The Background

I met my husband in November of 2003. We met at a wedding of mutual friends. He seemed nice enough. Normal enough. We had our first “date” on New Year’s Eve 2003/2004 and began dating immediately. While I love my husband dearly, that was the start of my problems.

My husband’s parents divorced when he was young and both had remarried. He grew up with his mom and step-dad. He told me that both of them were counselors, his step-dad a marriage/family therapist and his mother a school counselor with her own private practice on the side. That seemed normal enough. And to him, it was.

But there is much more to the story. His parents divorced after his father had an affair. While that seems to put the blame all on the man, I later learned his mother was so controlling, even using sex as a way to get what she wanted, that she basically drove her husband to another woman. She eventually left and took the kids with her. She used the kids as a pawn against their dad. She manipulated situations so that the father could not see the children and then told the children that daddy didn’t show up because he didn’t love them. Horrible, horrible things. She had such bitterness in her heart that she made the children pay for it. She was a single mother for a few years after the divorce.

She eventually re-married another man. He had been married twice previously and had 2 estranged daughters. He had been a minister in several churches for many years until he left the ministry for who knows what reason. That is when he began he career as a marriage/family therapist. This man has a terrible temper and bitterness oozes out of his eyes. He even hit the children occasionally, but my husband’s mother never said a word. She just let it happen. She chose to put her happiness in front of the happiness and safety of her two children.

This woman, I believe, has a deep fear of abandonment and a lot of anger and bitterness. She was the oldest of 2 children and always felt like the came second to her younger brother. For some reason, she seems to hate her mother and has nothing but negative things to say about both her mother and her brother’s wife. Because of all of her bitterness and with the help of her detailed training as a counselor, she taught her children to believe just as she wanted them to. Brainwashed is what I call it. She told the kids that no one would ever love them like their family. That no one would ever be there for them except their little family. That she and her husband were the most knowledgeable of life and of all situations because of all their education and credentials as counselors. My husband grew up believing that they could do no wrong. He never questioned them. Never voiced his opinion. Never really was allowed to have his own opinion. He was sucked in.

Enmeshment is the clinical term for it. It means you are so engrossed in your own “family bubble” that you cannot see anything else. This was my husband. He had known nothing different. His biological father, as far as he knew, was an evil man and his mother had saved him. He was taught not to question anything his mom or step-dad said or did. He believed that every child spent as much time with their family as possible and that there was nothing outside of this family bubble. To believe anything else or look anywhere else for any happiness was, as his mom put it, betrayal. And her owed her. She changed his diapers, she fed him, she raised him. He owed his life to her and to not give her what she wanted was betrayal.