# Abuse symptom?



## imperfectworld (Jan 18, 2015)

Going back nearly 20 years to when I met my wife, I recall some strange dialogs several weeks into the relationship. Both of us met at religiously-affiliated workplace and were virgins. She pulled me aside very seriously on a number of occasions and said that I must promise as a condition that I would never, ever, EVER want to have sex with her from behind (“doggy” style). I was puzzled but simply agreed.

Skipping forward many years, we avoided that position and have had a reasonably satisfying sex life. Over the past several years there has been a worsening of frequency and intensity. It’s at a point now where there is only one position she likes – and usually she is half-clothed with a thick, long sweater. I’ve told her many times how beautiful she is (truly is – she is 39 and the same thin weight she was in college) and how much I enjoy seeing her, but any dialog like this results in a nasty fight.

I’m going back into her past and I do think there has been more to it than she admitted. I hear stuff more from her these days about being “technically a virgin” and I wonder if she had a bad experience, like perhaps one of her boyfriend’s trying to convince her to try a--- sex while “preserving her virginity”.

Sorry for the long backstory but is it a symptom of abuse for a woman to have a fixation like this? I don’t want to flat-out ask her but I’m trying to trace why in all these years she still isn’t entirely comfortable with sex and her body and especially with the worsening of things now.


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## FrazzledSadHusband (Jul 3, 2014)

You may see a parallel with my wife.

http://talkaboutmarriage.com/sex-marriage/204514-what-do-i-do-am-i-unreasonable.html

There were a number of things that triggered my wife that she didn't tell me until years after we were married.

Links that may or may not help. Both of these ladies dealt with abuse.

The Forgiven Wife - Learning to Dance with Desire

Official Site for Shannon Ethridge Ministries Home - Official Site for Shannon Ethridge Ministries

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1 Corinthians 7:3-5


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## EleGirl (Dec 3, 2011)

It sounds like your wife needs to get into counseling. My bet is that she was sexually abused/raped as a child. 

If a person does not deal with this sort of trauma it will re-surface later in life.

There also maybe some things in your marriage, like she feels her needs are not being met. This is cause a women to withdraw sexually.

Some books that might help for things other than possible sexual abuse are "His Needs, Her Needs" and "Love Busters"

I take it that your wife will not discuss that is going on with her? The above books are all about a couple learning to talk to each other, identify their needs and then to learn how to meet those needs.


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## imperfectworld (Jan 18, 2015)

FrazzledSadHusband said:


> You may see a parallel with my wife.
> 
> http://talkaboutmarriage.com/sex-marriage/204514-what-do-i-do-am-i-unreasonable.html
> 
> ...


Thank you for this. I certainly see much in common here! I don't have the faintest idea how to proceed but I do hope she can come clean if something happened. If I could get to a MC (which I think I could do without a crazy amount of drama since we are currently on decent terms) perhaps I could pre-brief the counselor with the theory.


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## imperfectworld (Jan 18, 2015)

EleGirl said:


> It sounds like your wife needs to get into counseling. My bet is that she was sexually abused/raped as a child.
> 
> If a person does not deal with this sort of trauma it will re-surface later in life.
> 
> ...


Thank you! Since I can't figure out how to broach it, I just had a flash of insight. She has a sister 4 years older that I can approach within an acceptable risk for discretion. Perhaps she knows something. What my wife does say with some regularity is things like "thank God I was protected" as she was in what I would call a risky environment.

Perhaps she wasn't as protected as she states, and this is a quiet way for her to scream inside.


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## FrazzledSadHusband (Jul 3, 2014)

One of the things that I had to learn the hard way & what everyone told me in my thread was you can't force someone into counseling. My wife did agree to once a week schedule for intimacy in MC, and we have gotten much better at communicating after I put my foot down. I told her "I married you, not any of the other women I dated. I married you to have a intimate, uninhibited relationship with."

I will warn you, in order to threaten divorce, I had to be ready to carry thru. I had to be OK either way. In forcing myself to get to this point, I feel like something inside has died. Our marriage is getting better, but there is still a dead spot inside. One of the links on theforgivenwife.com site is a article on how other men in the author's past tinted her view of her husband. I could tell that my wife was viewing me the same way as her abuser. After I had her read article, she did apologize and said she would work on separating her view of me from her past.

I will look up link and post it later. Don't know if you have kids or not, if not, don't have any until this gets worked thru.

Found link - http://forgivenwife.com/2013/11/21/unbearable-lessons/


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## imperfectworld (Jan 18, 2015)

Frazzled, thanks for your help. I had an earlier reply but it didn't post. I read your thread with keen interest because there are many similarities. 

I'm not incensed about anything yet to the point of divorce, just exploring her past and if there is something that could be done. We have a two-year old, which is both a commitment and a catalyst to these problems being elevated...even though they have been going along the whole time.


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## FrazzledSadHusband (Jul 3, 2014)

I've learned a lot in the past year. Hopefully I can save you some of the "learned the hard way". Here are a few more notes.

1. Read the book No More Mr. Nice Guy. Your wife may have picked you as she felt "safe with you". Eventually, safe gets boring. Also, there may be points you realize you have to address. It's kinda like the verse " address the plank in your eye before pointing at the speck in your wife's eye.

