Husband wants to apologize and save marriage

I originally posted this as a reply to my wife's first post from November 6th.  Nobody replied at all, so I'm trying this as a new topic to see if anybody has any insight to offer.

Here's her original post:
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Topic: Husband wants apology for years of my fat

Our story...

I've been married for 12 years. When we met I was 225... we broke up twice because he said he couldn't handle my weight, but then we reconciled, and when we reconciled the 2nd time I truly believed he had decided that it didn't matter... right... I went on adkins and lost 45 pounds, and when I hit a size 14, he proposed.

Between proposal and marriage, I put on 5 pounds, which he now refers to as "packing on the pounds"...

Weight went up and down, we now have a 7 year old old that we both adore...  But for years we've acted like roommates that tolerate each other... He totally blames my weight for denying him what he deserves.  Let me point out that he's 5'6", bald, and weighs 200 pounds himself (quite the pot belly).

I had lap band in May 2007, and have lost 90 pounds, so right now I'm at the weight I was when he proposed.  Just 2 weeks ago someone we knew got mad at him because they thought he had gotten rid of his old wife and gotten himself a trophy wife (he didn't recognize me...).  But there's still this lingering resentment on both sides.

He has no sympathy for my problem with food. All he sees is that he was denied an attractive wife for all those years.  He says that I owe him an apology... that part of recovery for any addiction is apologizing and trying to make up to the people you've harmed.  He said he went on prozac for 2 years, and really is trying to lay on the guilt.

Personally, I resent him for not being able to see me through my weight, and not being able to love me regardless...  Do I owe him an apology for having been fat?? 

Boy, I was stupid. I never should have married him knowing that he had this issue with my weight before we married.  But now we have this great kid, and he wants to stay together to give him a stable home. Honestly, I'm not so sure.

He wasn't even very supportive of my surgery. He wanted me to have it, but went through the motions of helping me through recovery.  According to him (in our first honest discussion last night after years of simmering nastiness), he said that "rather than deal with your addiction, a scalpel helped you avoid it".

I plan to call a counselor today, to start talking by myself, and then bringing him into it (which he only grudgingly agreed to do last night).

Thoughts?

Beth
Lap Band 5/07  270/180/?

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As you might imagine, I got beat up pretty badly by the folks *****plied!

And my reply, three months later.
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As you can see from the name I've chosen, I've had a change of heart.  You might even say that I have finally *found* my heart.  Since Beth hasn't posted anything since her initial furious post, and she did share this with me, I have come to take my lumps publicly.

She's set on divorce at this point.  I want our family to survive together, and to heal.

I know that she will get a notification of this posting, and I think she will see this as yet another attempt to plead my case, but I am pleading it before you folks - the ones that wanted to string me up, or beat me to a pulp.  I'm hoping that someone will find a way to communicate with her that I haven't.

This is long, so please bear with me.  I ask that you suspend judgement until the end, and then I invite it, and your comments.

I'm not here to make excuses; I'm here to apologize, and perhaps explain.

I am here to beg for forgiveness; yours' and hers.

I am so sorry for the pain and hurt that I caused my wife.  If I could take it back, if I could heap it on myself, I would do it in an instant.

Right now, I'm trying like hell to keep my family together, as Beth wants a divorce.  I've spent a number of hours in counseling, with her and seperately, and if anybody had told me four months ago that I'd be believing and saying what I do believe and say now, I'd have just laughed.

After Beth had lost a lot of weight, I started to "come back".   Things were looking up.  Then we started to have some problems. Our politics are different - I got a bit too into it with her in an argument, and really stomped all over her, so to speak. I was so "right", and boy did I know it! That started a cascade of things, that went very bad. Basically, I had a huge chunk of repressed anger, and when I decided that I had to be honest and let it out, and said to her, "Hey! I've apologized to you over and over. What about the hurt that was done to me as my needs went unmet?" (Meaning, of course, because she was fat and I hated that.) Oh, boy --- was I ever full of such righteous indignation!

Well, of course, that did it.

All of *her* repressed anger and pain and humiliation surged up, and she started wanting out. She has every right to it all, as I know now that I hurt her very deeply.

