How best to respond to a partner's ridicule?

Thanks for your endorsement of my understanding of myself and my situation & my right to self-determination.

If you want to know what I really take from the Serenity Prayer, you would have to ask me. I should have left out the second stanza as it has led you to draw conclusions that do not apply to me. I could discuss the theology of the prayer and what I believe but this would be a distraction and a divergence from what I was asking for ideas on.

I do not want to debate about anything.

Thanks for your replies.

I know the theology of the prayer & I also know that it doesnt apply to abuse situations. I have been there, done that & it got to the point where trying to stay I found myself wanting to kill myself rather than stay trapped because I stayed way too long.

That is why I say it is a very personal decision to stay & it is a very personal decision for what works for you & your situation in ordwr to stay. There are NO general "coping strategies" suitable for dealing with abuse. You have to figure out how you can best deal with it personally & in regard to yoyr situation. Most people get out & those who dont resign themselves to their fate & deal with & accept it best they can given their own specific personality & situation they are in.

Thanks unaluna. Yes, you may be right about all that. The bit you have given to me as a possible revelation is about whether my husband sees niceness as a weakness. That is possible but I need to process & come to understand that. I hadn't thought of it. I think he has learned a sort of fake niceness but that is not the same thing. He certainly isn't transparent & open. I have wondered whether he can be genuinely nice as I have wondered for good reason whether he has no empathy. I also wondered how much autism was in that but maybe that is not the issue as he is too calculating and can be extremely nasty.

After working on understanding many aspects of my situation in the decades since I met my husband, I'd say you are absolutely right about my husband not having the goal of being nice to me unless he is after something. As my understanding of the matter has progressed, I have tried to keep that in mind when my husband behaves without niceness towards me. He certainly doesn't seem to hold To many of the standards I hold about good behaviour and the need to try to be true to that. And he often seem to act self-centerdly and without sensitivity, good principles and the sort of logic I aspire to. In fact, a great insight (via a dream I had many years ago) I had was that my husband and his brothers are like highway robbers with guns and & who hide away in the dark. They play a lot of power over games. I try to live true to my own values and I don't hope anymore to be able to change him. My challenge is to work out how to stay calm & detached despite his bad behaviour. I am sure I don't know everything about that. And I think it is still very possible I am making some mental errors that enable him to get to me. These would be to do with the personal areas I need to work on, my "weaknesses" that it seems he can home in on though he may mistake where I am at and talk down to me or manipulate me in ways I know are nonsense. I know I could do better.

Mindfulness; trying to live more healthily; and becoming wiser and more advanced spirititually have helped a lot. A lot was involved in that. I am still trying to progress and I am waiting on my bouts of inflammatory arthritis to settle and then I plan to work belatedly on exercise. Right now I am very stiff & in a lot of pain & do not have enough energy (my doctor says I am sick).

We humans are blind to many things, including what goes on in our subconsciousnesses. I am still trying to understand my subconscious better. I stated working on that as a teenager.

Without going into the details, I have only recently become enabled to have a greater range of choices with regard whether I stay or go. I am taking that "breakthrough" slowly and there are various good reasons for that. I am taking one step at a time, taking the time to reflect & deal with what I need to deal with. There is no need for great speed; rather there is great need for careful decision making, one of these reasons you wisely pointed out.

Interestingly, I have started to wonder more (intuitively) about my safety with him and I should trust that more.

Your reply has helped me think more. Thanks.

Thank you healingme4me. Thank you for putting so much effort into reading the thread and for sharing your opinion. I love your honesty.

"Frenemies" - that's an interesting word. We certainly can never be friends because we truly are irreconcilably different & what seems to me like "evil" (strange word but it is the best I can think of right now though I have serious dissatisfactions & doubts with it) in him repels me. But I am not into hate. For now, I am striving to live with the "devil" and "to sup with the devil you need a long spoon." I try to have a "long spoon" with him. He seems to want to absorb me & control me & I have constantly thwarted him on that, to his great resentment. I can't work at pleasing him or he will suck me dry & destroy me & take all my resources - and then what, when I am lost & broken & at his mercy? Fortunately there is something in me that resists that but I am not invincible. But the mind and spirit are very powerful & I am working on that.

I edited this to say that I do try to be fair and to cooperate reasonably. He just seems to me to ask for too much and to think unreasonably that he has a right to do so & that I am wrong & all sorts of awful not the be his pawn. It's as if he think what he wants is enough justification. But he does do helpful things & I am sure there are far worse than him.

I've had a few random thoughts that maybe I should leave my money to the kids but I couldn't tell him that so that would achieve only so much. Also I have wondered if a Health Care Directive could be drawn up to say "resuscitate" or maybe I could tattoo it on my chest. I am not particularly paranoid so I try to pay attention to these thought, but I have ended up setting them aside so far. I am certainly under no illusion that he loves me. And he can do things that I consider to be immoral. He doesn't care what I want or feel. I know that now.

My wish for you is peace within... and to remain unscathed through this experience with your husband, but I worry a lot for you. Abuse takes its toll, no matter how strong, defiant or resilient a person is.

Thank you, yes, peace inside, that is so important to me.

I am not sure that it is not true that, in the end, how to say this?, the toll taken by abuse is not the same thing or irredeemiable. Once, I was so naive; now I am not so much though maybe I do not see darkness enough. And I am stronger.

