# Letter from him...



## SilverPanther (Feb 2, 2012)

So I have been recieving a steady influx of mail from my husband (hopefully soon to be ex), and have been refusing to open it. For a while I was opening his letters, and they were all filled with nothing but venom, accusations, and lists of demands on me for what I need to do to become an acceptable wife. So I stopped opening them, and when he cut off contact with me but I kept getting them in the mail I just set all of it aside to open and read when I am in a better place.

But I got one today that I thought had come after the date he supposedly left town without a forwarding address, so I felt I needed to open it, for legal reasons if no other (and believe me, right now, there IS no other reason I want to hear from him!), because if he is giving me updated contact information etc I need to know this. But it wasn't a letter since that day, and it was just very upsetting to me to read.

I have been telling him he is mentally unsound and needs help, so that is what he parroted back to me. He sent me a "get well soon" card, that opened by telling me he has no doubt that he loves me very much, and hopes I realize that I am very sick, and get better. This is almost to the word what I have told him previously. Then he goes on to tell me how I'm nothing like the person he thought I was, he married me because he thought I wanted to travel the world with him, help "stop the holocaust" were his words, though I'm not sure what this is alluding to, and that if nothing else, I wanted to be a good wife and homemaker to him in his home in Canada. His letter was warm and distraught, as though I have been straying and demanding the impossible from him, and all he wants is someone who behaves decently.

But that's just it. He wants someone who behaves. He would talk to me like I was his child, telling me what I am allowed or not allowed to do, what he demands I do for him. That I have no rights concerning intimacy, if he demands it from me, I must give it, whenever and wherever, and if not he has the right to take it from me. That if I don't keep our bedroom life interesting, and if I do not work hard to keep a good home for him and prepare him good food, then he has a right to look elsewhere for female companionship and that's just what I should expect if I'm not giving him enough.

This is the reality of how he feels about me and about our marriage. The last thing he said to me, which evidently came after this letter after all, was that through my monstrous selfishness I had turned him into a monster, and I should pray I never see him again. I do take that as a veiled threat. And the idea of living the kind of life he wanted us to have, the constant nagging, demands, requirements that I change myself for him, the constant degrading and reminders that I'm not being selfless enough, clever enough or skilled enough to suit him, make me sick when I remember them. I know it couldn't have been all bad, I know I loved him, but I am so scared and sick at the thought of him now.

This is just a garbled rant because reading that letter even knowing what I know, messed with my head so much. He has a way of turning all the facts around, and you can try to say "wait, that's not how it happened..." but he will assure you that no no, you're remembering it wrong, THIS is reality, this is the truth, I am reasonable and stable and loving and just want a happy home, and you are totally nuts. I KNOW I am not. There's written evidence of how verbally abusive he is and how much he looks down on me. But all the same sometimes I still think, what if I did do all of this to be selfish? What if I am the monster he says I am? 

I just feel so twisted up inside and miserable.


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## Homemaker_Numero_Uno (Jan 18, 2011)

Go by how you feel when you do not read anything from him.
If you were crazy, you would feel crazy even when you did not hear from him. Just because he has some kind of knowledge about you does not make him more expert on you, than you. You spend 24-7 with yourself and while reading something from him might be a lapse of self-care resolutions on your part, it does not define you as crazy, merely curious. Now you know that you feel fine when you do not read something from him, and you feel upset, unsettled, and a bit out of sorts and disoriented when you do read something from him. 

I hope this provides some perspective for you.
It sounds like he is one of those crazy-making people.
Mimicking language is something that people do when they want to get through to you, to your core, in order to plant something that can explode or wreak havoc, like a virus tricks the body into accepting it. They use a channel that is already open, they know it is open because they received a signal on that channel. It's the same way that espionage works. 

One thing you can do is to change the language of your inner dialogue. LITERALLY change the music you listen to, the art that you expose yourself to, your physical hobbies, your language (yes, get out a dictionary and a thesaurus), even take up a foreign language. Think in images. Change your diet, change some habits. Then you have extra experiential layers between what he knows about you and what your daily life/communication consists of. After some time, when you open a letter from him, you'll see that he has clung to the old language and is still stuck in there, while you have moved on and can read his writing for what it is. A pre-schooler who copies down a sonnet and calls himself a genius.


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## SilverPanther (Feb 2, 2012)

You're right, Homemaker, I don't feel crazy when I'm not reading things he wrote. I don't feel that this breakup is my fault, or that I was the sick and crazy one. Other people have spoken to him and agreed he was not acting at all rationally or in a way a husband should ever act. And in my interactions with everyone else in my life, I appear to be rational and sane. Sometimes I can overreact or be overly sensitive, but who doesn't have some flaws? And the other day one of my friends told me that I am one of the nicest people she has ever known. And I really got the vibe she was being honest, not just saying that.

But it's so hard, because I can't understand how I can love someone so much, and have tried to make things work, and all he can see is that I was horrible and that I sabotaged things and broke up our marriage. How can he see things so completely differently from how I do?


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