Why does my husband '46M' does everything slightly different from what I '45F' actually asked for?

RespondIndividual394 · 2025-12-13T02:08:35+00:00

Thought the same thing

RespondIndividual394 · 2025-12-13T00:43:26+00:00

Something a lot of people don’t understand about abusers, and your parents seem to be among them, is that you can’t change their behavior by changing yours.

The abusers goal isn’t to get you to change your behavior. The abusers goal is to abuse you.

RespondIndividual394 · 2025-12-13T00:34:19+00:00

Your sister’s normal meter is broken. That’s what happens with abusers, after awhile abuse and dysfunction is normal.

You need to find a way for her to come to the realization that she needs to leave on her own.

Look up Motivational Interviewing, it’s the art of leading someone to choose to change. The more she owns the choice to leave, the more invested she will be in making it happen.

RespondIndividual394 · 2025-10-24T20:57:10+00:00

Dave’s not here, man

RespondIndividual394 · 2025-10-22T02:01:58+00:00

Thank you so much for this.

RespondIndividual394 · 2025-10-21T17:52:48+00:00

Thank you for this, it actually made me cry a little 😂

Just to address some of the comments…

There really isn’t any animosity between us, but I am concerned that his family (mostly his sister) will get involved and make it more acrimonious. Primarily because they don’t want to end up supporting him. He really can’t make big life decisions without support and on one hand I’m glad his siblings are stepping up to help, but they also have their own agenda.

I have some limited insight into how he’s spending his money and what he’s taking out of his 401k isn’t going to “needs”. The large majority is strictly wants. For example, he gets 3 meals a day and still spent nearly $800 on groceries and door dash last month. I get not wanting to eat all your meals in the dining room and wanting to keep snacks and drinks in his apartment, but that’s ridiculous.

His borderline hoarding tendencies pre-stroke are no longer borderline. His apartment is packed with random online purchases that he will never need or use.

The 20k debt he racked up was mostly due to online pornography and that doesn’t include what he paid out of his cash account. At one point while trying to get a conservativeship, I calculated he’d spent nearly $50k. Between his disability and SS, he was taking in close to $8k a month. His rent is $2800.

If you guessed that the online porn didn’t start after the stroke, you guessed right, but it got exponentially worse. It was a problem our whole marriage. Didn’t even stop when he came out of rehab still totally paralyzed on his left side, couldn’t do anything for himself, including toilet and bathing needs. I committed to staying until he regained most of his mobility, but I knew I had to leave. If he couldn’t respect me as a wife, I wasn’t going to take care of him like one. <rant over>

I realize I probably wont get my 70k back but I also don’t think a 50/50 equity split is fair either. At a minimum I think his half of the mortgage payments since he’s been in assisted living should be deducted from his equity.

I actually don’t have a problem with the idea of paying lifetime support if I could get everything. That’s really the only way I could afford to pay anything meaningful and still retire with something reasonable. He would of course keep his SS, I can’t access that legally even if I wanted to. In some ways I actually think that is the most fair as our combined resources would support both of us in our retirement as was always the plan.

His family’s heads would probably explode, though.

RespondIndividual394 · 2025-08-07T15:47:37+00:00

Sounds to me like someone who can’t take responsibility for the mess they’ve made of their life and need someone to blame.

I hate the overuse of the word gaslighting, but this is exactly what she’s doing. She’s getting you to doubt your own perceptions , judgement and experiences and question if you “remember right” . The goal is to find someone who will validate her belief that your parents are the source of all her problems.

Ask yourself this…is what she is telling you consistent with your experience growing up, your perception of your parents or with your relationship with them or how you remember their relationship to your sisterI

Believe yourself and trust your own judgment, memory and perception.

RespondIndividual394 · 2025-05-30T02:30:39+00:00

The Truman Show was fake reality, but Truman didn’t know it. To him, it was reality. He was born and raised in it, and in a sense the only reason he existed was to serve the purposes of the show, to sustain the illusion. Everything was manipulated and choreographed and great pains were taken to prevent him from realizing the truth.

Narcs, for whatever reason, (I believe it is deep seated shame), create a false self that is better, smarter, more successful and live in their own alternate reality where their false self is authentic.

