Question From Spouse

[Unaware]

My wife was diagnosed with Complex PTSD recently. We have been married for 28 years. The reason she has finally taken the step to get therapy is that I suffered an emotional breakdown 7 months ago caused by caustic emotional abuse in the early years of our relationship and her inability to accept my full range of emotions during our marriage.

She is the love of my life. Stupidly I tried to bury the early abuse. Up until recently I did not know that I was abused and where the abuse came from. Turns out she was sexually abused at 7 and her mother emotionally abused her beginning at age 9 until her mothers death 20 years later. She never told me about this. She never told anyone.

I reached crisis and reached out to a wonderful therapist who helped me work through most of my feelings. During the therapy I was angry and confused and lashed out at my wife on almost a daily basis.

I am still working through the feelings I have about her not opening up about what happened to her. I don't understand it and feel so betrayed.

She has begun therapy and is starting to understand how her past has affected her life decisions and the impact it has had on our relationship.

I am struggling with resolving all of this due to working through my emotions at a time when she is beginning to finally accept and work through hers. I have a high stress job that offers me little time to myself. I am trying to be supportive but feel so lost. My biggest fear is that deep down inside I will not be able to forgive her abusing me on top of her inability to tell me about her past so that we could have worked on it as a couple.

I would welcome any comments about my situation. We have spent our lives together and I don't want to throw away the years we have shared as a couple.

 

[NicG]

Welcome to the forum.

I'm sorry you've been suffering abuse from your wife. It must be very difficult to work through and it's great that you've turned to therapy for help! I hope you find some help here. Abuse in any situation is unacceptable, regardless of and individuals past or mental condition! Please in everything look out for your own safety and mental health as well... no matter how supportive you want to be for her, you can't be helpful unless you are taking care of yourself.

I am still working through the feelings I have about her not opening up about what happened to her. I don't understand it and feel so betrayed.

From a sufferer's perspective... her not telling you really isn't anything to do with YOU. I know it's hard to wrap your head around why someone you love and trust wouldn't tell you something so important, but PTSD changes the way our brains process trauma and function in our daily lives. There are times when we try to think about our trauma and just... can't. It's like there's a wall in the way and we can't get around it, and if we try everything goes fuzzy and we lose touch with the present. We have flashbacks that terrify us, and sometimes talking about our trauma can take us back to the moment it happened. There are some stories about my trauma that I literally CANNOT force out of my mouth... I can't talk about them to my best friends, my family, even my psychologist.

Also, especially with childhood sexual abuse, there's often a great feeling of guilt and shame. I'm sure she knows you well enough to know you aren't a hateful judgemental person, but that doesn't stop the constant fear that somehow the victim is "dirty" or "tainted" or worth less than everyone else. When you are that young, your brain is still forming and trying to understand the world around you, and if the information fed to you by the people you love/trust is that negative, you're going to start believing it.

I hope that helps a little. Best wishes for you and your wife's journey towards healing.

 

[Al_Lurker]

I'm not a sufferer but if it was me I'd try to face that biggest fear... Find the way to trust yourself and forgive yourself first.

I wish you the best on the journey.

 

[Lucycat]

I am still working through the feelings I have about her not opening up about what happened to her. I don't understand it and feel so betrayed.

I was married for 25 years before I opened up to my husband. I had to, because I had a breakdown - and yes I am now diagnosed with CPTSD and was sexually abused as a child.

I too have not been nice to my husband. Fortunately he has been able to walk away until I calm down. He has dealt with a lot and coped very well, but there was a time he had therapy too, as a result of my behaviour and at that point I did not accept it was me or understand why I was acting as I was. I have now been in therapy for 5 years and next year will be our 30th wedding anniversary. There were many times I did not think we could reach that point. It does get better, but there is no quick fix.

 

[Unaware]

Wow. I did not expect the kind of response that you have given me. The support this community is willing to give is overwhelming in a good way :).

I am 59 years old and nothing in my life has prepared me for this. All of the issues relating to this are so counter intuitive.

I have spent our entire marriage holding back feelings that she was not able to accept. She has major shame and guilt and abandonment issues as well as self esteem problems. I knew none of this as her "false self"(not sure if I am using the right term) was a confident, attractive women.

The hardest part for me now is that she still cannot accept my feelings. She does not experience the standard range of emotions due to her abuse. She really expects my feelings to just go away when she says she is sorry for what has happened.

I know that i have to protect myself and never want to go back to holding my emotions and feelings inside. I never want to suffer the kind of emotional unraveling that i had earlier this year. I got to the point of being suicidal.

The dilemma I face is finding a way to sort through my feelings without her. She is of course hyper aware of how I am feeling. She can detect when i am working through my issues and feels horrible and tries to "correct" the feelings. This of course is self defeating.

I want this to come out well. On the one hand I think that I may need time away from her to really heal. But I also know that leaving for a short period of time will unravel her.

Thanks again for all of the responses and all the advise. This group is amazing. It is wonderful when people care...even though they don't have to.

 

[BeatenMan]

Wow Unaware, you basically read my story back to me except that I somewhat knew the root of my wife's issues all along but spent a decade as a punching bag out of loyalty/duty to help her get better. I too had a total breakdown and as result deal with complex ptsd/trauma issues. I wish I had some profound advice for you bud but don't really have it. I know with me, It wasn't as much betrayal of not knowing the issue behind her behavior but I was searching for a reason for why I had to be the receiver of the abuse, that is where my anger and confusion came from. I think with time you will be able to tell if your wife is genuinely wanting to get better or if she is trying to hoover you back into your role in an abusive relationship. I know waiting is hard but its really the only way to know for sure but under no circumstances does she have the right to abuse you. In the mean time, you deal with healing your scars and let her deal with hers. You cant fix these things in marriage counseling, the marriage can be focused on later when there are two somewhat stabile individuals.

