My story: husband threatened me last week

[Ahepburnfan]

Hi all, I'm so relieved to have found this site today, I think my husband may be a sociopath. Nothing else really makes sense. I am excited to read other people's stories on here. I am very isolated and have few people I feel I could talk to about this and have felt this way for the three years I have been married.

Can I go ahead and share my story then in a separate post? I would like some affirmation on whether the problems I am seeing are common, or if I am just overreacting.

Also question, can my husband be a sociopath and not know it?

Thanks all so much.

[Ahepburnfan]

Hi all, I'm going to keep this fairly short but there's a lot here. My husband of three years understands me like no other. When we got married it was tumultuous but he has made me feel I am truly loved for the first time in my life. My parents were both abusive and narcissistic and I had just gotten out of a highly sexually verbally and emotionally abusive relationship. I am however starting to think there is a huge problem that he is unaware of here. I will attempt to avoid any identifiers here but need to get independent input.

We are currently living in a very isolated rural location that has been very hard on me.  My car broke down about a year ago and he refused to get it repaired or to let me buy a new one so I have been totally dependent on him for contact with the outside world since then. I also have two small children under age two. Our house is very rundown because my husband used it as a rental property and it got trashed while he was in the hospital. He was very sick and almost died and now we are trying to rebuild his five businesses. He has a large number of unpaid bills and went I catalogued his bills prior to getting married, I saw he had lots and lots of unpaid bills. He owes several relatives large amounts of money, in the tens of thousands, and he also has people in his line of work who owe him hundreds of thousands of dollars. I do not have contact with any of these people.

He also has several legal issues , civil lawsuits that are pending and very expensive. I have seen the paperwork and he says they were caused by various family members betraying him. I believe him on this. He also had not paid his taxes for years because he has been sick and he is also very messy and disorganized and terrible at anything clerical. So the irs is auditing him again and wants another settlement. This is incredibly stressful for me being financially dependent on him. He has borrowed about twenty to thirty thousand dollars from me and has yet to pay it back. He does not pay himself a salary for any of the businesses he owns because he says he cannot afford it. When he does favors for friends with his equipment they sometimes give him cash and he uses that. However, with two months exceptions, the entire time we have been married I have had support the family. That being said, our House comes with a free gas well and water well so our only bill is WiFi and electric. The house has no mortgage.

Since we got married, I have been convinced by him to drop my entire circle of friends as well as all my siblings and my parents. He has also fallen out with three out of his four siblings. We live next door to his parents who are narcissistic so we do not spend much time with them. I feel very isolated but in the past few months I have reconnected with friends and relatives and am starting to feel I belong in the community. We have also recently decided to change religions but not tell anyone, which has been tumultuous.

Now for the positive stuff. I have experienced a lot of suffering, but also a lot of happiness, more than sever before since getting with my husband. He makes me feel so understood and I am a lot stronger than when he first started dating, my two kids bring me so much joy. I just got used to the fact that even though my husband is a millionaire and has tons of assets, we need to live frugally until the business can get back up and running. I took a long time to accept this involving the five stages of grief. There really is just not much I can do.

He has had a fantastic life with tons of unbelievable stories that I have not verified. I always took them on trust but now I am starting to doubt. Some examples:

He went to Chernobyl for work and got radiation poisoning, which has caused all his medical issues. He can't take me to the hospital because the work is classified and the government is involved. He did not use his real name in the hospital.
He has worked all over the world with powerful people and made a ton of money to pay off the millions of dollars he borrowed to start his business. His dad stepped in out of jealousy in these instances to sabotage him, thus the problems. His family refuses to make issue of this and says he deserves it because of his problems with unaccountability instability and secrecy. He also is very arrogant.

Lately it has become more frustrating to me that he is still not getting ahead at work. I put together his bills for him and he wrote out the checks and put them in his truck, but he has not mailed them. He doesn't seem to have time to go pay his relatives back. We can't hang out with many of his relatives because of this rift. He has many rifts with people because he is the hero figure for them and is super helpful and charming. He is ultra competent. But the relationships fizzle when they criticize him, he can't take it and just isolates. I think this is because his parents abused him as a child by forcing him to do child labor from the age of three and he often had to solve their many emotional and financial problems as a child. He has a very hard time seeing projects through from start to finish and is extremely bad at doing things on time. Everything always takes much longer than he estimates. This is partly because he is a perfectionist and also because he is very easily distracted.

