H crying over family

[bumblebee44]

We have been LC with my DHs family  for the last 4 years since my in-laws blew up at our wedding and drove home drunk after making a big scene.  This weekend I was a bridesmaid in a wedding and my husband decided to drink way too much, started losing his mind on me about how I've ruined his life and he misses his family.  He barely remembers the night but he has been apologizing because he knows I ended up crying all night (it was super embarrassing-we finally had one night off from being parents and everything went in a very high school type direction). 

I guess he also went to a guest of the wedding and told them he has contemplated suicide which resulted in the guest staying by his side all night to make sure he didn't do anything. 

I don't even know how to handle any of this.  His family is awful (one recent example is after I gave birth to our daughter I ended up with a massive infection and went septic - MIL told my husband I was faking it for attention.  I was in the hospital for 2 weeks and required emergency surgery.  My DH had to stay home with a newborn and get up alone every 2 hours.  MIL and FIL went to Mexico and instead of asking how we were doing, they sent pictures of themselves drinking on the beach and having a great time).

I don't want to invite them back but is this how things will always be?  My DH secretly resenting me?  So embarrassed by the weekend and just wishing things were normal.

[biggerfish]

Hi bumblebee44. I'm so sorry you're going through this. I'm going to take some guesses, and then you can "check in" to your gut reaction to my guesses, which will tune you into your own insights which of course will be much more accurate then mine! LOL

I'm guessing that your hubby doesn't resent you. Instead, being a typical male, he doesn't know how to deal with his feelings very well. So he has somewhat pushed down the conflict, which emerged in response to the combustible mix of a wedding as reminder, plus too much booze.

Maybe for yourself, choose to get past the embarassment because after all, that's just a passing feeling, and it's about how things appear on the outside. Addressing the inside is more important now.

The inside is about your hubby's feelings of grief over the loss of his family. He has chosen you over his family, but it's painful for him. (And of course, the inside is also about you and YOUR thoughts.)

Do you have the stomach for allowing him to have a conversation with you in which he gets to think through his thoughts out loud, with you only doing reflective listening? Notice I didn't suggest he share all his feelings. Feelings are surface, and they arise from our thoughts. When we focus on our thoughts, and adjust them, and make decisions, our feelings shift. It would be too hurtful for him to express his feelings to you. (And anyway, that's already done.) But with some gentle encouragement from you, he might be able to articulate some of his thoughts, including conflicting and contradictory ones. You can validate by listening.

Once he feels heard, the two of you might be able to figure out that therapy can be helpful -- probably separately, not together. He has family issues to work out without you. You should not be required to get dragged into all that. But to make it feel equal in some way, you could decide for yourself to get your own therapy at the same time as he does.

Give him warm-up time, though, as this is an upsetting event in his life.

These are just suggestions, based on my hunch that this marriage could be worth it and that he is open to learning. If I got this totally wrong, you'll know it, as you will have visceral reactions to what I'm saying.

Hugs for you today. This isn't easy at all. But no husband worth his salt, in the end, can ever expect you to have a relationship with people who did to you what those people did.

I hope there was some help in here. I'd be interested in reading how others on this board respond to your situation.

I'm cheering you on.   

[NotFooled]

I wouldn't invite them back into your life but you might leave room for your husband to have his own personal contact with them, without you. 

That's pretty much how me and DH manage this issue.  Unfortunately I'm watching my husband struggle with the severe stress of having to deal with his mentally ill mother and brother.   You also might want to look into a counselor or mental health provider.  I think  that is where DH and I are headed at some point.

[Starboard Song]

I'm guessing that your hubby doesn't resent you. Instead, being a typical male, he doesn't know how to deal with his feelings very well. So he has somewhat pushed down the conflict, which emerged in response to the combustible mix of a wedding as reminder, plus too much booze.

---

Give him warm-up time, though, as this is an upsetting event in his life.

Typical Male here, reporting for duty.

I checked with the Typical Male Union first, and I have permission from TMU Local 568 to report that this is a brilliant post. Biggerfish has us down pat, and we fully concur with her recommendations. If it passes your gut check, we highly endorse this approach and wish you all the best.

Oh, and he wants to watch the game.

--

Really: I mean it, though. I'm a dude and think she's right. A similar dynamic is going on in my head (now 4 years NC with my in-laws), and I think Biggerfish isn't just guessing here. It is a real pattern, as outlandish as it seems. On behalf of the International Union of the Fraternal Order of the Brotherhood of the Typical Male (masculum typical), we apologize for rarely understanding our own emotions and then getting them all confused and blurting them out in a spray of light beer.

We promise to kill the spiders if you'll help our hearts to grow.

[candy]

 

Oh, help, I cannot stop laughing about the typical male's answer that checked with the Union first!

We just managed a wedding WITH the ILs some days ago, and I really can resonate with husbands who get a blurry vision.
We've had ugly highschool like fights for years when DH had too much light beer until I found out that DH will shut the drunken f*** off if I tell him to. Really that was all it took - I did not want to talk to drunken DH as the alcohol didn't do anything good for our conversation. And all I had to do was tell him to please go to sleep and talk about it tomorrow.

