Exhausted and heartbroken

[Lois]

I'm heartbroken and gutted over this.

 

After years of putting up with verbal/emotional abuse from my husband we separated a year ago. Nothing I have done has ever been good enough in his eyes. We have been together for 14 years and have a 6 year old autistic son.

 

We had tried counselling and he would be okay for a while but things always resorted back to hell - he would sabotage any happiness that we had, Christmases were hell, as were birthdays - you name the occasion, he spoiled it. When he made me miserable, he was always sorry and he'd tell me that he would never hurt me again and I would believe him. I always made excuses for his behaviour and every time he would hurt me I'd just try harder to please him.

Last March I was diagnosed with a terminal illness and he came home and we tried again but he soon resorted back to his old abusive ways and so again, he moved out.

 

In June he told me he had been sexually abused as a child and I felt/feel terrible for the things he went through. He is now in therapy and has been diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and wants me to give him another chance because he says it's not his fault that he's abusive. The thing is, I don't think I can give him another chance. I don't think I can take any more - I feel that I'm being selfish but I'm emotionally and physically exhausted. Am I the world's biggest cow for not trying one more time?

Edited October 29, 2010 by Lois

[lapse]

I'm heartbroken and gutted over this.

 

After years of putting up with verbal/emotional abuse from my husband we separated a year ago. Nothing I have done has ever been good enough in his eyes. We have been together for 14 years and have a 6 year old autistic son.

 

We had tried counselling and he would be okay for a while but things always resorted back to hell - he would sabotage any happiness that we had, Christmases were hell, as were birthdays - you name the occasion, he spoiled it. When he made me miserable, he was always sorry and he'd tell me that he would never hurt me again and I would believe him. I always made excuses for his behaviour and every time he would hurt me I'd just try harder to please him.

Last March I was diagnosed with a terminal illness and he came home and we tried again but he soon resorted back to his old abusive ways and so again, he moved out.

 

In June he told me he had been sexually abused as a child and I felt/feel terrible for the things he went through. He is now in therapy and has been diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and wants me to give him another chance because he says it's not his fault that he's abusive. The thing is, I don't think I can give him another chance. I don't think I can take any more - I feel that I'm being selfish but I'm emotionally and physically exhausted. Am I the world's biggest cow for not trying one more time?

 

No way. To it all. Especially about not trying one more time.

 

Ya know what concerns me the most is that he claims it's not his fault he's abusive. He's rationalizing it, justifying being abusive. That does not portend a recovery, methinks. If he claims he doesn't have any control over it, he won't change it. Moreover, he's saying that it's someone else's fault (remember when it was your fault?) again... it's anyone's fault but his.

 

I recommend to you a book that the lovely Angel recommended to me: "Why does he do that? Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men" by Lundy Bancroft. Excellent book about verbal and emotional abuse. It has been my companion since my move and it's really helped me stick to my guns. It may help you, too.

 

I'm so sorry you're going through these difficult times, Lois. And that, in this time of personal challenge, you don't have the person by your side who 'should' have been a comrade. Congratulations on believing in yourself and your choice.

[You Go Girl]

You have a terminal illness, I am so sorry.

Life is short without one.

I've thought a lot about compassion for abused people recently. But, my father beat us with a belt often when we were children. I never ever hit my daughter but one swat on the butt as a toddler. It made me so sick I never touched her again except in a loving manner.

Point being, an abused person does not have to repeat the behavior.

Your H sexually abused as a child does not = mentally abusing you as an adult.

Your H is completely responsible for his actions, and it is utter balderdash that he is trying to manipulate you into sympathy and pity with his sexual abuse story. The two--that sexual abuse, and his abusive actions to you now have no relationship whatsoever.

Sexual abuse may beget sexual abuse. It certainly doesn't beget mental abuse to a marriage partner.

His mental abuse to you now is a result of mental abuse in his family growing up, more than likely. He is connecting the wrong dots!!!!!!!!