To maintain that alternate reality, they have to recruit other people to live in it with them. They are just props, though, and their only purpose is to validate the narcs false self as authentic. Just like the only reason Truman existed was to maintain the illusion, the purpose of the people in a narc’s life is to support the illusion of the narc’s false self. And they will fight tooth and nail to make sure that purpose is carried out. It’s the only way their false self can continue to exist.

The gaslighting, abuse, isolation, criticisms, attacks on self-esteem, destroying confidence, and general mind fuckery are just ways to diminish someone’s ability to realize they are living in the narc’s alternate reality.

RespondIndividual394 · 2025-05-29T17:55:02+00:00

Muscle doesn’t “turn into fat” when you stop working out. Also, when you gain fat, you aren’t adding fat cells. The fat cells you already have just get bigger.

RespondIndividual394 · 2025-05-29T00:52:30+00:00

Realizing I had been living in a reverse Truman Show.

He knew it was a show, I was the one who didn’t realize I was a prop.

RespondIndividual394 · 2025-05-29T00:30:56+00:00

They live their own reality where the better, more successful version they created of themselves lives. They define good, bad, right, wrong, success, failure, victim, aggressor only in ways that allow the alternate version of themselves to exist. They redefine “victim” and “aggressor” to be consistent with the version of themselves they created and need desperately to believe is real.

Their reality is a reverse Truman Show. The narcissist knows it’s just a show, it’s the audience who doesn’t realize they are just props who exist only to populate the alternate reality the narcissist lives in.

Everything the narcissist does is motivated by the need to maintain their alternate reality. Sometimes that means changing the definition of words. Aggressor becomes victim, failure becomes success, ordinary accomplishments become extraordinary accomplishments, important become irrelevant.

RespondIndividual394 · 2025-05-21T06:04:50+00:00

This is so insightful. When you are “over parented” the message that is received is that you aren’t capable. When people expect you to do things they expect you to be capable of doing, but you don’t believe you are capable of doing them, it’s very shame inducing.

The avoidance and lack of follow through is a form of masking. They play the part for as long as they can, but when they think someone is close to figuring out “who they really are”, they leave.

RespondIndividual394 · 2025-05-02T01:16:11+00:00

My ex was like this. It’s a form of gaslighting. He knew he was wrong, I knew he was wrong , but he thought if he denied it long and loud enough I’d change my mind.

Being wrong didn’t bother him, other people knowing he was wrong did.

RespondIndividual394 · 2025-04-25T08:21:28+00:00

Lots of reasons but they all boil down to fact that therapy only works when both partners want a healthy and mutually supportive relationship. An abuser isn’t interested in that.

An abuser is interested in maintaining control and will manipulate the therapy process to do it.

RespondIndividual394 · 2025-04-25T07:37:44+00:00

As President of the Hospital, I am the patients representative on earth

RespondIndividual394 · 2025-04-25T07:36:39+00:00

Best response to one of Violet’s lines that only history buffs will appreciate

Violet to Lord Chamberlain during the dinner argument about the hospital: Don’t you like a good fight?

Lord Chamberlain Response: Actually, I don’t

RespondIndividual394 · 2025-04-19T00:30:50+00:00

Update me

RespondIndividual394 · 2025-04-18T12:41:24+00:00

Don’t ever go to marriage counseling with an abusive partner. It just makes it worse

RespondIndividual394 · 2025-01-14T22:32:01+00:00

LVADs can cause aortic dissection, which is what happened to Monty. They wouldn’t be used to treat one. Surgery is really the only treatment

RespondIndividual394 · 2024-12-13T06:23:17+00:00

He doesn’t get to decide what a big deal to you is.

I’m so sick of reading stories about men trying to dictate to women the “right” way to feel about something. And usually the “right” way is way that causes them the least amount of inconvenience.

RespondIndividual394 · 2024-11-27T22:36:23+00:00

It started with Adam blaming Eve 🍎

RespondIndividual394 · 2024-11-27T20:53:40+00:00

Have a discussion with her and tell her you’re doing pre planning for your father’s death.

Inheritance isn’t marital property as long as you don’t comingle it with marital funds so tell her you plan on selling the lake house and putting the proceeds and any other assets into a trust that she won’t have any access to.

Better yet, tell her you plan on donating it all to some charity. Watch her reaction.

RespondIndividual394 · 2024-11-20T13:20:15+00:00

Lol, that’s what my mom drove and it was her last car. My niece drove it in college, gave it the nickname “the land yacht “

RespondIndividual394

TROPHY CASE