DH emotionally damaged - can our relationship survive?

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NCed for this but am long standing MNetter

DH and I have recently started couples therapy as I have been getting increasingly frustrated at what I perceive to be his constant and increasing selfishness around protecting his own needs at the expense of family time and my needs. We’ve been together for 17 years, married for 7, two kids DD 5 and DS 3. I work full time, him part time. He’s 10 years older.

We’ve been exploring our pattern of behaviour (basically me the semi-martyr, him constantly wanting more alone time, not engaging w parenting) and through it have been having some very intense conversations about our childhoods. I am the eldest of 5 children (all of us born within 5 years), DH was brought up in a fairly classic screwy upper class British way - loveless parents, sent to boarding school at 7 etc. The conclusion of the therapist is that I have learnt to fend for myself and not ever ask for help/prioritise others, DH has (a) a reflexive need to hide away from the world as he has never had unconditional love and (b) zero model of how to be an engaged parent. So we’re in this cycle of me doing everything and then getting frustrated/ exhausted and him refusing to step up at that point.

All of which is fine, it’s great that we’re unpicking it (and should have done it years ago). BUT I just feel it is so hard and that DH is SO damaged by all this, I wonder if we will ever get to a place where I’m actually happy / he will be able to step up.

Does anyone have experience of this dynamic? It’s not childhood trauma/ptsd per se, just dysfunctional patterns. I am just not sure he can change.

Any advice? I am just so exhausted by the whole thing but know we need to keep going w the therapy.

Awful. Sounds very tough for you. It is so unfair when one person in a relationship has to carry most of the relationship + parenting burdens because the other person is ill-equipped to do so (for whatever reason).

Just wanted to say you don't HAVE to do this forever/until he can get with the programme. You could free yourself, don't feel bad if you choose to.

Thank you. I know I don’t have to (and have discussed this with my own therapist), but it would be such a nuclear option and I don’t feel it would be fair on our kids. I don’t want to split up I just want him to get his shit together!

I’m just so tired and sad that I will never get to be the centre of someone else’s world. I look at other men doting on their wives and it just looks totally foreign to me. But I can’t blame my husband, he’s wired like that and it makes total sense.

OP- I had a similar dynamic with my exDH. After 20 years I had to accept that he did not have it in him to do the sort of profound personal change that I needed. I did not think of it as what I needed though at the time because like you I grew up believing I should not have needs.

And I also realised that so much resentment and bitterness had built up in me that I did not love him anymore. It actually was a relief to let go of the dream I had been pursuing all those years and accept the marriage was at an end. I felt free.

It may be possible for him to change and you may still love him. But don't forego your own happiness in the hope that one day things will be better.

Will you not be able to discuss this with your therapist? Practical ways of putting what you have learned to use in actually benefitting you both? I would have thought an obvious way would be him taking on something helpful on a regular basis in order to stop it getting to crisis point. It may be that it starts small, and he is walked through exactly how to do this and gets lots of praise etc when he does to it to build his confidence.

Also involves you prioritising yourself at this time to break the pattern of martyrdom.

Does he want to change? Do you want to change?

This has to stop being about how you each want the other to be.

But I can’t blame my husband, he’s wired like that and it makes total sense.

You've said it, op. This is who he is. What you see is what you get. He will not be changing. You need to think very long and hard as to how much more of your life and energy you are willing to sacrifice being the only one holding all this shit together.

I think he does want to change our dynamic, and he intellectually accepts he needs to do things differently. I am not sure he emotionally understands what it will mean for him.

@CowboyBebop your story feels like mine could be if things don’t change. It’s the resentment that drove me (us) to therapy to start with.

It is possible for him to change, if he wants to. Humans have a lot of neuroplasticity. Wouldn't come easy though.

I recommend Dan Siegel's book Mindsight.

OP- you also said in your second post that you can't blame your husband for being who he is. This struck a chord with me because I felt the same for many years and it was an excuse we both used to get around the fact exDH was not a good husband (or father in many ways).

You have to remove the issue of blame or fault from your thinking. Obviously your DH is not doing things deliberately to hurt you. And no one is to blame for being poorly parented. But that doesn't mean you just have to take what you can get when it is not enough.

Before you mentioned it in your op, I was thinking "boarding school". My DH was packed off at 8, didn't understand why his parents had done it, and had no say. As a family they are quite distant now, we see them fairly frequently but I wouldn't say they were very involved in his life from 8 onwards. He's now 40. Ex- boarding boys are quite a different breed and emotionally insular, it's learnt from school (even if they did have a good time there. The sense of abandonment only comes when my dh's guard is down, and peaked when we had our own children). But I am lucky that he's an excellent parent so an emotionally stunted childhood shouldn't necessarily mean your dh doesn't step up.

It may be that as your children grow older he can relate to them more but somehow, he needs to find it in himself to be part of your family. Whether that's via therapy or even parenting classes, even you writing lists of very specific things for him to do with the children that they might all enjoy [yes I know how patronising this is but] etc - he needs to address it.

@CowboyBebop yes. That’s exactly it. I am afraid of the enormity of the decision that I have to make. It feels impossibly weighty and, ironically, yet another thing I have to do.

@Neighneigh absolutely. It’s going to be an enormous challenge for him. Part of the problem is that he is so inflexible when he doesn’t want to do something/I’m asking him to step up. He doesn’t trust me that it is needed for the sake of the family - he’ll fight it even though he doesn’t really even know why.

OP, I am sorry but I feel little sympathy for your h. I get that he might well be damaged as a result of his childhood, but i don’t understand why you and your dc must be left to deal with this.

