I didn't let the L word out of my mouth, I know I don't feel it so why say it, even in that namby pamby "I love you like a brother" way. I know now deep down that I Love You has meant "don't leave me".
Ouch. Boy can I relate to that. H and I still say I love you and I'm starting to feel really awkward about it. The "fakeness" is about ready to drive me insane. Interesting that your H feels like he is "in love." I think my H would say the same thing. Are they nutty? What is wrong with these men? Ok, just venting.
I understand that too. I noticed recently that my H says "I love you" with equal emotion to all members of our extended family. The "I love you" reserved for me is no different than anyone elses and the "with love" on emails is also the same. I got a birthday card that was kind of "lecture" from the good people from hallmark - something about how love is not measured in flowers, candle light etc...but rather in the simple daily things, blah, blah, blah. So....if I were to quantify the "dailiness" in our lives it means that love is measured in sitting on separate couches to watch tv, conversing about our budget, next parent/teacher meeting etc..., sleeping side by side and not touching, me scrubbing toilets, him changing oil and flinging an occasional ILY in each others general direction. I suppose I'm "loved" a lot then.
For H, ILY means "you are a member of my group/herd/club/family".
Fran, congrats for talking about the 800-lb gorilla in the living room. I don't think you were wrong not to tell him to go to AA. If you are going to be out of his life, you must be OUT of it. Also, as far as living under the same roof and/or behaving as a family, all you can do is request. He will do what he wants; you can't make him do anything. Cajoling, persuading, reasoning... none of those is effective. I think you can say things like: "This is what we're going to do and you're invited" and LEAVE IT AT THAT. (Wish *I* could take my own advice.)
The eagerness with which he wants to move out of the house is alarming to me... is there an OW? That just does not seem natural-- especially at holiday time. And for him to say that knowing you don't love him would make it painful for him to stay under the same roof with you? Huh? What about the kids?
You might want to put some of your questions on the soberrecovery.com board, too, just to get the pov of women who are used to dealing with and confronting the alcoholic mentality.
congrats for talking about the 800-lb gorilla in the living room
I'm not so sure about that. More like we talked about the 200lb pile of steaming stinky crap in the middle of the living room, not the gorilla that dumped it there. We are not separated/separating yet. He's ready to go with that if that's what we need to do - we got that far at least and we both know we mean it. The "more emotional honesty" part was something I felt was a pretty huge step. I've talked to him about honesty before and he has always deflected it and read it as me wanting to just get away with berating him and never having to cushion my language. BTW I don't berate him, I think you'll remember when I said I'm constantly surprised at his ability to hear blame when there genuinely is none. I feel a lot braver. Even the insight into what ILY has really meant has made me feel braver. I can say to myself "that's just your fear of abandonment talking" but I'm a big girl now, I'm no longer that 2 year old that got dumped on an aunt she didn't even know so her parents could go off on a jaunt etc. If he goes he goes, and I am standing in his way if I try to cling to his legs - but I'm over doing that. Now it is more like he that is desperate to keep ahold of me. It's amazing the emotional maturity that man can pull out of the hat when he really needs to, and just makes me realise how much PA game-playing has gone on. How much game playing I have allowed to go on. Well it stops right here, I'm going to call him out on every sigh, every eye-roll, every needless spiteful remark. There was a time when I reacted to them with bewilderment and hurt and tried to do better, then there was a long time when I just ignored them, now I'm not going to let a single one pass without saying. "What was that for?" and then when he evades "how some emotional honest here?" And if I don't get it then we're done. I'm really starting to see the damage S8 has already sustained by having an emotionally absent father, well an absent father really, a workaholic alcoholic doesn't have much time left over to hang with his kids.
I do fear that the alcoholism won't allow us to get very far. I'm glad we both at last acknowledge the work there is to be done, acknowledge that we probably could survive separately and are ready to go ahead and do that if the work can't be done together.
I found a bunch of stuff about passive aggressive behaviour on iVillage, which I can't find now so can't post the link, but it was very insightful to me. A long thread with several women posting things about their H's which just made my draw drop. The similarities were just incredible. I know I've spotted people on this board with H's "just like mine" here but this is a whole different league.
