Personal life getting in the way of my dreams, help needed

Just a heads up, I’m going to share a lot of personal stuff, but I’m in a difficult place and looking for help.

I try to focus on my book writing, but I find it hard to focus for long periods of time because of the difficulties in my personal life. My wife has great difficulty acknowledging me, and we also have two little ones. We have very little couples time because she is so busy with the kids and her own personal things. It feels like we live separate lives.

Things are much better than before because I set a lot of boundaries. But even the boundaries are not necessarily working. I feel sad and depressed a lot, and I try to bulldoze through it by working on my books, but it’s too difficult to ignore. I feel the pain is actually helping me by not letting me let these issues go in my marriage.

About 90% of the time my wife is with the kids, she comes back around 10 p.m. with the kids already asleep. The kids are so accustomed to this that I feel the pressure to do the same. She doesn’t cook very much for the kids because she is out with them all the time, and they’ve gotten used to eating out and not liking home-cooked meals as much.

She also devastated our family financially by losing hundreds of thousands of dollars (around $500,000) through crypto. A couple of years ago, she misunderstood something I said, got triggered, and then proceeded to liquidate half of our family’s finances that were under her name, which ended up costing our family about $80,000. To this day, she has assumed that half as her own.

I lacked healthy boundaries growing up because my mom used her pain to control me, and my dad did nothing about it. I’m a whole lot better at having healthy boundaries now. But when I voice certain things, she has the tendency not to take them seriously.

We used to not have family time, but we do have it on a weekly basis now. I also fought for us to have 10–15 minutes of couples time before she goes to bed, but recently she has been so tired because she is out with the kids until 10 p.m. that she has no energy left for it.

We also have very little physical intimacy. She never initiates, and sometimes it feels like she can almost live without it. 

There’s actually a lot more, but I don’t want to share it all here. We have done couples therapy before, but it never really worked. The only meaningful changes in our relationship have happened when I set firm boundaries with real consequences. That's why I'm wondering whether temporarily moving out is the only consequence serious enough to communicate how important this is to me.

I’m thinking about moving out temporarily to show my wife that if she doesn’t want to share a life together, then there’s no point in living together physically.

I’m sorry for sharing all of this. I love the work I do. I actually work in the field of emotional healing and inner child healing. I want to share my message with the world, but this is really holding me back.

I feel like the pain just won’t go away because I’m trying to ignore it whenever we’re not around each other. She has had a lot of dark trauma in her life, and she copes by focusing on herself. I coped by forgetting myself.

Having said all this, there has been a lot of positive changes. I’ve turned into a real fighter, and I fight for what’s right in our marriage and family. But many of these things have been happening for so long that I’ve become used to them. I tell her how I feel, and she hears me to a degree, but then she gets carried away with the busyness of taking care of the kids and her study program, and nothing really changes. I feel my wife is so used to coping with her trauma, which is harmful for herself and for others, that if I don’t draw the line, she will have no motivation to change, because she feels nothing is wrong.

I think moving out temporarily is probably the one thing that may wake her up. Obviously, I love my kids dearly, and I always talk to them about their feelings. I have even tried to emotionally prepare them for the possibility that I may move out temporarily and explain why I would be doing it—to try to share a life together with my wife. I believe a healthy marriage is the roof over the whole family, and right now we have a lot of gaping holes in that roof, which indirectly affects our children. 

It’s hard because I know moving out will make my children sad, but if it ends up help protecting and saving our marriage, then it will be for the best. 

My wife used to acknowledge only about 10% of me. Right now, I would say it's about 35%, which is progress. But I'm a whole person, and I can't settle for crumbs.