Trying to decipher his actions...

Trying to decipher his actions...
S

Struggling

Registrant
Ive written before how I recently found out that my husband was a victim of SA for a period of several years as an adolescence. Well, he refuses to really talk about it, so I have very few details. It is frustrating because I feel so helpless as to how to help him. Anyway, sometimes he manifests a certain behavior that I just dont understand and I was wondering if anyone can relate or if it is sounds like something a victim of SA would display.

My husband is extremely clingy. As a matter of fact, there are not many things that we dont do together. He has to be under me all the time. I cant even call up a friend and go out for a cup of coffee, because, to him, he is my permanent best friend, and I should not really have all these outside friendships. We just so happen to work about 5 blocks from each other, so he wants to have lunch with me ALL the time not to mention we drive to and from work together every day. We go grocery shopping together, run errands together, etc. I love being with him, but sometimes I am just feeling plain smothered. If I want to do anything away from him, he feels rejected and he just plain acts up.

On the other hand, there is the bedroom. Once during a period of getting over an illness, I was not up to being sexually active. Although he knew of my sickness, he took this as rejection. So when I got better, I made sure that I was pretty aggressive in wanting sex, to show him that I am interested in him and having sex with him. That was fine, but when he was sick or too tired, he tells me that I am a nympho. So when I backed off, or if I was just too tired, then he accuses me of not loving him.

To top it off... he tells me last night that one of our problems is that we dont take time for each other and we never talk. What??? The ONLY time we are apart is during the 8 hours of work, and even then we take an hour lunch together practically EVERY day. So that pretty much led to a small argument and we both went to bed practically in tears. I dont know what to do. Is that behavior common?
 
Struggling

If he perceives all of the time you spend together as not enough, my first thought would be that maybe there's something he'd like to happen during your time together that isn't happening.

Maybe there's something that he very much wants to tell you, or hear from you?

SAR
 
Jealousy, and forms of it, are insecurities that manifest because of trust issues. As an insecure person, he doesn't trust himself, he is also projecting that onto you, and to some extent, doesn't trust you. This is a form of jealousy. It has been brought about by the way his ability to trust was destroyed as a result of the SA. As for some of the other stuff, he is testing your boundaries. He wants to see if you will pass his own personal tests of trust. He will test you to see how you react, both consciously and unconsciously. Sometimes, does it feel like he is pushing your buttons as hard as he possibly can for no reason at all? Does it sometimes seem like he is actually trying to make you leave? Anyway, this won't change until he learns to trust himself, or until he decides to not give a $*#! about anything. Either can happen. This may never completely go away, but it is possible.
 
What Mike says about "trusting himself" is very true, and it could also show up in other ways.

Perhaps he just doesn't trust himself out there in the world without the one person he does trust - even though that level of trust might be small compared to a 'normal' mans trust in his partner, it might well be more than he trusts himself.

I relied on my wife for EVERYTHING until I sought help and started to sort myself out.
She did all the responsible stuff like manage the money, pay the bills, decide if we had enough money to buy something, arrange holidays and the list goes on.
I put very little input into anything because I didn't trust myself to make any kind of responsible judgements. I worked and held responsible jobs, I was a manager of a quality control dep't at 21yo, but that wasn't personal responsibility. ( and I soon gave up working responsibility and took a manual job at 25yo that I still have now )

And I too was clingy in a lot of respects, we did everything together and I rarely went for a drink with the lads or did anything alone.
But as I've learned that I can trust my personal decisions, and get over the bad ones, I have taken on a lot of the responsibilities that should happen in a marriage, and I go for a drink with the lads !

Dave
 
Thank you Lloyd, I was trying to think of a way to word that and add it to this post.
 
Thanks, guys. I guess I never saw it as a "trust" issue, because i don't give him any reason not to trust me. I am going to seriously try to do some convincing (in a non confrontational way) for him to seek some professional help, because i am feeling VERY smothered and frustrated.
 
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