Husband abuse

iVillage Member
Registered: 04-05-2004
Husband abuse
5
Mon, 04-05-2004 - 1:01pm
I hope it's OK for me to be here as I am a 43 year old MALE, who's been married to a mentally abusive wife for 22 years. I gotta tell you I'm tired of being unhappy and having no self esteem. I've allowed this situation to go on because of my two kids and not wanting them to have to experience thier parents divorce. My wife has hit me twice in the past but she has stopped since I told her if she hits me again I'll stop it myself. I could never hit her but the threat seems to have worked. I live a life that she controls and if I do or say something she does not like she becomes Superbitch and life really sucks at that point. Every minute of every day I have to be accountable for my time to her and God forbid I do something to have fun. Anyway, I'm miserable and feel totally trapped until the day I die. She refuses to go to counselling although she admits our marriage stinks. Funny thing is, I don't want to hurt her by leaving because I do have some feelings for her. I really don't know what to do but continue living like this until I die.
iVillage Member
Registered: 04-04-2003
In reply to: banmann
Mon, 04-05-2004 - 1:58pm
Please feel free to come here and seek advice and support banmann.
Avatar for cajunharmony
iVillage Member
Registered: 02-28-2001
In reply to: banmann
Mon, 04-05-2004 - 6:34pm
Hi banmann, and welcome. As a victim of domestic abuse you have every right and reason to be here, regardless of your gender. As wishful noted, we do have another male on the board who I will be dropping an e-mail to to let him know you are here. As wishful said, be sure to visit our resource center and read the recommended reading, for it is there that you will gain the knowledge you need in order to regain your power as a person of worth. What your wife is doing is wrong to you and to your kids. Many people mistakenly believe that it is better to stay together "for the sake of the kids", when, in fact, research and studies indicate that staying in an abusive marriage is every bit as damaging, if not more so, to the kids. To stay and allow them to see the way your wife treats you teaches them that this is normal and acceptable, when, in fact, IT IS NOT! I hope that you are able to visit the board and to post here safely and in a manner where she can not find it. In our resource center are instructions on how to remove any evidence of your having been here from your computer. This is a safe place for victims and survivors of domestic abuse to come to learn, to lean, to heal, to share hope and strength, to vent and to mourn. I'm sorry you have to be here, but I am so glad that here exists, for you and for all the rest of us who have found our way or are still finding our way out of the darkness. I wish you peace. Mama Harmony

Mama Harmony

Avatar for buffphone
iVillage Member
Registered: 03-26-2003
In reply to: banmann
Tue, 04-06-2004 - 7:59am
Welcome to the board banmann. Wishful and mommacaj have said alot to you and I do hope that you take the time to visit this boards homepage and take the time to check out many of what is there. You will find alot of solid information and you will find the more you learn about the dynamics of abuse, the better your choices for you and your children will be.

Just to let you know, I am the other male on this board that wishful and mommacaj mentioned. You are in a hard place right now because of societies stereotypical ideas of you. Well my friend, the best way to start finding peace is to realize that abuse has no gender, no color, it crosses all ethnic backgrounds and other situations in life. One of the things that will allow you to start to find the forgotten peace in your life is to accept that you are just a victim of abuse like all here and try not to see it as a male victim verses a female victim, because all of us were abused in the same ways. I cry along with everyone here and I feel the same sense of loss and injury with everyone. I found that once I took the gender out of the equation, the information and the proper path to healing became much more clear.

A good place to start locally would be to contact your local shelter system because they offer many resources beyond just a safe haven and yes they do work with male victims too.

Start to educate yourself so that your decisions become educated decisions instead of emotional ones. When you seek out a counselor, please make sure that it is someone who has been trained in abuse, not just "I've dealt with a few cases", as only those trained in abuse know the dynamics and tactics. This will keep you from getting the wrong advice as most marriage counselors try to keep families together which in abuse cases is dangerous. As you can, find counseling for only yourself because couples or marriage counseling does not work in abuse cases and can escalate the level of abuse because our abusers take what they hear in couples therapy and use it as new tactics to keep us under their control. That is what abuse is,,someone's need to control and keep power over others, it is a concious decision that they make, that they need.