He's also trying to avoid responsibility for his actions now. Don't let him. Don't fall for it. Call him out on it everytime.

I agree that abuse of any kind during childhood can leave a person with more to work through as an adult. But it never absolves them of responsibility for their actions.

In otherwords, he's giving you a crock of crap, even if he believes it.

 

There comes a time in life when you have to take care of your own mental health first. Start now, before you end this relationship. Start today. The outcome of the marriage relies on whether he is going to respect you as a person, take care of you, and love you. Settle for nothing less.

[Lois]

No way. To it all. Especially about not trying one more time.

 

Ya know what concerns me the most is that he claims it's not his fault he's abusive. He's rationalizing it, justifying being abusive. That does not portend a recovery, methinks. If he claims he doesn't have any control over it, he won't change it. Moreover, he's saying that it's someone else's fault (remember when it was your fault?) again... it's anyone's fault but his.

 

I recommend to you a book that the lovely Angel recommended to me: "Why does he do that? Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men" by Lundy Bancroft. Excellent book about verbal and emotional abuse. It has been my companion since my move and it's really helped me stick to my guns. It may help you, too.

 

I'm so sorry you're going through these difficult times, Lois. And that, in this time of personal challenge, you don't have the person by your side who 'should' have been a comrade. Congratulations on believing in yourself and your choice.

 

Thank you for your words of wisdom.

 

I asked him how on earth, if he has no control over his actions, can he promise it won't happen again and he said his therapist had strategies that he can use to overcome it. I don't buy it though, I think he just wants to come home and will say anything to make that happen.

 

I will definitely be buying the book you mentioned, can't wait to read it.

[Lois]

You have a terminal illness, I am so sorry.

Life is short without one.

I've thought a lot about compassion for abused people recently. But, my father beat us with a belt often when we were children. I never ever hit my daughter but one swat on the butt as a toddler. It made me so sick I never touched her again except in a loving manner.

Point being, an abused person does not have to repeat the behavior.

Your H sexually abused as a child does not = mentally abusing you as an adult.

Your H is completely responsible for his actions, and it is utter balderdash that he is trying to manipulate you into sympathy and pity with his sexual abuse story. The two--that sexual abuse, and his abusive actions to you now have no relationship whatsoever.

Sexual abuse may beget sexual abuse. It certainly doesn't beget mental abuse to a marriage partner.

His mental abuse to you now is a result of mental abuse in his family growing up, more than likely. He is connecting the wrong dots!!!!!!!!

He's also trying to avoid responsibility for his actions now. Don't let him. Don't fall for it. Call him out on it everytime.

I agree that abuse of any kind during childhood can leave a person with more to work through as an adult. But it never absolves them of responsibility for their actions.

In otherwords, he's giving you a crock of crap, even if he believes it.

 

There comes a time in life when you have to take care of your own mental health first. Start now, before you end this relationship. Start today. The outcome of the marriage relies on whether he is going to respect you as a person, take care of you, and love you. Settle for nothing less.

 

I'm sorry that your dad used to beat you - I don't know how any parent could do that.

 

Your post hit the nail on the head, especially the bolded part. The only answer that I can come up with as far as connecting the two is this: I believe for him, sexual abuse is so vile that he could/would never do it, but in his mind, emotional/verbal abuse is acceptable - somehow he's told himself that it's okay. He has no idea how much he has hurt me and doesn't understand why I can't just forgive him and move on.

 

He says that I am "the love of his life" ... it sure doesn't feel that way.

 

Thanks so much for your advice, I really appreciate it.

