Help me understand my ex? please

[single1ds]

ok,so you may have read my depression thread or prejudice at work thread so may know a little about my situation. i have a BIG problem understanding my ex. I have been described by others in RL as having the "patience of a saint" i am "kind, caring, understanding", i try to be open minded and non-judgemental. i let things go and just try to be on good terms with people, i bite my tongue. weak point is being assertive (lacking) and not being confident. i am fairly intelligent (been to 2 top uni's). so WHY THE BLOODY HELL CAN I NOT WORK OUT MY HUSBAND?
My H is intelligent, has a PhD but he can NOT understand me,nor does he want to. it is our wedding anniversary tommorow. he sent me a text last night,I quote "i dont want to be with someone who seems to be obsessed with analysing the way i communicate and making me out to be abnormal but you keep persisting and i dont think you want to change". this is rubbish and i was really upset. since he left (rented a flat before telling me..nice) and left left me single overnight, we have been to relate both together and seperately. the counccellor (female) said to him, he does not repect how i feel, does not have any insight and needs to be my "carer" which hasnt helped me trying to get out of depression! he likes it when i am down and wants to keepme there i think.he denies that but even the councellor pointed it out. we have een seperate a year now and nothing has changed. he still wears his wedding ring, has told no-one at work. he says he doesnt want divorce however is unable to come up with solutions and is stuck in the past. he did say how he loves to relax which he felt he never could when he gets in from work now he has his own space. GREAT FOR HIM,meantime i am dealing with toddler on my own. he doesnt have a clue. i cant work him out :-(

Hi Single. I was on your prejudice thread. I hope you don't mind me chipping in here.

I'm afraid I can't give you any insight into understanding your ex. I'm still baffled by what my own ex is capable of doing.

Having read other threads on here, I went out and bought a copy of a book by Lundy Bancroft - title it something like "why does he do that?".

It has a section on abusive personality types. My ex is in there, yours might be, too. Mine is (in a kind of surreal Myers Briggs way) the Water Torturer. Having a label for the behaviour is somehow making moving round him and through him easier.

hi irestmycase,yes i recognise you from my other thread.i will have to look that book up.i am also baffled after 13 years did i never know him? it is SO frustrating.there has been many a time he has left me in tears, he gets angry VERY easily cannot and i mean cannot take any kindof criticism WHATSOEVER, he has to be right, be supported. i mean even asking him to not put a bottle in the microwave with the teat on (when ds was a baby) he genuinely didnt realise however this was BLOWN up all out of proportion, i am criticising him, i am spoilt, noonehas said no to me and the emotional abuse continued for something i asked in the kindest way possible (or so i thought) for him not to do... i have tried all different approaches but the only one he responds to is if i am feeling down, then he can be my "carer" again

In your OP you say that you can't work your ex out. It's probably not worth the effort, you know. If their (your ex and mine) starting point is odd in some way, then any progression from that is also going to be odd and is best ignored. You can't change them, they have to do that for themselves. They also have to recognise that the way they behave is something that is in need of change. My ex is fundamentally convinced that him choosing not to see his DD is my responsibility because I was the one who left him.

Not that I can always ignore my ex's nonsense, there's still a large part of me that wants to get him to see my point of view (especially me not taking responsibility for his actions).

My ex never got angry or raised his voice. Quite the opposite. But could stoke me up into being a screaming banshee, which he would then use against me - I was obviously in need of psychiatric help because I was so out of control. I no longer have to live with this, which is great. I still have to listen to him sometimes because of having to tolerate speaking to him about DD, but I'm getting better at shrugging off his words.

I agree that irestmycase that it's not a good use of your energy to spent huge of amounts of time trying to understand your ex. I spent ages looking for logic in my ex's reasoning, thinking that if I could just point out the fatal flaw, he'd see the light and all would be well. When all along, he wasn't following a chain of logic, he was deliberately changing direction to keep me off-balance.

Your post is all about what he wants. What do you want? I think it would be better to concentrate on that for a while.

I haven't seen your other threads. I'm not clear here though, have you separated? I know you are living separately but are you still hoping that your relationship will come together?

A year is quite a long time. Do you want to rebuild a life with him or do you want to move on? If you are hoping to get back together again, it would then be worth establishing if he also thinks that.

you are never going to be able to work him out.

why does he do that is extremely helpful;

but ultimately - as was said - it aint worth the time you are taking... focus your energy on yourself and your child...

There is a certain personality type which is hardwired to be narcissistic (in varying degrees) and this type of man is not motivated or inclined to understand anybody else, least of all his wife usually! Your role was to sacrifice yourself for his convenience doncha know!?? My x was also completely unmoved by my deep distress. Irritated by it.

Your (x)h probably has his own perspective, and there isn't any other perspective as far as he's concerned.

Please don't waste time analysing his behaviour and trying to understand him. I say that, but I guess it's an unavoidable stage in the break up and moving on. I spent about 18 months wondering why why why did my x treat me like an incompetent employee... how could he not see that I had no choice but to leave him? Every single sacrifice for parenthood had to be mine, and he was cruel and verbally abusive if I 'crossed' him or stood up for myself.

But now I realise he will never understand because he can't. He lives inside a forcefield of delusion.

As an intelligent person like yourself (!) what I now realise is more important is to understand how I found myself with this type of man, why I put up with it, and what mark it's left on me, and when I'm going to know it's behind me.

