#48 What to do about husband's manners?

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Gabby
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#48 What to do about husband's manners?

Post by Gabby » Sun Dec 21, 2008 11:08 am

#48 What to do about husband's manners? / Wife masterminding divorce needs therapy

Dear Annie: I have a very sincere and vibrant husband, but his manners are awful and he often comes across as an inconsiderate jerk.

He’s been known to start eating at the table before others are served. He jokes loudly and disparagingly about people from other countries while we are in a mixed social setting. He treats service people, such as taxi drivers and hotel registrars, like dirt. It’s embarrassing.

He’ll correct his table manners when I call it to his attention, but only temporarily. If I ask him to stop making unkind comments about others, he claims he is only speaking the truth. When I ask him to treat the taxi driver better, he says that service people are there to serve us and they need to do their jobs right.

His attitude makes me cringe, and I worry what others think of him. It is stressful to contemplate an evening out. I don’t want to be a nag, but I also don’t want to put up with this for the next 50 years. Any ideas? —MRS. NO MANNERS

Dear Mrs.: Your husband doesn’t “come across” as an inconsiderate jerk. He actually IS one.

Poor table manners can be corrected, but ridiculing those of other cultures and treating service workers like dirt are indicative of inferior character, and that is not so easily fixed. You can try to sensitize your husband to the way his comments hurt you and others, but he may be too arrogant to work on his attitude. Nagging won’t help. Just remember that his remarks do not reflect on you. —Annie


Gabby's Reply

Hi Mrs.: It would work for you to acknowledge that you are masterminding a divorce. The tragedy is that you will then lie as to why the marriage failed. You’ll find yourself blaming him as you have here. He is merely mirroring you and your leadership-communication skills. He has absolutely no choice other than to behave this way around you.

I assure you he didn’t start acting this way after you married him. While dating you made something more important than your integrity. It reveals that you were, and still are, unconscious. It also reveals your arrogance. You saw these behaviors while dating him and arrogantly thought that what you call love would change him. Worse yet, you didn’t communicate clearly (covertly, yes), “I don’t like this… this … and this… about you. I want to change you. Do you want to change you?” If yes, “Do I have your permission to support you in completing your experience of abuse? I need your permission to share my experience with you each and every time you do something that offends me. If yes, please complete 24 sessions of therapy and then we’ll talk.”

What needs to be addressed here is not how to change or fix him, but for you to discover what it is about you that attracted, and now empowers him. This will take you a minimum of 25 50-minute sessions of therapy or counseling, during which, ask for support in discovering what it is about your leadership communication model that inspires your loved one to act this way. You’ll know you are healed when you can chose to not interact with people stuck in abuse, you’ll be conscious, back where you should have been when you first met him, when you would have intuitively known to not interact with him. This whole thing is about you completing your relationship with your parents

It is unethical to marry someone you want to change. That’s not love. Love is choosing the person to be the way they are and are not. Those addicted to abusing and to being abused attract abusive people. It’s important to know that you validate for him that his behavior toward others is acceptable. He has not destroyed enough relationships to motivate him to get therapy on his own.

Put another way, as long as you stay in his life he cannot and will not change. Any change he makes would be for you, not because it’s the decent mature thing to do. He is dramatizing the game he played with his mother. He has absolutely no choice other than to thwart you, to communicate his disrespect of you for rewarding such behavior, such is his programming. He has become a programmed machine with no conscious choices. What’s also true is that hanging around him sets it up for others to think you’re the nice person when in truth you are the leader. This is deceitful of you. They do not know who you are. Your friends are as unconscious as you are, else they would not hang around you; they have no choice other than to stuff their thoughts about you.

It’s not hard to imagine what your relationship with your parents is like; one thing we do know is that your marriage has been about invalidating/thwarting them. At some level it must pain them to know that you married such a person against their wishes. Yours is what’s called covert suppressed anger. You set it up for him to express your anger, contempt, and disrespect. Thousands will see their own relationship through your letter. Thank you, Gabby

P.S. Please show him these communications else it will be badmouthing.

Last edited 3/18/19


 

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