Confused and upset

[BayTiger]

I wrote a similar post a few weeks ago and received some great advice. I don't want to keep asking for the same advice over and over but I feel so confused and don't trust my own interpretation of things. I have always been told I am over sensitive so for that reason don't think my feelings are valid. My husband has become more and more difficult since we married and moved and we now have an 18 month old daughter. I wrote about some of the things that have happened on my other thread but basically he gets very angry and sweary and rants on at me over things I find minor. He then calls them arguments but to me they aren't as I can never defend myself.

He is currently under a lot of stress as he is starting a new job and a family member has been diagnosed with a serious illness. He finds it hard to cope with stress and I try to be as supportive as I can when he wants to talk but he will eventually say he doesn't want to talk any more and I should give him space.

He feels I go out with our daughter too much and wants me to stay in three days a week, I tried to say I had done that last week and he says: I don't need you to defend yourself, ie I am to just listen.

I spoke to him last weekend about his tone and I thought it was a good chat and he admitted that he thinks he has a deep seated subconcious anger towards me. Our child is adopted and he has become upset at the idea of his bloodline not continuing. He wants me to consider us having a child with a surrogate or us trying more IVF, which I spent years doing. I am really happy with what we have and extremely grateful and couldn't love our child more if I had given birth to her. He loves her too but really wants a biological child as well. This makes me feel weird and a bit humiliated and a failure as a woman.

In the week I didn't have his dinner served when he came down from putting our daughter to bed, and he swore and me and said to fucking serve it up, I was waiting till he came down so it didn't get cold. But his tone is so harsh and mean.

He used to apologise but nowadays he continues to blame me and it's making me feel on edge around him. No one we know would believe in a million years that he could be like this and it would all get turned onto me if it came out as I had mental health problems in my younger years. So I know people would say oh she's just over sensitive.

I know people will probably find me annoying for asking again but I just don't trust my own judgement. I have read through the Lundy Bancroft book and other things and thing he is veering towards mild verbal/emotional abuse. I can't talk to anyone, I have said a few things to my sister but just feel I don't want to speak to people or see anyone.

I spend hours going over it all in my head trying to work it all out. I do get irritable at times due to PMT, and if he is really nice to me then I feel annoyed in a way as I think well you were so horrible to me yesterday and now you want to be nice!

I’m just posting again as I’ve just listened to a complete angry lecture and I’m starting to feel mentally battered down. What I have done wrong now is that our child had a very late nap so therefore wouldn’t go to sleep tonight.

This happens from time to time and she is all out of sorts from Christmas. He is laying down the law on her routine and says that I am only to go out after lunch to ensure she sleeps at the correct time.

I had suggested taking her out over the weekend while he’s busy working and going in the morning as she usually naps in her buggy. He can’t believe I have suggested this and implies I’m really selfish.

I don’t mind him having a different opinion but you would think I had done something awful the way he is going on. What is galling is that he usually whips her into a frenzy of excitement when he gets home which is just as bad for sleep.

I tried to say that nap times vary over time and you can’t force someone to sleep, but he says I have a communication problem and issues from my past that make me think people are being mean when they are just communicating normally. His face looks so angry and mean and I just can’t believe this is the person I first knew. Sorry to bleat on, I just feel like crying and know I can’t.

This unhappiness has been going on for some time now. The overwhelming sentiment on this thread is that your relationship is abusive and that you should leave.

How do you feel about maybe doing that now?

I have been thinking things over and reading a lot and am going to try getting through to WA again next week as it’s not been possible to try over Christmas.

He says that I am often irritable and bad tempered so I keep trying to change how I react to things. I think I have been irritable as I’ve been ill and very tired. As many other people on these threads find though, literally whatever I do or say always gets turned back on me. I’ve had another lecture this morning and it just leaves my mind in a whirl of confusion. I have accepted that he is being abusive on some level which was really hard. It’s rung a bit of an alarm bell that he wants to see less of my mum and more of his side.

I have tried talking to him kindly and calmly but whatever I say I get told to either listen or stop defending myself or ‘whatever’. Although he did promise to try to stop that and listen to me more after a while.

I know that there is some undermining and other weird stuff going on so at least I know I’m not going mad now! It’s hard when you’re someone with low self esteem to start with. He says now he feels ok as he has got it out of his system. I feel a bit of an idiot really but it’s so shocking to have it slowly dawn on you what’s happening.

I've just read this thread OP.

You are still looking at yourself as the problem and trying to fix yourself.

You are not the problem. You will continue this cycle with no success.

Think of how free and happy you would be with your DD if this horrible man was out of your life.

As I read the thread from the start I realised it was an old one. I hoped that the fact it had been bumped was due to the fact that you were updating it to say you’d left him. He is awful. And abusive. Just because some women (and men) find themselves in relationships where they are hit, does not make this type of abusive any less bad. You do not deserve less help because you are not being hit. Emotional abuse is just as bad, and sometimes worse, than physical.

