Safe people radar

[Cypress]

My experience was that once I changed myself, stopped being controlling, trying to fix, all that codependent sh*t, the fight went out of our relationship. I realized that if we weren't fighting we were emotionally estranged and that my PTSD emotional avoidance was part of it.

If he is not hitting you, calling you a sl*t, struggling with addiction or stealing your money, maybe your relationship is safe enough to reflect on the only thing you can change- yourself.

Your name @HealingMama implies you have kids? If you do and he is the father, they need you to work this out.

 

[HealingMama]

My experience was that once I changed myself, stopped being controlling, trying to fix, all that codependent sh*t, the fight went out of our relationship. I realized that if we weren't fighting we were emotionally estranged and that my PTSD emotional avoidance was part of it.

If he is not hitting you, calling you a sl*t, struggling with addiction or stealing your money, maybe your relationship is safe enough to reflect on the only thing you can change- yourself.

Your name @HealingMama implies you have kids? If you do and he is the father, they need you to work this out.

I've done a lot of work on the anxiety based control stuff. A LOT.

The relationship is safe enough that I am not likely to be killed, but it is chaotic almost all the time. The stress has given me a chronic illness.

Yes we have kids. I think staying in a toxic relationship isn't necessarily in children's best interest. We have been to multiple marriage counselors. I'm working on my own stuff. I asked him to work on his own stuff. He's not really trying to grow or at least not at the same level. He has caused massive financial problems for our family and has done some traumatic things throughout the years. Don't want to give details but suffice it to say he causes a lot of chaos for me. He requires a ton of managing because he has executive functioning problems. I limit it to stuff that will directly put myself or the child in harm's way, but that means things are falling apart, breaking, taking way too long, and there's a string of broken promises all the time. So the relationship is incredibly strained and stressful and it's almost impossible to not control some aspects because he would destroy all practical routines, order and stability if I don't do any of that.

I have been reading this book Should I Stay or Should I Go that is meant to help women understand if their relationship is salvageable. I've been back and forth so much I need a structure to help me assess it.

I don't necessarily want to divorce but I need him to realize things can't stay the way they have been. I think a separation might help us both have space to address our issues. I honestly don't know how I can keep working on my trauma stuff when my marriage is regularly triggering it all. And when it's too easy for him to frame everything as my issues instead of owning his own. He's always got a bunch of excuses. And he doesn't hold back. He calls me names almost as soon as there's a disagreement. He walks out of the room when I'm speaking. He's very disrespectful. I can't make him change that. And I can't stomach stroking his ego and accepting that we have to gloss over everything real which is how he wants his marriage to be. Pretense and surface and everyone pretending things are ok while there's a dumpster fire in the background.

But yeah I am trying to exhaust every possible option before calling it quits because I don't want my child to have to deal with two homes.

Sorry to tell you sweetie but people lie and hide things all the time. There is no true way of knowing if anybody is "safe". It's a crap shoot. I wish it wasn't but it is.

Yeah, you're right. I just... Ugh, I don't know how to keep my heart open to people then. Its easier to just be celibate. Betrayal just hurts so bad. I was numb until my early 20s so I didn't really learn how to cope and buffer these kinds of emotional impacts and it's just really hard. My heart was closed, busted my butt in therapy to fix that. Now I wish I hadn't ever fixed it. It was so much easier to deal with let downs.

I don't think it's unusual at all. Take the rule that whoever you are attracted to run like hell and you'll be fine.

My very first trauma therapist explained to me what "being better" was going to look like and "seeing the people who would be good for me and being able to avoid the others" was part of it. I don't see it yet.

Yeah the pull of the familiar and the effort to complete the story with a different outcome is pretty powerful.

Unfortunately we cannot take what some people say at face value. My opinion is (for some, not all) we have become used to abuse or we minimize it or sometimes we don't know it's there.
People who we thought we could trust lie about everything.
I hope you stay safe. Sometimes clarity comes with patterns, example, a person may be very controlling and watching your every move and you had no idea.

This is not uncommon. I wish it were. Wishing you the very best, if that's okay with you.

You are correct. It's like the frog that is boiled to death but the water heater up so slowly the frog can't tell it's about to be cooked to death.

I agree sometimes there's a bunch of extra stuff going on that you couldn't see. Makes it really hard to have healthy, functional beliefs and willingness to trust anyone.

 

[Mach123]

My experience was that once I changed myself, stopped being controlling, trying to fix, all that codependent sh*t, the fight went out of our relationship. I realized that if we weren't fighting we were emotionally estranged and that my PTSD emotional avoidance was part of it.

If he is not hitting you, calling you a sl*t, struggling with addiction or stealing your money, maybe your relationship is safe enough to reflect on the only thing you can change- yourself.

Your name @HealingMama implies you have kids? If you do and he is the father, they need you to work this out.

Yes, this. I usually take a very hard line about staying married especially when there are children. Yes, the only person you can do anything about is you in any situation. Those things add up to being grown up. I've never been much good at it.

