PhanelopeContributor
Husband with Intrusive thoughts and Dissociation
Hi. This is a long post. I have been with my husband for 12 years and I knew fairly early on he had mental health problems. He was sexually abused as a child and this has caused ongoing issues for him, although i didn't realise how extreme until recently. <br><br>Over the years there have been several occasions where he has seen a therapist or been medicated for anxiety and depression. Nothing really worked but once he was able to get to a point where he was able to function again he just let it blow over. Over the last year he has been behaving really erratically lying all the time and making bad choices. We are going through a lot of stress right now with finances so i thought it may have been that, but I didn't think that stress was enough to account for all of his behavior. <br><br>I told him to leave about a month ago but then made him come home because he was acting suicidal and i was worried. He promised he would change but he hadn't at all and was getting worse. Then over Easter he did something really terrible and criminal to me. I was encouraged to go to police and everything but i didn't because i knew something just wasn't right with him and he needed help, not to be treated like a criminal. <br><br>I demanded he speak to someone and he contacted mens line who told him he was to go straight to hospital and admit himself and not to go anywhere near me or my kids. He is absolutely terrified of being locked up. In his early twenties he attempted suicide and was locked away for 2 weeks. He said it was the worst experience of his life. I myself have spent one day in a mental hospital and agree its a horrible place that isn't good for your health at all and probably more used to protect yourself and others than to help you heal. In addition to this we are also struggling financially. We are barely getting by as it is and he knows if he is in hospital and can't work we'll lose our house and everything we've worked so hard for. My income is nowhere near enough to keep us going and we are already getting help from centrelink and its not enough.<br><br>After speaking with mensline he confessed to me what is going on. He says that he doesn't feel like anything is real or that people are real. He knows things are wrong but he doesn't attach any emotion to that wrongness. He said when he did what he did to me he wasn't thinking of me as a person but as an object and even though he knew what he was doing was wrong he just didn't care. He said the next day when i was crying he should've felt bad but he just didn't. We did some research together and looked at different dissociative disorders and he had all the symptoms and history including the childhood abuse. He said he felt better now that he had a better understanding of what was going on. Then he confessed to me that his entire life including our whole marriage he has had obsessive sexual thoughts. He says he thinks about sex almost constantly and not just normal sex, some things that are really disturbing like rape etc. He says he also thinks about having sex with men. He says he thinks about cheating all the time and hasn't yet but was thinking he should do it just to get it out of his system. He thinks that he pulls himself out of reality as a way of coping with all of these thoughts.<br><br>So obviously he needs serious help, but is reluctant to get it because of the fear of being locked away. Is there any way we can get help for him and guarantee he won't be locked away? Are his problems so bad hospitalisation is the only choice?
