Dear Emma,

I don’t want to minimize your husband’s suffering in any way, but it occurred to me that his extreme sensitivity and reactivity to certain scenes on TV is a little bit like having allergy to certain foods. When someone is allergic, they have an extreme negative reaction to things that other people have no reaction to whatsoever. In fact, other people can even like those same foods that the person suffering from allergy is terrified of.

If the husband is allergic to certain foods, is the wife a bad person for partaking in those foods sometimes, when she is alone, and when there is no way that he could be harmed? Mind you, she isn’t forcing him to eat those foods, she isn’t secretly putting those foods into his meals. Neither is she telling him that he is too sensitive and too weak for not wanting to eat those foods. She isn’t harming him in any way. Is she a bad person for that? Should she give up those foods completely, so that her husband wouldn’t feel betrayed?

You say:

He is alone. Everybody around him behaves how they want and he has to deal with the consequences of it while they just get on with their lives.

I guess everybody around him behaves as if he didn’t have food allergy. They treat him as an ordinary person, not someone who is super sensitive. Maybe they don’t even know that he is suffering so much in everyday situations?

He was always different to other children (he is highly sensitive and empathetic) and things affected him in a deep and violent way. He found it easier to avoid others as he got older, as they tended to affect him in a negative way.

I can imagine that he suffered a lot as a child, e.g. at school, because children can be cruel. And if he was super sensitive, it would have affected him a lot. But his withdrawal from people continued into adulthood too. And it’s probably not because everybody was nasty to him, but because he was extremely sensitive (“allergic”), and so everyday interactions with people (comments, jokes etc) affected him negatively.

I am sorry for his suffering, and I understand where he is coming from – but the problem is that he is coming from his wounded and traumatized self. As such, he wants to live in a world where everyone adapts to his condition, instead of trying to heal the condition. And he wants you, first and foremost, to adapt to his condition, to not partake of the foods he is allergic to, and to defend him before anyone who isn’t aware of his condition and might say something “insensitive” or “offensive”.

In short, I think he wants you to defend him from the nasty, insensitive and violent world – as he perceives it.

I want him to be happy and to be able to live his life in the way he wants.

Well, I think the above is what he wants. Are you sure that you want it too?