Chickencuddle, your H has always thrived on power and control. Nothing has changed. Your present is very much connected to your past.
When you left the refuge after a few days in mid-January, he agreed to adopt your gentle parenting method and to respect your consent. However, it didn’t take him long to resume his predatory behavior.
(1) In April you wrote that you’d been awakened by his climbing on top and lying on you, and repeatedly putting his face on yours. You froze and pretended to be asleep. When he finally rolled off and then stared at you, you pretended to wake up. You were freaked out, but never mentioned the assault.
(2) Also in that April thread, you said that you’d already had to remind him several times that ‘no means no.’
(3) Now, in October, you write that he keeps touching you sexually, and you have to move his hands at least 20+ times before he will stop.
He has not been brilliant since your return. He was initially knocked back that you’d left and that an agency had helped you. But he is an abuser, so eventually he started riding roughshod over your boundaries. He is not respecting your consent, and the assaults are escalating.
I highly suspect that he has been returning to his shouty, rigid parenting, as well as his inappropriate behavior in front of the children. Before going to the refuge, you were worried about their exposure to his harsh domination and sleaziness. Indeed, your son had started mimicking his dad’s smacking your bum by smacking his sister’s bum. And H was especially bullying toward DD1. Your children are being conditioned to repeat patterns of abuse by becoming either abusers or victims.
In your previous threads and in the threads of others, you have detailed some of the horrendous sexual and emotional abuse perpetrated against you by your father, mother and uncle. Your home and family culture were shockingly sexualized. There were no boundaries and you internalized much shame and lack of agency.
After your H ‘saved’ you, he started controlling and abusing you, so the pattern was repeated and normalized. His boundary violations have stretched across the board: sexual, emotional, physical and financial. (He has even dominated your food intake. During your last pregnancy, you were craving meat and had to hide some roast chicken, which he would have forbidden, and ate it in your car.) You didn’t recognize that he was an abuser until MN and Women’s Aid verified that. Even now, when he has ramped up the assaults, you are calling him brilliant.
Chickencuddle, I strongly advise you to access individual counseling with a therapist experienced in sexual abuse and traumatic boundary violation. You’ve been conditioned since childhood and are now with a dangerous man. You are sabotaging your life and are risking your children’s emotional health and well-being by staying with him.
Respectfully, you didn’t give the refuge a chance. You came out of your 2 day isolation on a Sunday, when support staff were not present. The children were asking questions that you couldn’t answer and you felt anxious and confused. You likely would have received much support the following day, but you left. Please consider trying again. 