So we have been to a "marriage counselor". Mostly the sessions have been spent bashing me (for good reason) and supporting Beth in "letting herself acknowledge and feel her anger", and learn to stick up for herself. There was a lot of discussion about parents, and childhood, and what effects those things have had on my inner workings. Naturally, I went on a book-buying spree at Amazon to learn more.

I own this disaster.  It's 99.9% me.  My past, especially the unresolved abandonment issues surrounding my own parents' divorce when I was eight, left me with some unpleasant core beliefs about myself.  I feel unlovable, unworthy, unimportant, and unoticed.  Although both my parents are still alive, I feel like an orphan. I still do not even remember the years immediately following the divorce. My sister, three years older than me, tells me that it wasn't unusually horrible, but it must have been to me. She's had a lot of problems too, including "feeling like an orphan", that she traces back to that time.

I think the eight-year-old logic that was operating is pretty obvious - if I was loved, important, lovable, or mattered, then how could they do this to me?

So what the therapists tell me is that when a person believes about themselves as I do, they struggle mightily against it ... railing at the world, "Hey! Look at ME! I count for something!" and they also develop a tremendous defensiveness, where just about anything gets interpreted as an attack, and is reacted to as if it were. Kind of like "reactive armor". Touch me and I will explode in your direction.

The irony of "feeling unloveable" actually sort of resulting in *being* unloveable, is not lost on me.

I withheld my love from my own wife.  I was emotionally abusive. I struggle with accepting that label, and my therapist says, "You can be abusive, and not be an abuser. You're a good man."

I try to believe that. I want to believe that. But I see the wreckage around me ...

I did have an issue with Beth's weight (or at least I think I did).  But because of who I am, rather than it being a problem of the normal and ordinary variety, to me it became "If you don't fix this, then obviously you do not love me.", which just made it crazy.  Made me crazy, made me say hurtful things.  Things I so regret now.  

And since so much has changed in the few months of soul-searching, I'm not even sure if I *really* had a problem with her weight, or if that was simply the first thing that I could find to push her away from me.  I no longer trust what I thought I knew.  As a matter of fact, I had always thought my parents were divorced when I was six, and I was stunned to find out that the truth was that it happened a full two years after that.

I have done this before. A previous marriage ended twenty years ago, and it's so clear to me now that all my issues then are the same as now.

I love Beth - she's the most amazing woman that I've ever met. We are so well matched; everybody says so, and I believe it to be true. I love my son, and I love our family together. I want to keep us together, not as we were, but as we could be. I don't like what and who I have been. I'm doing my damnedest to change, as fast as possible, so that I might be someone that Beth could forgive and trust not to hurt her again.

I'd rather cut off my right arm than hurt her again.

I've said all these things to her, but it's too late, barring some kind of miracle. What's killing me is that we are slowly moving toward doing to our son what was done to me at exactly the same age.

I'm also just plain scared. I'm scared because I'm 51 years old, and I don't want to start over again. I'm scared as I look at the world on the verge of an economic depression, the likes of which has never been seen. And to someone with unresolved childhood abandonment issues, another abandonment brings it all back, and with it, a profound fear of death since a child instinctively knows that abandonment is likely to be fatal.

The "fight or flight" adrenaline rushes have been something else.  While I'm still getting bald, what's left has really turned white in the last few months, and being on the "adrenaline diet" I have little interest in eating; I've dropped about 20 pounds in the last 45 days.  Itinially, there were lots of thoughts of suicide, and otherwise hurting myself, but that's pretty much passed, and I could not have done that anyway, as it would injure my son.

In therapy, the work is to comfort that inner child, and unlearn all the dysfunctional strategies that I learned to keep that child safe.  Obviously, they have only caused harm to myself and others.  My determination to change is unshakeable.  I don't know if Beth believes me, or thinks I'm just trying to get back to the status quo.

But the status quo sucked!  I want something better for us.

One of the self-help books I read was "How to be an Adult in Relationships" by David Richo. In it, he talks about transference, where we find life partners who in some way help us to recreate unresolved childhood situations, and we may even unconsciously maneuver and manipulate things to recreate those situations. It's all well-known and well-accepted psychology.

Here's a quote that had me in tears as I saw Beth and I in every word:

(shoot - I can't find the book, so I must paraphrase)

"So then we have two people, standing opposite each other, yelling - 'See what happened to me as a kid! Make it better!' But they're both talking to someone uniquely unqualified to do that, since because of transference, that's who they looked for."

