After a Life-Changing Event I Don’t Want Anything to Do With My Husband and Now Everything Feels Uncertain
“I almost didn’t make it.” That’s the raw, user-reported reality at the center of this Reddit post: a 25-year-old new mother who survived a complicated delivery in December, only to find her marriage and sense of safety rearranged in ways she didn’t expect. She says she and her husband, 26, both have mental health histories, his including psychosis, and that during her third trimester he was away helping family and couldn’t return in time for the birth. A few weeks before delivery she became dangerously ill, was hospitalized because she couldn’t breathe, and then the delivery itself turned into a life-or-death emergency for both her and the baby.
The aftermath wasn’t what she needed. According to the poster, her husband suffered a severe psychotic breakdown after the delivery and was hospitalized in a psychiatric facility. She didn’t see him for a month or two. During that time she felt erased: “Everyone was asking about him, not me or my daughter,” she wrote. His family was radio silence; the only updates she got from his side came from a friend checking in on his condition. The new mother says she felt overwhelmingly alone while recovering physically and emotionally from childbirth and postpartum struggles.
The reunion that felt like a goodbye
When they finally came together, things weren’t the same. She describes her husband as “completely different, cold, distant,” a person she no longer recognized. He reportedly found the idea of their daughter nauseating and didn’t want to look at her. That response, whether from lingering psychosis, new medications, or protective emotional shutdown, deepened the poster’s pain. She says postpartum depression hit hard on top of the trauma of nearly dying and feeling responsible for what happened to her husband.
She’s honest about the contradiction: she trusts him and believes he would never hurt their child, and she says he has been getting better in therapy. Still, she admits she feels emotionally detached, like she’s “waking up to a hollow version of my husband,” and has been staying nights with a friend and their daughter to avoid being around him.
Why this became so fractious
This thread blew up because the situation taps into raw, conflicting emotions: gratitude that everyone survived, rage at being unseen, fear about long-term stability, and guilt about resenting a partner’s illness. The poster repeatedly clarifies that her husband isn’t violent, that he’s in therapy, and that they planned to have a child only when they thought both were stable, yet trauma and mental health complications have rearranged all expectations.
People connected with different parts of the story. Some readers saw an abandoned woman who bore danger alone; others focused on the husband’s catastrophic break and the moral obligation to support someone who needed emergency psychiatric care. That split, between caregiving and self-preservation, is the tension many commenters tried to navigate.
What people on Reddit told her
Top responses urged practical support, especially therapy. One commenter, u/NowaGAgirl, recommended couples counseling and help “with the verbiage” to tell him how being alone during the trauma and being sidelined by his family made her feel. Several others echoed that: get individual therapy for postpartum trauma, get couples therapy, and prioritize safety and emotional care for mother and child.
Some readers offered clinical perspectives: a commenter pointed out that hospital-prescribed mood stabilizers after a psychotic crisis can “make people seem flat,” urging the poster to consider medication effects when dealing with his apparent emotional distance. Others were blunt and divided: a few suggested she’d been naïve to have a child with someone prone to psychosis, while many others insisted her feelings of abandonment were valid and worth addressing.
The messy middle: guilt, loyalty, and practical realities
The poster is trying to hold multiple truths at once. She says she believes in him, isn’t currently interested in leaving, and trusts that he would never harm their daughter. She also admits to ongoing postpartum symptoms and to feeling responsible for his breakdown. Those feelings, guilt, loyalty, fear, are normal and complicated. They don’t fit neat moral verdicts.
There are practical questions braided into the emotional ones: who will provide emotional labor while he’s recovering? Who will be the parent present in the middle of the night? How will finances and childcare be managed if one partner is emotionally unavailable? The post didn’t give exhaustive details on income or housing, but several commenters implied couples counseling and family-level planning are urgent next steps.
Concrete steps to consider now
The community responses clustered around a few concrete steps: prioritize safety, pursue therapy, and get external help. She has already started therapy, says the poster, and plans to talk to her therapist about couples counseling, advice many commenters recommended. It’s also important to assess daily logistics: build a support network beyond his family, discuss medication effects and expectations with his treatment team, and make a plan for boundaries that protect her and the baby’s emotional needs.
If physical separation is needed sometimes, for her mental health or to model healthy boundaries, that can be done without cutting ties abruptly. Temporary stays with trusted friends, a parenting schedule that shares tasks differently, and written agreements about money and childcare can all reduce the pressure while therapy does its work.
What To Take From This
This story isn’t about who’s a villain; it’s about what trauma does to relationships. A near-fatal childbirth and an acute psychotic break forced this couple into an impossible realism test: whose suffering gets seen, who becomes the caretaker, and how do you reconcile love with the loss of who your partner was? The healthiest move isn’t a moral judgment but a plan, recognize the valid grief she feels for what their relationship has become, keep insisting on professional help for both partners, and create temporary, practical boundaries that allow safety and healing.
For anyone reading and relating: you can hold compassion for someone with mental illness and still insist on being cared for yourself. Therapy, both individual and couples, clear communication about medication and expectations, and a reliable outside support network are the pragmatic next steps. If that fails to restore a functioning partnership, reassess what’s sustainable for the child and for your own mental health. You don’t have to choose between loyalty and survival; you can choose to protect the family by asking for help and setting boundaries while treatment continues.
