Dear Helcat:

I don’t think that you mentioned him being neurodivergent, but you may have. I remember you using the adjective stoic to describe him, and you shared that he is a Buddhist.

“I think that she also idolizes my husband a bit. He has helped her out a lot over the years“- I assume this makes him feel good, that he’s been very helpful to her and that she thinks highly of him, and therefore, he may be emotionally invested in continuing to help her and be thought of highly by her.

“She has been considering an affair for a long time… it is a mix of impulsive and not impulsive. I don’t think she is thinking clearly and is having some kind of breakdown… I don’t trust her that much because of the way she has been acting and I don’t know her very well. Obviously her morals and judgment are in question at the moment“- as I understand it (from what you shared and, like I said, I trust the accuracy of what you shared), her intent (an impulsive intent, one that she may not admit to in a calm moment, or after her breakdown), I am sorry to say, is to have an affair with him. I mean, it’s not a far-fetched idea. Being neurodivergent, he may not pick up on her intent. I think that he wants to help her and that he is somewhat attached to how she views him (idolizing him). I don’t think that he wants to have an affair with her. I am guessing that it didn’t even cross his mind.

“Yes, I think he was unmoved by the details. But I still find it disrespectful“- her sharing of sexual details with the man married to you is absolutely disrespectful of you.

“You are spot on. It hurts that he doesn’t understand, even when I explain my feelings to him. It makes me feel dismissed and invalidated. Thank you for your kindness and empathy! I hope that things change too“- you are welcome. I suppose that being neurodivergent, it’s not his fault that he doesn’t understand. I figure that his lack of understanding indicates his difficulty, it does not that your feelings are not valid.

A Buddhist man is still.. a man who needs to be thought of highly by the woman in his life. Like a boy who needs to be thought of highly by his mother (in every man there is boy). Maybe it will help if you express to him at length or repeatedly how highly you think of him (or have you already done so, consistently)?

anita

Dear Helcat:

Starting this post with ❤️!

“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?“- yes:  your hurt hurts him because upon hearing/ seeing your hurt, he immediately feels responsible for your hurt. Your Hurt turns into his Guilt and his guilt hurts him.

If my understanding above is correct, then I relate to him very much. Growing up with Guilt (with a capital G for emphasis) made me not want to be close to people. Motivated to avoid Guilt, I avoided people, I avoided relationships. When I experienced closeness, I got scared and ended the maybe-beginning relationship.

Guilt is such a yucky, greasy kind of mental disgust (words that come to mind). Guilt was inserted into my brain by my mother who went on and on with guilt-inflicting tirades, repeating the same message, over and over again in each tirade and over the years: my feelings are hurt, and you hurt me!

She would go in great detail about what I did wrong, or what I didn’t do that I should have done, or the expression on my face was wrong, etc., and express how my alleged wrongs hurt her a lot. But the wrongs she claimed I did, there was no intent on my part to do wrong. I think that I was always caught by surprise.

I remember one time, I was in primary school, playing with a cousin in the apartment. We saw the school cleaning lady walking on the street below and I called her “cleaning lady!” so to get her attention and then hide so she couldn’t see who was calling her. For some reason, I/ my cousin and I, thought it’d be funny. Now, it was wrong to call her and hide, but this is not what got my mother going. Next thing I know, a neighbor and aunt were holding my mother’s arms on both sides, restraining her, as she struggled to free herself from their hold so to kill me, or “murder” me was a word she used, and other threats of violence.

She was upset that I called the woman “cleaning lady” because my mother was also a cleaning lady (not in the school) and she, my mother, claimed that I intentionally tried to hurt her feelings by calling the school employee a cleaning-lady, an occupation that my mother felt was shameful. But her accusation was not even close to being true: I didn’t know the school employee’s name, the word “janitor” was not a word back then. To get the woman’s attention, there was only one term available for me to use. And I did not use the words cleaning lady to humiliate anyone for their occupation: the thought did not even cross my mind.

Now, if I had a sane mother back then, she would take the 7, or 8 or 9-year old me to another room and kindly explain to me that it is not nice to call someone and hide, and later, on a school day, she’d walk me to the cleaning lady, introduce ourselves, respectfully talk with her, ask for her name, and teach me that people should be addressed by their names and talked to respectfully.

But this is not what I learned. What I learned was that at any time I might say and do something wrong, without meaning to, and=> game over with disaster for me, no correction.

In many of her tirades, she would go on and on about her hurt, not only following a recent event, but she brought back past hurts by me, and by other people, and express how terrible I was for hurting a person already so terribly hurt. She cried and yelled and threatened suicide (and homicide, at different times).. on and on and on.