 

[scout86]

From what you've said, I might be a little like your wife. Except that I don't think I've ever gotten angry about anyone else's feeling, or expected them not to have them. I tend, more, to just miss the point that there IS anything going on and have tended to get involved with people who aren't open and honest about their feelings anyway.

I'm curious, You said

She really expects my feelings to just go away when she says she is sorry for what has happened.

After she says she's sorry, what's ":supposed" to happen next? Do your feelings change at all, as a result of the apology? What would you like from her? Should she continue to apologize? How long? What do you need from her, best of all possible worlds, in order to move on? Maybe those are stupid questions. I honestly don't know the answers, from the perspective of a "normal" person. Any thoughts?

 

[Unaware]

BeatenMan,
I had the same feelings about myself. I let her beat me up, but I fell in love with her at a level I did not know that existed. That love has continued all 28 years. My wife has a side to her that is amazing. Everyone notices it. My children adore her. I have never stopped loving her and doubt I ever will. In the beginning of my breakdown she did want to go back to the "way it was". She now realizes that we cannot. I have changed. I simply will not let her abuse me anymore. Now getting her to acknowledge my feelings.....that is another story.

Scout86,
I need her to understand that my feelings about what has happened cannot change overnight. Heeling from this is a process, not an event. I feel very betrayed and the betrayal will take time to go away. Only time will help me to regain trust in the relationship. The apology acknowledges both the abuse and the fact that she probably should have told me about her past in a more revealing fashion along time ago. But it cannot heal the wounded part of me that hurts both because she abused me, and I was living in a world where I did not know the rules. Imagine waking up and after 28 years of marriage and you realize that you have been hurt over and over again by something that you did not know even existed. Talk about a sucker punch.....

 

[scout86]

Imagine waking up and after 28 years of marriage and you realize that you have been hurt over and over again by something that you did not know even existed.

I'm trying to imagine that and literally can't. My take on things is that, if I don't know it exists, it can't hurt me.

I have trouble understanding the feeling of betrayal too. Because of my own background, there are a couple things related to sex that I have problems with. In that kind of relationship, I tell my partner that much, and make a vague reference to the reason, but I've never given any details. I was married for 12 years. Granted to a guy that my T suspects was a narcissist, a psychopath, or both, but he never even seemed to be curious about the reasons. Do I owe a "significant other" details? That's not the way I see it, but I'm only seeing it from my own point of view. How does it look from your point of view?

To me, the question of telling someone or not, has some to do with how much I trust them, but is more of a "need to know" kind of thing. If I don't have to tell someone, the details are better left unsaid, from my point of view. Bad enough that I lived it, no one else needs to hear about it, especially not someone I love. Maybe a potential partner has a right to know that I'm "damaged goods"?

 

[Unaware]

I feel that if we love someone we owe it to them to reveal who we are. The point of a loving relationship is finding someone that accepts us for who we are. We are accepted and loved as we exist, not as someone we want to be. That is the point of a falling and staying in love to me.

I love my wife. In the beginning of our relationship I tried to get her to talk about what her life was like before me. Essentially I was lied to and misdirected. In her defense her mother had just died. I am sure that she may have thought it would all go away now that she was dead as she was The abuser. As part of this whole scenario I have lost all respect for my late father in law. He stood by and watched it all happen.

Scout86 you are an individual. There is no one like you on the planet and never will be. As I said above my wife has a side to her that is amazing and that is what attracted me to her. Had she told me in the beginning what had happened to her I would been compelled to help her in any way that I could.
If someone loves you....then revealing your pain is a good thing, not a bad thing. Please be who you are as you are. That would have made such a difference in the last 28 years for both my wife and myself.

Posting on this board was very hard for me to do. But somehow this has made a big difference in my day.

 

[scout86]

@Unaware, you've given me some things to think about. Thank you. I hope that maybe, someday, I'll actually believe that someone could love the real me.

Think about it. As I understand it, for most people, the one person in the world who is guaranteed to love them and accept them as they are, no matter what, is their mother. What does it mean when even your own mother doesn't love and accept you? Where do you learn what a loving relationship is, if you don't learn it as a child?

I've actually thought a lot about the "being who you are" thing from a different perspective. With my ex, and in most of my relationships, I've "gone along to get along" and never expected my feelings to count. Eventually things got to the point of being intolerable and I left. Had I expected that "i" actually counted from the start, those relationships wouldn't have happened, and that would have been better. I'm not at all sure that there would have been other, better relationships in their place, but at least we'd all have been spared those bad relationships.

I guess what I'm hoping is that you can find a way to not take your wife's lack of disclosure personally. She, and I, have a different road map of reality than you do. My T says we all have our own road maps and that that is ok, but to remember that they are all just maps. None of them are "reality".

 

[MorningDove]

This is truly heartening to read how you are trying. My husband recently left me just as I was waking up to the way I was treating him. We were working through things and I know I was hard to live with but was trying to get a grip on my patterns. Therapy would have helped immensely but he felt the twelve years and all we had behind us were not worth it. Will write more later-work is calling.