Wow - so sorry about the situation with the abusive coach. Where were your parents in all this?
Often - perversely - we subconsciously pick partners as adults who reproduce that childhood trauma, so as to try to work through it with them. Can you see any ways in which your H resembled your coach?
(An example - my good friend lost her mom in childhood, and her father quickly remarried a younger woman. My friend had been the center of her father’s world and attention until she “lost him” to his new, and somewhat sexually inappropriate bride. As an adult, my friend fell in love with a married man who was trying to have an open marriage. Eventually he left his wife for my friend [ I believe his wife grew tired of the arrangement although she’d gone along with it at first]. This man was the “great love” of my friend’s life even though he had many flaws and cheated on her too eventually. Emotionally she had “won her dad away from his wife” and “healed” that wound from her childhood.
Nowadays, as an older, wiser adult, she knows she has to avoid relationships that are triangulated like that and understands how that’s rooted in her childhood. )
The challenge will be to keep your trauma about the coach separate from your interactions with your H. What’s happening with him is bad enough on its own, you don’t need to amplify it by piling on the old pain from the coach. And quite frankly, your H deserves responsibility for his own actions but doesn’t deserve to pay for the coach’s actions too.
And developing heightened awareness about the ways in which the coach experience carried over into your adult life may help prevent you from picking another inappropriate partner in the future, even if you’re attracted to them because of this primal wound.