Thinking about it this morning, I can see that I did not have the opportunity to understand hurt and correction, as in:  anita did X wrong=> anita can do Y to correct the wrong and fix/ maintain a good relationship.

Instead, it was: anita did X wrong=> game over: a tirade by her, threats of violence and Guilt-infliction, and me drowning in greasy, yucky Guilt, a Mental Torture.

To avoid Torture, I had to avoid the opportunity to do wrong, which meant social/ personal isolation.

I know another person who grew up many thousands of miles away from me, different story, different circumstances, but same message: there is no such thing as a small mistake, all mistakes are huge, unbearably heavy to carry for any amount of time, all unacceptable, all mean that you’re a bad, shame-worthy, guilty.. forever guilty person!

Back to you and your husband: if in his experience growing up, there was no such thing as a small mistake, a fixable wrong, then any wrong, or suggestion of wrong done by him (what you may bring up during disagreements) looms big, too heavy to carry, overwhelming..?

“Aside from my therapists, he was the first person to show me unconditional love. His love taught me to love myself“- loving oneself has to include enduring the reality that we all do wrongs/ mistakes and that we need to correct those whenever possible, to learn to not repeat the same wrongs, to minimize future mistakes. Does he love himself in this way?

“Can you tell me more about the emotional chart idea? What do you mean by that? Flashcards with emotions?“- if the above carries some truth in regard to your husband and the dynamic during (respectful, non-abusive) disagreements, then an emotional chart can start with identifying a suggested or alleged Wrongdoing, or Mistake on either side: yours or his, because this may be the core of the problem. He needs to see (if I am correct in my understanding) that you too make mistakes/ wrongdoings and while correcting such best you can, you are okay with making mistakes, you accept this part of the human condition with serenity.

An emotional chart can start with a flashcard or the like asking “What’s the wrongdoing here?” Another question: “Who is/ who are the wrongdoers here?”

Normalize wrongdoing as part of being human, while doing all one can do to correct, to not repeat and to minimize mistakes and wrongdoings. Do No Harm (the Buddhist principle) best you can while accepting that to some extent, be it the least: to be Human is to Harm.

The H&H Dictionary can provide concrete definitions of wrongdoing, mistake, guilt, love, forgiveness, etc.

You are very welcome and thank you for this valuable conversation! Closing this post with ❤️-

anita

Good night, Helcat ❤️

anita

Dear Helcat:

“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“- thank you. Seems like I lived a whole life believing that I deserved the treatment I got because she said so, wouldn’t call it abusive but.. fair treatment considering the wrongness of the child.

Now I say it was abusive, and at one point on, after reading about abuse, I suspected it was abuse, but I wasn’t sure. A big part of me still thought, believed that, as she said, she was the abused (by me, by others), and I was her abuser (one of her abusers, and a major abuser).

There was this incident I remember: she was hitting me with her hand, hitting my face, and after a while of hitting me on the right side of the face, then on the left, then right again, and again, she stopped hitting, looked at her hands and said: “Look what you did to me, my hands are hurting!”

Everything was my fault, and she.. only reacted to this faulty thing in front of her, a faulty thing that was hurting her.

“I feel like my mother was more direct with her concerns. But she kind of used them as excuses… 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“- Excuses-to-beat. Just now as I quoted you right here, in this paragraph, and decided to not quote all (using “…”), a concern appeared to me (brace yourself, it’s crazy): what if Helcat gets angry at me because in the first paragraph of my reply, I quoted all that Helcat wrote about my experience, and here, in this paragraph, I shortchanged her and quoted only part of what she wrote about herself..?

I feared this because that’s what my mother did: anything, everything was ground for accusations. In the case right here, the accusation would’ve been: anita, you only care about yourself, or, you tried to hurt my feelings by not quoting all that I said.

Accusations came from everywhere, could come from anywhere and as you can see, I still hear her (projected into others) accusing me and I get anxious.

“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“- I used to say every now and again: From now on, I will be perfect. From now on, I will make no mistakes, and I was optimistic following those declarations, but of course, I failed every time. The next accusation was just around the corner.

“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… 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“- this is what my mother told me too, that everyone will or did try to hurt me and I can’t trust anyone. She didn’t include herself in the message.  She too punished me for things that weren’t wrong (things equivalent to not quoting all that you said, right above). But she didn’t try to toughen me up and protect me. She tried to.. protect herself from me. She kept presenting me as a wrong or evil-doer who was hurting her.

I am sorry for all the abused children in our world, past and present, including you and your husband. I wish healing for all. Love and best wishes for you, your son, your husband and your dog.

anita