It's so sad.  I am so sorry.  I am so ready to work my ass off to be who she thought I was in the first place.
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So what say you one, what say you all?

Wow.  I can't believe that one. I can totally understand why she wants a divorce. I am a man, and I would never treat my wife like that. She is suppose to be the love of your  life no matter what her size is. If you really loved her, her size should not have been a issue.  Your job in life was to love her and to support her if she decided to lose weight , not to bash her. You should be sorry, but from what I am getting it is to little to late.

You are right in so much of what you say.

Yes - that is the way I *should have been*.  I can see that now so clearly.  Back then, I couldn't.

I am in agony - I have destroyed the only things that matter - my love, my family.

And yet ... I know that I am changing, working to calm that fearful and despairing child within, and to learn not to act from his fear and shame.  I'm doing this now; I'm learning. I can be free to love without fear.

I will never be perfect, but neither will I ever be as dysfunctional as I was.  Right now, even as Beth makes plans for divorce, I am a devoted husband, and I am acting from my love for and commitment to my wife and our son.  Oddly, becoming more loving, even in this intensely strained situation has been the easy part, which gives me faith that I'm on the right track.

The hard part has been coping with my guilt and shame, and the enormity of what I've done for so long.

And so, is there not virtue in forgiveness?  Is there not joy in redemption and rebuilding?

Must this be so cold, and (it seems) only about retribution and escape?

I have a couple honest questions (not meant to bash you or anything like that): Are you saying all this now simply because she's decided that she's not putting up with this type of behavior anymore? Or do you really mean it? If her attitude twards the marriage hadn't changed, would yours? If her attitude hadn't changed but she wanted to do therapy/ counseling would you have done it strictly so you could say that you tried that, it didn't work?

One thing I noticed from your post is that everything, whether just in your head or in reality, revolves around you and your feelings. A marriage is more than that, and it wasn't until your wife decided to start believing that that your attitude changed. Now it seems that YOU'VE decided that YOU can't live without her, and now YOU see how wrong YOU'VE treated her and YOU don't like the way it's making YOU look. Well she's had years to think about this stuff and belive me she probably has. You also say that you don't want your son to go through the same situation that you did when you were little. Well, believe it or not he's been seeing the way that you've treated her and he may have had enough of it too. Her motivating factor for leaving may be to preserve his innocence and provide him with a more stable outlook and environment to grow up in. You never know... Since marriage was instituted by God I'd hate to see yours break up but I can't say that I blame your wife for wanting to get out. For the sake of everyone involved I hope things work out for the best. Take care.

Thank you for taking the time to reply.

Honestly, this is not about me looking bad.  I talk about it from my point of view, and of my feelings because the crisis has forced me to confront demons that I never knew I had.  I'm still doing weekly therapy sessions to work on it.  I act differently now, and I feel differently now.  It's a long ways from complete, because underneath, all those defense mechanisms are still there, but I'm learning to not act from them.

I almost want to say that I am glad of this crisis, because if not for it I might have lived the rest of my life the way that I was.  If Beth had not forced the issue, that is likely what would have happened.

If she will still have me, then this was indeed a blessing.  If not, then still a blessing, but one more mixed and a lot more painful.

We have noticed that our son speaks to her with less respect than he does to me.  I do fear that he learned that from my tone toward her in the past.  One more thing for me to own --- and I spoke to him about it (with Beth present) and made it clear that I had been very wrong and was very remorseful.  I told him, "If you learned this from me, then you learned something *wrong* from me - something I regret doing."

Strugln2BMe - I can't blame her for wanting to get out either, based on the past.  I'm praying that she'll see enough good in me now, in the present, to give her a new hope for a future together.

At this point the most important thing you can do at this moment (IMO) is give her respect.
Respect that she's done with emotional abuse, she's done with settling for a painful marriage and respect that she wants a new beginning.

Now the trick for you is, can you be part of that new beginning? 

Are you acting like a prospective
boyfreind?  Not an old flame but a brand new guy?  Taking her out on dates?  On your best behavior?

Are you courting your wife?  No expectations?  No falling into old habits?  Taking her places she's never been before?  Making all the plans for family outings? 

