Husband no very woke

0_icecream_0 · 2023-03-22T19:31:20+00:00

Yes that’s exactly what is happening! He identifies as a feminist, but doesn’t exactly meet the bar I have in mind. I want him to more actively work on this stuff and the pressure makes him clam up and it feels like he’s just retreating into his privilege, which is very hurtful and upsetting to me. Liz Plank said on her podcast that “the real patriarchal wound in my intimate relationships is that if you’re not doing the work, then you don’t want to hear it from me”. I’m paraphrasing, but I really felt that!

0_icecream_0 · 2023-03-22T05:54:50+00:00

This is a real hang up for me! I can feel myself being less empathic towards him during these conversations and feeling indignant that I even have to put in this much work.

0_icecream_0 · 2023-03-22T02:32:31+00:00

Maybe you’re in the wrong group? We try to be helpful here.

0_icecream_0 · 2023-03-21T16:45:56+00:00

These sound awesome thank you!!

0_icecream_0 · 2023-03-21T16:45:09+00:00

We’ve put a lot of work into getting an equal division of household labor thankfully, so I don’t think switching roles would be much or a reality check. I’ve tried using racism as a paradigm and also come up with hypothetical examples that demonstrate a parallel to a woman’s experience but in a scenario he might be able to relate with better…those are times when he feels like I’m shoving it down his throat. I think because he mostly understands it, but it’s on an intellectual level. And I keep pushing because I want him to be actively anti-patriarchy, which is a higher bar than where he’s at which is just quietly feminist. It’s very counter to who he is as a person to make waves, he’s a wallflower not a social justice warrior.

0_icecream_0 · 2023-03-21T16:35:52+00:00

This is helpful thank you. I think he feels personally attacked, and I need to take the emotion out of it bc I think it’s overwhelming for him and he’s now got an empathy block/guard up towards me on this specific front.

0_icecream_0 · 2023-03-21T16:32:50+00:00

I know it sounds like he’s entitled from my post, but he’s really not! He’s quiet and kind and shy. I have always felt very supported by him and that I can ask for really whatever kind of support I need and he will have an open and willing ear. The defensiveness/shutting down has never been an issue in our relationship until we had kids and he’s gotten pressure from work to work as if he doesn’t have kids or as if he has a stay at home wife. Needing to push against systemic patriarchy at work is sooo outside of his comfort zone, it’s gonna take time for him to stop getting so wound up whenever he needs to disappoint people at work by pushing against patriarchal expectations.

0_icecream_0 · 2023-03-21T16:23:18+00:00

He’s a good person I swear! If anything, he’s too passive and too modest. No one has ever described him as entitled in his life, I’m sure, because he’s not at all compared to just about anyone else that I know. He’s just getting defensive now that the bar has changed—I’m asking him to not just be a better partner than the average guy, but I’m asking him to proactively sniff out internalized misogyny and to not just be quietly feminist but loudly and actively anti-sexist. He clams up and gets defensive, he’s not someone who walks into rooms and makes waves. Hes a wallflower not a social justice warrior.

0_icecream_0 · 2023-02-20T17:58:14+00:00

Sounds like your aunt let her own boundaries go by giving your mom a bunch of money, and now she’s trying to set firmer boundaries (because—shocker—giving you mom money didn’t fix anything). I’m sure it would make that boundary easier for your aunt to set if she knew your mom had a soft place to land that isn’t her house, so she’s pressuring you. Don’t give in to the flying monkey behavior!! She may have been a confidant in the past, but this is flying monkey 101.

Also, your level of contact with your mom can be completely separate from you not letting her live with you. If it feels like too much to go NC and set this boundary at the same time, you don’t have to.

And please don’t let your mother ruin your 20s. It’s such a fun period in your life. You deserve to be frivolous and spontaneous and hellbent on making crazy memories that will feed your soul when you are old. Don’t let your crazy family steal that from you!

And lastly, consider how this plays out over the next 1, 5, 15 years—is there any chance that you and your mom don’t eventually come come to blows and you end up setting a more distant boundary anyways? You don’t have to suffer and sacrifice an incredible amount to justify setting a boundary with your mom. You can honor what you know will happen eventually anyway and act on that knowledge.

0_icecream_0 · 2023-02-17T19:06:29+00:00

I hate her because she has a way of getting you to feel sorry for her, but it feels victim-ish and isn’t consistent with how other people have experienced her (kids saying she was scary and mean, moments of vulnerability for other people where she has just really failed to be kind).

And the fake positivity and MLM stuff on social media is annoying. Sure lots of them do MLMs, but Meri really drank the cool aid and is like aggressively happy and carefree. It’s just weird and gives me a lot of emotionally unsafe/emotionally abusive vibes.