You don’t specify what it is he does or doesn’t do, but surely if you are far enough down the therapy route you have all these references to why. But where is the action? Even if it’s small… eg he ç pets that as part time worker he should be doing more of the school/nursery runs? A commitment to cooking dinner x times per week? An agreement to organise the next playgroup?

Because otherwise it’s all just talk and meaningless.

I know that’s not easy to accept. But at some point, the reasons for behaviour are irrelevant. What’s relevant is what he is going to do.

Thanks @BlingLoving. I don’t disagree.

A lot of it is around him accepting that sometimes he needs to do more than exactly 50% of his share (we split everything 50/50 despite me working ft and him pt - this is an ongoing source of conflict as we have a ft nanny yet he insists on us having equal time off on the weekends whereas my point is that he gets 20hrs to himself during the week). Eg I had a very important customer come to the U.K. last week to do a big negotiation and our nanny got Covid and wasn’t around. He threw a strop about having to do all of the childcare (I organised temp nannies but there were gaps in the coverage) and made the whole thing super stressful for me. And is STILL complaining that he’s behind on his work and needs some alone time because of last week.

Oh dear OP. Your update makes him sound worse. I hate to say this but it seems to me that he's using therapy as an excuse to justify his behaviour and get away with behaving badly. I can't get my head round him thinking that he a) needs so much more time than you and b) him not willing to take on the slack when the nanny is off.

As someone who works full time vs DH working part time and who does sometimes get irritated that DH doesn't step up enough on the planning and organising etc, I get that it's not as simple as saying, "he should do more than 50%". But his complete inability to see that you're a partnership and that therefore he needs to step up sometimes and even, gasp, do MORE than 50/50?

DH and I have argued about the split before. Here's the difference between him and your DH - my DH listens to what I say and sees how stressed/overworked/overwhelmed I am and then realises that even though he doesn't want do more because he's also tired etc, that it's not fair to leave it all to me.....

Have you considered personal therapy? Because its well known that abusive people should not go to couples counselling. And he's sounding pretty emotionally abusive to me right now. He might not be doing it because he's a wanker, and it might well be the result of poor parenting for him. Doesn't change the behaviour. Sorry.

Perhaps point out that in a divorce he'd be doing 50/50 of childcare etc. So he can either step up now or suck it up when you leave?

you say your DH has no model of how to be an engaged parent - most of us have not much of a model, we just get on with it. it is not something you can learn in the abstract, you learn by putting in the hours and playing with playdough and sorting out little arguments and being there all the time with the kids.

What does he do if he has all day with the kids & no nanny? can he get on with it if there is no alternative?

He sounds like a horrible man op. He's part time , you have a nanny , yet he complains about what he has to do at home? Any othee adult would just crack on of the nanny was sick. But he took it out on you instead.

Why are you doing this to yourself?

Jesus he didnt sound that bad till the last update. What an entitled aresole. Why didnt he organise the nanny then. I work PT my partner FT. Weekend is family time. I get 1 day in the week my time. If he really needs it he can have 1 weekend day if its important.

I am really sorry you're going through this OP. Whilst it's possible for your husband to heal and change, I do not think he wants to. At least not now nor in the near future. No one can make him change until he truly wants to and even then it may not be possible. I really think you need to make yet more decisions, hard as they maybe but your little children deserve happy parents and obviously they are learning that how their father behaves is acceptable and normal. I would look into therapy for yourself alone as well. Take care of yourself.

And this is probably contentious considering you're paying for couple's therapy , but sometimes a twat is just a twat.

@BlingLoving yes it’s the having to negotiate every single time I need him to do more that is exhausting. In the example I gave ^^ with our nanny out he said “well you didn’t even explain properly WHY you didn’t have flexibility” whereas my view is that he should just trust me when I say I don’t and not subject me to some kind of verification/interrogation.

On the needing alone time, we have been around the houses on this. He is utterly inflexible on it, he says it is a critical need of his and he feels horrible if he doesn’t get it. I have come to accept it because what else can I do?

He’s great with the kids when he has them, entirely competent to have them for a whole day/weekend/week.

I am in personal therapy for those who asked. I don’t see myself leaving, at least not now, mostly because of the children. I’d really like to try to make things better.

He wanted you to explain because in his mind, childcare and house organisation is your problem ad your job. So you have to justify it if you can't do it. Sort of like you don't just tell your boss you're not coming in but instead have to explain why, "I'm sick/have sick children/car broke down" or whatever.

It's not about trust. It's about the fact that YOU are the person who needs to be doing things and if you can't, he will only choose to do them if your reasons are strong enough (in his mind).

I know you want to make things better but the point is that YOU can't. He has to want to make things better and he very very clearly does not want to.

Yes I think that’s right.

One of things that baffles me is why he picked me - I am career oriented and very far away from the sahm / owns the domestic domain model that he now seems to want me to be doing. He would hate it if I wasn’t working, which is weird to me.

I’m trying to understand if he does indeed want to do things differently - that is why we’re doing the therapy. We shall see.

who earns the most money/contributes the most financially? Because it's entirely possible that he sees no disconnect between wanting you to work (and earn money) and also expecting you to take on the lions share of the domestic chores. BIL, who barely works and at minimum wage at that, honestly does not understand why SIL doesn't do his ironing or why she gets annoyed if he doesn't do any of the chores. His response is constantly, "But you're ironing your clothes, why not mine? Or, "If you just asked me...."

Sadly, misogyny does not mean they necessarily want a SAHW. If anything, it's the opposite - they don't want women to have anything that is easy and good. So a SAHM would be seen as a leech.... living the life of riley etc etc.