The redirection of attention onto getting yourself on track will take the weight off trying to make your partner fix everything which they can't.

They may or may not choose to go along with you, you have to do it anyway. We all do in the end. It's an inside job. Whatever you're getting out of the people around you you're helping create. Maybe more than helping.

Which is not to say I'll take all the blame and go back to beating myself to death lol. Start with little things. My wife and I fought like cats and dogs for thirty years.

We are working it out. It's still good.

 

[Gs172003]

My experience was that once I changed myself, stopped being controlling, trying to fix, all that codependent sh*t, the fight went out of our relationship. I realized that if we weren't fighting we were emotionally estranged and that my PTSD emotional avoidance was part of it.

If he is not hitting you, calling you a sl*t, struggling with addiction or stealing your money, maybe your relationship is safe enough to reflect on the only thing you can change- yourself.

Your name @HealingMama implies you have kids? If you do and he is the father, they need you to work this out.

Woah hold on....are you telling her because she isn't experiencing what you deem as "bad enough" she has no reason to leave? Or am I misinterpreting?

 

[Mach123]

Woah hold on....are you telling her because she isn't experiencing what you deem as "bad enough" she has no reason to leave? Or am I misinterpreting?

I'll say it if she isn't? What are the rules regarding divorce? Are there any? There are children involved.

 

[HealingMama]

Children need happy parents. A happy parent is a better parent. Children need modeling of healthy relationship skills. My partner isn't giving me the opportunity to model that for the children. He's giving me the opportunity to model toxic, mutually inconsiderate behavior, bad communication, unfair fighting skills, animosity, a household full of tension.

I've been trying to save my marriage for 5 years now. We have 2 weeks of good, max, before I get aggravated about something and he freaks out and responds really poorly to it.

There's no room for me to have reasonable concerns or get my emotional needs met by bringing them up. He used to hide in another room for like 3 days whenever I was trying to work through an issue with him. He's very bad at apologizing or showing remorse. He's even worse at making amends even for very egregious errors and hurts. He never treats my complaints as reasonable. Sometimes I find out after the fact that he believed my frustration was justified but he almost never treats it that way in the moment. He acts like anything I'm emotional about is me splitting. He acts like I just want to fight rather than be understood. He acts like he can give a very incongruent message where he sees how what he did hurt me but shows anger rather than compassion and expects me to let it go. He expects me to let everything go so he doesn't have to feel the normal pain of hurting someone you love. He's too busy protecting himself from his inner critic to respond I'm a prosocial manner in his marriage.

I don't really want to raise my biological child in a way that he learns this is how you treat a spouse.

 

[The Albatross]

I had to read it to learn about safe people and also how to address my own behaviors to be (consistently) one: Safe People: How to Find Relationships that are Good for You and Avoid Those That Aren't

 

[The Albatross]

Do children need "happy" parents? I would challenge that and myth bust it.

 

[HealingMama]

Do children need "happy" parents? I would challenge that and myth bust it.

They need healthy parents. I'm too wrapped up in my relationship problems to be my best self for my child. It is very difficult to just compartmentalize the conflicts. I want to resolve them. I can't hide that from my kid although we are very careful to not fight in front of the kid. I'm a better parent when my partner isn't around or I've given up on ever having a functional marriage. I don't think that's a good thing for my kid to see is how things work.

 

[The Albatross]

Do parent's need "happy" parents? You posted it above (#18) but substituted "healthy" above. Myth bust/examine core beliefs about "happy" and health being synonymous. Because they aren't.

 

[HealingMama]

When I say I've worked on my marriage for five years I mean that I facilitated marital counseling two separate occasions, sent my partner resources to help with communication and help him see that I'm not just making up my assertion that conflict avoidance taken to this extreme causes worse problems. I sought therapy for myself and got him into partial treatment for some of his issues. I requested that he facilitate treatment to address some of the other issues. When it wasn't happening I requested separate bedrooms as a perpetual reminder to him that I see us as on our last legs and I'm doing everything I can on my end to fix it but this is something he has to do on his end.

I've done everything except comply with how he wants relationship to work so that he has to do no growing of his own. I'm willing to compromise, but he has to meet me halfway. I definitely have major issues but I feel like I'm working hard to separate out what's a consequence of my issues and what's a reasonable expectation. When you have the specific type of issues I have, and you're with the type of self-absorbed person I'm with who has great difficulty taking on another person's perspective when they are feeling even small amounts of stress, it is unfortunately the case that a partner will tend to assume your frustrations are in your head rather than valid.

Do you honestly think I'm supposed to stay in a relationship where I'm basically gaslit more often than not because my complaints and anger are assumed to have no basis in reality and my partner is unwilling to default to "I must not have all the pieces here or I wouldn't just write her off as crazy"?

 

[Gs172003]

Do children need "happy" parents? I would challenge that and myth bust it.

I agree with that. Children need parents that learn to navigate the waters. However, abuse is abuse whether the name called is slut or not. Whether addiction is involved or not and whether it's physical or not. Et Al.