Bastard bingo around the campfire

[helplesshopeless]

Hi everyone...creating thread number 2 (or at least, attempting to...!) Link to old thread here

If that link doesn't work, I'll be forever indebted to any of you more mumsnet savvy folks helping me out!

I'll come back in a bit to post properly, thank you all again for your help and support

Sometimes when we're mid-discussion (me and my husband), I wish you were all here with me to witness the conversation, so you could tell me whether I was overreacting and in fact my husband is a normal hurt person, or whether he is indeed all of the things you say he is

But OP, it doesn't matter what we think.

It matters what you think.

There is no absolute standard he needs to meet or not meet to justify staying or leaving.

You don't need our permission to stay or leave. You don't need anyone's permission to stay or leave. No one can give you permission. It's what you think, what you want, that should be driving your behaviour.

By locking you into this endless cycle of desperately trying to smooth over his moods, anger and manage his anxiety, while still respecting the last little bits of yourself you're unwilling to give without triggering his moods, anger and anxiety too much, by keeping that awful balance of atmosphere with a horrible anxious knot in your stomach, in constantly doing all that you're so focused on him that you've lost all sense of what you really think, and lost all confidence in your own ability to judge what you believe is reasonable and unreasonable behaviour. It must be absolutely exhausting and you must be living in a constant state of stress and anxiety.

Somehow you need to carve our some space for yourself - even if it's just 30 minutes on that stupid bench every day - and start listening to yourself again. Probably a silly thought but even something like meditation or yoga might be really helpful?

Sorry, just to add:

In a nutshell, your husband is deeply immature, and unlikely to grow up while he's with you.

You could pin all your hopes on him growing up one day, but look around you: not everyone actually manages it, do they? Even in the long run.

Thinking more positively, though, his best chances of ever growing up are if you leave him, instead of propping up his fragile ego for the rest of your life.

Helplesshopeless - I've read along from the start. The shower & bench things have prompted me to comment as it's just so concerning.

I wonder if you are actually hoping / waiting for him to do something sufficiently dramatic that you HAVE to call it quits. Either he decides it's ending (to punish you) or he does something so awful it's as unforgivable for you as an affair apparently is his end. That way it is his action that ends the marriage and you do not have to feel responsible.

You said more than once that the reason you are still with him is you need to have peace of mind over how you are feeling, and to know you tried hard enough before giving up.

You also agreed you are in effect hoping that at some stage you will "wake up one morning and discover you're married to a new person" as someone else put it.

But you also agree this is all very unlikely/ wishful thinking. You know you can't MAKE yourself 'unfreeze' or fall in love again. You are shut down for good reason. He can't suddenly be a different person. So understandable as it is to wish for these things, it's very passive and it's almost certainly your guilt preventing you from acting.

Clearly a dramatic intervention of that magnitude is unlikely to happen. He is almost certainly not going to let you go voluntarily and what would he have to do to push you to leave?

In the meantime you are in limbo. So you have to really ask yourself, how long do you wait. Because eventually as others have said this pressure you are under will be untenable.

Sometimes when we're mid-discussion (me and my husband), I wish you were all here with me to witness the conversation, so you could tell me whether I was overreacting
I remember feeling the same and telling my psychologist I could picture the face she'd pull over something exH had said. And she said it was a first step to believing my own reality. Still safer to trust someone else's view than my own, but wasn't letting exH dictate.
You can trust yourself you know. You aren't overreacting. Your feelings are important.

Yeah I’d also say over time I’ve developed a helpful “what would MN say” reflex about all sorts of things. Sometimes it’s telling me to get the fuck over myself, sometimes it’s saying that another person’s behaviour is twattish. I may sound a bit mad but it is an amazing place to hear many people’s thoughts and when the consensus says something it’s certainly worth reconsidering!

What is interesting @helplesshopeless and this isn't meant to be challenging...well maybe just a bit , is on the one hand you have one DH telling you X, and on the other hand you have a dozen (two dozen? three?) women on MN telling you Y.

