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About midlife crisis and different personalities:
https://thestagesandlessonsofmidlife.org/the-children-of-the-mid-lifers-issues/

While he certainly has signs that could be DID, I agree on that, it is NOT something he had before the end of last year. I am certain of that.

I know that people in certain cultures have a lot of faith in therapy. I will just tell you this. There's no such thing as therapy in the culture we live in. No I'm not in denial about anything, but to criticize my husband for not being in therapy is simply unfair to him and insulting.  Yes, I do defend him because while I have pointed out the symptoms he is suffering from as that is what this forum is about, I am not giving you a complete picture of him and the good and normal side that I see too.

And really I find it offensive that you jump to the conclusion that I think I don't deserve dignity and respect. My H knows that I believe that I do and I expect it and that I am not shy about demanding it. I don't always get it, but he is acutely aware that he should be giving it to me and he wants to do that. I really see he is doing his best that he can right now and trying even though he isn't perfect.

I'm more upset about the things he is NOT doing than the things he is doing, to be honest. He's really lost so much of himself in the past year and a half. He has become very narrow minded, not in the sense the doesn't have an open mind, but he has become obsessed with food and talking about food and controlling food and cooking and shopping and going on long harangues about food and critiquing what is cooked. His mother telling me his father was abusive toward her at meal times explains some of it, but it really goes beyond that. He has become obsessed with eating the food of his childhood too and one day he actually stuck out his tongue when I said I was making something that he always used to like to eat. I can't really explain why he has latched on to food. It's a mystery except maybe it is just low hanging fruit (so to speak) for someone who really wants to control his life.

I would challenge him when he got grouchy at meals and several times he refused to eat with his mother and myself for extended periods of time. It was all about control. Frankly, I was relieved to not eat with him, but then his mother would start getting grouchy. She would complain about the food I made or look really morose and even one day she snarled at me that the food tasted better when there were others at the table, as if I was to blame for him leaving us. I was in a catch-22. I couldn't eat with her (and him) and I couldn't eat with just her, one or the other would behave badly, OR BOTH. Because she started modeling his behavior at some point. But it's not like I could say "Your mother should eat by herself." Because when she wasn't here to eat with us he was fine.

I finally turned the tables on him one day when I saw the opportunity and it was ME who refused to eat with them. I kept this up for an entire month. At first he was curious about it, tried to get me to come back, but I refused to budge. He respected my choice (I actually had made a video of him with my phone 3 months before when he was haranguing us that mealtimes were about "freedom" and we didn't have to eat together if we didn't want to do so and if he had challenged me about it I would have been able to show him his own words) but I was polite and I ate by myself. Our relationship improved. I came back to eat with them after a month and he let out all this anger at me  about the previous month during that meal and so I went back the next day to not eating with them. Eventually one day he came to me and said, "You are eating with us today and don't argue." So I went and he behaved himself. Since then he has had more self-control but he knows now I have boundaries. Some days he just sits silently at the meals and says nothing.

As awful as this all sounds, I have managed to get it under control but it took me setting a boundary that I could control and he couldn't. And really when we are alone together, he is not engaging in this kind of behavior. Yes, we do fight sometimes but I would call it a heated argument, not abuse.

But there is so much else about him that I miss. He is physically, emotionally and mentally distant. I wouldn't say I am angry about this, but it's really a lot easier to stop someone from doing something than to force them to do something. You can't make someone be closer to you if they don't want to (or can't be).

I'm the spouse of someone with CPTSD and his memory issues are one of the biggest problems. I wonder how much other sufferers can say about their memory loss because if you can't remember something, you may not even realize you have forgotten. Here's some of the issues my husband has to show you the breadth of the memory issues he is having. It's not like people who forget their keys or somesuch at all.

