptom of the illness. It is not just like she has left me, she is hiding, she seems to be actually angry with me and I have done nothing to deserve this.
I think in my wife’s mind, she is cured because of her medication. The reality is not quite like that. The delusions are remarkably well controlled compared to where she was five years ago and a lot of this is down to stabilizing her home life and her medication. She has really moved forward with her insight into her delusions. But he mood disorder component of her illness, she just does not seem to understand. Her last major episode was 3 years ago when she was not under my care. However, we have had some near misses, and interventions to keep her well when things were getting out of hand. Prior to this in January, she had started to come home and get very aggressively angry about one of her colleagues. Eventually she was screaming at me at 2am in the morning about this colleague. I decided to support her in a decision to resign, as I was worried something was going to happen in the workplace. She was signed off for the whole of her notice people with symptoms of her illness as the reason given by the GP. She does not recognise that this was a problem or an illness thing at all. The thing is, she was out of work for 5 months, and she lived a life of leisure for most of that time. She did whatever she wanted to, and on top of my job I did nearly all of the cooking, cleaning and laundry. I never came back and was angry or anything because she had just been relaxing all day. I just wanted her to recover.
Unless she is fully delusional, she does not accept anything as a result of the illness. So I am pretty sure she is telling everyone that she has been well for three years and that I have been using the illness to try and control her, when the reality is I have often been trying to rein in unacceptable behaviour, or explain why her illness was making really big demands on myself.
Because my wife does not feel any love for me when she is unwell, I think there is a fair chance she is telling people I have been exploiting her with her illness, or something similar.
So the problems is, this happens ALL OF THE TIME with those closest to the loved one. My mum was a receptionist at a mental health hospital for many years. She said to me, “How many people do you think are happy that their partner has brought them to the hospital?” She told me, day in, day out, they get people coming to hospital saying all kinds of things about their partners. It is the expectation to have this. We as carers of people with these conditions are routinely subject to paranoia and outrageous false allegations. So why is it that I can not actually get any information about what is happening with my wife, even though we are looking at a textbook case of a sudden radical life changing plan being made and executed, when her right to UK residency is on the line, and when it is in her interests for me to be informed?
At present, my wife has locked me out everything and thrown away the keys. I should know more that what I know. Her father has spoken to her, but she is not giving him much information either. How can it be, that people are looking at me like I have done something wrong, when I have done nothing but make sacrifice after sacrifice, mostly without complaint, to take care of my wife. How can I be the one person who is in regular close contact with this illness for years, and yet people she has met in the last few months think they know better than me? Why are people judging me when they know she has this illness, and they even see me running around after her, helping her with whatever she needs to do.
I think so many people do not understand that people can look ok, but be unwell. It is driving me potty. My wife is going to make radical decisions whilst displayed symptoms, I can not see her, I don’t know if I should just think she is actually leaving me, I made a vow in sickness and in health to take of her, and I am in limbo, watching the days count down until she has to leave. At any moment, she might just go. How can we not have a system in place that means those who care for those with psychosis type illness have a degree of protection against false allegations, and that they can access recorded and get health updates on their loved one, even if they’ve tried to lock them. This situation I am in is just cruel. It will never end. I am so loyal to my wife. I am just going to be sat here waiting, and she could be anywhere in the world, and I she might never talk to me again, and I will not know if she is ill, or if she is actually now callous person. It is just so cruel.
If anybody had any ideas how to get out of this situation, please let me know. Otherwise, I think we are snookered.