[Downtown]

Lois, I am so sorry to hear that your health is failing. Although I cannot help with that, perhaps I can help you to realize that you H was likely damaged in early childhood and you cannot possibly help him. As I will explain, the behavioral traits you are describing are the classic traits of BPD (Borderline Personality Disorder), which my exW suffers from. Because all of us have all nine of the BPD traits (albeit at a low level if we are emotionally healthy), it is easy to recognize strong BPD traits once you read some about them -- especially when you've been living with the man for 14 years, as you have. That's the easy part. What is difficult is determining whether those traits are so severe as to satisfy the diagnostic criteria for "having full-blown BPD." Hence, diagnosis is the province of professionals.

When he made me miserable, he was always sorry and he'd tell me that he would never hurt me again and I would believe him.

The likely problem is not that he is insincere but, rather, that he is unstable. If he has strong BPD traits (i.e., is a "BPDer"), he is unable to control his emotions because his emotional development came to a screeching halt when he was struggling to survive the childhood trauma. Indeed, the single most defining feature of BPD is the inability to properly regulate one's emotions. That is why a small group of psychologists has been lobbying for nearly twenty years for "BPD" to be renamed "Emotion Dysregulation Disorder."

 

Another result of the stunted emotional development is that a BPDer never learned to integrate the good and bad parts of his personality into one integrated sense of self. Unlike the rest of us, a BPDer mistakenly believes he must be "all good" or "all bad." The notion of being an "essentially good person" who occasionally has bad thoughts and makes mistakes is intolerable to a BPDer because it triggers his intense feelings of shame. He therefore goes through life categorizing everyone (including himself) as "all good" or "all bad." This dichotomous (i.e., black-white) thinking destroys his attempts to maintain LTRs because, in the space of ten seconds, he can flip from classifying a person as good to classifying them as bad. This means that he can be very loving and caring to you for a week and then, when triggered by some minor thing you do or say, he can instantly become very angry with you, perceiving you to be his enemy. This all-or-nothing thinking is a hallmark of BPDers.

He would sabotage any happiness that we had, Christmases were hell, as were birthdays - you name the occasion, he spoiled it.

Another hallmark of a BPDer is behaving the worst immediately after a great evening or weekend of intimacy (true intimacy, not just sex). That is, within a few days of telling you how much he loves and adores you, he can flip to being abusive. This occurs because BPDers have a strong fear of engulfment and abandonment.

 

Hence, when you draw close to him and become intimate -- as occurs during holidays or romantic getaways -- he will feel engulfed by your strong personality and feel like he is disappearing or being suffocated. Being that close to you is very frightening because his self image likely is very fragile and unstable, having been nearly destroyed by the time he was 3 or 4. This is why, after every great evening or intimate encounter, he would push you away the next morning -- if not that same night -- by creating a fight "over nothing." This also would explain why you two had so many fights over issues so tiny that you cannot even recall what they were about.

 

Yet, as you backed off to give him breathing room, you triggered his other great fear -- fear of abandonment. Hence, days or weeks later, he would become all sweet and enticing to pull you back into the relationship. This push-you-away and pull-you-back behavior is one of the hallmarks of BPD. It is reflected in the title of the second-most-popular book on BPD (targeted to nonBPD spouses). That book is called "I Hate You, Don't Leave Me." With my exW, I spent 15 years trying to find the "Goldilocks position" mid-way between "too close" and "too far away," so as to avoid triggering the two fears. It took me that long to learn that, if a Goldilocks position exists at all, it is a knife edge that is continually shifting.

 

You don't mention it but it seems likely -- if your H is a BPDer -- that he is incapable of trusting you or anyone else because the ability to trust also was destroyed in early childhood. If so, you would have experienced him being jealous of your spending time with friends or family members from your side of the family. My exW was the same way, to the point that she was even jealous of girls I had dated decades earlier -- and she hated for me to visit my family or friends very often.

After years of putting up with verbal/emotional abuse from my husband we separated a year ago.

Frequent verbal abuse (or physical abuse) is another hallmark of having strong BPD traits. Because a BPDer is unable to properly regulate his emotions, intense feelings sweep over him -- just as you saw occurring in your son when he was 4 and 5 years old, before he learned how to do self soothing to calm himself down. The verbal abuse, then, is essentially the same tantrums you see in a young child.