• I feel as if the memory of the past 23 years of his life is very foggy and that he is living more in his childhood. This is clearly manifested to me in the things he does NOT say anymore. He had certain phrases and lines he used to use with me ALL the time. Many of these he simply has not uttered since he has fallen into this state a year and a half ago. Even negative statements he used to make, he simply does not say them anymore.
• Sometimes his memory winds up reversing things or is projection. For example, he saw something that needed fixing and asked me if HE should fix it (I don't know how to do it myself and he knows that). I told him he should go ahead and fix it. A few weeks later, he said to me, "I told you to fix xyz, why haven't you done it?" Perhaps he felt bad about not having done it but he projected it on me?
• There is a very sensitive matter between us, something he has not been doing lately and he knows it upsets me more than anything. He actually sat here and told me, "I did xyz MANY times." He actually did it only 3 times in the last 9 months and this is a factual matter, not one of opinion. I think he actually really believed what he was saying because to believe otherwise would mean he was being really neglectful toward me and he can't face himself.
• He can get in a very agitated state and not remember it AT ALL. One Friday he tried to create trouble between me and his mother. It wasn't working and actually what he was trying to do was so ironic that I laughed at him. He was acting like a big drama queen and got very annoyed. A week later something came up that reminded me of what had happened and I mentioned it to him. He had NO MEMORY of the whole incident. NONE. I recounted what happened and he laughed as if I was telling him a story about someone other than himself.
• The very same evening I told him what he had done the previous week, he got very upset and swore he was not going to eat some fish I had in the freezer. That if I tried to serve it to him, he would feed it to the dog. I figured he would not remember this incident either. So two days later I told him if he brought some lemons and parsley, I would cook the fish. He said he would, but it took a few days for him to bring the stuff. But clearly he had forgotten he swore he would not eat it. Then after he did, he asked me one night whether I planned to cook the fish the next day because he wanted to confirm for sure. I said I would. Still not remembering what he swore. The next morning I got up, cleaned the fish, put it in the marinade, and then when I mentioned the fish to him, suddenly he said he remembered he swore he would not eat the fish and he refused to eat it. There was still half in the freezer after that and he vacillated about what to do with it for months and was very agitated by the whole thought of it, even though it was his favorite type of fish. The remainder eventually did go to the dog because it was too old anymore. 
• I asked him to buy me something. There are two kinds of this thing, expensive and flimsy and cheap and sturdy. I told him to bring the latter, and explained to him why even. He came home with the former. He was so upset when I told him I had told him to bring the opposite, he swore I had not told him such a thing and we were shouting at eachother about it.
• His mother had an old stove that we converted to a bbq by stripping out all its parts. He did it together with me. A few months later, he offered to his mother to bring back the stove for her to use, not realizing that it wasn't just sitting outside unused, it was stripped to the point of being unusable as a stove anymore. I didn't correct him on this one.
• He is studying for his masters exams now. He told me he is having memory problems. He said when he finishes studying one subject and switches to another he forgets what he studied previously. He rattled off a list of the subjects he is studying, one of them was "psychology". He's not studying "psychology," not even "psychiatry". I pointed this out to him. He claims he had this memory problem when he was studying before, but he NEVER complained about it before to me so I have my doubts.

I use a different voice - it exaggerates in situations where I need to "win"; arguing my method of doing a chore is better, discussing politics etc. I hate thinking I mimic his persuasive techniques, even over relatively trivial things. I become defensive when people ask how I picked up my accent (I don't sound like the locals and I've lived here all my life). I hear myself and understand I am different and I know why. But I can't trust that others would understand it's not a conscious choice.

When my husband first started acting strangely, I came to the conclusion he was having a midlife crisis. I still 100% believe that because he fits all the typical symptoms to a T but I also see a great deal of it is CPTSD. From what I have learned about midlife crisis, the different voices are him returning to earlier stages of his life when he had issues and/or acting out the abuser role (i.e. his father). He started school at age 8 (there was no school open here before then and he started off in 3rd grade) and I suspect that is when the abuse may have started. It's interesting that you realize what you are doing, I was really gobsmacked when he said he had been using the 8 year old voice for 3 months. He HADN'T been using it that long, but he obviously was aware that he had started it in the near past when I told him he never used it before. He told me he used to say "Mommy mommy" in that voice (he uses it to call me as well) and I asked him if he used it when he needed something from her. He went silent at that point.

It seems your husband told you parts of the story but not all. It is great that you have connected the dots this far and sought advice from this forum. I hope you continue seeking advice and also that you look after yourself because there seems to be many demands on you.

