Sage, bttrfly, PLC, thanks for your support. I am going on not much sleep, because H did hear from his L and came home majorly monstering last night just as I was trying to go to bed. It was pretty much what I'd expected--he repeated all the statements he's made before blaming me for where we're at now, for not communicating in our M or for the past year, said all his friends and his L told him a sexless marriage means he should get an annulment, said my L is now making up reasons he can't get an annulment (those reasons are called the law?), called me a b****, etc. etc. I felt trapped. He was in my room and my room doesn't have a door. My plan had been to leave the house for a bit if this happened, but it was late, and I had nowhere to go, and I knew I had a big day at work today and needed to get sleep. I said I wouldn't interact with him because he wasn't treating me with respect, but he just kept going. He again brought up this time post-BD when I was cutting grass outside and didn't ask him for some tool I could have used from the shed (why ask him for anything? I figure things out myself, take care of things myself now. I find it curious he is stuck on this instance. Translation: His identity is based on caregiving to the point of resentment and he can't stand not having that dynamic in place?)
Eventually he seemed to run out of anger and started talking about himself. I don't know if this will be helpful to anyone else dealing with a pod person. It was like Jekyll and Hyde--I saw him morph from monster back into an echo of the person I knew. He cried. He jumped from topic to topic but said, among other things:
--he knows he held all of his feelings in and when he couldn't do it anymore, everything blew up, and it was like I was collateral damage. He didn't intend it. He thought we would be M forever too. But then his unhappiness caught up with him and he had to kill part of himself in order to get un-stuck. He had to make a big change. He apologized. He talked again about knowing that was unhealthy and he can't push down feelings any longer--his IC worked with him on that until he had to stop seeing her because she was just pointing out problems he didn't have. He knows it's not healthy to supress feelings, so now he just gets angry when he's angry, even when he's in public, and other people can deal with it. (Translation: he's still pushing a lot down and wasn't ready to deal with that with IC. He understands he can have emotions now, but still doesn't know how to work through them, so just unleashes them on others.
--he still cares about me even though he's not in love with me (yet it's clear to me he doesn't understand what this means--to care about me would have meant filing for D when he said he was going to a year ago and supporting me with the money I would be entitled to. He still is going on about how I don't deserve his pension--well, you know, that is what I'm entitled to and someone who cared about me would understand that that was supposed to be for my future too.)
--he feels like he did everything for me in our M, gave and gave and gave, and I didn't love him the same amount; he wasn't as important to me as I was to him, and he kept waiting for me to give him what he needed (sex, whatever other unspecified ways I should have been putting him first?). He felt unloveable, he felt worthless. (Translation: This is partly the effect of the SSM, partly that he is way more insecure than I ever realized--it makes sense why I could never "convince" him that I did love him, that he was more important to me than X or Y). Then he started talking about how he does everything for everyone in his life (complained about two specific friends, one of which he's dropped), always has, and no one recognizes this or does the things he needs or shows him the same amount of love in return. (Translation: this is not just about me! This is about a whole pattern in his life he has pinned on our M. I thought of something Wayfarer wrote recently, about the nature of love, and I just wanted to say, "H, this is going to keep happening if you view all of your R as transactional. If you only perform acts of service or love or whatever because you expect somethin in return and then don't receive it, you keep building resentment, and those acts are no longer true acts of love or service." It's like *I* can see, at least in part, what's making him angry an unhappy, and I can see how that will keep happening beyond our M, but I know he can't, and I can't point this out to him.
--We should have been having sex in our marriage but we were just on our phones all the time (Yes, building and maintaining intimacy takes work. I really wanted to point out that I had had convos with him about not being on our phones when we were together, and he always got angry and refused to put away his phone. No point to this, I know.)
--He doesn't want Ls and he doesn't want any of these things his L is demanding I give him. He doesn't want to do it this way. (This is all his choice, and he can make different choices at any time.) He didn't file for a D for so long because even though he knew his feelings wouldn't change, he was scared. And then he filed for an annulment because his L told him he could and because he was angry. (He still talks about it as if I should accept it because it's easier an less expensive than a D--is confused when I suggest otherwise. Translation: still doesn't see me as an equal partner in the M who is entitled by law to certain things in D.)
At the end he apologized for the anger he'd confronted me with--he had just gotten news from L and was angry.
So, friends, what do I learn from all this? How can I better take care of me? I see that I've made progress in that I'm not completely drawn into the gaslighting. But I'm also not in a place where I can completely withstand it yet. The whole time I felt dizzy and confused and anxious and scared and still had that tendency to feel like maybe what he was saying was true, maybe he's right on some level...
I don't fully regret staying in the room, because all of this confirmed for me that he is far from okay--he is still working through anger in unhealthy ways and though he blames this on me, it's clear that he is just putting all of the issues with everyone in his life on me. He doesn't know to express his feelings in healthy ways, so he is still going to spew at will and see that as progress in that he's not holding his feelings in. I see so much of his dad in him here (he's quick to anger) and his mom (she's a major people pleaser and struggles with boundaries, but she realizes this, whereas H doesn't realize this about himself). He needs to get to a point where he can go back to IC, but who knows if or when that will happen. He's going to need help getting to a more healthy place in his life, and I am not the person who can help him.
I also think if I had left the house (to sit in my car in the dark?), the L situation would have escalated, his anger would have escalated, and instead he ended up talking his way to several apologies. (But it's not like this means he won't get angry again tomorrow and escalate things with L, so...)
At the same time, I feel like I was just his punching bag for an hour. He didn't know what to do with his feelings, so he unleashed anger on me. Then tried to process some of what's gone on for him in the last two+ years with me, all while saying I didn't communicate and didn't try to save our M in the last year and never talk to him anymore. I'm thinking of your H here, May, and how you don't have to be the one to do his work for him; you can't be that person. I wanted to say that I don't owe H conversation or small talk. I wanted to say that he fired me as his W, and he can't be hurt when I don't go out of my way to talk to him or accuse me of not communicating with him anymore. But this person doesn't understand things the way rational people do. Everything is just more justification for why I am at fault and he is not. He isn't capable of seeing how he starts a "convo" with calling me names and saying I don't deserve respect is the obvious answer to why I "don't communicate" with him. I get it--he's not capable of self-awareness. But that doesn't mean he gets to take his anger out on me. And of course this meant that I couldn't sleep, was physically feeling sick, and now am running on fumes today, with echoes of everything he said constantly playing in my head.
I did finally say something like, if I don't talk to you, it is not because I don't want to communicate, but because I have been hurt, and I need to protect myself now. He seemed to get that in the moment, but I doubt it will stick.