I am glad you feel stronger.... I just worry for you. I, too, have been through multiple abusive relationships. They are mentally and emotionally exhausting, beyond maddening and wear on a person's self-esteem, self-worth, self-respect and sense of self. If somehow, you can survive his abuse, rise above it all and remain unscathed, kudos to you!! It takes a lot of mental self-protection to survive and also maintain one's mental health.... I hope this works out Ok for you in the end and that your mental health is preserved. (((((((many hugs))))))

Your husband doesn't need to know if you've spoken with and attorney or solicitor, I presume in your case? If you want to leave your legacy/estate to your kids, that can be arranged discretely?
I'm concerned that he finds it incredulous that you want provisions cared for in his absense.
If you're just looking to tolerate one another's existance, then grieve the could have beens and should haves and carry on with your days.
A health care directive isn't a terrible thing. I think it's standard to resuscitate. Read recently a do not resuscitate tatoo case that had directives on file but that's the exception to the standard, imo.

The only compelling reason for me to leave my legacy to my children, in the context of my safety, would be for him to know. But, knowing him, it would not be a good idea to tell him as he would be very angry & would be sure to retaliate. My main reason for sharing that thought with you before was that it had occurred to me as a way to make it less advantageous for him to want me dead. I trust my intuition a lot as "it" can know what my conscious mind does not. I think it is very likely that he would love it if I wasn't around but he knows that he would lose a lot financially if we divorced (or equivalent) as the assets would most likely be split 50-50. Maybe I'm a thorn in his side and therefore he can't resist behaving badly towards me. Not that this would be the whole story as he has always behaved nastily.

I can make a will and not tell him. I do not want a do not resuscitate tattoo or health directive. I want to be resuscitated. I want to be in with a chance. The tattoo would say "Please resuscitate".

I am willing to tolerate his existence & also to be helpful & reasonably pleasant (no nastiness, passive aggression or cold war tactics). My problem is that he is not doing that towards me. He has never been like that towards me & that is not how his brothers treat their spouses or one of them treats me. They are abusive & play abuse games, I presume because they get a kick out of acting like this. It is their mindset though it is not good for the partner or the relationship.

About finances, my husband has always had an issue that a wife should take care of herself. Actually, that applies to everything. I have learned that if I ask him to do anything, even to make me a cup of tea when he is making himself one or to help finish the cooking or serve up a meal, he is resistant & unpleasant. He plays a whole lot of games around the subject of his being asked by me to do something. If I really want his help, I have to be prepared to push for it and to negotiate my way through the maze of the games he throws up, like pretending to be deaf; being irritable; or acting as if he doesn't understand.

Also, there are particulars about our finances over our long marriage that come into play. He bought the house just before we married and would never put it in joint names. So he is free to get a mortgage against it (which he has done to play the sharemarket of travel - he travels often) or sell it. He has a large superannuation whereas I have almost none. I became self employed because our oldest child (of 4) had a disability & was better cared for by me and therefore I lost out on current referees so I could reenter the workforce. I didn't have capital so I worked from home and never managed to earn much. And my husband would not contribute to all expenses, leaving me to do that. So what I earned was spent. Remember that we had four children & there were a lot of expenses due to that & he would just say "No" - he is very good at saying no. He is younger than me & is retired. But he is too young to get the aged pension so he lives off his superannuation.

I am now on a government aged pension and contribute to a joint account he set up after I got that. He also contributes but sometimes there is little left if big bills have to be paid.

Almost a year ago my mother died (my father had predeceased her) and I got a one off legacy. It is virtually my only nest egg as my superannustion has only a few thousand dollars in it & I need soon to draw on that. My husband has always viewed my nest egg as something he has the right to draw on for bills and there have been awful incidents when he has been ragingly angry when I have refused. Of course I have tried to explain my point of view but he says I am being selfish, unreasonable & calls me names like "piece of work." He also threatens me in various ways. He has always used threats & name calling. He keeps trying to get me to explain but I have tried hard to do that and now there is no point; it is just a game for him. It comes down to it just not being equitable that I keep drawing on my relatively small legacy to pay bills. He has many more assets than I do (my legacy is my only real one) and the reason I never could earn a lot or amass superannuation was because I was also caring for our oldest child since he was a toddler and then had three more children to also care for. I have had legal advice and I understand that I am entitled to half his assets if we break up. That would enable me to buy a house (I don't have enough now) but there would be all that moving & I am now quite incapacitated. Also there are pets.

My husband presents a story/narrative that is supposedly to justify his claim that I have never contributed and just spent money on myself. He always throws in the claim that I only ever bought him one cup of coffee. It is simply not true, none of it. I had to spend some money on myself as he didn't, but I was always frugal and mostly bought my clothing & the kids', etc, including furniture from second hand shops. And my mother & relatives used to pass on their unwanted clothing my way. There is nothing more I can say in the face of his repeated lies and distortions. The best I can do is to say I have already explained about that. Then he try to get me to explain again but it is not that hard to understand. It seems he just wants my money and likes to speak against me.

Right now I have "locked" my legacy into term deposits. He is angry about that but it has lessened his raging episodes after I say no to paying a big bill. I don't have much in the way of savings and he says to use my credit card for expenses when he is away (for weeks and often) but I don't want a debt (it is debt free) and it isn't fair in my eyes. He says I am bad & am talking nonsense. He has also periodically called my "crazy" but I have dampened that one down as I just laugh ridiculingly, copying his preferred style and saying something like "Ha, ha. What!!!? Crazy? YOU think I'm crazy?", dismissing that nonsense out of hand and turning my attention elsewhere. But sometimes I do find myself wondering if I am making sense because he keeps saying I don't. I have to work hard at shutting down hopelessness and negativity in myself. That didn't come easy but I have worked at that for a long time & have read many helpful books related to that.