No it's clear he hasn't. 97% of his stories from his childhood involve animals, not people, and he is an endless source of animal stories-wild, stray, pets, farm animals-you name it, his mind is a virtual zoo. I even asked him a few months ago if he spent all his time with animals as a child and he said yes! Although I know he had friends. He has only ever told me two stories of him being a troublemaker even though he believes he was a really bad one. I have many many stories of making trouble myself and I was a GOOD kid, although i got away with almost all of it. His mother claims he was hanging around with bad kids, his sister says he just wanted to play the normal sports that all kids like to play, but his father wanted him to study. She thinks all men beat their children and there is nothing wrong with it. According to his sister, he got the brunt of the abuse because he wasn't afraid of his father. She said his older brother, who unlike him was a total failure in school, was afraid, so he didn't get beaten. He truly does have a "fight" personality with a bit of "flight" so I can see that in him. I told his sister about midlife crisis and also the effects of the childhood abuse on him and his current behavior and even though she is uneducated and never went to school herself, she agreed with my interpretation of the situation 100%, which reassured me I was on the right track because she was a firsthand witness to the abuse. I only asked her about his relationship with his father at that time but I really think I need to ask her next time I can take her aside privately about his mother's relationship with him, especially regarding his father's abuse. i feel that might help shed more light on his current behavior.

I'm wondering if you and he have to live in his childhood home and with his Mum and sister. Are there no alternatives? I'm wondering if he drinks, medicates, or practices a coping technique that leaves him numb (I have no judgement of how others choose to unwind). Could this be addressed if it has become destructive?

Fortunately there is absolutely no substance abuse beyond an addiction to chewing tobacco (he started smoking at 16 and quit cigarettes for a while when he had a cancer scare but then someone gave him chewing tobacco and he got addicted again). He saw what happened to his father with his opium addiction and as a consequence he won't even prescribe any sort of addictive drugs to his patients whatsoever even if they really badly needed them because he doesn't want the responsibility of making anyone addicted like his father. So in that sense he does understand his father's legacy and does not want to perpetuate it in himself or anyone else.

There is something else he is doing though that I think could to some extent account for the numbness as I think if he felt anything, the guilt he would feel toward me would be too much so he has had to turn off his feelings. But he readily admits to having no feelings. At one point I told him he is like a robot: I push a button, and he does what I ask of him in terms of practical matters, but he feels nothing. He totally agreed with this assessment.

I was keeping this journal last summer when he really started creating problems for me and he found it recently and wanted to read some of it with me. I didn't want to but he would not give up or let me pry it out of his hands. One of the things I talked about in it was how I felt I was in a small boat in a hurricane. He said I was a very good writer and he agreed that he was like a hurricane actually. To demonstrate it, he told me how the previous day he had fired a nurse, docked another's pay for 3 months, and hired another to work for free for 3 months because she wasn't well trained enough. Before that I hadn't realize what a terror he was being at work (he's a director of a newly opened hospital) So he does indeed have some self-awareness of what he is doing and how it affects others. What seems to be lacking mostly is the cause and effect part of it. I'm hesitant to say to him, "You aren't your father" or "Your father isn't around" because he might just be driven more into denial.

Living with MIL isn't really something we can avoid. But she is a huge problem not just for the PTSD but also for other issues related to his midlife crisis. Her health is bad and he believes he will wind up like her. She is diabetic and is really bad about taking proper care of herself or even taking the right insulin doses. Even though she is living with her son a doctor who constantly reminds her what she should be doing. She's also started to show signs of dementia since late last year. He is in denial mostly about that too.

Well done for drawing boundaries - maintain them. In the past I have accused my husband of playing the role of a victim... I hate admitting that those were my exact words. I have a better understanding of it all right now and can see I have played a role too. I'm going to work on that. All the best to you and your husband.

