[Bzmn8tv]

I'm married 24 years. Didn't start with issues until 7 years ago. Husband has had severe trauma as well. I'm bpd. I have a question. I beg him to use different pronouns. He often comes at me angry using a "you" statement instead of "I". He's often telling me how I feel. This is hard enough. I don't need that but when I ask him to stick to huis feelings. He screams I have to many rules. I'm so stuck. I am in a loveless no romance mess here. I stopped having sex. Long story. It was physical issues at first then I realized I had been doing it out of guilt for a long time. Now I'm just broken. I've begged my husband to hold me for 2 years. He won't. So my feelings of being unworthy or unlovable are hard to fight. He says everything is my fault because of bpd. I don't know what is correct. I'm so screwed up. I do believe I have bpd. I just think he was a contributing factor to it. Not all his fault but triggering for 7 straight years does that. Help. What's ok to ask for?

[Hobbit House]

First thing? How invested are you with staying with your husband? If you are then marital therapy is your best chance of saving your marriage. If he won't go well you have your answer. You know what to do. It will only get worse. You don't need the emotional abuse and that sounds like what it is.
Anyway hello and welcome to Psych Central

[Cyclops5]

Try telling him you would appreciate if he is more understanding.

[Sunflower123]

Originally Posted by Hobbit House

First thing? How invested are you with staying with your husband? If you are then marital therapy is your best chance of saving your marriage. If he won't go well you have your answer. You know what to do. It will only get worse. You don't need the emotional abuse and that sounds like what it is.
Anyway hello and welcome to Psych Central

I agree with Hobbit House. I'm sorry you're having such a tough time. I had to get out of a 20 year marriage because my husband didn't believe in mental illness and was verbally and emotionally abusive. It was incredibly hard at first but I got better.

[Rose76]

It's okay to ask for anything you want. But asking isn't getting, as you've found out. It may be that this marriage, as a marriage, is simply over. Quite honestly, it sounds like you two are just not in love anymore. Are the both of you there mainly because it would be financially tough to go your separate ways? Do you each have jobs?

If you want to work on the marriage, I would suggest you both stop talking to each other through psycho-babble. Make out as if you had no idea who was diagnosed with what. Erase terms like trauma, bpd, and triggering. Nevermind telling him what pronouns to use. Start the process by talking to him using the vocabulary you had when you were in 6th grade. That's really all you need. You, for one, and maybe him too, are looking through a film of stuff you picked up in therapy. Set that aside, at least for awhile. Just speak basic English - like an 8 year old would understand.

If he tells you how you feel, and he's incorrect, you can say "That's not true. I don't feel that way." You may be someone who finds psych theory more relevant than he does. Put the theories you picked up away for awhile.

So you know your husband has had "severe trauma." I'm guessing you may be right about that. You don't have to tell us, but ask yourself if that's the way he sees it. How does what happened to him seem to affect how he relates to you? It's okay to have a theory, but realize he may not see the dynamics in the same context as you do. If you are the one who terminated sex, then he probably feels rejected and angry.

I think you two have a severe communication problem. A sentence like: "Now I'm just broken." is actually meaningless. I'm not invalidating whatever feeling made you say that. But I have no idea what you mean. When you use the term "broken," you are speaking metaphorically. Metaphors can really confuse things. The metaphor you appropriate is loaded with your own private meaning. But it may not signify that same meaning to anyone but you.

As an illustration: Quite a few decades ago, doctors stopped using the term, "nervous breakdown." From the beginning, that had been a metaphor. Even when the term had currency, it was not believed by lots of doctors that it corresponded to any actual physical damage to a patient's nervous system. Doctors do not use that phrase anymore. They consider it meaningless. Some lay people like to use it. For them, it means things that they want it to mean, some of which have no basis in science. People get to confusing theory with fact.

For instance, "borderline personality " is an abstract concept. It's not an actual thing like "measles." The term denotes a theory widely held by psych professionals, which they have found to be useful. Theories are very valuable, but a theory is not a fact. It's conceivable that, someday, the theory of "borderline personality disorder" may be discarded and replaced by something else, or by two or three something elses. When a lay person peppers their talk with phrases picked up from psych professionals and from literature about psychology/psychiatry, they are unknowingly getting on board a lot of premises that are quite debatable. But they don't know that.