You were a crappy boyfreind and husband.  She actually is giving you a chance--the only chance, really, you deserve.  A chance to start again from the very beginning. 

Reintroduce yourself to her, make it fun, double date, be kids together again.  Keep it light, be her best friend.  Prove to her, that life with you, won't mean she's missing out on the new adventure her new body offers her nor that you want to lock her into a relationship with a man who spent a lot of years resenting her.

She's going to have that adventure---she's worked hard for it---now your choice is to recreate yourself into the new boyfreind and be part of that adventure.  

Go for it--full court press.  Dates on the weekend (including your son)---horseback riding, beach, hotel room with indoor pool, museums, movies.   Dress up, go out. 

Be the boyfreind she's always wanted, but never thought she deserved.

Good luck.


 

 

Hecate,

Wow!  This is the most hopeful and positive reply yet.  Thank you!

I have been on my best behavior, which is getting better all the time.  In my session yesterday my therapist pointed out yet more ways that I was acting out of fear, keeping myself "safe", and how they were not working for me.  Yikes!  Every time I think that I'm making headway, I'm confronted by just how *DEEP* the dysfunction goes.  It keeps me from being open and vulnerable with ... well, just about anybody.

Later, I fought that off, and shared something with Beth. I had stayed up late the night before, and watched a couple of action movies.  Naturally, they were full of beautiful women.  As I watched, suddenly it struck me that I was seeing Beth in them, and feeling desire for Beth, not for the women in the movie.  It was such a strong feeling ... like they all had her beautiful green eyes.  It was an "AHA!" moment; it felt right, like this was the way things were supposed to be, and should have been all along.  In the morning, I'd mentioned it, but in a "safe" and intellectualized way, so I had had to go back and try again in a forthright, open and vulnerable way.

I did get a sort of "don't bother" look in response, but at least I was able to tell her and be vulnerable to whatever came back.

Last night I asked directly, and was told that her "thinking had't really changed any."  It was what I expected to hear, but disappointing nonetheless.

This morning, I asked for and got a hug.  I cheated a bit, since Ty had just given her one, but I detected no hesitation.  You'd not believe the volume of the internal yammering of "What if she rejects me!!" that I had to ignore.  This stuff gets interesting when you become aware of it.

But ... to reply specifically to what you suggest ... I *love* the idea.  It may be the key.  Not "I want you back", but "Hello.  My name's Paul.  What's yours?  I think you're cute."

We have a bunch of stuff planned already for the next few weekends, so I'm not sure how to put this into practice, and I'm not sure if she'd go for it, but it's a great idea.  Yes, a stretch for me, but a good one.  I hope she'll be open to a "date".  Maybe if I just sell it as a "family outing" for the first few times that would work better?  She always has been the one to do the planning of these things, so if I did something like that it would certainly be stepping out of our usual roles.


I did ask several weeks ago if she'd like to go out, but perhaps that was too soon.

Hecate,

You said: "She actually is giving you a chance--the only chance, really, you deserve.  A chance to start again from the very beginning." 

I am curious as to what gives you the impression that she is giving me this chance?  When I ask, she tells me that her mind is made up, and all that's left is getting through the process.

On the other hand, she could simply move out any time.  She could easily afford to rent an apartment if she really wanted to do that, more than she wanted to have some sort of "total plan" in place before telling our son.

Ah, here I go, trying to read the tea leaves again...

It may simply be that I have this chance until she leaves, and even then maybe a bit longer.

BTW, your reply has motivated me to do a few things.  Since I work at home, I've gotten into the habit of just jeans or work pants and one of the same old four or five knit shirts every day.  Almost a uniform for me.  No more.  I dug deep in the closet, pulled out some older casual slacks that now fit me again (I've lost about 30 lbs on the "adrenaline diet" in the last two months), and an edgy rough black silk shirt.  I plan to continue in this.  Thanks for the kick in the behind

thejerk <--- not such a great name, eh?  Oh, well ... one thing at a time!

 When I say that's she's giving you a chance, I should clarify, because she's not choosing to give you a chance, she's set up cir****tances that offer only one chance, in my mind----the chance to start again.

Remember one simple rule in every interaction you have with her----people always move toward pleasure and away from pain. 

I wish you much luck.  

Hecate,

Thanks again.  That is sort of what I was thinking too.

TJ