It's interesting you talk about your husband playing the role of the victim. Correct me if I am wrong, but it sounds like you wanted him to be stronger and NOT roll over and taken it when you abused him. I've gotten the same advice about midlife crisis, that they actually are crying out for someone to set boundaries on them. And sometimes I have responded to his behavior in a way that left me thinking "Oh *, now he is going to be really pissed at me" but then he came back in a better state afterward. My husband desperately wants me to be happy right now and gets angry if I seem depressed, even though he knows he is making my life *. But he doesn't want to take the actions necessary to ameliorate the situation. And I am the only one who is willing to set the boundaries on him. It's a cultural thing I think. People here are too deferential to a male and a doctor to stand up to him if he acts abusive. I'm from a different culture and I have a PhD so I am not going to kowtow to him and allow myself to be controlled in a bad way and he knows it. Yet, in spite of all his bad behavior, I do feel he has more respect for me than he does for others. But that he can't control me with abuse also drives him mad.

Kat-I do see a lot of similarities between our husbands. The thing that gets me is during the first year in our marriage, my husband, on his own, made the connection between his father's abuse and the way he was acting toward me at the time. He had a good self-awareness and I don't think if he had not told me, I would be able to show him the compassion and patience and understanding I feel right now, because otherwise his behavior would be totally inexplicable.

Radical-As for my husband's abusive behavior, at first as this all was starting last year I was giving him a pass, but with time I gained the strength to stand up to him and it HAS helped calm him down and he is a lot less abusive toward me since I did that. I have been very firm in drawing boundaries with him and I have seen good progress from him when I do so.

There's more to the story than I am willing to get into right now but it's clear he internalized his father's view of him as a "nasty" person (his own word to describe himself) and doesn't want to actually take out his self-perceived nastiness on me. I can see this in his actions and he has even stated it to me several times.But that is also part of the reason he is distancing himself from me. He believes the more time he is with me then more likely he is to be abusive toward me and he wants to protect me from that. Early in our marriage we did have quite a bit of turmoil but the last few years our relationship was quite normal with very little fighting, maybe every few days we might have a small fight, stay angry for five minutes, and then move on, totally healthy interaction. He basically had become pretty adept at behaving normally. But his memory right now only is of the early years it seems and he is convinced that his issues are with ME, and does not seem to recognize the role of his father as he did early on, nor the influence of his mother's presence, although I have pointed this out to him several times, because it is glaringly obvious. He can be totally normal and nice when we are alone but get his mother in the room and some food and he becomes a mocking, controlling, rude jerk.

I know I can't solve his problems for him, but it is frustrating that early in our marriage he understood himself and could see the problems were NOT between us but rather stemmed from his upbringing but now he wants to blame all the problems on our relationship, but it is more clear than ever that the environment he is in and the current circumstances that are related to his childhood are what is causing him so much turmoil at the moment, but he doesn't see that at all, or at least he does not acknowledge it to me. And he basically just says after all these years I don't know his personality.

His exams will be over in November and I am hoping that this will remove one huge trigger but his mother is here to stay.  His behavior toward her is not so good either, but she just says he's like his father and puts up with it, which doesn't help because it is tacitly saying it is ok I'm the one standing up and saying "I know you are capable of acting better than this," because truly, I know he is. And when I do stand up to him it can push him back into being a mature and respectful adult for a while. He becomes more himself, or at least the self I have known for many years, not under the sway of his childhood. In fact, after taking a very firm stand against him when he was acting like his father several times (and he was acting like his father toward others as well, not just me), he stopped going into those trances like his father with everyone, so there has been progress on that front.

He is aware of that progress and has told me he notices he is acting better and is proud of that fact, but chalks it up to spending less time with me and believes us spending time together is the problem, although his time with me has neither decreased or increased since the time he was acting like that frequently. He has a very bad sense of time at the moment by the way and cannot accurately say how much time he spends with me AT ALL. He believes it is way more than it is.

I do believe he knows there is something wrong with himself, as he engages in a lot of projection and defensive comments that if I turn them around in my mind, apply to him, but making the connection with the source of it seems to be totally lost.

Hi everyone. This is my first post here. I'm sorry for what all of you have gone through and hope you are finding the peace you deserve.

I'm the spouse of someone that I believe has CPTSD, but he SEEMS to have little self-awareness of himself at the moment. I'm not ready to tell my whole story, but here's what I know about my husband. We've been married 17 years and during our first year of marriage he had a very nervous personality. He would flail his arms around in his sleep as if he was fighting off an attacker. He finally told me that he was acting this way because his father (who was an opium addict) used to beat him. Actually what he described in some cases was more like torture. His father beat his mother too. He told me he was a troublemaker child and that is why his father beat him. He said he was never ever happy during his childhood. He told me at the age of 16 he stood up to his father and told him if he didn't stop beating his mother, he would kill him with his own hands, and his father stopped. He almost seemed like he had a mild case of manic depression the first 5 years of our marriage and then things got better and better until he seemed pretty normal.