And yet somehow you have been so trained to listen to him, you can't hear us, and you definitely can't hear your own voice. No matter how equitably you try and present his behaviour, it's still clear to us that you somehow need to find the strength to ltb. For you, not for us.

I know how hard it is to do, I've been/am there myself, as have many of the girls on here. We know the need to know that you have tried SO hard to make it right that you know that nothing would have made a difference. That's actually where you are, you ARE trying everything and it isn't working. We're all trying to say the one thing that will allow you to see that.

It's as hard as hell to make the decision that will unleash craziness and hurt in all directions, but I wish you all strength to make that sooner rather than later. You cannot go on like this [flowers}

sorry flowers fail there, have some of these instead

Thank you, all of you I prob won't have a chance to reply tonight but I'm taking it all in

@Alcemeg

so you could tell me whether I was overreacting and in fact my husband is a normal hurt person

Sorry OP, everything you've said on this thread and the previous one shows that he's not a normal hurt person. A normal hurt person is someone who responds to hurt by doing their best to find resilience within themselves. As they adapt to whatever life throws at them, they grow and become stronger. They don't need to control/abuse others in a desperate attempt to feel bigger and stronger without putting the effort in to truly grow.

Besides, your husband's "hurt" began long before you ever hurt him!

I'm afraid he has a core of absolute mayhem that you can't do anything about. He could try doing something about it himself, but it would take years, possibly with the help of medication (anti-anxiety, anti-depressant...), and may have limited success. Meanwhile, having you in the picture is not going to help matters.

The reason you're not helping is that your entire relationship has grown around his need to control/abuse you to make himself feel better, and you have both convinced yourselves that making him feel better is the ultimate goal in life. It's not doing either of you any good, I'm afraid.

Such an excellent, helpful and clear post!
I hope that @helplesshopeless reads it over a few times.

"Your entire relationship has grown around his need to control/abuse you to make himself feel better, and you have both convinced yourselves that making him feel better is the ultimate goal in life."

I would say now, cut the cord, be yourself, stop pandering to him to keep him calm. Stop being submissive, if you want to spend an hour on the phone to a friend on a bench, do it.
If he corners you naked in the shower, you tell him to get the fuck out of your private space. (this by the way is predatorily horrifying)
Go to work, Go to have drinks after work, Be Yourself.
You simply cannot pretend to be his puppet for the whole entire rest of your life, you might as well hang yourself immediately, just to get it over with.
His new tactic is to drown you in his self pity, you made him so sad, you now have to do penance for life, how is this any improvement on him hating you pre affair?
He married someone who is self sufficient, with normal confidence, & self esteem & ever since has been trying to prove he is better than you, stronger, the alpha, because he knows you are more intelligent & don't actually need him.
He has tried to put you down from the very start, to dominate. To "big" himself up. It is part of his DNA, he is not going to change, how ever many pamphlets he reads. You cannot make him happy, you never could, His problems are "him".
Why ? well that is something he should ask his therapist.

So please just be yourself, tell him you are finished with the flagellation, the affair happened, his behaviour drove you to it.
You are not cow towing to beg for forgiveness, he can take it or leave it.
If he can't trust you, then he needs to make his own decision about where this leaves him in your marriage.
But this is how it is, your marriage is rotting, it's stagnant, it's infected, it's it's move on or move out.

I agree with so much of the above but just want to add that the OP's husband may well be genuinely suffering and trying to the best of his limited ,messed up ability to put things right .

I can see that he is a deeply selfish ,unkind person .Possibly some of his behaviour is unconscious . How kind ,unkind ,manipulative ,conscious or unconscious his behaviour is hardly matters IMO . I only mention the possibilty of genuine remorse to preempt the OP defending him .

helplesshopeless it's not your job to rescue him at the expense of your sanity and wellbeing .You've been accomodating his needs for years and look where it's led .To you loosing love ,even like ,for him .

