Posted by Cecilia on November 19, 2001, at 2:32:03
In reply to controlling behavior, posted by GKJ on November 18, 2001, at 12:57:49
> My sweet, beautiful daughter has moved back home after a very chaotic six month marriage to a man she still loves and wants to work things out with. She is 24 and he is 23. This is someone she fell deeply in love with and married without a long courtship. In fact, he pushed us all to marry her, saying he was "so in love", he just couldn't wait. She knew she loved him, so we all went along with it. My daughter has a significant learning disability, and the young man does also. He is a very nervous and anxious person who cries easily and doesn't always tell people what he thinks. He is very neat and is very protective of his "things". He has a winsome, almost child-like side to his personality at times. The behavior that has caused the problems, from her view, is his overly-controlling, compusive and sometimes abusive behavior, as well as his different views on family and relationships. Before they were married, he interacted with our family all the time. He was over at our house every day. Now he is very jealous of her attachment to her family - we have five children - even to her sister's baby or the younger ones in the family. He is very intense and all over her and is very reluctant to give her any breathing room - even things like stopping by somewhere after work or working on her own projects. He complains that she is not being "in love" with him enough. He has tried to require things like adjustments to her work schedule to center around his, restrictions on her other activities and time spent with her family, restrictions on access of her family to the home (it's his house, bought with money from his father's death), monitoring phone calls, forcing her out of the house if he is angry with her, constantly threatening divorce, removing phones, hitting her with soft objects, messing up her things, and verbally hasassing her. Since she has been gone, he has dug up her plants, burned the hutch where she liked to put occasional pets, filled in the fish pond, and taken all her clothes out of the closet and stuffed them in boxes. He ran out and filed for divorce the first day but has not proceeded with it. He is very impulsive. She has been in, and continues to participate in counseling, but on the three ocasions he has gone with her, he became very agitated if criticized and refuses to go now. My daughter has a word retrieval problem, so he can outstrip her vebally to the point that she can hardly make a dent in his verbal barrage. He once agreed to go on medication and tried Effexor, with relatively good success (still had strange views, but not fights) - although he did things like open the capsules and cut back on the dose, but it caused some prostate difficulties and sexual disfunction, so he stopped it. At this point, a doctor prescribed Busbar and he is now trying it - only because he wants my daughter to come back with him. He says it's "sad" that he has to take medicine to live with her. She has to be like the Rock of Gibralter to get him to do anything, he is very stubborn. He seems a little better, but not great. It has only been a few days. He seems to project his behavior onto her - saying that he is not abusive, or she is abusive too - equating small things she has done with his clear-cut abuse. She has told him that she's afraid of him, and he says that he's afraid of her too. He has driven her car off the road 3 times while she has been driving. Sometimes he has been sorry and done things like write sweet notes or bring flowers, but generally he seems to want to say it's "both of them" and they should just "start over". She is very angry and frustrated. We never saw this coming - he comes off as the sweetest, gentlest guy, and I do know he loves my daughter. Much of the time he is OK. He does most of the housework and wants to wait on her hand and foot, but it's like he wants to totally control and own her. We are not allowed to come to the house, even when he's not there. He doesn't want to work and wishes he could be a "house husband". He was only working 12 hours a week when she left. His mother has some mental problems and also some physical illness and lives a pretty isolated life with her second husband. She is in bed most of the time. He is an only child with no other family connections except a grandfather. The grandmother died of Huntington's a few years ago. His mother has a very strong, almost scary personality, believes in corporal punishment like it's a real virtue, and he seeks her advise on a lot of things if my daughter is not with him. Otherwise, he is not in much touch with her. He says he gets less attached to people when he's not around them. He says that he did pretty much what he wanted when he was growing up, but he is generally submissive to his mom when she confronts him. She blames my daughter now and our family, saying that the problems are because my daughter is a "mama's girl who wasn't whipped enough" and the family "been all in their business." I will add, the young man is very persuasive and until we actually took them on vacation with us and allowed them to live in our basement for a month, we took our daughter's references to his eratic behavior with a grain of salt.
>
> My questions is - does anyone think this is borderline personality disorder, or what is it? Is this a disorder that can be treated with medicine? Is Busbar a good one? Is it safe for her to even consider returning to him if he remains under a physician's care and she never allows him in her car? Or is there no hope at all and we should just encourage her to get out while she can? She believes in trying to save her marriage, but she is very discouraged.I agree with Lynda K.-this man sounds DANGEROUS-do whatever you can to persuade her to get out!
poster:Cecilia
thread:84574
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20011113/msgs/84637.html