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HelcatParticipantHi Anita
Thank you for your understanding! I hope that you have a good day. I look forward to talking more tomorrow.
Love and best wishes, always! ❤️🙏
HelcatParticipantIt is hard for me that he struggles with setting boundaries. I can understand why he cares about people and had a childhood where he wasn’t allowed to set boundaries with family.
I’m a loyal person. I have ended friendships because people showed a romantic interest in me or because they were rude about him. I even set boundaries with my adopted mother because she said that she didn’t want to see him. I said that if you don’t want to see him, you don’t want to see me. I don’t let people disrespect my husband.
HelcatParticipantHi Anita
I agree. I have made my mistakes too.
There is an update to that situation with my husband’s female friend.
She complained to my husband about me politely setting boundaries with her “Please don’t talk to my husband about your sex life. Thanks” was what I said and I also reassured her and comforted her.
She tried to manipulate him. She said that I attacked her. That I was trying to get rid of her and that I would try to get rid of other people he cared about next. She said that I was worse than her abusive husband.
My husband told me about this and when I asked if he defended me he lied and said no.
I snapped and told her that I changed my mind about her offer not to speak to him. Something that she suggested before and I previously turned down. I told her that it wasn’t okay to disrespect people’s wives because she was having a breakdown.
It turns out that he lightly defended me and said that I wasn’t usually like this.
He has been angry about this. I can understand why. She was a friend. I have been at my limit with everything for a while.
After the sex life discussion I told him that I wouldn’t tolerate any disrespect from her. And she went and behaved like that. I know that what I did wasn’t right, but things are hard enough without her interfering.
Love and best wishes, always! ❤️🙏
HelcatParticipantHi Anita
You are very special! ❤️ I’m sorry to hear that you haven’t been sleeping well again. I hope that tonight is easier.
It is hard to suffer from the far reaching effects of child abuse.
I don’t know what my husband is covering in his therapy. I wouldn’t ask about such a private thing. He has started to take breaks during disagreements for himself since starting therapy. I am hopeful that as he appreciates the benefits for himself, he will understand the behaviour more, feel less threatened by it and be more open to me taking breaks.
Thank you for sharing all of your thoughts and the information on fears of abandonment.
He tends to want to continue disagreements and arguments for too long for me. He is a naturally loud person, so raises his voice sometimes. He tends to follow me if I try to walk away. He tends to threaten to leave me and say mean things when he’s angry. He never used to say things like that before. It’s been hard.
Love and best wishes, always! ❤️🙏
HelcatParticipantHi Anita
My husband gave me permission to do what I need to do to regulate my emotions. It’s basically the break situation again. He didn’t want me to do it before because he was afraid I was trying to end the relationship.
He’s not taking me putting boundaries in place very well.
It is hard having to be strong and deal with things by myself. I hope that it will help though. I wish that things weren’t so hard. It is difficult because getting out of this pattern between us requires complete emotional self control.
Love and best wishes, always! ❤️🙏
HelcatParticipantHi Anita
The always is just for you! I’m sorry I forgot the emojis. It was late at night.
Love and best wishes, always! ❤️🙏
HelcatParticipantHi Laven
End of life care is extremely difficult for carers and significantly affects their mental health. I urge you again to get the professional support that you deserve and need.
My first job, I had a customer come in and she spoke to me like I was her daughter. I didn’t want to upset her, so I pretended to be her daughter. My coworker said that she does it all of the time and that her daughter died. Lots of people don’t get the support they need.
Love and best wishes! ❤️🙏
HelcatParticipantHi CutieJ
Well done on controlling your emotions and behaviour despite another lie. You are right, she has treat you terribly. It is awful to leave someone waiting outside of a house with no place to go. You would not have succeeded if not for your willingness to reflect on your own mistakes and improve. You were aware of the situation, you were aware of your difficulties and you were able to prepare and successfully managed your emotions and behaviour.
There was mutual abuse in this relationship. You didn’t deserve to be abused by her, nor she you. Your childhood is the reason you stayed in this unhealthy relationship, it is the reason you have difficulty managing your emotions and behaviour. You need to get to the point where when someone treats you badly you can leave.
Love and best wishes! ❤️🙏
HelcatParticipantHi Anita
Please don’t worry. I’m not upset. You haven’t done anything wrong. You have been kind and helpful. I understood what you meant about to be human is to make mistakes that hurt other people. It is very kind of you to make sure that I understood though. I appreciate that because I can take things literally.
You never hurt your mother Anita. I’m so sorry she did all of those horrible things. She was a monster. It was all in her head.
You are free to write anything you want here. I don’t mind you sharing your experiences.
Yes, pleasing our parents is the impossible struggle.
I don’t think that she tried to protect herself from you. It might have been what she said but the only person she was fighting was herself and you bore the brunt of that. She abused you horribly because of imaginary slights that never existed.
Yes, I’m sorry for all of the abused children too. Thank you for your kind regards.
Love and best wishes to you, always!
HelcatParticipantHi Anita
I’m sorry to hear that your mother was so abusive and unreasonable. You didn’t deserve to be treat like that. You deserved to be treat with love and care.