This is all badly expressed ,my hayfever is off the scale and I'm not good at wise words .But I'm in your corner ,please separate . It looks to me as though you doing your best is not helping him ,you ,or your relationship .

Why, thank you, Ms Buttocks 🧐 what a compliment from one so wise!

OP, I think what really plagued me when I was leaving my exDH was that I feared he literally might not survive without me. His inner world was so bleak; I was the only light in it, and I felt like I could not extinguish that light from his life or who knew what might happen?

Well... now many years on, he's fine. He has his own life with things in it that he enjoys, things that have nothing to do with me (such as a different partner!). And he did go on to mature and become a much more fully rounded person than if we'd stayed together. He says he did a lot of growing up very quickly after our split.

What I had to come to terms with, the most difficult thing, was accepting that even if his whole life crashed and burned, it was not my fault and not my job to fix. I had to stare this down for years, trying not to fret on his behalf, nipping anxious trains of thought in the bud. It takes a lot of getting used to, when your entire life has revolved around anticipating his every need. But it is possible.

It does require tricking your own mind a bit. You have to start thinking of this compulsive nurturing as a kind of pathological neurosis rather than a virtue. Reading up on codependency might help, although for me there were whole chunks of it that didn't really apply.

We all have our own odd little ways of falling into this particular trap. I sometimes wonder if women are hardwired to look after babies, and this can accidentally get diverted into looking after childish men, and then God help us because they like to take over. And at least a baby grows up eventually! -- a childish man just gets worse over time.

And he did go on to mature and become a much more fully rounded person than if we'd stayed together. He says he did a lot of growing up very quickly after our split.

Just in case I didn't make this clear, it would have been impossible for my ex-DH to have changed in that way if we'd stayed together. Partly because I was so hypervigilant/attentive to his moods and needs that ignoring them and doing my own thing would only have been possible if I'd permanently worn a blindfold and earphones to block him out completely.

One thing I would add is that we can’t avoid pain in life, either our own or other people's. In fact, the more we try to avoid it, the more we often seem to create trouble for ourselves and others.

But that’s OK because pain seems to be the way we learn and grow.
If you think to key points in your life where you gained important new insights, and your outlook shifted (you grew up a bit)… how many of those experiences were delightful, and how many of them were upsetting and horrid?

I’m ready to bet none of them were much fun. Am I right or am I right.

Hey everyone! Crikey, it's hard to keep up with threads. I actually went a bit dizzy and nearly passed out yesterday with a combination of a madly frantic job at work, trying to contact poorly brother, getting kids from school, literally trying to be in three places at once, and trying to read this. I just wanted to say, I recognise so much of my behaviour in enabling and normalising dh's pathetic behaviour, which I can only really see when it's written down here in black and white. Your wise words really do help, and as one (or maybe more) PP has said, when you're embroiled in a discussion with your dh and you doubt yourself, just remember the MN ladies telling you to believe in yourself xx

@19bears me too - the recognising the enabling and normalising (not the nearly passing out), it is very odd/frustrating how you can see it in someone else's life but not in your own...ditto another thread where someone else's idiot DH has neglected to tell her about a huge debt that she's going to have to sort out/take on...been there too...

why/how do us wonderful, capable women end up with such idiot men...@helplesshopeless it really isn't just you as you can see

Evening all 

Just come out of our joint counselling and it was a tense one! My husband asked me to start off the talking so I described the week and started talking about the shower/bench day. It all kicked off from there really, he was very angry that I was focusing on negative behaviour again (part of that morning had involved him snapping rudely at me and he was cross that I'd mentioned it as an issue as he said he's only human - actually I'd explicitly said that wasn't the issue; as I knew he'd been stressed about work when he snapped). Anyway, he said he was fed up of me focussing on negatives and dragging him down, and he was frustrated that I was getting weepy about his behaviour and he was sick of me making out like he was a monster (I was being 'weepy' about his reaction in the session to me explaining how I felt my boundaries had been violated). He also said he didn't want any more cuddles or contact with me as he's sick of me dragging him down and so he didn't feel like touching me.

