I guess I was trying to say that when he's trying to exert his will like that, give him what he really wants. Tell him you think he's a good man, or that you appreciate that he's been trying to meet ENs and showing that he cares for you. Perhaps that wiill satisfy and he'll be comfortable with letting you lay there. You'll get your peace and quite. A win-win?

And being O&H is not a DJ, and I think you're right regarding how to do it. In the Boundaries book, they state that setting a boundary will often hurt the ones you love, but it will never harm them. Our loved way may not understand and reset us for it, but the truth is better then a lie, right? I tend to think of it alot like parenting. Sure, our kids are hurt when we discipline us, and they are likely to resent us for it, but in the end they are the better for it.

OH - sorry if I missed something - but have you told (verbally) your H how bad his AOs, DJs and SDs make you feel? And, if it's true, that you're not prepared to stay in the M feeling like that for much longer? Let alone 'hang with' or have sex with him?

It's important information for him, I'd have thought, and he seems to discount letters and emails.

I told my W this and it kinda worked. I still wonder if a separation might have worked better.

Harley writes quite a bit about abusive marriages (did you read the articles?), and about separating until the offender can guarantee a marriage free of LBs. He's looking at separation as a prelude to a reconciliation, not necessarily divorce. He say a long separation is often needed to unlearn bad habits.

I'm wondering if your H is inured to your talk of divorce and separation.

From here it seems you're trying to rein in your LBs, not always managing, and suffering mightily from your H's ones.

H sounds very frustrated with most of his life.

I said before I thought MB was a bit weak on dealing with abuse. Evans' book The Verbally Abusive Man I found useful as a catalogue of abuse and an aid to recognising and responding to it.

Harley does give some rejoinders to DJs (e.g. "I don't like to be criticised" or "I don't like the way you said that")

But nowhere to my recollection does Harley advise toughing it out and dealing with or coping with LBs in the long term. He's clear they have no place in a good marriage.

5 has a good point. You have already crossed this bridge!

He KNOWS how you feel! He knows you want him out if you can't get along. But he persists in NOT changing. Why? Because he knows you won't kick him out. He knows he is stronger than you. That you hate confrontation and choose letters, so he has you over a barrel. He'll just keep on being himself, because you won't do anything about it.

How about packing his suitcase for him and giving him a list of apartment complexes in the area? Telling him you gave him X weeks back, and nothing has changed; in fact, it has gotten worse. So you stand by your word - it's time to separate.

Your kids will never benefit from this situation as it is.

5/6: I have told H verbally and my statements are usually met with "well, that's your version of the truth" or "you are manipulating the truth for your own benefit and making your perception the reality" or "you're wrong" or "I didn't mean it that way" or occasionally "I'm sorry but..." (which isn't an apology). So I went to email as it felt safer for me. When we talk verbally, I have attempted to tell him that it's not my "version" of the truth, it is my perception and that for me and anyone, perception IS reality. My feelings are my feelings and they are neither right or wrong.

This usually degrades into an argument about how I"m going to use my perceptions to bulldoze my opinions on him. That's when I decided to withdraw and use email or letters but he's said he hates those too.

The separation issue came up last fall when we were still in MC. I said that I wanted a 'supervised' separation; that is, one with the guidance of a marriage counselor and some agreed upon rules such as no dating, continued counseling, etc. The counselor didn't disagree but he said I was getting ahead of myself. Then he asked H what he wanted and he agreed. But of course, we don't have the money to maintain two households so that sort of morphed into him going to Oregon and that morphed into his three week 'vacation'. In the meantime, my insurance changed, the counselor never responded to whether or not he was able to work with us in some way since he was not a provider on my new insurance so we've been without MC since last November. But I was ready to toss in the towel with that counselor anyway.

So now here we are--he's back from Oregon with no definitive plan other than "home feels like the right place to be. I'm going to concentrate all my job hunting efforts out there but it's going to be impossible to do that from here. I need a 'boots on the ground' strategy." So we brainstormed that last week and came up with some ideas and I suggested he put a timeline together and he's not done anything on that since over a week ago. He also made a statement about how he wants to be the hero that gets us all back to the PNW "where we belong". Now I don't disagree that I miss that area of the country but it felt as though he'd totally discounted my opinion of doing what's right for our family and the kids if/when we make this move. I have a job here and it seems silly to quit it and move to an area of the country where the economy is worse. My oldest gradautes this year and the next oldest is in 9th grade. I don't want to move him if he's in his junior or senior year (H agrees), yet it's going to take that long or longer if we go with the 'boots on the ground, find, get and keep a job for a period of at least six months to show stability'.