Of course you already talked. Since you are LC with the ILs you are probably the (only) one for your DH to talk to?
I had been the only one to talk to for my DH, and I got all the feelings, the hurt, mixed and stirred up in the pot of DH's emotional potpourri. This felt like he was resentful, too.

In my experience individual therapy for the DH can really help him sort out his feelings of grief and maybe anger. And individual therapy may help spouses like ourselves to understand and express that we are here to listen but not to be the sparring partners in fights the DHs have to fight with their FOOs (by fights I mean cutting the cord).

Yes, it is hard. But we can do it. It won't always be so hard and there will be weddings for the both of you to enjoy 

It sounds like your DH was confused by overwhelming emotions, and it is good he apologized. I am sorry your night off as parents and your night as a bridesmaid didn't go as planned. I checked back with the Union of young mothers who desperately need fun nights out and they told me they are working on a manual on how to stop unreasonable fights during fun nights. Hopefully they'll be done soon.

[lotusblume]

Hi there,

That's such a tough situation to be in. I've been on this board lately because I am the one with the FOO issues, and I'm trying to gain insight as to how my spouse feels.

Coming from the other side, maybe I can offer some perspective. I have admitted to my DH that I have been resentful towards him. I have gotten drunk and blown up at him. I have betrayed him, taken sides with my FOO in moments of fog, and secretly wondered if it was his fault.

I've come a long way and I know that that is not true. The problem is my FOO and the loyalty that would supercede my DH, most strongly in moments of fog. The "we are a family and everyone else is an outsider" narrative of dysfunctional families. I know that my DH is my FOC and I have done a ton of work to place my loyalty where it belongs, but it has been a challenge. We don't tend to see our FOO clearly until we have taken huge strides outside of the fog, and even then, in weak moments, weddings, gatherings, family type situations, it can trigger this overwhelming guilt and desire to run back to them. At this point, all logic flies out the window and YOU become the bad guy (our partner). It must somehow be your fault, maybe you just don't get how they aren't that bad, and it's because you're in our life that we are disconnected from our blood relatives.

Often, as I've read here, and in my experience, coming Out of the FOG happens when you meet the person you want to spend the rest of your life with and start your own family. Your FOO treats this as a betrayal and things explode and collapse. You side with your partner initially, and then after time, begin to doubt them. Seeds of toxicity leftover from the FOO haunt you. You wonder if it has to be so hard. Being NC or LC implodes all of your dreams of your FOO being happy for you, and this vision of a warm and close extended family. It is very painful.

Your husband may have been holding some similar feelings in, having these emotional struggles with himself. What has helped in my situation is talking to my spouse about it and also doing a lot of work to face things that I wish were not true. A private oath to trust him and put us first. Most people with FOOs like that have trust issues, and I absolutely despise how it feels when I have felt myself turning against my DH. In reality, it is turning against myself, going into cognitive dissonance, and being in denial.

You are not alone. I hope you and him will be able to talk about all of this and work it out. It might help you to know that everytime I have turned against my spouse, I have come out less in denial and more trusting of our relationship. And vowed never to do it again. I have done it a few times, but I try very hard to see more clearly when something triggers me into that narrative, and become more self-aware.

I hope that this helps. Take care.

[bumblebee44]

Thank you so much to everyone, the TMU, union of young mothers, and all else that replied.  I don't come on this board often, maybe once a year when things really hit the fan with my in-laws.  My husband and I have been together almost 10 years and things ebb and flow.  This weekend was a major flaw in our marriage that I wish didn't happen.  All I'm doing is protecting myself (his brother has threatened to kill me before and his mother backed him up saying "what else would you expect him to do when she ripped apart our family").  It's this behaviour that I always remind my husband "this is not normal".  I allowed his parents to visit and be around our daughter and I've even suggested they baby sit before since my MIL wanted so bad to do this (spoiler alert:  in order to assert her control and make sure I knew my place, they showed up 4 hours late to baby sit their grand daughter, wrecked our plans because we were supposed to meet up with friends, then got mad we didn't let them babysit (what was the point since our friends were mad we no showed and we had nothing else to do, plus were super bitter)).  I will say I've worked on holding my temper and just cutting them and my expectations of them out.  Again, thanks for the responses

[all4peace]

When I read SS's post, I nearly spat my coffee all over the screen....priceless! Fwiw, it was SS's paradigm-shifting views on marriage in the context of PD ILs that helped me significantly change how I looked at things. I had been handling things on my own for years and doing a lot of damage to my marriage in the process, and SS's marriage-team approach helped me significantly.

So, I can't claim to speak for women, either, but I will say that everything SS says rings true with how things went in my own marriage. I got a lot of blame from DH for "making him see," and to be fair I have also myself sometimes had a blaming approach for things that were really painful that I didn't want to deal with internally. It's easier to send it out in a blame statement than to really face the loss and grieve it. Especially if we've come from families in which we didn't learn how to identify our emotions, name them, accept them and work through them. AND then apparently if we have a Y chromosome


And Candy... Let us know when you get that manual completed.

bumblebee, I can understand how humiliating and embarrassing and hurtful this would be. Lotusblume gives really great perspective on the dynamics of someone who grew up in an enmeshed family with poor boundaries.

And the threat that your ILs have voiced to you---it's way over the top, far beyond what many of us face, and something to be taken very seriously. I am so sorry for all you have faced.