The counsellor looked a bit light a deer caught in headlights for a while  I said that I felt like the only way he would be happy would be if I never mentioned any new events or issues with his behaviour ever again. He said that wasn't the case but he didn't think it was relevant as I'd previously said I was operating on the assumption that he would be well behaved going forwards (which made no sense to me, as how can he correct any further issues if I'm not allowed to raise them...). He was very cross that I'd waited until the session to raise my issues as he felt ambushed.

He calmed down after a while and the counsellor managed to get him talking positively about what the future might look like in terms of the behaviour I need, our boundaries in terms of how to communicate with eachother, and he acknowledged how he understands he may be difficult to talk to and raise issues with.

He's now left the room and been quite cold with me so I think he's still feeling hard done by that yet again the session focussed on his negative behaviours, and the fact that I raised them to discuss. We didn't even get a chance to talk about me getting space!

We actually had a lovely evening together last night, as he was in a great mood after receiving some good news. So it's a shame that the session has dragged us back down.

I agree with so much of the above but just want to add that the OP's husband may well be genuinely suffering and trying to the best of his limited ,messed up ability to put things right

Thank you @peridito for saying that. You're absolutely right, he is genuinely trying to improve himself but being held back and locked into going round in circles over the affair because I'm unable to move forward with him. Yes, he has issues and it means his behaviour can be unacceptable, but he is still a person with valid feelings and my own behaviour is not helping him now either.

Desperately trying to discuss and fix your marriage through forced conversations is just another way of saying imposing his views and feelings on you. It doesn’t matter how desperate he feels, he doesn’t have the right to control your behaviour, erode your privacy and force you to listen to him when you are in the shower

Yes, I totally see that. I actually tried to explain in the session that I saw his inability to hold back on any discussions as linked to the same aspect of his personality that used to result in tempers. In both scenarios he's pushing his emotions into me without processing them himself. Neither him or the counsellor understood what I was trying to say though!

The reason you're not helping is that your entire relationship has grown around his need to control/abuse you to make himself feel better, and you have both convinced yourselves that making him feel better is the ultimate goal in life. It's not doing either of you any good, I'm afraid.

Yes, so true @Alcemeg, and the reason things keep stalling now is because I'm unable to fall in line to help him with that. You're right, he does have a core of mayhem - which is so strange because he presents to anyone else as such a logical person, but he hides behind that black and white logic I think.

Can I ask what is your end goal if you stay with him? To grow old and be buried together? To divorce and move on when your daughter is an adult, a teen, a child or while she is too young to remember a life with two cohabiting parents

That is a really good question, and I honestly have no idea. I think I knew deep inside, before this all kicked off, that we couldn't possibly stay together forever. Maybe subconsciously I wanted things to survive perhaps until our children were grown up. But yes, I do feel a lot of pressure to resolve this either way before our daughter gets any older!

Somehow you need to carve our some space for yourself - even if it's just 30 minutes on that stupid bench every day - and start listening to yourself again. Probably a silly thought but even something like meditation or yoga might be really helpful?

I love that idea! I've just downloaded a meditation app so I've got a plan to have 30mins each morning ( at least on a workday when I don't have my daughter) to do some mindfulness on my own in the garden. I think that will really help me.

@QuentinBunbury funny you should say that about picturing your psychologists face- I do the same!! You can trust yourself you know. You aren't overreacting. Your feelings are important. - this is the crux of the matter for me isnt it. I keep veering between just about managing to get some real perspective on what I want, to then feeling completely undermined by his own perspective on things.

