My divorce has been final for 16 months.

My ex-husband and I share a daughter and I have another child from a previous relationship. We had a contentious divorce and communicated only via text and a court ordered family app and had almost zero in-person interaction for a year plus.

We had a beautiful relationship for 9 years, 6 of which were married. A cross country move started the decline of our relationship. Shortly after our move a single unexplainable incident (in his sleep) left me with PTSD. I completely shut him out emotionally after that but chose to stay, and I didn't get therapy to process what had happened. It took several years for everything to fall apart. We stopped communicating. We didn't fight, just didn't connect about anything. He controlled our finances (I worked for him), had strong opinions on how he wanted me to look, was unconcerned with the health issues I had from the stress of our marriage. I ended up feeling alone, hating myself for staying and I had an affair.

I moved out, we figured out a custody arrangement for our daughter and tried therapy. At that point I had no desire to reconcile our marriage. I was completely unwilling. My breaking point to leave was how he started treated my son in the months leading up to my leaving. We had been together since my son was 15 months old, and he was a great step-dad until we moved. Because of the emotional impact of my ex-husband on my son, my son is now with his dad on another coast. It was mostly hurtful words and negativity but my son is super sensitive.

Several months ago my ex and I started to work through the reasons our marriage failed and started rebuilding a friendship. It has been eye-opening and a painstakingly honest experience. We are both in other relationships now.

I believe we could work through and heal from what happened in our marriage. We still love each other.
I don't know how to "fix" what happened with my son. Any insight is appreciated.

I would ask your son how he feels about reconciliation and start from there. You don't want to reconcile if it will wreck your relationship with your son or harm his well being.

Secondly, there wasn't one thing that wrecked your marriage, there were many things from what i can see. It looks like you weren't doing the necessary things to stay in love and were both committing lovebusters. If you don't know how to sustain the romantic love in a relationship, this will happen again in EVERY relationship you have.

What is necessary to sustain romantic love is: effectively meeting each other's intimate emotional needs, avoiding lovebusters and spending 15+ hours per week out on dates. Most people don't understand how this works. They think staying in love happens by magic, but it happens by design.

If you want to know how this works, I would strongly suggest you get the book His Needs, Her Needs. While I don't think you should reconcile with your ex unless your son is on board, having this knowledge will help you in future relationships.


Another issue to address would be your boundaries with other men. People have affairs when they have poor boundaries.