Reading stuff has really helped me too. Related to abuse:

Lundy Bancroft: Why Does He Do That? Inside the minds of angry and controlling men. Even though you know your husband was abusive, and even though he is dead, I wonder if the way this author describes the patterns would be helpful as you process things?

Bancroft also wrote a book with JAC Patrissi: Should I Stay or Should I Go?” Even though your husband has gone and the question does not apply to you, what I like about this book is how it helps a reader understand the patterns in the relationship, and focuses on you, the reader. It has a lot of writing exercises, visualization exercises, etc. to help you move forward after an abusive relationship. Just very very nurturing.

I think Patrissi might do healing retreats as well.

Lately I have been thinking of the straight spouse experience as a kind a sexual assault. I alluded to it on a recent post as a kind of “violent sexual betrayal.” I hesitate to really call it all-out sexual assault because I have never been assaulted like that, and I would not want to diminish the horror of violent rape, so I feel like it is an idea to handle delicately.

However, it is gelling with other ideas I have had lately, like how when our spouses are gay in denial, they are a “non” or the “un,” and that never-knowing is the problem, so we only see the real identity or what is really happening by looking for that which is not.  So I started thinking about how not acting is a kind of action. How withholding affection from children is considered downright abusive. 

Someone who rarely posts on SSN (so I don't remember her name) commented a while back that as a straight spouse working through the trauma, she finally decided she had been sexually assaulted by a gay man. It seemed aggressive to me at first, but it stuck with me.

Around then, I had also been thinking of these words: “you wanted to use my body but not to love it.”

[I deleted some long personal memories here which were helpful for me to write, but which I prefer to return to privacy.]

About the same time, a friend reminded me of betrayal trauma, and how living in a deceptive environment is itself ongoing abuse. I re-read that Minwalla article we've listed on other posts: “what they don’t know will hurt them,” because Minwalla’s ideas are used in workshops on betrayal trauma, and: many symptoms of betrayal trauma mirror the symptoms of those who have been sexually assaulted.

One of the biggest symptoms: reliving the trauma over and over.  Jist stuck and reliving it all. 

Also around then, I read  a comment on ChumpLady where someone said, when something is “JUST xyz,” it STILL IS xyz! And even when “it’s NOT abc,” it STILL IS efg. 

So, now I'm thinking we do not need to have a hierarchy of assault. Being married to gay spouse IS crazy violent in that "not seeable" kind of way.

The Lundy Bancroft books talk about sexual control as abuse. How abusers use sex to shame, and how they withhold and/or force sex to control and hurt and shame.  How abusers make degrading sexual comments about their partners--directly to the partner, and to other people too.  Etc. 

Away from us being abused, and back to your husband’s claims of abuse. That is so delicate.  However, If you look at Sean’s thread on the Is he/she gay section, he asserts that the claim of sexual abuse is a very  common red herring used by gay men to control their partners, almost like an abuser threatening suicide in a violent relationship when the abused wants to leave. In fact, Sean eventually seems to think it was so common that he would mock it a little, even while stating that abuse, childhood abuse, sexual abuse were horrifying. Then he would roll his eyes and sigh and add the false claims of abuse to his “top five signs” list.

And! i have also been thinking how a lot of my husband's crazy criticisms about me were actually projections of his own discord. But not projection of just a general feeling of unease that he channelled back atprojections that are pretty much a one-to-one mirrored thing, where he would accuse me of exactly what he was really doing—just maybe he said it in a soft voice, or behind the scenes.

When I think of that 1:1 projection he does, and I think about the straight spouse experience as a kind of sexual assault, and I think of your husband claiming he was sexually abused--this was him projecting what he was doing to you.

Anyway, just FWIW.

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