What is interesting @helplesshopeless and this isn't meant to be challenging...well maybe just a bit , is on the one hand you have one DH telling you X, and on the other hand you have a dozen (two dozen? three?) women on MN telling you Y

Ha! Yes, and I think that's why I'm always so desperate to point out his own views. Because the message from him and all of you lovely lot is so different that surely I'm misrepresenting things somewhere along the way.

There's sooo so many helpful posts and comments and I've not managed to respond to many of them, and I appreciate the above is a bit of a brain dump! But I'm absolutely reading and digesting everything you all say. Thank you as always for your help

He felt ambushed when you told the counsellor about the shower and bench day. You were ‘negative’ to mention it and drag him down. What topsy turvy world does he inhabit where this is reasonable behaviour? He KNOWS that his actions are wrong, hence his rage that you exposed them to a third party. You’re supposed to just accept it you know, keep it secret. You’ve been with him too long, you’ve become so used to pandering and pussyfooting, that you don’t want to admit that you’re trying to justify remaining married to a deeply unpleasant man. You ascribe pleasant characteristics to him, and say you had a lovely time together the other day, no doubt you you did! If he was horrible all the time your choice would be easy wouldn’t it? What proportion of ‘good’ behaviour is sufficient? If your cup of tea was 50% shit you wouldn’t touch it, how about 10%? No? Still shitty isn’t it?! Try not to feel you have to defend your husband or your marriage, and focus simply on whether he is a good husband TO YOU. Get on that bench, or in that long bath and think hard about it. If a friend told you all this stuff, what would you advise her to do? Would you want this relationship for your daughter?

Hi everyone. There is so much wisdom in this thread. All I want to add is to echo what others said earlier hopeless, that your longing to untangle and understand everything before you act could keep you trapped for a long long time.

But you don’t have to be certain of being “right” or justified to leave. You can give yourself permission to leave because you know in your heart that you will never be happy with him. Thats enough. You don’t need any other reason. That’s all you need to know, and you already know it.

Well done for raising the shower and the bench issue and allowing your narrative to be given primacy. I would say he felt ambushed as he did not get a chance to reframe it as somehow your fault that he behaved like that in the shower or indeed reframe it in any way before the session. And good that the focus of the session was on his behaviour and what he could do differently. This should flow into your space next week, hopefully.

But also note his reaction - effectively to punish you for raising it: by getting angry in the session, by withdrawing or threatening to withdraw from your current attempts at intimacy, and his cold behaviour after the session. Resist the urge to fix this and soothe his emotions. You did well by speaking your truth and if this process is going to have any value for you, you need to be able to do that.

Less good that neither he nor the counsellor sees the obvious connection between his previous tempers and his current need to be heard at all costs regardless of whether you want to listen at that point.

Dear @helplesshopeless I was getting so mad reading your post. I mean, the whole point of couples therapy is dealing with issues. What are you supposed to do, not bring it up to protect his fragile ego?

You see, my STBX never wanted to do couples therapy. Well, he actually kept saying he would not mind if we did it, but when I finally confronted him he said, no, he would not be comfortable talking to strangers about his personal life. The thing is, just like your husband, I knew that he would feel uncomfortable being "criticized", in front of someone else. Although I suggested it to him, I knew that couples therapy would never work, again, for the same reason as yours, because my STBX would not tolerate discussing himself. I only wanted to do it because that would have been my chance to tell him all the things I kept inside me all these years.

And yes, @KatySun you are right, it is good that this time the session was about his behavior as it seems to me that they mostly discuss her affair which is so unfair. That is why he got so upset, "how dare you shift the focus from you to me!?!?"

I am sorry but I also have a feeling that this therapist is not doing a very good job controlling the situation.

That session sounds so distressing hopelesshelpless but well done for raising those issues. His mask well and truly slipped didn’t it?

Please believe this is the real him. Not the carefully prepared responses after reading various self help books. You got his gut reaction and it was ugly. This is how he responds when in time of stress and difficulty. Remember this.