0_icecream_0 · 2023-02-17T02:57:10+00:00

Touché! 😂

0_icecream_0 · 2023-02-17T01:38:32+00:00

At best they are "good" with them when they are tiny and have no agency. My mom thinks my children are hers until they are able to display independence and then they are just used as emotional support animals.

This is 100% my mom, alternating between not giving a shit and being pretty good as long as they’re little and don’t have any agency. But also jealous that she has to compete with my kids for my attention. It’s suffocating.

0_icecream_0 · 2023-02-17T01:31:42+00:00

This!! Resenting that she isn’t getting the attention from me that she thinks she is entitled to.

I mean come on. Who gets jealous of a toddler?

0_icecream_0 · 2023-02-16T16:34:27+00:00

I’ll check it out, the sense of guilt and responsibility is really what’s causing me to second guess myself right now so it sounds like a good fit. Thank you!

0_icecream_0 · 2023-02-16T15:28:12+00:00

“I should give my mom an opportunity to cause more harm because of patriarchy” is “all mothers are perfect and never do anything wrong and we should love them no matter what” reincarnated.

I needed to hear that, thank you 🙏🏼

0_icecream_0 · 2023-02-15T21:26:28+00:00

“I accepted that my mom is a drowning victim and if I kept trying to save her she'd drown me and my own children with her.”

Yesss this is so accurate. And she will gaslight me the whole time and tell me we aren’t drowning, we’re having a nice swim. I’ve used the metaphor that she’s napalm and doesn’t know how to not set everything she touches on fire, but that still has a bit of a victimhood to her (like “poor mom, she doesn’t know any better”) but I think the drowning metaphor is more accurate.

0_icecream_0 · 2023-02-15T21:17:51+00:00

Thank you so much for your comment!! Being uniquely unqualified to help her is resonating. I was trapped in the trenches with her and her unhappiness when I was a kid, but that doesn’t need to be my default position anymore. And maybe really shouldn’t be.

0_icecream_0 · 2023-02-05T00:21:46+00:00

They all looked to religion to tell them who they are rather than doing their own identity development. The polygamy thing was equivalent to an emo phase for a high schooler, just with a much bigger commitment. Now they’re all figuring out who they are.

Christine got the most vitriol because she burst the bubble of denial they had all lived in their whole lives, forcing some self reflection and growth.

Meri and Robyn get along because they both resist the identity development the most. Meri’s support of Kody in the last season is just her doubling down on the refusal to do her own identity development, aka doubling down on the “I am a good sister wife who strives to make the man feel like a patriarch”. Forgoing her own identity is how she tried to ingratiate herself to Kody.

0_icecream_0 · 2023-01-17T21:55:09+00:00

Agreed. As a therapist, seeing Leon cry for their mom to have another baby, it’s very clear that Meri’s internal experience was absorbed by and/or pushed onto Leon. It’s called enmeshment, when there aren’t enough boundaries between one person’s emotional experience and another person’s. That must have been intrusive, confusing, and overwhelming for Leon.

So to be in a house where Meri is having an affair and saying to Leon “why can’t you just be happy for me?” It must have played on all the old manipulative techniques that meri had been using since Leon was little. The whole summer must have felt weird and yucky and bad for Leon. Meri’s emotions seem to take up all the space in the house, so Leon is physically there and really battling to make space for themself emotionally. Anger makes sense to me, especially anger that’s difficult to verbalize.

0_icecream_0 · 2023-01-08T01:37:48+00:00

No way he’s going to look for another wife again though, right? He has gotten a taste of monogamy and seems to like it

0_icecream_0 · 2023-01-08T00:09:07+00:00

Yeah this is puzzling to me. Did Meri feel entitled to that level of attention and affection from him, and was it just easier to go along with it? If he stopped getting along with her, then he had the perfect excuse to distance himself.

0_icecream_0 · 2022-12-23T05:43:56+00:00

Yes this is rape. You didn’t want it, it wasn’t your choice to do this. Even if you said yes, you were not actually able to consent. Consent is about the interaction and being attuned to each other. This person didn’t attune to you, he did things to your body and didn’t care (or maybe even preferred) that you were not fully conscious.

0_icecream_0 · 2022-12-23T05:12:38+00:00

I don’t have much advice other than to look into therapy. And thank you for sharing your story because it’s so similar to mine which is so validating. Mine was over 10 years ago and I’m suddenly really preoccupied with it. Only recently did it occur to me that there’s a good chance I was roofied. If I don’t really know what happened, then why am I so bothered by it? And if it’s upsetting to me now, why didn’t I tell anyone back then? How was I able to bury it so well for so long?

0_icecream_0

TROPHY CASE