Reply to How do you stay neutral when spouse gets locked in power struggle with tween?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Thanks pp. Sounds like you’ve done a lot of work and I appreciate your perspective. And some of the others too (who upon reread, did classify it as abusive). I’m just really struggling because I also come from a verbally abusive upbringing, with two consequences: 1) I don’t trust that I’m interpreting what is happening correctly and 2) I just freeze. I can’t negotiate, I can’t seem to think at all. And yes, I’m in therapy. He is not. [/quote]

10:29 here.  I think you should trust yourself more and have confidence in your interpretation of what's going on.  I suspect the reason you feel the way you do when witnessing these interactions is because you remember what it's like to be on the receiving end.  Your tween is likely feeling the same way even though it may present differently.

As far as freezing, my advice would be to have a discussion with your husband in a calm moment.  Tell him it's triggering for you and that you don't want your tween to feel like you did growing up. Try to get his agreement on a signal that you would give when you see the situation spiraling so that he and the tween could have a cooling off period before engaging again.  Have a similar discussion with your tween so that, hopefully, one of them will have the presence of mind to disengage when this occurs.

At first, it was me jumping in (I'm more of fight than a flight person) and going toe to toe with DH. Yes, it was hard on our relationship but, as I told him, I have to protect the kids.  That really, really pissed him off because he didn't believe his behavior was damaging.  I would then ask him to think about what would drive me to jump in knowing how it affected our relationship.  Yeah, he'd sometimes say that I'm overly sensitive because of how I grew up.  It told him that gave me more insight into the impact of his behavior.  Yes, I'm sensitive to it but there is a reason - and I definitely never want our kids to ever feel even a fraction of what I felt.  It took a while but it's worked.  Now that the kids are older, they're able to speak up for themselves and I think that's a really helpful life skill. HTH[/quote]

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