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Message: <blockquote data-quote="coraxxx" data-source="post: 1775219" data-attributes="member: 50212">Eh it's difficult to find it out. [USER=51442]@Anonymous92[/USER] I didn't mean to berate you or your husband my point is just that perception is irrelevant when it comes to examining risks.Perhaps I can make myself clearer by saying that for me engaging in violence has been engaging in a form of contact that made me feel closer or more connected, albeit in a profoundly twisted and dangerous way. That was shared by my ex with whom the escalation happened. At some point you get to kick each other's extreme responses and rodexing between complying, freezing/checking out, running away or fighting till death.Did we love each other? Yes. Was it a disaster? Yes. Is that my fault? Not so much so.However cognitive distortions like "he hugged me and it made me believe it was my assaulter so I had to respond in this and that way..." here is where it becomes a distortion. I know what you're talking about in fact it's exactly in that context that I did assault my first ex and that second ex did start to assault me. First ex was worried I would hurt myself so decided to override my will to get him off and I turned to do the very exact same thing with my ex, the only reason I wouldn't get off of him would be because I believed it was the best way to keep him alive, at the cost of my own safety. Then it escalated and became bonkers in other ways. But it's not even because you know something from one side that it helps you to be on the other side. Both situations are crap. We don't know how it feels on the other side. And even when we do, it doesn't mean we know how to respond. And it doesn't mean we should know how to respond, everywhere, every time.I'm sorry for the sex tentative that sounded really bad, cold and confusing. I'm under the impression for now what you need is just to be gentle with yourself. Even if you carousel back again with your husband, it's okay. It might not be the best thing to do but if you care for each other and are used to be close getting rid of the connection and physicality is really hard and isn't necessarily linear. You still have the right to care about each other, you have the right to kiss, show warmth and affection. No matter how crazy things went. It often feels like a bad movie repeating itself over and over, I've been through that so many times, but it's useless to judge oneself for failing to slam the door on everything at once even if it would be the rational thing to do. Hearts don't work that way. It's notorious that with DV it takes several serious attempts to separate for it to become effective.[USER=44157]@OliveJewel[/USER] and [USER=51403]@MnM[/USER] I'm not so sure about the codependency thing, I don't see as especially gendered. There are plenty of codependent guys. A codependent was first a term coined in addiction treatment to describe a spouse who would unwillingly enable the addiction or by extent any unhealthiness just by having poor boundaries or not knowing what to do and trying to compensate something they just can't do anything about. It's certainly possible to be codependent of each other.I guess an useful notion here would be perhaps the one of the locus of control? Like, you get to control yourself, your actions don't make others change unless they want to and do and other's actions don't make you change unless you want to and do. You can coerce someone into doing something but you can't make someone to feel this or that or to change this or that just because you want. Trauma can and often does result into a twisted locus of control since stuff seems to jump of your face and we're quick to think "what they did made me do this". Because we've been in fact coerced. But then it's hard to get out of that mindset. I read that in offender's accounts all the time, and often victims will go "it's because I'm bad I made them do this of that". Both affirmations are wrong but are meant to make a traumatic event affordable and not either a senseless manifestation of violence from someone we wished cared about us, either a shitty thing we did to someone else. One would make you question the sense of the world and the other one to question the sense of yourself, I guess the swap happens since the displacement puts that stuff one step further away from yourself and be psychically self protective. But then yea, twisted locus of control. It can happen in innocuous ways of for more damaging things. I tend to prefer it than codependency because it's broader and captures more of what I saw, felt and read than codependency alone, but that might be just me.</blockquote>

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