He’s full of shit. After having read too much of the Afghanistan threads today, I am sick to the back teeth of male depravity, so I won’t go over all the many ways in which your husband has deliberately preyed on you, groomed you, manipulated you, sexually coerced you, raped you, and financially abused you, since you first met him – a man in his thirties – as a vulnerable teenager and recent rape victim.
(Skimming through the thread might be a good idea for you, if you’re starting to feel swayed by him again, Poet.)
But he’s full of shit.
Right now, he has a wife who he has subjected to years of abuse and rape, who is suddenly not just lying back and accepting it, like she’s supposed to. Suddenly, she’s pushing back. She’s seeing a therapist! Who knows what she’s saying, and to who, aside from the therapist? She could leave – or there could be criminal charges. His whole life – his years of grooming and systemic abuse – suddenly seems vulnerable, because she’s not cooperating properly anymore. Something has changed.
Subconsciously or consciously, he’s likely in damage control mode, and reacting to your changes in behaviour and habit. He’s adjusting. He’s trying to figure out ‘what will get her to stop pursuing this, so things can go back to normal?’
For a while, he fell into a holding pattern focusing around therapy, which other pps picked up on – a cycle where he shifted through rape or sexual assault, to apology, to niceness, to ‘I’ll stop pestering you’, etc. Now, it seems as though he’s realising you’re not just going to let the therapy go, and his holding pattern might not work for much longer.
So he’s shifting to more active ‘look how lovely I am, and how distraught that you’re upset!’ and ‘look how much I care and am trying!’ behaviour, and crucially – ‘can’t we just start over?’ which would mean, as pp said, wiping the slate clean. It would mean making his past behaviour unmentionable – so he could guilt you if you ever brought it up. I imagine he would then start complaining about your therapy, how you were refusing to let go of things, how you won’t have enough sex with him, and he might criticise your drinking etc.
This is not him turning over a new leaf. This is him figuring out how to try to regain control of a situation that is very precarious for him – which is why your therapist, and many of us on the thread are concerned that he is a danger to you. The ultimate form of control is killing, which is why men who think they are losing control are at their most unpredictable and dangerous.