HTH,
Do you think he feels good for treating you this way? I doubt it. I think he may feel he has no choice but to teach you a lesson so that you don't have another affair. The lesson he teaches could last for decades.
I think this situation is likely to turn into physical abuse if this is allowed to continue.
When our now 11 year old son was 2, he paraded around our in-laws house, with his finger raised in a scold, saying "[censored] you." I got a chuckle out of that. Our in-laws didn't see this performance, and my husband picked up his son and said, "Don't you say that bad word." I was so much in an abuse fog that I thought this was funny -- the verbal abuse was so pervasive that it seemed normal.
A few years later, I wondered to myself how many times he said "[censored] you" to me, and so I counted: 42 times in one weekend. The next year was the broken arm and the affair.
That's my story. I was in an abuse fog and see some similarity to you. This gets worse if allowed to continue. You cannot change him. You can remove yourself from him. If he thinks you are worthless, remove yourself. Don't argue with him.
What helped me was to tell myself that NO ONE deserves this treatment, NO ONE. It's not that I'm so special ("You think you're so special" has been a favorite put-down of his). It's that I'm HUMAN.
This is not the path to emotional divorce. My husband has been nasty and I've told him I won't participate in this conversation, then he's come back and told me that I ignore what he says and dismiss his feelings, and then I have said that I will participate in a conversation that is pleasant for me. The key is to be receptive to a respectful husband and to withdraw from an unpleasant one.
You may go months with no conversation. Fine. Let that be. You need to be responsive to a husband who treats you well and remove yourself from one who doens't treat you well. And what is the definition of "treat you well". It is HOW YOU FEEL. Is this positive for me or is it negative for me?
One thing that has really helped me is that, in May, I decided to make one habit change per month that is in response to his complaints about my behavior in the present. I organized one room in the house per month and have kept in clean and neat ever since. When I get deluged with complaints, I can be calm and listen. I tell him that I am trying to be a better wife and need time to create new habits. This has nothing to do with a change in his behavior, but it sure helps me to hear and not be undone by complaint after complaint after complaint about how I'm late and the storage closet needs to be cleaned out and you aren't getting our son to practice trombone in the summer (that was a daily complaint all summer; I didn't want to get him to play because I have to pester him all summer).... What I have done is say that I need time to change habits but I am willing.
Just consider this... It's not that your husband is this horrible ogre. It's that he has a belief which is preventing him from caring for you. His belief is that you need to be punished for a horrible thing that you have done, and he's the one to punish you. There is no end to the punishment for an affair. I told my husband that I would have preferred a broken back or death to the pain of the affair, so I never got into that belief myself, but I did think he needed to change. What I didn't realize is that I cannot change him. He has to change himself.
I gave my husband no reason to change because I was so afraid of abuse that I did my best to meet his needs. Your husband has you bamboozled, too. Look at the situation. He can have SF whenever he wants. You don't ask him for anything. He's like a little dictator, with complete control in his marriage. There is a saying that applies here: "Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely." What you are seeing is the ugly side of humanity, something we are all capable of doing in certain circumstances.
It makes me nauseous to imagine what you are going through, except I don't have to imagine it. I saw how my father in law treated my mother in law. Contempt. Disdain. And here this woman was doing her level best to meet her husband's needs. 54 years of marriage. Unbelievable.
You can soften your change in approach to him by saying that you are hurt by what he is saying and need time to recover. Don't ask him to stop what he is doing.
By way of encouragement to you, my husband is treating me better. At least that's my perception. When he is nasty, I think to myself that this isn't about me. This is about him. And I remove myself quietly. I don't always need to announce it. I try in as unobtrusive a way as possible to end the conversation as quickly as possible.
Cherishing
Last edited by Cherishing; 09/25/07 11:21 AM.