And even if we were to do this, we'd be separated but with no discussion of rules, etc., and no counselor to guide us. It feels like a royal f-up in the making.

:: So he's upstairs having another sh**ty day. Slamming doors and drawers and muttering to himself. I ask him what's wrong. "EVERYTHING IS WRONG". Is there anything I can do to help? "IT'S BEYOND HELP". Is there something *I* said or did to make it worse? "NO AND IT'S NOT ALL ABOUT YOU".

So I retreat down to the basement office. But now I'm mad. If the tables were turned, you can bet I'd hear an earful about just settling down and not having the right to take my crap out on him.

What I really want is to say:

"Ok, I want a separation. I want a separation of at least one year and for us to agree not to date others in that period and to agree to try to work on the issues of our relationship to see if we can recover and improve. If you feel differently, let's talk about it; see if we can come up with a solution. But I can't do.this.any.more."

Print this paragraph out, hand it to him, and go back downstairs.

OH, the thing is, you have to be more forceful. I don't mean be a beech. I mean, plant your legs, look him right in the face, and tell him you will no longer make your decisions based on how mad he is. That time has passed.

Abusers get what they want by intimidation. You know that, right? It is all he knows.

You will have to make it clear you will NO LONGER let that intimidation rule the household. You want him out. Today.

Normally, I tell people to keep fighting for the marriage. But you two are caught in such a quicksand that I can't see you getting out of it without a year apart. I just can't. You are both too entrenched in your misery.

Tell him you need him to leave.

So how do I respond to:

Where am I supposed to go? The homeless shelter?

You are going to keep pushing until you get your way?

And so on.

He's not going to slink off with his tail between his legs. He's going to take this as an invitation to a fight. And I don't want to fight.

I dont' know if I'm brave enough to print out that paragraph right now. I might do something wishy-washy like tell him (or email him) that my response to his angry outbursts is to withdraw. I've tried not withdrawing but it only results in my feeling worse or somehow provoking an arugment so I need to just withdraw and be by myself and I would like him to respect that.

That will probably start a fight too.

ETA: Update. He had to borrow my car to head to the pharmacy. His is in the shop--tailpipe fell off yesterday. So he slammed around before he left. Said he didn't have enough cash on him to pick up my prescription so he picked up his own. Slammed his way out the door after conversation, see above posts. Came home and slammed his way home. He's upstairs walking around, muttering and slamming doors again.

And I'm trying to work. Geez.

What about asking him to leave for the day? Heck make him a hotel reservation and ask him to come back when he's better. You have a job to do and kids to take care of and his actions are making it very difficult to do.

Do you have a friend or pastor or someone you can ask to come over and help with asking him/telling him to leave?

OH, I'm worried about you. I feel like you're one step over the precipice. And all you know to do is get angry, and that won't work here. You need to be calm, resolved, and confident that you're doing the right thing for your family.

I don't care where you go today. I only want you gone. You have not held up your end of our agreement. I want you gone.

Just keep repeating that.

Do NOT let him bait you into an argument! He knows that that is how he wins! Don't do it! "I don't care where you go. I only want you gone."

And if he digs his heels in, you can call the police, whoever you need to, and tell them whatever you need to tell them to get him to leave.

Where is IAgree when you need him?

OH, I was stuck for a long time in the "I need to lovingly detach, but I'm afraid that he will be unfaithful if he's not accountable to me with his time." I have read that article that I linked for you yesterday many times over the years, and Dr. H does address that concern, but I still held on to that fear.



IAgree is giving you great advice, but his personal experience was a little different than yours, in a way that gives you an option that wasn't open to him. When you did the Plan A the kids and 180, where you back off from him, he liked that, didn't give you a problem when you went to bed, and demonstrated how much he liked it by hugging you in your sleep instead of waking you, a huge shift to new behavior in response to your huge shift. I hope you find something in that plan to be enthusiastic about. But on the other hand, when IAgree made the same shift, to let go of the rope, and stayed in the same room playing his guitar instead of fighting over the TV channel, his partner got furious. "Why aren't you paying attention to ME?" Huge consistent and escalating change-back behavior. There were many other examples too, and I'm giving you the more mild ones. She would follow him in a car when he walked away from an argument. It kept escalating until his safest option was to leave.

I think your H is different from this, OH. I don't know if he will or will not respond by meeting your ENs, OH, but I do think he will continue to respond to your changes by not fighting with you. If he doesn't ask you to go upstairs to help him work out his anger, then please give him the space and the respect to work it out by himself.