You may be alienating your husband by insisting on referring to concepts that may not resonate with him. (Or he may be doing that to you.) You may have internalized assumptions that he does not happen to have made. So stick to facts. How you feel, btw, is a fact. How you behave is a fact. How you behave may fit a pattern that professionals like to describe as typical of a syndrome they call BPD. But that term is completely unnecessary for your husband and you to employ. Avoid it.

[Crazy Hitch]

Just one question. Why do you stay in this loveless sexless marriage?

[Bzmn8tv]

When we married 24 years ago I was madly in love with him. I was married in an abusive relationship. I left my husband. Divorced him. And got with my current husband. I knew nothing back then about trauma. Therapy. Bpd. OCD. Nothing. I didn't know about his trauma. And I denied mine. In 2010 he had what I call a mid life crisis. We had a young man move into our home. My husband spent every moment with him. This was after 17 years of marriage. Our marriage was good. We fought. But always made up. So. Since 2010 I found out so much I didn't know. My trauma affected me so badly about 2 months ago I was diagnosed with bpd. Two years ago my h told me about sexual abuse against him from ages 3 to 8. It was really bad. It was more than one boy including his older brother. His father was also crazy and an alcoholic. These things came out after his father passed away in 2013. We've been counseling for years. Both individual and marital but not improving. There were questions about his sexuality summer of 2010. It wasn't until 4 years later I found out about his trauma. So. I was seeing a counselor and she was our therapist. She was also our marriage counselor as well. Last week we got into a fight about his yelling and my issue with him using the you pronoun with regards to how I feel. I hate it. It makes me really mad. So I flipped out. So my counselor said. Go to the local nut house. I am 49 years old. Never been in trouble with the law. I pay my bills. I've never even visited jail. The nuthouse place (sorry I don't want to say the real name) is understaffed and very rundown. With my broken foot. I was in hell. Im traumatized by that night. I couldn't go to sleep becasue there were crazy people screaming at garbage cans. I had crutches but I can't carry things with them. So I never got food. They wouldn't give me my medicine. I was scared to death. She put me in there because she claimed I was a danger to myself and others. I NEVER saw a single soul that worked there. So in the morning after texting her for an hour begging her for help due to no food water or medicine. No help and no one to talk to. She said stay. I checked myself out though. Feeling like a criminal. My husband came and got me. He almost had a nervous breakdown. He didn't think I should have been in there either. I fired her. I didn't want to but she recently started a new medication and always asks me questions about her relationship. I feel like I need a more focused therapist. I have a new interview Friday. I have a psychiatrist appointment in August. My husband is in therapy. We are now not doing marital therapy starting this week. His therapist told him he ought to leave me unless I go to a treatment facility. We have a 2 year old we adopted. We do not want to mess her up. So our goals were to get better. But now I'm diagnosed with bpd and he has OCD. Anyway. I'm very calm. I spent the weekend alone. I thought a lot. Read a lot. Prayed. I didn't cry. I was really thinking. I'm still afraid of my therapist. I don't now why she did that. Freaks me out. I still have nightmares about that night. Some of those people should have been restrained. They talked openly about their hallucinations. I've never seen anyone hallucinating before. My husband and I are very stubborn. Intense. We both want to stay married. But neither trusts the other. He jumped on my diagnoses. I didn't deny. But I don't want to be defined by my diagnoses. I am not bpd. I have it. Anyway. Sorry this is so long. I think. Both of our counselors sre t great. Im going to find a new one for me. He's staying with his. We are terrible st communication. Im afraid he will yell so I inevitably screw up due to being scared. Then he yells. I trigger. You know the rest. Thanks.

[Bzmn8tv]

I stay in a loveless sexless marriage because it was once good. We are both such a mess we likely wouldn't find happiness elsewhere anyway so we want to fix this marriage.