'Background negging', how weird or common is this?

[pentangles]

Really difficult to describe but will try my best.
Now Ex DH of 30 years, met when i was 21 and he was 32. We are from fairly different family backgrounds, but before I go further I will say that he has never shown prejudice to any social group. That kind of thing has never seemed to interest him at all.

I was born into a good deal of privilege, he wasn't. We both came from stable families and never suffered any early trauma. He did not grow up in poverty but had much less choice than I had, and left home at 16 due to arguing with is parents as he did not want to get a job. He joined a kind of arty counterculture and dropped contact with them.

I met him quite young and we seemed to have a lot of things in common, although looking back I am not so sure. My family liked him and were very open minded when I moved in with him but advised me to be careful of putting my education on hold. After a few years I applied for uni and received many offers, my chosen one happened to be at the other end of the country. He really didn't like this and told me the relationship would not survive the distance. He even went so far as to suggest having a child, which was crazy since we had both decided we didn't want any.

Unfortunately I turned the place down and relocated somewhere local to him instead. I felt as if he gritted his teeth through most of it, but never said anything. During most of these years my parents were incredibly generous and funded my education/home costs. And this brings me to the weird bit -

The 'negging' thing has only become apparent to me lately, in retrospect. During that 30 years he always described me (and 'us') as 'struggling', as never having had access to any kind of privilege, and that we didn't fit in to society. I thought this was unusual but never really questioned it. As the years went by I slowly took on his values and perspective. He chose low paid work and terrible housing, which my family advised me against, but I loved him so went along with it. For many years I did very little with my degree. He always favoured his friends to mine, so slowly people from my own background lost touch.

A few arguments over the years brought this up, and he would insist that we 'began from nothing' and 'didn't have the options' other people did. If I mentioned my background he would absolutely refuse it, saying my family were just like his, but with a car
Over the years I have come to accept that I was indeed extremely privileged and had many advantages at my feet, with an endless safety net and security even going into my 40's with some inheritance.. His denial of this seems so thoroughly weird to me, and I can't think of why he would do that, since he does not seem to have any kind of class prejudice at all. His sister and brother are more the other way - they both used to rib me constantly about my speech and behaviours.

Unfortunately the relationship left me confused and uncertain of myself, nothing new I know, but it has been difficult for me to re-establish my own memories and awareness. I now see myself as having lived a life of struggle even though I really really haven't. He even insisted my inheritance was 'small fry' and useless to me, which I am sure it is compared to many.
Why would someone do this?
I have heard of people having cultural clashes but this was like a whole scale denial, one that I stupidly went along with. In a way it is like my confidence was slowly stripped from me, but because there was no overt abuse I couldn't see it happening in real time. He always got on with my family and they supported him often, yet his family largely didn't approve of me due to a belief that I would hurt him (no idea why) and that I was' laa-dee-daa'.

WTF does any of that mean? is it at all common? Am sorry it is so long, I tried my best to condense it.
is it a kind of negging? It sure feels like that now.

He's gaslighted you for 39 years, rewritten your history and the narrative of your life script. With a ten year age gap, the power imbalance was such that he was able to do that fairly easily.

I imagine it was all down to his own feelings of inadequacy and a fear that if you worked out what a loser he was, you'd leave him. So he 'force teamed' you. Made you think you were in it together so he could keep you stuck where he was.

It's actually despicable. He's robbed you of the chance to avail yourself of all the opportunities you ought to have had. I suspect as time goes on and the dust begins to settle, this will bring up some very complex emotions for you around loss, grief and your sense of self.

I second PP's suggestion to look into therapy. Go for a therapist who's psychodynamic, not CBT.

I would also add that it may be helpful (although painful and confronting) to start to frame his behaviour for what it was; which is coercive control.

Maybe start to do some reading around the subject and see if any of it resonates. I suspect it will and you'll need to make sure you have some robust emotional support around you for when those scales start to fall from your eyes.

