People pleasing, resentment & relationships

[PPSWife]

Hi,

My DH has recently come to the realisation that he’s a people pleaser and he doesn’t want to be this way any more. He thinks it’s a learned behaviour from his father who was the same way with his mother and also a product of coming from a family that is very conflict averse. He’s slowly started to be more honest about what he thinks and feels and I’m really proud of him for making this change. I had always sensed and told him that I didn’t feel like I always really knew who he was. He never understood that until he came to the realisation himself that he is a people pleaser and he wasn’t being authentic.

He has however started to question whether he wants to carry on with our relationship. I think there is a lot of resentment towards me because I am ashamed to say I took advantage of his agreeable nature, particularly in the early years of our relationship when I had my own insecurities and I wasn’t very mature in how I handled them. At the same time he wasn’t able to set boundaries around my behaviour and wasn’t able to express healthy anger because he was scared of how I would respond. I think we both accept that we are both to blame here.

My feeling is that this is a resolvable issue and I want us to work on it through marriage counselling. He seems less sure. He has said he wants to separate for now and then he will think about whether to pursue counselling. I think he feels like he doesn’t know who he is any more and needs time to figure it out. He has also discussed divorce, children, finances etc so I think that’s a real possibility for him, even though right now he’s just asking to separate.

I was wondering if anyone has been through anything similar. I do think he will come out much happier eventually as an authentic person but I don’t know if it possible to overcome resentment and save our relationship?

@Thepeopleversuswork Yes the timing doesn’t make sense. When I’ve asked about it he says he doesn’t know why it’s come up now, maybe he was in denial about what he was feeling etc. There’s definitely some kind of breakdown going on. Apart from the relationship stuff there’s a whole load of other very difficult things that have happened to him one after the other over the last two years.

Op I think he needs counselling and a visit to the GP if the strain is so huge on him, but it is also stressful lying and cheating and can create precisely these kinds of problems.
It smells fishy, it is fishy. The timing, the excuses none of it adds up, I would say to him cut the crap and tell me the truth.

@Blizzard23 Oh I have said that to him. I’ve also told him it would be much easier if he just tells me there’s someone else, then we can just stop having conversations about what’s going on (which he clearly doesn’t want) and start looking at a divorce. He’s always known that if there was anything like that, it would be over. Personally, if I had met someone else, I would just tell him, so I don’t really understand people who don’t do that, but I guess everyone is different.

You said something about feeling you were drawn to him because you felt a connection with him that you didn’t feel with anyone else.

If he’s a people pleaser this makes sense, because what you’ve probably been experiencing through him is a connection to yourself.

From experience being in your H’s shoes, it would be very difficult to find himself while in a relationship. Either a period alone or with a counsellor would be best.

I would think about what you really want from him (sounds like it’s connection to yourself) and whether he’s able to provide that (sounds like no, because he’s now aware that you were using him for connection to yourself and there’s no him in that). And focus on your own inner work.

I do feel like he’s entitled to feel resentful but the timing is all strange given this stuff hasn’t happened for a long time. I do think you could be right that I’m buying into his narrative about growth too much. I have wondered if he’s maybe going through a midlife crisis.

Sometimes it takes a period of stability and safety for real needs to come out. And midlife crises happen when you wake up to how precious life is and the ways in which you don’t want to live anymore.

Don’t focus on labelling yourself with BPD or anything - likely you’ve been drawn together because you both have similar traumas and they just manifest in different ways.

@Heroicallyfound When you say “from experience” do you mean you have been through this yourself? There’s definitely something about “finding himself” (as you have described it) because he has talked about needing to be a “whole person” before being able to engage with anything. So maybe a period alone does make sense and there isn’t anything else sinister going on.

As for the connection, I don’t think it’s a one sided thing. Even now, when he struggles to say “I love you” back to me he is still able to acknowledge that I’m the love of his life and he would never be able to have what he has with me with anyone else. We are very right for each other in so many ways, but there is also a lot of hurt that has been caused on both sides.

Yes, I grew up with an overbearing/abusive mother and an absent father, both narcissistic in their own ways. So people pleasing to keep myself safe from mum’s abuse, and a lack of attention and emotional nature from both parents meant I grew up with little sense of what I felt and who I am.