 

On top of that problem, a BPDer also has the problem of carrying enormous rage inside from the trauma experienced in early childhood. That rage can easily be triggered by an innocent act or comment, leading to another tantrum. It therefore would not be surprising to hear that you have been walking on eggshells for 14 years to avoid triggering your H's rage and verbal abuse. This is why the most popular BPD book (targeted to the nonBPD spouses) is called "Stop Walking on Eggshells." Note that the rage of a BPDer is "event triggered" and thus can occur in ten seconds. This is much different from the rage characteristic of bipolar disorder which -- being triggered by a slow change in body chemistry -- typically develops slowly over several weeks and lasts about two weeks (not the five hours that is typical for a BPDer).

He told me he had been sexually abused as a child and I felt/feel terrible for the things he went through.

A 2008 study of nearly 35,000 American adults found that 6% have BPD at a diagnostic level at some point in their lives. When you add in those having strong BPD traits falling somewhat short of the diagnostic level, the figure likely rises to roughly 10%. The study also found that 70% of the BPD sufferers reported having been abused in early childhood. My exW, for example, had been sexually molested for years by her dad, who also molested her two sisters also. All three of them have BPD. This does not imply, however, that everyone who is abused in childhood will develop BPD. Most abused children apparently do not develop BPD. It seems that there is an important genetic component that predisposes one to having a mental illness and the abuse causes it to take the form of BPD.

Nothing I have done has ever been good enough in his eyes.

Because a BPDer has such a weak and unstable ego, he is too fearful of admitting to mistakes or flaws. He therefore goes through life thinking of himself as a perpetual victim. To support that false image, he needs to have a "perpetrator" around at all times so he has someone to blame for his unhappiness and misfortunes. This is why, following the idyllic honeymoon period, a BPDer will start blaming his partner for everything that goes wrong -- and will become increasingly vindictive as the years go by. And this is why it is commonly said that "a BPDer would rather get even than get well."

We had tried counseling and he would be okay for a while but things always resorted back to hell.

If your H has strong traits of BPD, he has damage to his emotional core that has been there since early childhood. That type of core damage can only be treated successfully in individual therapy provided by a psychologist who is trained to treat BPDers. Marriage counseling, in contrast, cannot help at all. Because a BPDer suffers from a thought disorder, he is unable to clearly perceive other people's intentions and motivations. Hence, teaching him better communication skills will usually only make him better at controlling and deceiving you. As to the individual therapy, it is rare for a BPDer to stay with it long enough to make a difference in his behavior.

I always made excuses for his behavior and every time he would hurt me I'd just try harder to please him.

As any ex-partner of a BPDer can tell you, it is very easy to fall in love with a BPDer and very painful and difficult to leave one. As to the "falling in love" part, that is so easy because a BPDer -- lacking a stable sense of who he is -- will mirror your personality for about six months when you are first dating him. It will make you feel like you have met your "soul mate." Moreover, because they have the emotional development of a four-year-old, they have a child-like warmth and passion that is "catnip" to caregivers like you and me.

 

As to the "hard to leave" part, we caregivers form an addictive relationship with BPDers because, when they are "good," they are good beyond anything we've experienced in another human being. Because a BPDer is unstable and does black-white thinking, he will flip back and forth between idealizing (i.e., adoring) you and devaluing (i.e., hating) you. As caregivers, we are mistakenly convinced that we somehow will be able to stop the bad periods.

