Hello Kells!
I appreciate your caring response, thank you.
I will try my best to answer your questions:
- I don’t have a vehicle and cannot drive. I do live in a city, though, so I can walk to a hotel if necessary.
- Yes, he or she will be my first child. Thank you.
I have been excited, but recently started to get mild depression (something I haven’t dealt with in years), which may be hormonal or may be from the stress of this situation. I’m not sure... Normally I am good about keeping space for my own mental health and self-care, but I’m hitting an unusually low point lately and that snowballs into anxiety about postpartum depression, which would be awful.
- I took the MOSAIC assessment as you suggested and scored 6 out of 10. On a website about trauma-informed therapy for abusers, I read there are three main mindsets abusers can have (sadistic, controlling/entitled, and dependent-on-partner-for-emotional-survival). I’m not sure if any of these are more likely to be common in pwBPD, but my husband isn’t at all sadistic, and maybe a ratio of 30% controlling/entitled relative 70% dependent.
I don’t believe he would harm me if I decided we needed to separate. I don’t want to overstate the issue. Mild physical abuse has happened 5 times in our relationship total and it never caused any non-psychological damage.
3 of these 5 incidents did happen in the last few months, however, unfortunately...
I will describe the first, as it is what worries me most.
We were having a great day. We spent a lot of time together. As we were eating supper, my sister called to chat. She talked for maybe two hours.
While I was on the phone, my husband got blackout drunk, which I didn’t realize at the time. I have only ever seen my husband get “happy drunk,” and he is NOT an alcoholic, so when I got off the phone I wasn’t sure what to make of his mood and behavior... He was mad at me for spending time talking to my sister and abandoning him all evening.
It was not at all what I expected, since we’d had such a good day and I was looking forward to continuing our earlier conversation.
I figured out he was drunk as he was saying a lot of mean and accusatory things (“you don’t care about me at all”) somewhat tearfully, whilst I was trying to prevent him from drowning in the bathtub... Not sure why he got the idea to take a bath. Anyway, it was bedtime, and even though I was reassuring and all I did was try to calm him down and get him to go to sleep, he did something (not going to go into detail here) that made me fear for my life and put me into a “freeze” state.
The next morning I did not move or talk. My husband was still mad at me when he woke up. He said: “Why are you acting passive-agressively? I am the one who is hurt.”
I was stunned. Why was HE the hurt one? Huh? But I could not say anything.
Eventually he tried to help me because he could see I was in an unusual state, and he ended up getting me food at suppertime even though I wasn’t verbalizing.
At night he asked me what happened. I started crying. He gave ma a hug. I asked him if he didn’t remember. He said he was drinking and wasn’t sure. I asked him if he remembered taking a bath, and he looked quite surprised. So I told him everything except the violent bit.
He apologized. He felt quite genuinely bad. He didn’t remember taking a bath, but he did remember some of the other odd things he had done just enough that he believed me about his verbal abuse towards me, even though he didn’t remember he’d done that.
He was so upset. He threatened to harm himself. He was having such a fragile sense of self that I decided I would never tell him what he did that had actually scared me.
The next day he acted as though nothing had happened, but I was still shaken.
To be fair, he hasn’t gotten drunk since, and has always asked me if it is all right for him to have *one* drink.
A few months after this event he grabbed me and threw me onto the bed during an argument, and I cannot remember if this happened at the same time or not, but he also dropped me to the floor, causing me to break my glasses. (Incidents 2 & 3.)
He never offered to replace them or apologized.
When we talked about it a few days later, he basically said he couldn’t control himself and that it is up to me to stay away from him when he is angry.
This triggers a trauma from my childhood. It was the same scenario with one of my parents, who would lock themselves in a room to prevent themself from harming me when they were raging.
But I am bad at determining when he is in a rage or just walking off sulking... I guess I need to assume the worst.
Anyway, he doesn’t see himself as abusive. And when he is in a good mood, he is not.
But I don’t understand if I need to be more concerned about what happened when he was blackout drunk? Does it count if he doesn’t remember? Or does it reveal some deep, subconscious rage he has towards me that he normally hides which I ought to appreciate and fear? It was a traumatic thing for me.
I am going to edit this post to delete that part later because I don’t want him to accidentally find it. He has actual depression and I am concerned it would crush him to know this... His negative self-talk towards himself is already excessive and I don’t want to add to that problem.
I just want him to get help for his mental health so he can be kinder to himself and understand where his anger is coming from.