Then about a year and a half ago everything started to change. We made a long planned move to his hometown and moved in with his mother (his father died about 7-8 years ago). His career though really has taken off since then and he is having success he never had before (he's a doctor). At the same time, he is studying for his master's exams.

As I said, I'm not ready to go into all the details of his symptoms but suffice it to say his behavior has become what appears to be a classic case of CPTSD. I've learned more about his childhood from talking to his sister who is close in age to him and his mother. His father beat him because he wanted to play soccer and things like that and his father wanted him to study. I know he credits his father with encouraging him to study and become a doctor but i did not realize the abuse was related to his studies until his sister told me. His mother has also confirmed that much of his behavior right now is just like his father (he even sometimes goes into what can be described as trances where he speaks in his father's voice and his native language and cannot understand English). He also often behaves like he has returned to his childhood and lately has been using a tone of voice that he admitted to me he used when he was 8-9 years old (I noted I had only heard him use it since a month prior and he said I wasn't paying attention because he had been doing it for 3 months!)

However, here's the problem I face. Compared to when we were first married and he clearly could see and admitted the connection between his behavior toward me and his childhood abuse, now at least outwardly he does not admit there to be any connection. I'm the one who changes, I'm the one who is crazy, psychotic, sick in my head. (He says these things sometimes).

What I have clearly observed is that his aggressive and controlling behavior is at its worst when his mother is present and the topic of conversation is food or it is meal time. I have ascertained from him and his mother that he never had any shortage of food as a child, even though he grew up poor. He always told me they had plenty of meat and dairy products as they had their own animals and even some land to grow food and his mother confirmed his pockets were always full of sweets. She did say his father was very abusive toward her at the table (not the children) and that he was acting like his father, only his father was worse.

At one point I gave up eating with them because it was creating more problems between us. He kept pressing me as to why I was doing this and one day he was pressing me and finally I said, "Stop worrying about what I eat, where I eat, or who I eat with. Worry about something important, like your exams." What struck me was as soon as I said that, he shot up from sitting like a rocket, said, "You are right" and left the room. I realized I had touched upon something, namely that telling him he needed to study resulted in an overly compliant response. He uses his exams as an excuse to avoid me, even sometimes I find out later he was not studying. He was a student studying before at other points in our marriage and he did not act like this, but then his mother wasn't in the picture.

My feeling is that the combination of living with his mother and studying for exams has created the perfect storm of a trigger for him that has catapaulted him back into his childhood. However, unlike when we were first married, there is no acknowledgement from him about this. I did point out one day that food and his mother seemed to be a trigger and he got angry, started avoiding me and his mother and particularly has reduced interaction with his mother compared to before and is actually now starting to behave better at meals, although many times he just sits silently at meals.

The long and the short of it is though that I do not sense any real sense of admittedly connecting his childhood with a lot of bad behavior he is engaging in (there's a lot more I haven't talked about above) like he did in the beginning of our marriage. He is suffering from complete emotional numbing. Tells me he loves no one and that if he could feel he would wish he was dead. When I say nice things to him like how much I love him and care about him, he gets a very pained look on his face, like he has constipation and someone stuffed a bitter lemon in his mouth. He is convinced his behavior is the real him and that he wasn't himself before. He's obsessed with wanting to feel in control, before he was happy to share decision making with me. As you can see, a lot of classic CPTSD symptoms.

I guess I want to ask all of you who have CPTSD, how did you come to realize 1-that something was wrong, 2-that is was connected to your childhood, 3-got a diagnosis of CPTSD? The lack of self-awareness (or acknowledgement) on his part is a huge problem because he is engaging in a lot of destructive behaviors that could have lifelong consequences for multiple people if not nipped in the bud sooner rather than later. I'm just wondering how the awareness grows inside you and the dos and don'ts from my end of helping him to cultivate an awareness.