It sounds like you were young, naïve, incredibly impressionable, overly impressed with an older alternative man/arty sub culture while not particularly interested in your own career and in fact not driven in any particular way. You were privileged and handed a lot on a plate over the years so never really had to find your own way (despite substantial public school privilege some people encounter a failure to launch). You adapted yourself to someone else’s values and lifestyle, possibly willingly? It would be easy to put it down to coercion and blame him, however in your shoes (being from a loving well balanced family with respectful relationships) I would look inward and ask why I had compromised my own value set. You may find that you have always danced to the beat of someone else’s drum and never your own. Maybe finding your own way has always been difficult to navigate, with pleasing others more of a priority?

The lack of acceptance from his family might just be them feeling lesser due to your educational/financial/privileged differences. They may be poor and see these things as unobtainable, hence putting privileges down makes themselves feel better about their own circumstances.

So glad you're rid of him.

As others have said, try some therapy.

He was an abusive, gaslighting, loser and he knew it.

I hope you're making your world much bigger since you don't have that anchor dragging you down anymore.

My dsis had the misfortune to fall for someone similar. Thank God she realised it after 5 years and escaped, after several attempts.

Sorry @DatingDinosaur but I found your comment extremely unhelpful. OPs story has got more red flags than a communist parade, but you're minimising the situation to a borderline insane extent!! This isn't just "sometimes you fall out of love", OPs ex-husband is clearly a gaslighting abuser.

@pentangles: I think that you need some serious therapy... who wouldn't!! The imbalance of life experience alone when you were first together is problematic in itself, and it sounds like it only got worse from there.

TLDR

I think that you should spend time & effort building up your own emotional, physical & spiritual self.

Spend much less time thinking about your past & your ex

You cannot change your past, but you can plan a much more positive future for yourself

It's less like nagging and more like a narrative he has created in his head which absolves him of feeling like a failure. If you step up to your potential, that will cause his narrative to fracture.

My mother is like OP's x, ie, the narrative is what her self-esteem needed to be ok, so any time that narrative is questioned, she flies in to a rage and shuts me down instantly. Her narrative is her survival shield. I've given up. Unfortunately though, like @pentangles aspects of that narrative have harmed me and held me back. I know it might seem weird to compare a mother's narrative to a spouse's narrative but when you got together with him so young I can see how its effect would really shape you growing up.

I think it's a natural part of the process to try and figure him out. When I left my controlling blaming x, I did read Lundy Bancroft and I'm glad I did. I completely agree with the post that says your x was determined to ''level'' throughout your relationship.

Levelling is a covert narc behaviour, but then, sometimes 'narc' just means using manipulation to get your needs met.

Whether he's a levelling covert narcissist or whether he utilises covert narc behaviours to get his needs met, the result was the same, you look back on the time you spent with him and feel regret for not seeing it, not walking away........

One of my therapists (I sound like woody allen now) recommended a really good work book to me. It'd do you the world of good too I think. Check out the mindful self-compassion work book by kirsten neff phd and christopher germer phd It's really good, it is broken down in to 16 chapters and I took it slowly, I did one chapter per weekend so that i was giving it what it asked. It is the one thing I've done that has helped me the most.

I think you’ve got an excellent grasp now of what he truly amounted to in the cold light of day.

There are also some excellent posts on here describing his controlling personality type and how and why he snared you.

You’re free now and back to the REAL you, and because of him, you should be more aware of personality types and not always take things on face value.

I don’t think you need therapy (unless you want to).

Why give this man even more headspace or make him your favourite subject. You’ve worked the animal out now.

Onwards and upwards without a ball and chain stopping you.

You’re intelligent and you’re free.

Sound to me that he was envious of and felt threatened by the opportunities your privilege afforded you and, rather than support you to become the best version of you, he chipped away at your confidence, rewrote your history and created a whole new narrative where you and he were no different. When you were.