So this past week He was intensely triggered by losing a lawsuit with the neighbor over road usage. It came as. A huge shock and was very unfair. He responded by freaking out and saying we needed to move. It was very chaotic and I got very stressed. However he would not stop talking in a way that intensely triggered my fight of flight instincts. I asked him to stop several times but he did not even listen. He said that we must spend no money at all to buy a huge farm involving another lawsuit nearby with some relatives. I said this sounded really stressful and preferrred to talk about it when the boys weren't making so much noise. I also was  following his plan for potty training our eldest, where you spank them every time they winkle on the floor. My eldest winkled twice so I spanked him twice. The second time I looked at my husband and said I enjoyed that, I am so tired of cleaning up pee puddles. He FREAKED OUT and left. Then that night he screamed at me and called me a child abuser. He insinuated that he had married the wrong person and he said that the next time I did that he would probably get violent. Those were his exact words. He said he was much smarter and more skilled than I am (I have my masters and was making around 100k when I dropped out of the workforce to raise our kids) but he thought that at the least I could do childcare. He said he didn't want to have to punish me but he hadn't decided how to react. I responded by saying he was triggered by his childhood and that was why he was freaking out. I told him I would support him but he had to get a mentor and some accountability. He responded by saying he couldn't trust anyone. He repeated his claim that no one loved him and said I also didn't love him because I wasn't capable of love. To be clear, I apologized and cried and cried. I was so sad I had lost my temper and spanked twice when once would've been sufficient. He said our child would never fully trust me again.

The next few days he acted just like his dad, cold and avoidant. He was kind to the boys but not so much to me. On his birthday he yelled at me for singing happy birthday because he said he didn't want to celebrate his birthday. He said I was disrespectful for doing so. I had no idea and thought that a low key birthday celebration from my perspective would be fine. To him it was way over the top.

Finally I got afraid and contacted several of our mutual friends who he knows and trusts. They were shocked and offered to come get me. I told them that wasn't possible because the last time I went to visit a friend he freaked out and made me promise to never leave again because he had intense abandonment issues from his parents. I didn't tell them any of the other problems but they told me I just need to be patient and a better communicator and that men and women handle stress differently. I hope they are right but I don't know.

Guys what do I do. I can't really tell anyone we know without them judging us. My husband has explicitly forbidden it. I don't have assets or a car. I can't tell his parents. I don't want a divorce or anything like that. He did agree to see a marriage counselor. I know I have damage too and take full responsibility  for that. I just can't fix him or control him in any way and I feel like our life is still out of control.

Is this normal???

[notrightinthehead]

Welcome! This place is full of information and support.
You might find some answers to your questions on the Personality disorders tab:

https://outofthefog.website/traits/

as well as other useful information.
You might also study the toolbox: https://outofthefog.website/toolbox-intro for strategies what to do and what not to do.

Are you safe? From how you describe your situation it does not sound safe to me.  You might want to consider making an emergency escape plan for yourself and the kids. What you describe also does not sound like a loving, mutually respectful, normal relationship to me. More like an endurance test in suffering as another member so wonderfully expressed.

The having to be secretive about what is going on in your marriage sounds very worrysome to me too.

As to the spanking your kids for peeing, some kids only learn to control their bladder with three years, some only with 4.  Two sounds very early to me. It might not be the best idea to spank a child that is not yet able to control his/her bladder completely.  As a parent your role is to protect your kids from harm. As you wrote this is your husband's rule but then he scolds you for implementing his rule, that sounds a little bit crazymaking to me.

I hope you will find useful information on this site and see you around on the boards!

[BeautifulCrazy]

Welcome Ahepburnfan,
You are definitely not alone. I'll bet you find lots of stories and discussions here that mirror your own experiences.
Lots of validation and support too.

I'm sorry you are going through a difficult time.

I don't know what a professional would say, but my first husband was a sociopath and he seemed to have no idea. He still seems to have no idea. Despite being formally diagnosed with Antisocial Personality Disorder and a couple of other disorders / issues, he still maintains that he is not the one in any of his relationships who has a problem. (I think that might also be symptom?)
All the horrible abuse he has inflicted on people throughout his life.... he isn't responsible for any of it. Those people are just bats**t crazy, or they deserved it, or they "made" him do it.

Sending encouragement your way!
I will look for you around the forum.

~BC

[Fiasco]

I hope you will find this a supportive and safe place for you. We are all different backgrounds and experiences but I know a lot of us can relate and sympathize with what you're describing.  It's a very upsetting and confusing time when you've become distant from your other friends and family, hope you can find lots of support here.