He is now in therapy and has been diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

I hope I am mistaken about your H having strong BPD traits. It would be much better for him if he only has PTSD, which typically is more intense but much shorter lived than BPD -- and is far easier to treat. Whereas BPD occurs in early childhood and thus distorts the personality for a lifetime (or until treated), PTSD generally happens much later in life after the person has developed a strong personality and good sense of who he is. PTSD typically occurs in mature adults who are exposed to trauma in war, a physical assault, or an auto accident -- and thus usually produces flashbacks and nightmares -- but does not produce the fears of abandonment and engulfment, weak sense of self identity, lack of impulse control, and lack of trust, that I mentioned above for BPDers.

 

Significantly, unless you are certain your H had such a trauma after childhood and has suffered frequent flashbacks and nightmares, I would be suspicious of the PTSD diagnosis. Psychologists and other therapists usually will not tell a client that he has BPD even when that is the correct diagnosis. Instead, they typically give a "diagnosis" of PTSD or depression. One reason is that, whereas therapies for PTSD and depression are covered by insurance, therapy for BPD is rarely covered. The insurance companies usually claim it is "untreatable" -- not true. The real reason is successful therapy can take five years or longer and the chances are slim that a BPDer will stay in therapy long enough to make a real difference. So the companies are unwilling to spend the money.

 

A second reason for a therapist misrepresenting the diagnosis as "PTSD" is that the BPDer almost certainly will quit therapy on being given the dreaded diagnosis of BPD. And a third reason is that, with medical insurance being tied to nearly every client's employer, the therapists fear starting a written record that may harm the client at his current job or his prospects for a better job.

He ... wants me to give him another chance because he says it's not his fault that he's abusive.

Of course it is his fault. He could choose to confront his illness and learn to control it, but he declines to do so. Because a BPDer's emotional development is stuck at the level of a four year old, he has access only to the primitive emotional defenses of a young child. These include denial, projection, dissociation (e.g., daydreaming), all-or-nothing thinking, and magical thinking. Due to a BPDer's need to remain blameless, he relies heavily on projection, wherein he attributes all his bad thoughts and mistakes to you (or whoever else happens to be in the room). Of course, projection works to protect him from feelings of shame and regret only because it occurs at the subconscious level -- allowing his conscious mind to believe it really is true. This is why a BPDer can stand there and say outrageous things about you, all the while believing the nonsense coming out of his mouth. When that occurs, you are essentially talking to the four year old child in control of his mind. Reasoning therefore will not make a dent.

I feel that I'm being selfish but I'm emotionally and physically exhausted. Am I the world's biggest cow for not trying one more time?

No, not selfish. Rather, you are being HEALTHIER. The fact that -- after 14 years of cow-towing to his tantrums and abuse -- you are standing up for yourself and your son is a clear sign that you have grown stronger emotionally. What likely has happened is that, during the past year of separation, you strengthened your personal boundaries -- something that caregivers like us are loath to do. We have such a strong desire to be needed that we will keep helping someone even when it is to our great detriment to do so. That is, our desire to be needed far exceeds our desire to be loved. I therefore applaud you for building stronger boundaries that are essential for protecting yourself and your 6 year old son.

 

Yet, because it is so painful for you to stay away from a loved one who is sick (as your H seems to be), I strongly recommend that you read an article that clearly explains why it is important for you to do EXACTLY THAT, i.e., to leave the toxic relationship. It is at http://bpdfamily.com/bpdresources/10_beliefs.pdf. This article has given comfort to many people like you and me, who had to walk away from a toxic relationship. If you have any questions about BPD behavior, I would be glad to try to answer them, Lois. Please take care.

[Lois]

Downtown, I read your wonderful, informative post 3 times and I couldn't believe my eyes - you have described my husband precisely. It also reinforced the fact that I am doing the right thing by ending the relationship. I never thought I could walk away from someone who was "ill" but I know now that I can't help him, in fact I'm probably guilty of enabling him. He must be in hell.

 

Thank you for taking the time to respond to me, you have helped me more than you will ever know.

[Woggle]

It is very much his fault. I was horribly abused growing up and while I certainly do have some baggage and trust issues because of it I never use it as an excuse to abuse others.