Good morning @bonney78 ..... I missed this tag somehow ..... good to see you ..... 😊
The situation is actually more serious than that. Mr F&H is locked into a strict ritualistic pattern of exercise and restrictive diet across the day, the same pattern with very little variation, and it takes up almost all of the day. It caused a change in personality and value system as it set rigidly into place and he became both controlling and highly emotionally aggressive, opposed with “rewarding” behaviours. His need to control took over, and it took over all our household routines .... in fact every aspect of our lives that it could.
He doesn’t have friends ..... his workaholism left very little room to socialise, which he kept for virtually family only .... and now with this regimen in place and in semi-retirement, he doesn’t seeacquaintances either, unless there is some major event he can’t avoid. It’s like tunnel vision, and we can’t break him out of it,
At a point where he had achieved his weight-loss goals, his attention turned to regimenting everyone else in the household, at a time when it is important to relinquish control over kids who have become young adults, and unfortunately the control and control wwith extreme, but controlled or “rewarding” generosity. The level of emotional aggression and control meant that, aside from desperately seeking intervention from medical people, where our plight was not being recognised, we would have had to flee the house and cause a firestorm to try to break free.
Thus has affected the youngest of the adult kids and caused an emotional regression in them, which has turned inwards in the form of illness, making them even less independent, and causing them to be further, not only house-bound, but room bound as well. It’s more complicated than that, now that we have medical professionals involved, but the truth of my husbands illness is still not exposed because it is so insidious and well-hidden in the form of a “healthy” lifestyle. It’s only the inside view which shows that it is in fact anything but ..... and delusional thinking is part of the mess.
The expectation for dependence has come from the father over the kids, rather than the other way around. The medical intervention has also come via the kids, and until the underlying illness in Mr F&H is truly understood, it won’t be clear what else is influencing the eating disorder, which is an EDNOS, and so, what else needs treating here .....
Hubby has regressed into birth-family patterns that were never part of our dynamic, in fact we had rejected them, which he can’t recognise now ..... making him a stranger to me and confusing to the kids.
