My husband yells, “You need help!” so often that I’ve decided to stop believing him. I do need help, but not in the way he implies. You see, quite regularly my husband points to my rapes as being the underlying cause of our marriage problems. He says that because men raped me, it means that I hate men, including him.
I think he believes that if I hate men, then he’s off the hook and he doesn’t have to take responsibility for his part of our problems. Or better yet, that I might go off on a self-exploration journey to discover if his opinion is the truth (Types of Verbal Abuse: Blocking and Diverting). While I’m on that journey, I won’t bother him.
Yes, I journeyed down that side road a few times in the past. I disappeared inside myself because I respected his opinion. I certainly didn’t want the rapes to interfere in our marriage. But he’s over-played that hand. My trips of introspection brought me to a place of emotional security, so far as the rapes go. And while I’ll never forget the rapes, I am confident that the worst of it is behind me. I no longer hate my rapists, let alone hate all men, and truly, I have never once blanket-hated all men.
A while back, I spoke to Will about verbal abuse and presented to him a list of verbally abusive statements from a Patricia Evans book
. I hoped that recognizing himself in the list would lead to positive change. It just made him angry. He brought up the rapes and printed out a list of rape symptoms from the Internet and yelled, “HERE! THIS IS YOU! YOU NEED HELP!” as he threw the papers at me (Types of Verbal Abuse: Abusive Anger).
The reason I bring this up is because in our last conversation (3 days ago), he talked about how we could fix ourselves and our marriage on our own. About how we didn’t need a bunch of book-smart idiots (therapists) telling us how to fix ourselves. His opinion leads me to more questions.
You Need Help? Then Follow These Crazymaking Rules
If we’re supposed to fix ourselves, then how can we do that when he:
- ignores or laughs at my opinions (Types of Verbal Abuse: Discounting).
- believes our problems would end if I would only fix myself from rapes that happened 24+ years ago.
- deems any information I find in a book irrelevant.
- Or, my favorite, he believes we would have no problems if I would just stop looking for them.
In the same breath, he both tells me we can fix ourselves but we’re not allowed to use any outside knowledge to do it. It seems clear to me that we can’t fix our relationship by doing the same old things we’ve always done. Isn’t it time to look outside of ourselves for solutions?
This is crazymaking. He’s doing everything he can to dump our problems on me. I’ll take responsibility for my part, but I will no longer accept responsibility for his.