You keep saying that he gets mad that you don't spend enough time with him. Your own trial and error has shown you that he isn't expecting you to interact with him or anything, just simply be your happy, confident new self that you are aiming for, too. I know it can be hard to be calm when someone was slamming around a few minutes ago. But if you give yourself a half an hour doing something you want to do, like Stosny's "Improve, Connect, Appreciate or Protect," then you may well be just fine spending the rest of the evening being yourself again. AmIOk did an amazing amazing job Plan Aing her kids, setting her boundary of a Only Room for Two People in a Marriage, and then recovering their marriage together. I believe in you, OH, that you can be a success story, too.

Ears, thank you for pointing out that IAgree had a different situation. I think you are right and it was getting difficult for me to read his posts because I knew he was writing them with the filter of abuse. Not that I give H a clean slate in this regard--he is very prone to using verbal abuse because I think anger is his primary motivator in life and so far, it's usually gotten him his way--in our marriage and in his life.

We just had an interesting discussion. Yes, this is a DJ, but it's also a fact. My husband is one seriously screwed up guy. And I can't fix him. I have to stop trying. I am happy to be his sounding board (respectfully). I am happy to offer up ideas and opinions when asked. And I have to figure out where to draw that boundary so that his anger doesn't take us down with him.

Mostly he talked (more like ranted, but at least he had stopped yelling at me since I told him I wasn't going to listen to a volume level that hurt my ears). He told me some interesting things. He keeps beating himself up over past disappointments, past decisions he feels were bad ones and blames all that for where he is today. He even went back to his first marriage and how all his friends couldn't stand her but her married her anyway and all his friends backed away from him and that was a big part of why he wanted to leave Oregon in the first place--even after he'd met me.

So he ranted about all of this-getting fired 8 years ago, marriage on the rocks, bankrupcty, having to sell our house, not being able to give me the things he wanted to give me, etc. And I listened. I asked him questions and didn't offer opinions until he said he didn't want to answer questions anymore, he wanted to know what I thought. So I said that I thought he needed to leave the past be and work on the here and now. Use his anger as a motivator. Stop expending energy trying to complain or fix things over which he has no control (the economy, the people who live here, etc.).

Certain things were typical H responses. At one point he said that there would never be any retirement. IF he were able to get us back on our feet, we had kids to send to college and then we'd be just the two of us--"like this. That's what I have to look forward to?"

So at that point I said "ouch. It was very rough for me to hear that" And of course he went off on a rant about how 'once again I opened up to you and once again you slap me in the face with it'. And I didn't budge. I stood my ground on my right to emotional honesty. I said 'it hurt my feelings and rather than sit on it in resentment, I felt it best to tell you.' He ranted and grumbled about that a bit more and then I tried to tactfully move him past it. I also took the opportunity to tell him about how I truly wanted to be by myself on the couch last night and his response was "fine, I'll just leave you there next time and not try to help." Once again, I refused to let myself be engaged and stuck to my 'it's my promise that I will be open/honest with you.'

That got him started on a rant about how he didn't want to 'work on our relationship. I just want our relationship to be. I don't want to read books, websites, learn buzzwords, etc." So I said that no one was asking him to do that; it was my choice to do this on my own. And he said 'but I'm not going to know what you're talking about--'I statements/you statements'--unless I read the f--ing books."

We also talked a bit more about trying to make decisions for the now and about Oregon and how I didn't feel comfortable pulling the whole family out of our lives here until if/when I knew he was able to put all the pieces of the puzzle of his life together out there. And that in the meantime, he should concentrate on the stuff that makes him feel good--helping his mother, talking to friends--to override the stuff that makes him feel bad but is necessary--job hunting.

I kept myself calm and collected.

I'm no more emotionally invested in this marriage than I was before this discussion. In fact, probably less so. But I was able to give him a hug at the end. I think he needed it.

OH? I hope you won't be offended, but I'm having a hard time NOT seeing your relationship with him like a parent/teenager one.

If you had a teenager who was having a bad day upstairs, swearing and tromping around, you wouldn't assume that he was taking it out on you. You'd just assume he was having a bad day. And you certainly wouldn't go upstairs and say "Is there something *I* said or did to make it worse?"

There's a good chance he's deflecting, imo. He could be diverting attention away from the fact that he isn't job hunting or is having no luck and trying to pull a fast one by steering your attitude in the direction of concern and worry rather than disappointment and subsequent confrontation over the real issues.

