Confusion

My husband has cyclothemia. He is very good with taking his medication and overall we all (his parents, himself, his doctors) consider him stable. He is able to hold down a full time job. He is very loving toward me and our 14 month old daughter.

We've been married almost two years and have known each other for 4 years. In those four years, there have been a handful of times where he's unraveled and felt like the world is closing in on him. We often refer to these as our sheets and blankets arguments because the first time this happened he got insanely heated and insistant that there was no difference between sheets and blankets. He was so angry that I thought there was a difference that he began swearing at me.

It had become apparent to me that these outbursts are connected to unusual stress factors that occur in our lives that are not in our control. For instance, both our cars got hit in our parking lot in the middle of the night within a month of each other. When the second car got hit, we found out that the person didn't have liability insurance. He had an outburst the morning we went to pick up our car.

These things are very short in duration. If I give him his space to cool off, sometimes it can be avoided.

I feel like I have no one to talk to about this. I'm afraid of giving people the impression that he's always like this. I'm afraid of labeling him as an evil violent man. I don't want to see myself as a poor victim of verbal abuse. I want to focus on all the ways I'm proud of my husband and on how our relationship is 99% of the time.

The whole abuse thing is very confusing to me because whether it is movies or descriptions I read online, its always constant. It seems if that line is crossed, its always a constant pattern. Well, my mother once strangled me. It happened one time and that was it. When I had to sit through a video presentation of what sexual preditators due to groom their victims before a sexual assault, I realized it was exactly how my uncle has treated me my entire life. However my uncle has never touched me sexually, though.

How am I to understand these seemingly middle ground things? Am I to pity myself? Am I supposed to never forgive and never speak to them again? Am I demeaning myself by forgiving them and preserving these relationships?

Hun, the biggest sign of strength is to have autonomy and strength in your convictions. I can so identify with what you told me about your mother, for the same thing happened to me. It was just the one occasion, when my mother, who had a degenerative illness, HPD and a type of bipolar disorder, went into some kind of dissociative state and tried to strangle me when I was 12. She was overcome with guilt afterwards and I suppressed the experience. It was only during my therapy many years later that the enormity of it occurred to me. There were also times when she was a loving mother, and when I had fond memories of her. I forgave her, but I also acknowledged the effect that this had on me, as I later developed HPD and cyclothmia/bipolar 2 myself. Relationships with partners or parents are very rarely black and white, and there is a whole area of grey in the middle. The same partners or parents who can at times act abusively can also act in ways that are loving, and yes, it is okay to love them, and yes, it is also okay to forgive them. This in no way demeans us.

What could be felt to be demeaning though, is to deny the fact that the abuse had an effect upon us, and to say that we have no right to be hurt or angry by these things. We all owe it to ourselves to VALIDATE our feelings and emotions. Yes, we can understand and rationalise the reasons why people have acted abusively, but to understand is not to excuse, or to deny the effect of the abuse. It can also be demeaning to ourselves to deny ourselves safety, for that is a fundamental human right.