Be careful with your threats to stop the abuse as this is a dangerous path for any victim seeking help to follow and not for the reasons you might think. A tactic of abusers is to keep pushing our buttons until we lose the ability to think straight, get us to react physically and then turn the police and everyone's head into thinking we are the abusers not them. Abusers hate to be outed and will sacrifice everything and everyone to try and keep their secret. You say it's working now, but believe me, she's thinking of a way to use this for her benefit.

You say that you do not want to hurt her by leaving,,take time to read other's posts on this board and you'll see that most of us felt the same way. Most of us do still have loving memories of our abusers because they wait until they have our hearts before they start the abuse. And then it's usually so subtle that we never see it coming or see it for what it truely is, abuse. You are not going to hurt her by leaving, you are going to upset her by deciding to no longer live under her control and she will not be pleasant when you do. You will find that it will become one moment of love and tenderness followed by sheer hatred, trying to confuse us, how we feel about everything and get us to doubt our own sanity. They are all tactics that they have used in the past that they know worked and now they are desperately trying all of them to try to regain the power they are losing.

So welcome banmann to the boards! Please keep posting here, venting here and asking here as it will help you to start finding your path for you and your children to start finding happiness again. One thing I will give you warning on, is the fact that your children may have some of your wife's abusive tendencies as this is how they are seeing your family work. Children learn by immitation of their parents, the older they get the more they could be effected by the abuse. If they are younger, then they will have a difficult time understanding why Mommy and Daddy are splitting and they cannot understand abuse, they just know something is wrong and will likely act out their frustration too.

You will not do them well by staying as it will only make matters worse and it could lead them to follow the abusers path as they think this is how it is suppose to be. You will find that once you are separated, that in time they usually will start to see the reason you left without you even talking to them about it. Yes you will have to explain some of it to them, and guaranteed your abuser will tell them a whole other story to keep the focus off of them and onto you. Again, this is where all of us here can help you and your local shelter system can help you with helping you link to trained abuse counselors.

I apologize for getting so long in letter here, but I do want you to know that there is help, there are ways and people who can help you to once again find happiness. Your path will not be an easy one at first, but as you start to heal, happiness will once again find you and your children.

It's never too late to seek happiness in life,,,but if you stay, it will not get better. You are no longer alone in all this as you have found a wonderful community of people, women and men, who like you have had to deal with abuse. I do hope you stay around and work to find your freedom!

Hugs

iVillage Member
Registered: 04-02-2004
In reply to: banmann
Tue, 04-06-2004 - 10:46am
Banmann:

I just read your post and wanted to share a quick note with you. I completely understand where you are coming from. You hate what the abuser is doing to you and your family but you still love the abuser...I know try explaining that to someone who has never been there. When you finally realize that you are in an abusive relationship it becomes very scary and confusing. I got a book called: Why Does He Do That? by: Lundy Bancroft. It explained so much to me and helped me sort out some of the confusion. I highly recommend this book. Good luck to you and this is a great place for making friends, getting information and just venting.

Sandi







iVillage Member
Registered: 02-10-2004
In reply to: banmann
Tue, 04-06-2004 - 11:36am
Welcome banmann,

There's not a whole lot I can add to the wonderful advice already given. Education is the first key to start becoming aware. It will scare you when you start recognizing actions that were written by someone else...it's like how do they know? I was married for a long time too. We separated on Nov 20, 2003 and I filed on Dec 8. The road to freedom has been unbelievably hard and I still have quite a ways to go. One thing I do know is that I WILL NEVER GO BACK!

There is this guy that I know that separated from his wife 15 months ago. I had met her a few times and have no doubt that she was the abusive party. I hadn't seen him in quite a while. One day I took the children to the movies I saw him. We talked a little about his divorce and he looked at me and said "I will never live that way again. I am a good person and deserve to be treated good." He said it with such pride, like he just discovered something great. All I could think of was that someday I will say the same thing.

As buff warned, if your children are older, get ready for some ugly resistance. One thing abusers do is use the children to promote the control. Mine are older and I am still licking some very deep wounds from them that will take a while to heal. I'm not going to let them fester too long though because they were being controlled just like I was.

Good luck and we are here for you!!

Terry