I’m not sure if DARVO is real or what. But I left this conversation more confused than when I entered it.

My husband and I have been separated and trying to find reconciliation. One of the main reasons we are having issues is because I believe he is sexually coercive. I know that this is a common issue in marriage. He has explained why he applied sexual pressure (largely because he felt insecure and needed sex and me to validate those insecurities). He has said repeatedly that when I stopped initiating, it made him feel even more insecure which led to even more pressure. I’ve been trying very hard to understand WHY I stopped reaching for him and WHY pressure even had to enter the relationship. I came to the conclusion and brought to him that I think it is because I did not feel emotional safety and that’s why there was lack of sexual initiation on my part that caused pressure to enter the relationship. Our arguments often ended with diminishing the issue, explaining away the issue, or escalating the issue until something hurtful enough was said that it ended it. Regardless, my conclusion was that lack of emotion safety led to lack of sexual initiation on my part which led to increased insecurity and increased pressure/coercion.

When I presented this potential cycle to him, he felt like I was attacking him and got defensive. Ironically, I had also sent him a post about how defensiveness can cause lack of emotional safety and leave people feeling unheard and alone in their pain. But he just says I built a case against him and use what he says as evidence in my case. I pointed out that this was the same pattern of defensiveness and blame-shifting that caused lack of emotional safety in the first place, and I told him I needed to take a break and to step away from the conversation to process it. 

That’s when he tells me I’m shutting down and stonewalling him. I asked for space and he sent me text after text after text begging for understanding and apologizing and self-deprecating. When I finally broke my own boundary and responded, he ended up telling me that I use an aggressive tone, twist the knife with my words, and only view him negatively. All the while we move further and further away from the initial issue: emotional safety as the source of lack of initiation causing sexual pressure.

The conversation is so destabilizing and I’m just so sad. Maybe I did bring it up in a bad way. But I was just trying to say that I felt emotionally unsafe and that’s why I stopped initiating. It is so defeating and painful to be the one try to give grace by diving deeper into the coercive dynamic that hurt me (that probably shouldn’t exist in the first place tbh), trying to provide a legitimate explanation to the dynamic, and have the exact same pattern of defensiveness and blame-shifting happen that caused lack of emotional safety to begin with. I’m just sad, I guess. Maybe he’s right and maybe I don’t communicate what I mean well enough.

Anyways, dinner is chocolate ice cream.

DARVO..?