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cleotokos
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« on: January 16, 2020, 03:43:45 PM » |
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Will try to keep this to the point - I have only fairly recently decided my H may have BPD/C-PTSD. We have many ongoing issues and "themes" that repeatedly pop up over our 11+ years together. I need help knowing how to set boundaries in specific situations. What to say, how to react? I'll outline a couple of problems we're currently experiencing.
-I work full time and he stays home with our 2 toddlers. (When he worked and I stayed home, he acted like King of the Castle and did not lift a finger at home.) I try to help out and one thing I do is the laundry. I do it after getting home from work and before the kids go to bed. Often I'll get it washed, dried and folded but not take it upstairs to put away. He has "OCD tendencies" and I think sees this as an imperfect "job not completed", and uses it as justification to abuse me verbally/emotionally. I believe that he should be grateful I help out, and if I leave the folded laundry downstairs he should just put it away. Currently he's threatening to "start taking it personally" if I don't take the laundry upstairs (this means basically all bets are off and he considers it his right to rage, shout, break things...whatever he likes to try to get me to comply). Leaving the laundry for him to do is not an option as he just won't do it and nobody will have any clean clothing, it will all be dirty and all over the floors where he tosses it. I don't understand how it works in his mind that dirty laundry all over the floors is fine but clean and folded laundry on the living room chair is not acceptable?
-He creates imaginary conflicts over nothing with family members. Currently has a vendetta against his cousin, who suffered a terrible divorce where her husband defrauded her and took everything she had. She emigrated to our country as a single mother 4 years ago and, horror of horrors, didn't call him (they hadn't spoken since they were children). His mother never told him his cousin was living in our country, very near by (that's a discussion for another time - his mother may have manipulated this situation a bit). His sister invited cousin and her daughter to Christmas dinner, and he refused to attend because of what she has "done" to him. Now she is going to be at his nephew's first birthday and he refuses to attend, and says his sister invited cousin just to "be a b*tch" because he told her he didn't want her there. It is very frustrating that he can only think of himself, that it doesn't occur to him that his sister and her children have relationships with this cousin, that our children would benefit from a relationship with her. He wants his sister to make his cousin feel ostracized and I'm honestly shocked and repelled by his behavior. The kids and I will be going to the nephew's birthday without him. I feel like he sets up these "tests" wherein people are supposed to choose him over someone else he's chosen to paint as the "bad person".
I'll keep it to those two for now, but the overriding theme is he believes people that care for him need to do what he asks as a sign of respect and love. I've tried to explain to him that he can't just ask for things that are unreasonable. I'm open to suggestions for responses to the above situations.
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