What's needed is for him to get right in under the nub of his so-called "happy childhood". There is no way he had any such thing. I believe he was brain-washed by his parents' propaganda and that the emotional abuse was subtle - that's why he can't see it. I think it's about his dad's R with his older brother and lack of R with him and his subsequent identification with his sainted type 2 mother. Very often when we are with his folks I hear subtle put-downs coming out of their mouths. Also stories he has told me about things he did as a kid are re-told by them except it was his brother. I don't know which is true and which one of them has a need to fabricate, but he is in serious denial about the health of his upbringing. I'm not in denial about mine, I know it was crap. Unfortunately he has used that as a stick to beat me with in the past "you're the one with the dysfunctional family ergo you're the crazy one".
I wouldn't say he was eager to move out of the house. I think he knew when he said that that I would want to preserve what I could of a happy Christmas for the kids - it was more like his last ditch attempt to get me to back down on the idea of a separation. And I guess it kind of worked.
Fran
if we can be sufficient to ourselves, we need fear no entangling webs Erica Jong
I'm going to call him out on every sigh, every eye-roll, every needless spiteful remark. There was a time when I reacted to them with bewilderment and hurt and tried to do better, then there was a long time when I just ignored them, now I'm not going to let a single one pass without saying. "What was that for?" and then when he evades "how some emotional honest here?" And if I don't get it then we're done.
When I call bf on this stuff (which he does A LOT) I usually gat an even bigger blast that makes it my fault, I provoked him, what's the matter with me, it's never enough, what he does isn't good enough, what am I getting at, just STOP, why do I go on and one, etc., etc. These convos NEVER come out well. A few times, he has called me later to apologize for being a butthead, but those times are few and far between.
I've been posting on the soberrecovery board and people have told me that if someone is a @$$hole when they're drunk, sometimes after they get into recovery, it turns out they're @$$holes sober, too.
I think the answer to being told you provoked them is to say well you could just tell me what's wrong instead of sighing about it. Uh oh, no I've btdt too, I just get "if I do that you just go into attack mode". Which if I think about it seriously just isn't true. Of course telling him it's not true is just a recipe for disaster.
I'd like to know what Karen means by exposed too. I'm guessing what she means is that the game-playing has been exposed. I just never understood about game-playing I just thought it was stuff you read about in books, never what real people did in real life. Huh talk about loss of innocence.
Anyway like I say, he's not eager to move out. So maybe that's just a red herring
Fran
if we can be sufficient to ourselves, we need fear no entangling webs Erica Jong
Now it is more like he that is desperate to keep ahold of me.
I'm sure this is true. He is probably panicked at the thought of a separation/divorce.
if someone is a @$$hole when they're drunk, sometimes after they get into recovery, it turns out they're @$$holes sober, too.
I agree. From my experience with my father and uncle, they seem to feel entitled to be a$$holes because they think they're making such a sacrifice by not drinking. They don't seem to know who they are without a drink in hand. They started drinking because they couldn't cope with life, so take away the booze and they're not nasty drunks anymore, but they can still be crabby, rude, anti-social, self-centered and selfish.
My cousin (eldest daughter of alcoholic uncle) and I used to talk about which of us had it worse. She lived in a relatively peaceful house post-divorce, but grew up on public assistance because my uncle skipped out on child support for FOUR children. She said it was embarrassing to be on welfare and come from a broken home. Of course, this was the 1970s, when it wasn't so common. I grew up in an intact family, where both parents were able to work to support the family, but they fought constantly and it was a chaotic environment. It was embarrassing to be their child sometimes because of the fighting and my father's drunkeness. My father has never been a person I could count on for anything, really. I stopped having any kind of expectations of him a long time ago. My uncle is pretty much the same with his kids. (He's lucky that they have anything to do with him at all.) I remember my father being passed out drunk on the sofa a lot and it was pretty pathetic. And when he wasn't passed out he was nasty and tried to provoke us into a fight. Countless times we'd have plans to go somewhere as a family and then at the last minute he'd pick a fight with my mother, she'd fall for it, and he'd refuse to go.
I know that divorce is really tough on kids, but growing up with an alcholic parent in the house isn't a walk in the park either. It has a deep and lasting impact on the kids.