2. Get the book "The 5 love languages" Find out what your wife's top three are and work at speaking them. You are going to be asking your wife to address the demons from her past. Let her know/see that her husband is worth the effort.

3. You cannot control your wife actions. She may absolutely refuse to see a counselor. My wife told me I was a good provider and father, but she was not attracted to me. Since then, I have lost 41 pounds & lift weights 3 times a week. I go to gym at 5 am so I don't take away anytime from my family. She asked why I was working out, I replied "My weight is one of the few things in life I can control. I can't expect you to be passionate with a fat man, so I am changing. I want to be with someone that wants to be with me." 

Give her a break from watching your child, but then take some time for yourself and lift like a maniac.

4. Attached is a portion of a letter I wrote my wife expressing what my needs were in our marriage. 

"I need you to be proud of your body. I want you to walk around our bedroom with no clothes on. You are beautifully and wonderfully made. Your body is like holding a rose by the stem in the sunshine & slowing turning it. As the light hits it, all the various textures and shades are revealed. I feel I am looking at the same rose when I see you naked. " 

And in reference to her receiving oral, I quoted familiar passages - "(Awake, north wind, and come, south wind! Blow on my garden, that its fragrance may spread everywhere. Let my beloved come into his garden and taste its choice fruits). "

Finally, I am attaching a post from a female poster on TAM, GettintIt, I think it was. It may explain how your wife is feeling, although she may not know why.

"I keep reading through this thread, OP, and I recognize every observation you make about your wife, and I recognize your pain and confusion. You are describing me and my husband and my marriage during ten years of emotional disconnect.

Something is broken inside of her, yes, but don't get too attached to the idea that she knows what it is and how to fix it. It is a terrible feeling to lose desire and attraction for your husband, but still feel that you love him. It is confusing and isolating and no matter how much you TRY to drum up those old feelings . . . they are simply gone. They are gone because you look at your husband and you see someone who needs you, not someone who wants you. You look at your husband and you see a man who cannot be happy, and blames you for it. You look at your husband, and he is focusing his behavior around trying to fix you, when what you really want is for HIM TO FIX HIMSELF. He's not going out with his friends, he's not able to focus on work, he's grumpy with the kids, he's not finding things to do in his spare time that make him happy. You find him brooding, and always, always watching you, trying to figure you out. WHY CANT HE LET YOU ALONE AND GET HIS **** TOGETHER so you can desire him again?

Because it can't really be you? Can it? Where is the man you married? Where is the confident man who has friends and hobbies and was a leader and didn't back down the moment you got pissy with him? Where is the man who told you NO? Where is the man who let you rage and scream and let it all out . . . and then hold you while you cried? Instead you have this man who looks at you sadly, pleadingly, constantly expecting an explanation that YOU JUST DONT HAVE. 

And the thought that he could even want you sexually, when you don't want him? Incontrovertible evidence that you are meat to him. A way to get off. How can he love you in that way when you don't respect him, when you disdain his weakness, when his touch makes you shrink inside? If he can want sex with you when you so HATE what he's become, how, how can he say it's because he loves you? No, it's because he loves sex, he has an itch that he needs to scratch, that it all, and you are the convenient body. 

Oh wait . . . . but you don't say those things to him . . . because you cant. You can't because you mind will not let you form those thoughts. You cannot go there in your mind, you cannot. 

It's resentment for the changes life has wrought on both of you. It's not her fault, it's not your fault. Resentment happens. The difficulty is owning it and understanding that, although it's not your fault that you ended up full of it, ONLY YOU can do something about it. 

I think about relationship resentment as being like the baby weight after pregnancy. You both were responsible for the pregnancy, but the woman ends up with the weight to lose. You cant do it for her. She knows this, and if she wants to restore her body to the way it was before pregnancy, she will do the work. But it's harder to recognize resentment in that fashion : because it's emotional and not physical, we can shift the responsibility for "the fix" to our partner. We fight against owing the responsibility to "lose the baby weight." So we just sit in it day after day, month after month, year after year and it grows and grows and grows just as surly as extra weight will if it is not addressed. 

Until your wife can accept that "something is broken inside of her" that ONLY she can fix, I think you will have limited success. 

I don't recommend marriage counseling. I recommend individual counseling for her. It's nothing she should be ashamed of. It's a mental health issue: even if she isn't willing to purge her resentment for you or for the sake of her marriage, she should do it for herself. She doesn't realize it, but it is greatly affecting her happiness and her outlook in general. 

And I also recommend individual counseling for yourself, OP. Fight hard to keep resentment at bay. Fight hard to be mentally healthy. Fight hard to be focused on things besides your sex life. After my husband made the conscious effort to work on himself, to find happiness without me . . . THAT is when I felt a small, a very small shift in myself that said, "ok, so let me take a little look at myself here . . . " I saw a glimmer of the man I fell in love with, and I decided he was worth the effort. 
"


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## imperfectworld (Jan 18, 2015)

Great reply, Frazzled. I am doing some homework now on it. And there's been a new development with odd timing - she had a nervous breakdown a few days ago, was diagnosed with depression, and will actually be doing individual counseling! I was able to write a letter to her doctor that included my suspicions of abuse. Somehow my feelings that prompted me to join this great forum and post, were also being felt by her. But I think this crisis HAD to happen to move forward.

BTW, I just lost 48 lbs since August and am back to my high school weight. Feel great!


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