Not Realizing the Source of Your Problems

[AnchorintheStorm]

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.

[Kat]

First of all, welcome!  I think it's great that you've come here to ask your important questions.  I'm not sure how much help I can offer, but I'll give it a try.

As someone with CPTSD, I'll give you my answers to your three questions.  1) I always suspected something was wrong in my family, my mother was finally diagnosed as having borderline personality disorder, but it wasn't until I heard her diagnosis from a family therapist that I realized something was also wrong with me.  I was 31 and it kind of flipped my world upside down to realize all I had known to be "normal" was far from it.  I remember thinking: Hmm...so maybe that's why I'm always angry and drink until I pass out most nights and self-mutilate.  (I know, it sounds funny not to have recognized these behaviors as problems before then.)  2) I think I already answered this in #1.  It just really hit me that the way I was raised was dysfunctional and had to have affected me.  There was no way, in my mind, that it could not have negatively affected me.  (My older sisters all completely disagree, however.)  3) I entered individual therapy shortly after completing family therapy.  I was first diagnosed with early on-set dysthymic disorder--low-grade perpetual depression starting before the age of 21.  Then it was chronic major depressive disorder.  Then it evolved to a non-specific dissociative disorder.  Finally, the term C-PTSD was used.  The first diagnosis was from my first therapist.  The other three all came from my current T who I've been seeing for over a decade.  I suspect she always knew I was suffering from CPTSD and the associated dissociative disorder, but waited until I was ready to accept it for myself before broaching those diagnoses.  Plus, CPTSD isn't an official, recognized disorder by the DSM, so she may have been apprehensive of naming it as such. 

One thing I hope you noticed was that while I can see how my childhood has negatively affected me and caused problems, my two oldest sisters are in complete denial.  In their eyes my parents were perfect and neither of them has any problems.  Ha!

I think maybe the story of my husband might be a bit more helpful...maybe.

My husband was born in another country.  His family fled and ended up here in the U.S. when he was about seven.  I mention this because you mentioned your husband going into trances where he speaks in his native language and doesn't understand English.  You also spoke about him being brought up poor, but not lacking for food.  For my husband's family, and the family of my brother-in-law whose parents were both immigrants and struggled with money, the one thing that was not skimped on was food.  I think food is such a vital part of culture and identity that it is the one non-negotiable.  It's like these families would go without almost anything just so that they could provide the food they knew and which named them.  I hope that makes sense.

My husband's father was very abusive.  My husband is the youngest for four boys and claims he was never beaten, but his brothers sure were.  The story goes that the father didn't beat his wife...at first.  Once that started, they separated.  The father became delusional (possibly due to syphilis) and ended up shooting my husband's oldest brother, mother, and maternal grandmother.  Only the mother died.  My husband was only fourteen.

When we first met, as we were falling asleep, my husband would do that whole-body jerk that happens when you have a dream that you're falling. He did it EVERY night.  He also would cry out in his sleep and beg his father no or become very little.  Once he spoke in a very little voice in his sleep about a lollipop.  At the time, I think he knew how he'd grown up was negatively affecting him.  As the years have progressed, however, he doesn't see anything wrong with his current maladaptive behaviors.  He's not curious about knowing how his childhood still affects him.

Just this evening, we went to the beach and stayed until after dark.  Unbeknownst to me, he'd put his wallet and car keys in a pouch on the back of my beach chair.  When I closed it up, they fell out.  We didn't realize any of this until we were back at the car.  He FLIPPED OUT.  His MO is to blame others.  That's what had always saved him from being beaten as a kid.  He does it any time he "messes" up.  If he breaks a glass, it is because someone else put it in the wrong place.   He became furious and blamed me for dropping everything in the sand even though I had no idea he'd put anything in my beach chair.  He yelled at our daughter for having to use the bathroom.  He yelled at our son for having wanted to go to the beach in the first place.  He was out of control.  But, he didn't see any of it.  And he won't.  He did apologize because I was over-the-top with my explanations to the kids that they'd done nothing wrong and that the correct way to deal with such a situation was to have a plan, keep calm, and execute the plan.  When I walked almost directly to where his dropped things were, he melted and apologized.  He could see, only then, that he'd over-reacted.  But I highly, highly doubt he'd ever associate any of his behaviors with his childhood coping mechanisms. 

I know this doesn't help solve your problems.  My hope is that your husband doesn't remain in denial, but the denial can run very deep.  It absolutely sounds like your husband is suffering from CPTSD, but there's no guarantee he's capable of seeing it.  Probably not what you were hoping to hear and quite possibly me projecting my own family issues onto yours.  Keep reading.  Keep talking to your husband.  Keep seeking answers.  I wish you the best.

[radical]

Hi AnchorintheStorm,
If your husband is being abusive it doesn't matter why.  That is the bigggest problem I see here.  Your husband suffered abuse and now you are suffering abuse, yet your focus is helping him with his suffering.  Abuse is often, perhaps always a consequence of experience of abuse.  The problem is that abuse is a sick solution, it is taking feeling powerless, humiliated, hurt etc. and dumping them on someone else, so they suffer instead of you. 