It takes a lot of space and time to ‘find yourself’ and tbh I’m not sure I would have managed it within marriage or a relationship - as it was, my husband died by suicide which was the catalyst for me to get into therapy. I didn’t cope very well with it at all as we were codependent - I’d oriented my life around him and didn’t have any supportive family to hold me through the loss. In an ideal situation I think you’d have years of attentive parents in childhood to help you get acquainted with your feelings and how to manage them. It’s difficult to emulate that extended ‘womb’ in adulthood, but psychotherapy has come a very close second for me.

Just about your BPD wonderings - There’s an valuable podcast here about how we can all have BPD tendencies to some extent:

https://www.rickhanson.net/being-well-podcast-understanding-borderline-personality-tendencies/

@Heroicallyfound I am sorry to hear about what you have been through. It sounds incredibly tough.

My husband also has a mother who has certain narcissistic traits and she has always been the overbearing matriarch whilst his father was generally pretty absent (workaholic) but kept his relationship going with her by being a submissive people pleaser. My husband has spoke to me about how he feels that his parents are responsible for all the problems he has. I think that’s true for many of us, but we can’t turn back time and I think eventually a person has to recognise that they need to find a way to move on from all the hurt and anger they feel towards their parents in order to have some peace themselves.

Yes very true, but in my experience moving on like that - as a top-down cognitive rational process - leaves the body behind and there’s still a big disconnect between what you think and what you feel. To truly move on you have to connect with your feelings/body and allow yourself space to feel the anger and grief. It doesn’t necessarily follow that outward changes in relationships etc are needed, but as someone connects with their feelings they may come to realise that they’ve made lots of little and big choices in life that aren’t aligned with what they really want. So only your H is in a position to say whether your relationship is compatible for him.

From your side, if you’ve been aligned with your feelings you may be in a position where your relationship feels compatible to you.

If the two of you don’t agree, there’s a grief process for you to go through.

I think for you the interesting bit is whether you’ve fallen for someone who isn’t really emotionally available for you, why that might be and what you feel about it all. It’s easy to get yourself wrapped up in what’s going on for him, but what’s going on for you is your only work.

He sounds quite manipulative to me. You are shouldering a lot of blame (and he seems to encourage this) around you being hard on him. When in actual fact you were only hard on him because of your past experience with him love bombing and then abandoning you. I think if you take a partner back after such circumstances you are well within your rights to be a little defensive-the fact that he is now pushing this back on you doesn’t sit well with me at all.

put aside what he wants, space to find himself and all that. What do YOU want? You are aloud to advocate for yourself and your wants-by putting blame on you he’s basically written himself a free pass to behave however he likes.

@Heroicallyfound Thanks for the podcast. I will check it out. It’s something I was actually wondering about recently… can a person have BPD tendencies and can it be something on a spectrum

@Heroicallyfound What you’re saying makes a lot of sense. I guess only time will tell how long he needs to have space, to sit with the anger and to see what conclusion he comes to. There’s no way to speed up that process as much as that’s what everyone in his life who is seeing what he’s going through would want.

That’s an interesting question for me. When I was growing up my mother was depressed (she came from a broken home, her father was violent and abandoned her, her mother crumbled under the strain) so I guess she may have been emotionally unavailable. I think I read somewhere that we are drawn to people like our parents?

Yea absolutely, our nervous systems are programmed in early childhood and we’re drawn to levels of stress etc that we’re used to. We’re often drawn to the pattern we’re used to from our opposite sex parent (so your H will be similar to your father in emotional patterns).

There’s some good School of Life videos on YouTube that explain things like the attachment styles, the anxious/avoidant dance, childhood trauma etc which give some pragmatic and easily digestible education on the psychology of relationships.

@Inthesamesinkingboat What I want is to be with him. To be happy in the way that we were before he had this breakdown. When I felt like I had started to heal from my pain and that he had started to address his own issues around authenticity. For us to fix our issues individually and work on our marriage together. For my children to have the happy, secure family unit we have given them for the last few years. That’s all I want.

@Heroicallyfound That makes a lot of sense. My father was a very loving, caring man but came from a culture where taking care of children was seen as the mothers responsibility whilst providing for the family was his, so he was probably not as involved as he should have been. My husband is similar I guess. He’s always been very loving and caring, but who knows if that’s who he really is or if that’s just the “people pleaser”. I will definitely look at those videos.