Ps, my X didn't tell his colleagues when I left either. Immediately afterwards I could understand being reluctant to talk about it, but a year later!?

thanks.i know a year later (!) unless he has and just tells me he hasnt.its our wedding anniversary today..... i know i am wasting my time, we have lived seperately for a year now. i have just organised my work hours so he no longer needs to come into the marital home for childcare reasons. i am just hating my life at the moment.i feel like i want to move away from this life start somewhere new. just having a bad day i think :-(
somewhere deep down i still have feelings for him, maybe love but it just seems hopeless.how long ago now is it since you split valium? i feel like i have kept busy, busy, busy the last year to not deal with my feelings but it isnt going to work doing that long term is it. i need to face up to it :-(

it's been three years and I feel good now. You know, content, never give him a thought. But if people expect you to be magically over it after a whole year,,,, they are being unrealistic. Actually, I think I felt quite low at about 12 months to 18 months after I left. First of all, there had been a kind of fight or flight response, and the drama, adrenalin and the relief carried me through the first year. People were all kind and supportive of my decision to leave him (apart from my x himself and his mother of course!).

But 12 months on, I still had two very small children and I felt the weight of responsibility on my shoulders.

I don't know what's changed now. Just think that I'm free from all the thoughts. You know, the ones that do 45 laps of your brain when you're just trying to fall asleep! I have just stopped trying to make sense of it all, because as cliched as it sounds, mere time more than analysis has made it not matter any more.

I have managed to save some money (was broke when I left x as he was a selfish ass, I've learnt to drive, made some new friends, my children are both at school now (hallelujah!), I'm going to start a course quite soon. I just don't sit around waiting for a man to make my life interesting. I think the first year I was waiting for something magical to happen. But now I'm not waiting for anything. I am just stronger and happier and I can make my own life. A bit at a time.

I hope that makes sense. I honestly wish I could fast forward you to this time next year. The less you see of your X the better though. So try and get some formalised arrangements in place. I can sit here typing and seem like I have it all sewn up, but I don't know if I could be in this place (mentally) if I'd had to see my X regularly as he is so snide and loves to mock me and mess with my head. So I have a policy of not ever seeing him. It works for me.

x

Hi Valium
you do make sense totally. the difference i have is that i dont have supportive family, if i did it would make the world of difference. my relationship with my mother is almost as bad as with ex! my relationship with dad a bit better but not consistant.did you have to go though a divorce? I am not free of the thoughts yet, my mind is constantly distracted and i worry of the effect this wil have on ds, who is very happy but quite clingy at the moment. are you at work now or home? guess you are going to pick up kids from school x

Hi
Your ex sounds exactly like my ex (not my ds's dad), except he didn't get aggressive, he was always the 'calm', passive one.

I know now that he lied from day 1. And not just about big thing, about tiny, small, completely irrelevant things. He was a compulsive liar and just can't tell the truth about anything. Everything I though I knew about him was just a facade. And it wasn't just me, he lies to everyone. Looking at his twitter page now there are so many inconsistancies, and lies revealed on there. He could never remember all his lies and was continually getting caught out, he didn't figure on someone like me who remembers stuff in minute detail I guess.

And I too tried to figure out how he worked, what was going on in his head. He wouldn't and couldn't let me or anyone in. He had zero empathy, and seemed to feed off the distress and misery his behaviour and actions caused me. In fact when I was happy and thought our relationship was great he later told me that he was completely miserable in that time. It meant I was constantly wondering if he was unhappy when I was happy and trying to figure out why. So I could never be happy again after that.

He didn't want to hear how I felt, complained he couldn't relax when he came home etc.
I would do everything I could to help him through the crazyness his ex inflicted on us while he tried to maintaine a relationship with his dd. He told me she was crazy and suffered depression etc to explain away her behaviour. I just couldn't understand it.
Late I found out he had lied about her, and to her. When I discovered the truth her behaviour made sense and, while I didn't condone it, I could completely understand her reaction and behaviour.

I know now that he is sick. He just won't admit it (nothing is ever his fault after all). I also see now that he runs away when anyone comes close to working out the truth about him. But it took me a long time to find that out and time away from him to get over the deep misery he cause me. And that I allowed to continue when really I should of cut him out of my life much sooner. But I kept thinking there was a decent person inside him somewhere, basing that on him be a normal person and before I knew the extent of his lies.

Your OH is lying to his colleagues too, about being separated. What else is he lying about, to you and to himself.
You need to cut yourself off and stop thinking you can have a future with him if he would just.....(fill in your choice of normal behaviour)...
You are feeding his bahaviour and allowing it to continue. Only you can stop it and start to heal yourself and make a life for yourself away from his destructive influence.

It takes time though. 1 year is nothing, I struggled for about 3 or 4 and we weren't together as long as you and have no children together either. So don't worry about that. It takes time, but you need to stop worrying about him and start thinking about yourself and your dc as separate from him.

I filled in this from my point of view (he kept telling me I was the one with the problem) and also what I believed my ex would answer if honest and the way I saw him from my POV. It made interesting reading -
www.4degreez.com/misc/personality_disorder_test.mv

That's interesting.

I did it for myself and got low in everything. Then I put in my x's answers (and tbh, I knew he'd never admit to lying all the time, so I put no for that one because he doesn't see it like that! but he does lie. However, I put 'no' for that one, and even so here are the results. I spent 8 years with this man

Paranoid: Very High
Schizoid: High
Schizotypal: Moderate
Antisocial: High
Borderline: Moderate
Histrionic: High
Narcissisti c: Very High
Avoidant: High
Dependent: Low
Obsessive-Compulsive: Moderate

And I agree with this 'diagnosis' btw. NPD (narcissism) was his biggest issue imo and he comes out very high for narcissism.