The measure of your counsellor is going to be your next session. She should now be fully aware of his problematic behaviour and should react with more robust responses.

However after my experience, l don’t really recommend joint counselling in an abusive dynamic and many counsellors won’t either.
It just revictimizes you one way or another.

You made a comment a few days ago about you being stuck in a cycle where you both couldn’t meet each other’s needs regarding space for you and intimacy for him. This was exactly the same for me - l ended up calling it irreconcilable needs. It’s ok to accept this as evidence of a total relationship breakdown. Because where can you go from here?

It just get more and more toxic.

The only answer is to separate because it is impossible to continue. You both need time away to reflect and recover.

You are actually in a trauma situation where you have used the coping strategies of people pleasing and disassociation to survive and he is using the coping mechanism of anger and rage ( by discharging it onto you). This is no way to live and you are both in a massive act of self denial. All you are managing to do is delay immediate pain ( of facing the end of your relationship). Your pain and disconnection is being compounded by your emotional and spiritual needs not being met.

This act of self preservation ultimately leads to self betrayal and can ultimately make you sick as you are denying your authentic self.

This may be very painful to acknowledge but it took me to get to being on the brink of becoming seriously unwell before l could put myself first.

Big hugs xxxx

Also, on the subject of you feeling certain on your perspective and then being undermined by his perspective, you know, it is entirely acceptable for both of you to hold different perspectives and the sky doesn’t fall in.

I think the term for it is called dialectical thinking or something. Where there are two opposing views but neither are wrong. It can help to accept the search for clarity and harmony in holding shared perspectives is a fallacy as you are so far apart in your thinking.

He can’t control your narrative but by the same measure you can’t control his.

It can actually feel quite freeing to accept this as the energy taken up by trying to convince the other person is released.

Morning everyone! Thanks for all your comments 

I didn't do too well resisting the urge to soothe last night! After I posted I went upstairs and he explained that he felt like I presented the issues in a very one sided emotive way which is what had frustrated him; whereas when he describes a situation he does his best to make it more even (which to be fair he often does). So now I'm wondering if I was unfair. But he did have a chance to explain his perspective after which surely is the whole point. He also said if I can't handle him snapping at me now and then (which as mentioned last night, wasn't actually the issue for me) then I was pathetic and there wasn't any point in continuing.

Anyway, this morning he has come to me and said he's going to work on his expectation that any issues he has should be immediately addressed and he's sorry it's made me feel smothered.

So I feel like although there's still problems with his immediate reactions to stressful situations, at least he is capable of reflecting on at least some element of them. Would any of you say that's a positive sign? I suppose it depends on whether he can actually follow through on that or whether it's just a matter of time until that mask slips again.

Irreconcilable needs is a really apt way to describe it @Whatdirection, and it's helpful to recognise dialectical thinking in our scenario. I think I'm desperately trying to discern who is right and wrong in each of our discussions to verify my feelings, but actually we are each allowed our own experiences and we don't need to interpret them identically.

your longing to untangle and understand everything before you act could keep you trapped for a long long time.

So true, and I don't want to be trapped but I don't see how I can act before I have clarity

So it really feels that you cannot act before you have clarity. That is very understandable. It is a massive decision.

How do you feel about these other statements.

I cannot act because l still love him

I cannot act as he respects me

I cannot act as he truly cares for me

I cannot act as he makes me feel safe

I cannot act as he puts my needs on the same level as his

I cannot act as l see a future with him

Are these above statements true or untrue? Surely your answers will give you enough clarity to know deep down your truth.

Also your comment about his ability to reflect. I agree this is something BUT always know in the heat of the moment he will revert back to his core dysfunctional behaviour and that will always be a very damaging feature of your marriage. Think about how much pain you endure and the hard work that goes into addressing his behaviour BEFORE he verbally acknowledges there is a problem.

As a previous poster said, it shouldn’t be this hard.