Your suffering matters to me.  If you have children, they are being harmed too.  I feel for you, wanting to provide the love that your husband was denied, wanting to make it better for him.  My opinion, you can't.  Your husband has solved his problem.

[AnchorintheStorm]

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.

[AnchorintheStorm]

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.

[radical]

What you describe sounds awful.  There are many different ways of being in denial about abuse and its effects.  Do you ever feel angry about being treated abusively or do you always seek to find reasons to explain it?

[AnchorintheStorm]

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).

[fullofsoundandfury]

Hi Anchor,

I hope you don't find this upsetting, please hear me out. There are many, many, many red flags of DID, dissociative identity disorder, previously referred to as multiple personality disorder, in your testimony. I see more very clear indicators of DID than I do CPTSD. DID is a survival mechanism the psyches of highly intelligent children employ, when the abuse is so severe that the mind splits. One compartment of the mind holds the abuse and the memory, allowing the other part of the mind to be shielded, forget, and go to school. It often begins in infancy.

His behavior is not actually reflective of what I understand CPTSD to present as. Trauma is the fundamental cause of DID - people with DID do have PTSD or CPTSD, but their abuse was up a few notches and caused this amazing survival function available to humans to enable cognitive survival.

I have a lot of personal experience with this, which is why I feel confident about what I am seeing in your posts. I do not have DID myself, but still consider myself a lived-experience expert

The nature of DID is to be covert. Many people don't realize they themselves have it or that their husband or wife have it, until mid-life, if ever. Many people with DID cannot function at all and many are very highly successful - they actually create personalities whose role it is to achieve. DID is designed to hide and protect the person. It happens when abuse is so horrific that the mind cannot stand it. More severe abuse causes it than the majority of people occupying this board endured (not to minimise, just explaining) DID often goes undiagnosed or misdiagnosed.
There are often apparently normal parts who act as the Host. The Host's job is to go to work, be a husband, and live a normal life. The Host is in complete denial, has to be in order to do its job to protect the system. 

It is possible that the personality acting as The Host changed when you arrived at your MIL's house. That may explain the drastic changes in behavior.

I'll go through and find the strong signs of DID I see:

*Actually what he described in some cases was more like torture. As noted above, torture creates DID in highly intelligent, resillient children. Others go insane or die.
*He told me he was a troublemaker child and that is why his father beat him. Child alters often take this identity, as a bad trouble maker
*He said he was never ever happy during his childhood. Indicates severe abuse or amnesia
*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. Emergence of powerful protective alter, possibly capable of murder under specific circumstances?
*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. Do you say manic depression because of sudden, extreme mood swings? Suddenly very 'up' then down? In context, that could suggest DID

*Then about a year and a half ago everything started to change. The glue holding the system you were familiar with, began to come unstuck?

*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). This is not CPTSD. This could very well be an alter personality. It is quite common for people to absorb 'fragments' of their abusers then act the person out. This is very well documented and researched

*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!) This is not CPTSD. People with CPTSD do not act out as their inner children or change their voices. This is known as a 'little' alter emerging. A literal child personality. Littles are frequently delightful; many are very scared. Frozen back in time. Calling for his mommy probably connects to a memory that child holds/was created to keep from the rest of the system

*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. Seems quite a dramatic shift of perspective. Could it be that one self of his knows the connection to his father, and another doesn't have access to that information due to amnesiac barriers and lack of co-consciousness?

*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. No history of caring about food? A Protector/Controller Alter emerged at the sight of his mother and the return to his hometown?

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. Again, could well be an internalised fragment of his father being triggered to come out at the scene of the original creation.

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. Sounds exactly like a switch. Another personality emerged in that moment, probably the one whose job it is to obey the father and study.


However, unlike when we were first married, there is no acknowledgement from him about this Different host personality at the helm, than the one you married?

many times he just sits silently at meals. Quite extremes of behavior - abusive and controlling or silent. Different parts of him active?

He is suffering from complete emotional numbing. Very common with DID.

Tells me he loves no one and that if he could feel he would wish he was dead. Common DID

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. Common DID

He is convinced his behavior is the real him and that he wasn't himself before. Indicates different selves, different personalities. If it is DID, this current self truly wasn't the same person who was in charge of the body before. He's telling you the truth.

*He's obsessed with wanting to feel in control, before he was happy to share decision making with me. CPTSD usually doesn't produce such radical personality or relational changes. I haven't encountered that as a symptom in any of my research. I've researched a lot

*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 Might be alters engaging in that behavior

*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). Is there evidence that this happens during a midlife crisis? I've never heard of that as a midlife crisis symptom - different voices, reverting to childhood states, embodying an abuser? If that is common in midlife crisis, that is useful learning for me, interesting.