I feel like my mother was more direct with her concerns. But she kind of used them as excuses. She would beat my brother and I for being loud, or if we squabbled, for being messy. These kinds of things that children do. There were a lot of rules that she had for us. We were not even allowed to eat without her permission. We were not allowed to use the TV without permission. With all of these rules it was easy for her to find an infraction and make up a “reason” to beat us.
I responded to this with perfectionism. Growing up I would review the mistakes made each day and try to get everything right the next day. I had magical thinking because I was a child. I hoped that if I got everything right, she wouldn’t beat us. A foolish belief, but expected from a child.
I feel like you experienced, my husband’s family didn’t make sense with their complaints. He would do things that weren’t wrong and be beaten for them. They had their reasons, but they were not reasons a child would understand. My husband’s home country is very dangerous. They wanted to toughen him up and protect him and had a level of control over him. He grew up being told that everyone will try to hurt him and he cannot trust anyone. As well as the difficulties with neurodivergence, I also believe that he has difficulties setting boundaries with people, especially people that he cares about.
Love and best wishes, always! ❤️🙏
HelcatParticipantHi Anita
Much love! ❤️
Thank you for your thoughtful message. I will need to reply tomorrow because I am falling asleep. I love the red wine comment. 😊
Love and best wishes, always! ❤️🙏
HelcatParticipantHi CutieJ
I can explain a bit for you about the effects of breaking things. As you said, the picture frame was a gift, so there is an emotional element to breaking it. It is not just giving it back to her, it’s destroying it. Also, with any violence during a disagreement even towards objects carries a threat of violence towards the person witnessing it because the person is out of control. It could happen to them next. And in this case it did, you shook her.
I understand that it hurts to think about. That is where a touch of denial comes in to soften the blow. You have made mistakes, but you can learn from them.
I’m sorry to hear that your father had a tendency to break things when he was angry in your childhood. That must have been very hard for you.
Therapy takes a long time for the kind of trauma you have. If you think about it, for how long did you live with these difficulties going on around you? It takes time to undo that. You are open to seeing the harm caused by your actions shows your willingness to reflect. You haven’t been defensive about it. You have been remorseful.
Personally, I feel like she was being cruel and mocking you about your therapy. Just because therapy takes time doesn’t mean that it isn’t worth doing. Her unwillingness to go to therapy is more about her unwillingness to change than it is about you.
You have a good level of insight into the reasons behind your actions (likely because of your therapy). You mentioned feeling tired of everything before the violence started. In the future, learning to take a break can be helpful to calm down.
I truly believe that you can overcome the unhealthy behaviours that you learned in your childhood. I know that you don’t want to be like this. Stick in therapy contrary to your ex, I do believe that you have had some benefits from it.
The reason why someone can hug you one day and not do that the next day is ultimately that they are feeling hurt.
She doesn’t want to discuss heavy things because she is afraid of fighting again.
You are still young. Honestly, healing does take time. A normal, happy life sounds like a great goal.
Love and best wishes! ❤️🙏
HelcatParticipantHi Laven
I’m sorry to hear that you are suffering so much. Unfortunately, I am not qualified to speak to someone who is suicidal, it can be rather dangerous for people when they are not in the right hands you see. I urge you to seek professional help who is qualified to assist you. I hope that you write back soon, when you are feeling better.
Love and best wishes! ❤️🙏
HelcatParticipantHi Anita
Love right back to you! ❤️ I love your ideas too. I think that we should work on that during couples counselling.
Yes, it is very special that he loves me. Aside from my therapists, he was the first person to show me unconditional love. His love taught me to love myself. If I didn’t have that experience with him, I would not be able to cope with disagreements.
Can you tell me more about the emotional chart idea? What do you mean by that? Flashcards with emotions?
Starting with love is a good idea because it is the easiest place to do that. I would like to hold hands during disagreements too. If possible. Starting with love, holding hands and ending with love sounds really nice.
I showed him this thread during a disagreement before I read your most recent message and I think it really helped him see me. It has been a long time since I felt like that. We did end with love too!
Yes, he is sensitive to criticism I think. More so than me. It has taken me a long time to understand how sensitive he is to it. I think that it is hard for him that I am sensitive and feel hurt sometimes by things that he does. He feels hurt that I feel hurt when he didn’t mean to hurt me. If that makes sense?
It is also hard for him that I focused on the baby for so long. It takes a while for me to process things and I have a one track mind. There is a backlog of stuff to process about our relationship. So he feels like it is a lot understandably.
Thank you so much for everything. You are helping more than you know and I am so grateful. ❤️
Love and best wishes, always! ❤️🙏
HelcatParticipantHi John
Thank you for sharing your insights. I’m happy for you that you discovered Buddhism. Would you like to share how it was a life altering experience for you?
As an ex-language teacher I think that is the problem. As social intelligence creatures, we need to communicate and language is imperfect. Society and time of course change things. Which behaviours are and aren’t considered socially acceptable. This influences the way that we feel about things. But it is always the same behaviour. The same behaviour in different contexts can have a different meaning too. Fascinating stuff!
I get what you mean when you say different. That is what I meant when I said unique. See what I mean about how people interpret language. 😂
Love and best wishes! ❤️🙏
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Though I run this site, it is not mine. It's ours. It's not about me. It's about us. Your stories and your wisdom are just as meaningful as mine. 