Removing Guilt

I initiated my divorce 2 years ago. I kept trying to figure something out to make my self love him again, but i couldn't do it anymore. He started to become more controlling of me and manipulate me. I didn't figure this out until I moved back with family and started to talk with my best friend again. I guess moving back was to his detriment, it started to give me back who I was. I realized that I wasn't me anymore. I had changed myself so much for him that I was at war with myself. This was just the tip of our relationship. He had problems with drinking and he tried for a year to not drink after his "friends" beat him up, he has no memory of it but I was there and had to take care of him. He also had been doing meth about 6 months before I meet him. I had came out of a very controlling family and just wanted to find love, I didn't see that this was not love. He didn't want people to know that we were together, even his family. Lucky him I am not a quitter, I will run my self into the ground trying to make something work. This is mainly because I start thinking that it is my fault.

When I said that i was through, I wanted a divorce, he said we had never had any big fights. It was funny, i was thinking of all the fights we had had and how I ended up in the bathroom sobbing into a towel so no one heard me. Why should they hear me, no one heard me when I was talking. After we spilt he started to mentally go down hill, stalking me, watching my place, listening at the windows, breaking into my house, using the kids against me, telling his coworkers to also track me, listening devices, tracking devices, calling with threats....etc. All the while he was supposed to be in therapy to try to help us. Wanting to have couples therapy to get back together and also saying that he has a girlfriend. I felt so guilty.... I tried to make sure he had good friends around him, my brother gave him a place to stay because I asked, I asked friends to be there for him, I made sure that he had what he needed for the kids....but he kept going down hill. He took things that I said and turned them around as promises and used them against me. I let him, because I felt like he had every right, every justification to. I Blamed myself for everything he did against me.

Even after I had to get an order of protection against him, I was still trying to make sure that he could talk to the kids, that he had time with the kids. I felt guilty that I was taking the kids away from their father. My family and friends tried to tell me, but I couldn't hear them over my own guilt. He even told me at own point that he would make sure that the kids new everyday who messed them up....me. I did believe that I was messing them up mentally.

Fast forward to October of this year. He is arrested for DWI with the kids in the vehicle. We are finding out that he has had a drinking problem for a while. Now I am blaming myself for causing him to become an alcoholic. If I hadn't had done this, if i hadn't taken the kids away from him. This kids haven't seen him for almost a month, they don't ask about him. I am trying to get the divorce modified. As I am going through all this, one of my friends came forward with someone they meet. This person knew stuff about my life about a year before I called quits. Trips that we had made, place we had gone, things i hadn't told anyone. They let me know that he had been cheating on my and back into drugs for over a year before I called it quits. How did I not see this?

What do I do with this? I see now that I am not to blame, he did this to him self but now I cry because I was putting the kids into harms way every time that I let them go with him for the weekend. How do I stop blaming myself? How do I move on?