Earlier in the thread you say that your husband says that all you do is point out what he does wrong. It seems to me that that is actually what he does to you. Everything he says is all about what you need to change, what you need to do better. To keep him happy. And I’m guessing that if you do manage to meet his targets, the. He moves the goalposts and you have to do more. Or you’re doing something else wrong.
He is trying to isolate you by stating that you must spend less time with your family and more with his. As far as he sees it, you are simply there to cater to him. Have his meals ready at the exact point at which he designs to walk through the door. Shut up and stay quiet and let him point out to you all the areas in which you are failing. Which aren’t by the way. Not by a long shot. He is setting you impossible goals and complaining about things that are completely normal, like your daughter napping. He is being ridiculous.

Please let 2019 be the year you see him for what he is, and break free.

Being told to "stop defending yourself" every other sentence you dare speak is sinister as hell.
Who tells somebody that?

Does he imagine he's the lord of all righteousness, morality and normality, the guardian of speech? Yes he probably does think that.

You cannot agree with his bullshit delusions of god like status, or you wouldn't keep posting.

You are correct and he is batshit. Please don't lose sight of that.

He has MASSIVE problems with ego, communication, being a total shit in every way possible, not understanding normal relationships, parenting or even NAPS for ffs, he is a dominating.abusive bully and you have little else. It's no wonder you're snappy and irritable when you're not numb completely it IS heartbreaking treatment from a man who admitted he hated you.
There are many more swears I could apply to him, but my post has gone all ranty and I didn't mean to do that.

You must be made of Irn Bru, Girders and Oak trees to have withstood his constant attacks. I really hope something changes for you Bay, your thread has not been far from my thoughts since I first read it.

Thank you Spinney and everyone else, I appreciate your support very much. I was thinking, today I could tell he was funny with me so I did press him as to what was wrong, so I guess if I hadn’t he wouldn’t have ranted at me. Although I would have been on edge waiting to find out, so in a way it’s best to get it ‘sorted out’.

I wonder why people in this situation find ways to blame themselves? I’m now wondering whether I’ve misrepresented things, but it was how it seemed to me at the time.

Thank you and wishing you a good Sunday.

It sounds like you are walking on eggshells, and blaming yourself for making one crack. Thing is, if you had not put your weight on that one, you would have put it elsewhere and caused the same reaction. The point is, it is not you.

Why look to blame yourself? Because that way you can change your behaviour to avoid his outbursts and abuse. That way, you do not have to believe he is abusive and everything that means. There are two problems with this - the first is that the standards he sets are impossible to meet so you are never ever going to change sufficiently to meet them (no-one could) and secondly, you are losing so much of yourself by doing so.

Think about the time and energy you are spending wondering if you misrepresented things - that is monopolisation of perception from the chart of coercion. Of course you have not misrepresented things, you have spoken your truth from your perspective, but you are tying yourself in knots trying to work out why it was/is not okay when you have not done anything wrong.

Isolating you from your family is also straight out of the abuser handbook. You have the right to see who you please.

In terms of being irritable, who would not be under this kind of relentless pressure? There is a book called Eroding Your Soul about emotional abuse and it says there are two responses, either to submit or to fight back. Thing is, if you submit, it erodes your soul, if you fight back, you get blamed for causing the conflict. My marriage was coercive control and it was relentless pressure. It made me ill with anxiety, it made me shouty so his response was well, you shout. So I stopped shouting and breathed through my urge to shout (basically as if I was having a panic attack) and paid attention to his behaviour. And I could see that he was escalating what he was saying to try to get a reaction, he was going over all the points usually guaranteed to get a reaction. It still took me five years to really understand that he had been (was) controlling and abusive and the extent of it. Not seeing it is partly a survival strategy.

Keep trying with WA. I always think that leaving is a process, not an event. It is a series of little steps which show that your determination not to have your soul eroded and your determination to get your own life back is bigger than his abuse. No matter how many steps there are, you will keep taking them until one day you are breathing freely. The fact that his wish for you to spend less time with your family gave you pause - that is a step. Posting here is a step. Calling WA will be a step. And so it goes on until you get to the life you will have beyond this. It is shit to be in, shit to have to go through, but it is not your fault.

I agree with a PP who saud 'nothing about this sounds ok'. Alarm bells ring for me over his attitude towards your adopted child. He's happy to treat the woman he's supposed to love like shit, so it wouodnt surprise me if he starts on his 'non bloodline' child when they start having opinions too plot your escape and concentrate on giving that child a nice, loving life x

You hope that you misrepresented things, because you don’t want it to be as bad as it actually is. But it is that bad.