I have a feeling this is is typical abuse behaviour...

[thefeelslimlady]

but I still don't know how to work out what the real issue is.

If I ever get mad with DH about something he's done, he will rant on for potentially hours, until in the end I seriously doubt my own perception.

So for example if I say, 'you did x behaviour and that wasn't right'...I will be bombarded with, 'you're speaking to me like a child', everyone else was doing x and you only noticed me doing x, this is perfectly normal, why do you have a problem with it?' etc etc.

I should say that things have to be fairly bad for me to say something, as I try and avoid this reaction a lot, so it's not like I critisise him regularly. Is this what's known as minimising? I feel so confused!

I think it’s called crazymaking. That’s why you are confused.

Right, off to google. I feel if I can understand the theory behind what he's doing I'll feel more sure of my own position.

It’s quite simple really. The point is to confuse you which then makes you feel like you must be mad because you don’t know what is going on and therefore you just concede to his view as he seems to know what he is talking about.

There are lots of threads:
Is he a narcissist?
Is this gaslighting?
Is this financial abuse?
Is this an emotional affair?

There seems to be a drive to attach labels, as if that makes everything understandable when in fact every person is unique, complex and multi-dimensional.

What is important is how it makes you feel.

He doesn't make me feel like I'm crazy (I have a fairly stable sense of self thank goodness) but he makes me wonder if I've misjudged a situation.

There was one time where he did something that I thought was really dreadful, as it happened I went on about it so despite his protests that he relayed the situation to his dad, who agreed with me. At the time he accepted his dad's view, but since then he had rewritten history.

I agree that the most important thing is how you feel but I also think if you are in a relationship where your self worth has been eroded to the point that how you feel is not thought to matter then finding the labels and understanding that the behaviour is ‘a thing’ can help bring you back into a place where your feelings do matter again.

Of course there is a risk that by trying to ‘understand’ you will go too far and start making excuses to stay and ‘fix’ it but I don’t think it is always possible for people to find their self worth and value their own feelings when they are being subjected everyday to a barrage of messages that all say ‘your feelings don’t matter’.

I feel like my feelings matter now I am out of the relationship that I was in that was like that^ but when I was in it I was totally consumed by his feelings and trying to predict what he would do/was thinking etc because my feelings were irrelevant to him and he was not prepared to allow me to feel like my feelings mattered.

Wasn’t that long ago so I still remember feeling that way.

It makes me awful, but to act on that feeling I need to be sure that he is entirely responsible for creating that feeling. When he does this he makes me wonder if my perception is clouded by something in my own psyche.

Your own perception can't be clouded or wrong ALL THE TIME. He's not perfect. He must fuck up sometimes.

It’s not always that he makes you feel like you are a crazy person (though it can if it goes on long enough). It’s more that is designed to shut down that particular point you are making because the point is made to seem crazy. The confusion comes from the inner knowledge that your experience is true but the level of his reaction to it makes you doubt your experience is real because if you are a normal person you have respect for what your partner thinks, says and feels and you judge their strong reaction as indicative that they are being truthful as you wouldn’t display that level of feeling without being truthful.

Could you give some examples of the sort of thing he's done?

Thank you offred that's so true it brought tears to my eyes,

‘Why would he be so unpleasant if he didn’t think I was really wrong?’ is the thought process...

The answer is not necessarily because you are wrong. Sometimes it is actually that the other person doesn’t want to accept they were in the wrong and they are meeting your criticism with rage to try and avoid ever being accountable.

Cambi it's rudeness to people, such as my family and friends, which means that I start not to want to see them with him because I hate that he makes them uncomfortable.
He's basically controlling so I think this is either a conscious or subconscious form of control.

It can be over really trivial things too, which adds to the confusion because you just can’t comprehend why someone would be like that with a person they claim to love over something so trivial unless they were right in what they are saying.

E.g. my ex had such an extreme reaction to me saying that I thought something in a newspaper was not a quote but a summary of what was said because it was not in quotation marks that he ranted on at me for an hour trapped in his car to the point I was fearful that he was going to punch me and I was frozen to the seat...

It's cognitive dissonance, where you are trying to reconcile two opposing things - one that you know to be true and one that he is telling you.

And personally anyone who bangs on for ages like that is a complete pain in the arse. Who wants to listen to that?

Do you have children together?

That sounds very much like he is trying to control you, op - I completely agree. Also trying to isolate you from your friends and family.

Think very carefully about putting up with this for much longer... I was in a similar relationship and it really doesn't get any better.

Offred that's sounds awful.
He never initiates this, it's always in defence of me criticising him.
My we have 2 DCs. If we didn't this thread wouldn't exist because I would be over the hill and far away!

Yes, it’s horrible but that particular one happened in response to what he saw as me correcting him re the quote issue. He took that as a criticism and unleashed the rage.

You should be able to point out when he is wrong or making you uncomfortable without him unleashing rageful rants.

And it might start with you expressing that his behaviour has made you uncomfortable, that’s we’re my relationship started too but it progressed over time to him taking me simply expressing a different opinion as a personal criticism and unleashing rages which gradually escalated to causing me fear of violence and him preventing me leaving places and him being physically violent to things....

All followed by outrage that I would ever be afraid of him because I ‘should know [he] would never hurt [me]’

*where

In actual fact it got to the point where he was trying to trip me up any asking my opinion on things because he suspected my opinion was different (and therefore I was supposedly criticising him). If I wouldn’t be drawn on my opinion he’d rage at me anyway, if I shared his opinion he’d twist it so that it was outrageously different, if I tried to be tactful he’d exaggerate what I was saying to a ridiculous degree (e.g. I said I felt dictators like Hussein and terrorists like Bin Laden should face criminal charges rather than being executed he’d go on about how I was ‘effectively’ supporting dictatorships as a valid political system etc), if I walked away I was ‘childishly getting the last word’, if I wouldn’t engage I was ‘sitting on the fence’....

Your h may not be that bad but it’s the same behaviour. It’s designed to make you feel like you can’t exist.

Does he exhibit controlling behaviour during every day life, or is it only when he feels criticized?

Some people with shitty parents experience any form of criticism as an attack on their character and will react very aggressively.

If I was upset he ‘wasn’t indulging [my] dramatic tantrums’ and would stop speaking to me for days/weeks all the time seething with rage about my ‘behaviour’....

When he’d finished raging he would cry about how crap he was without ever acknowledging he had done anything bad and demand that I comforted him so that there was never any room for me to have any feelings at all...

And that’s the point. You are not allowed to have feelings, experiences, opinions or complaints about anything that he does.

I think it’s particularly concerning that he behaves in a way that you feel humiliated by in public BTW because that is EXACTLY how my ex started.