*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. Loss of time/inability to track time, classic dissociative symptom. I think I saw you mention somewhere else that he loses time? If so, that will be when different parts of him are active

*No it's clear he hasn't. He may literally not remember. Different parts may remember different things, but not one cohesive story


*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! Unrealistic account of his childhood. Inner world stuff? Happens a lot.

*He has only ever told me two stories of him being a troublemaker even though he believes he was a really bad one.

*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.

*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. Very common in DID

*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.

*He's really lost so much of himself in the past year and a half.

*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.

*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. She may trigger a particular protective personality to emerge to protect the littles and other personalities who don't feel capable of sitting in her presence, considering she was complicit in their abuse and would be a heavy, heavy, dangerous trigger for him

* (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. So.... do you feel like you have to record him, to show him versions of his own opinions, because later on, he will forget what he said or have a totally different stance? That's not CPTSD.



*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). The person you are interacting with may not be in love with you, may have been 'asleep' when the body married you, may not consider you his/her wife, may have just met you.

Please research DID thoroughly, and research CPTSD thoroughly. I can recommend this book for a thorough and in depth, complete understanding of CPTSD. https://www.amazon.com/Complex-PTSD-Surviving-RECOVERING-CHILDHOOD/dp/1492871842 There are plenty of excellent books on DID too. It's always better to know the truth either way.

The three C's: you didn't cause it, you can't cure it, you can't control it. No matter what it is he has, please look after yourself and stay focused on you and your needs.

If it is CPTSD, it really should respond to clear communication. He may be the fight/narcissist type as described in the book linked above. Denial is powerful in CPTSD but your husband's denial sounds quite extreme. Many people with CPTSD are people pleasers who need harmony in relationships, are badly frightened by arguments, are perfectionists and readily take on criticism from others and work hard to change - though I may be speaking from a 'fawn' point of view.

Wishing you all the very best. Read some good books and you'll be well armed with the right info  

[Three Roses]

I confess, although I don't have first hand experience with DID, it leapt out at me, too.

Lots of us here, myself included, recognize different personalities within us. My therapist says, "Everyone is a bus load of people."

There are some forum members here who are diagnosed with DID, I hope some of them will weigh in on this thread.

In any case, please feel free to stay here and ask questions and reach out for support.

[radical]

Hi AnchorintheStorm,

I believe abuse is very harmful to our health.  I can't know, but I suspect what you are experiencing is serious abuse.  It worries me that you have adapted to this situation and are actively making excuses for it.  I suspect that it won't be until you are free from abuse that you will realise the harm it caused you, and the severity of it.  I realise that I'm basing this on my own experience, and that one of the things that concerns me most is your response to it.

I spent far too much of my life being adapted to being abused, making excuses for abuse, and  being unable to recognise how harmful it was.  So much of what you write, in particular; feeling compassionate rather than indignant,  feeling grateful, almost to the point of awarding brownie points, when he is not abusive  (see intermittent reinforcement), looking a long way back to a time when there was no abuse, and imagining that there is a way back, seeing this as a therapeutic problem, when your husband is not in therapy and has no desire to work on his problems,.... - your entire focus is on helping your husband it rings alarm bells for me, because it is all at your own expense.  I feel it may be that you may have developed symptoms of CPTSD as a result of interpersonal abuse.

I want you to see yourself as being important and valuable, as worthy of dignity and respect.  From what you have written, I feel you have been in a 'frog-boiling' situation for longer than you realise.  I really hope you will seek therapy for yourself so you can talk openly about your experiences and how you have been, and continue to be affected.

Every person who was abusive to me had issues and problems at the root of their abusive behaviour.  I felt compassion for the abusive person but not for myself.  I became more and more adapted to abuse and this was very much at the expense of my own health and well-being.   I really hope you seek help and support for yourself, because you matter.

[AnchorintheStorm]

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.

[Kizzie]

Hi All - I just wanted to pop in here and encourage posters to take one step back from diagnosing others and/or giving advice.  Certainly suggesting areas a member may want to consider looking into is fine, we all can use some feedback and input as that's a main reason we are here.

Anything beyond that, however, can seep over the line into pressuring others to see something the way we do, or perhaps telling them what they should/should not do.  This doesn't give the member space/time to figure things out for themselves, and can result in the receiver feeling defensive.

This is why our guidelines encourage members to share what has worked for them, perhaps pointing out something they have picked up in a member's posts, but not pushing their own perspective.  I know we all want to help our fellow members  , but please do so in the form of suggestions, examples of what you have been through that seem similar, what has worked/not worked for you, etc.

Similarly, we are not here to diagnose anyone so any suggestions about what areas to look into regarding someone's behaviour should be taken as just that, suggestions. And if you are asking for some feedback about someone's behaviour please remember that we are not trained to diagnose anyone, we can only share what we have encountered ourselves or offer a suggestion. 

So, please let's take a step back from giving advice/diagnosing and instead offer and receive suggestions in a respectful and considerate manner.

Thanks everyone! 

[Three Roses]