I fear that you've been dealing with manipulation so long that it feels normal to you.

Soolee, a good point.

When I read this, though, I instantly think of my H. He does exactly the same thing. Exactly. Storms. Rants. Bangs. Slams. All waiting for me to come see what's wrong. When I don't, he brings it to me. Like that kid in the tantrum video. It IS about her. He wouldn't be shouting if he knew she wasn't in the house.

The fact is, he IS taking it out on her. He IS waiting for her to see what he's doing, both to deflect like you say, but also to regain control. If he can keep her concerned that he isn't happy, she will make no demands on him. That's what controllers do - they keep changing the dance so you don't have time to succeed; if you do, they just change the dance again so you have to start all over.

That said, I'm glad he was honest with OH. I don't expect him to change overnight. In fact, I don't expect him to change AT ALL unless he moves out and stops all these manipulative habits for a good year.

I noticed that you are using "Need to" again Next time, how about thinking, "What do I want?" "I want you to come up with a plan, using whatever resources *you* find relevant. I want you to set up some accountability for yourself that *you* find relevant on this plan. If you're interested, that online board I go to is very effective at holding my feet to the fire! I look forward to hearing what you come up with!"

ETA: How about asking him, does he want help brainstorming solutions?

Ears, right now, I just want to let it rest. I'm too emotionally exhausted from this morning---our conversation, his ranting, etc. I'm just not into approaching him about anything at the moment.

ETA and yes, Cat and others, I am worried about my own mental health. For the first time, I find myself teetering on the brink of full-blown depression. The signs are there.

I didn't mean right now. Most of the stuff I say isn't something I think you need to run and do at the moment. LA gave me a lot of great stuff to say, that I could draw on as self-talk and drive-by O&H months and years after. I hope most of what I say would be others' ripples, because I've been so fortunate to have some awesome mentors, who have been tested by fire and came out stronger.

Cat, I like the tantrum anology. That cracks me up.

OH, don't let yourself get into a depression state. Keep your boundaries up strong and try to think that he can't hurt you unless you let him.

I don't know if this is right at all, but I keep thinking there's a way to give him what he needs, while keeping up the boundaries. IMO, the fact that he can open up and admit that he will say how poorly he things of himself is very important. I think you're right that he needs to forget about the past, but I don't know that he can do that till he can forgive himself for his past mistakes. And perhaps it might help if he knew that you forgive him? I don't know if you could do that, but at the very least he should know that you're still here, so atleast a part of you believes in him. Better yet, you told him how he can make things better with you.

His navel seems to be the center of his universe right now. I don't say that as a DJ--I understand that he's completely overwhelmed with all the pressures he faces--both outside and those he's put on himself--and how his sense of self has suffered since his job loss of 2002! Even though he's had his own carpentry/contracting business since then, completed some freelance marketing projects, was a football coach, was an account manager for a design firm and a new business development associate for a contracting company, and had one or two other part time jobs since 2002, he discounts all of this and is stuck on this job loss from 2002. Worse, he is digging in his heels re: his job skills and the need to update them. He says he doesn't want to have to use the social marketing/web 2.0 component of marketing and product development. He just wants to do what he knows--make money for companies by being a CMO or marketing officer.

Professionally, (and I'm in the same line of work, so this is NOT a DJ), I think he's missing the point here. It's the old 'adapt or die' rule. But I don't know how to suggest that to him, hence my gentle prodding to consider other avenues of work.

Today was the first time I didn't mentally flinch when he gave me the "you just threw that back in my face" routine. I'm not sure I'll ever be very good at setting effective boundaries but for right now, I'm working on detaching emotionally when he goes off on a rant so that I don't get angry and dragged into a fight.

I'm not at all sure what he wants. He seems to want to turn the clock back and won't consider that he can still recoup and create a great life if he moves forward. And my depression comes from my fear of getting stuck/mired in that. I don't want to go down with his ship.

No, OH, those days are over. No more going down with the ship for you (((OH)))

OH, this is very important. As I suspected, he hates HIMSELF, not you. He needs to know that YOU don't hate him, too.

That said, I still think he needs to move out. JMHO

Remind me: does he belong to the American Marketing Association? Are you near a big city? We have so many different meetings to attend here in Houston I can't catch them all. And almost all of them are mini-seminars that teach you how to market better (such as how to do email newsletters). If nothing else, if he started adding these 'classes' to his resume, he would start looking more current.

Did you read The Dance of Anger? It might help you to remind yourself how to stay strong during change back! behavior. Tiny book, quick read.