Dear all,
I’m a newbie here, desparately seeking advice on my aspie cousin’s problems. My 26yro female cousin who got married last year has had epilepsy and mild depression/negative thinking all her life but she is exceptionally bright and she had managed ok until she got married. She always felt lonely and fearful of how she would manage to live by herself should her parents pass away. So she was desparate to get married. But she has since developed serious mental health issues like severe anxiety, insomnia, odd behaviours (constantly picking at her skin etc) and she talks nonstop obsessively about her favourite topic (marriage problems). She was diagnosed with OCD and prescribed a plethora of drugs, which have helped only the insomnia a little three months on. Our whole family is desparate.
I won’t bore you with the details but we have since come to the conclusion that both she and her husband have aspergers. I apologise if my descriptions of them are negative, it’s not my impression of individuals with aspergers, just how this particular situation is and my best understanding of it. Her husband is very single-minded, emotionally detached, focused solely on his work and has an extreme need to control his environment which includes her and so he treats her as a posession, constantly telling her what to do. He loves her in his own way but is unwilling AND genuinely unable to do what’s best for her, to put himself in her shoes. He is a continual source of stress for her, his inability to understand and respond to her needs (which are different to his since he doesn’t need emotional support/cuddles/talking to others etc). BUT, she thinks he is God’s gift to her and doesn’t blame him at all and she gets extremely panicky if anyone says anything remotely negative about him. In other words, even though their relationship is destroying her, she won’t and can’t separate. At the start of their relationship, she said that no one else could possibly live with him because of his controlling behaviour. For her, it’s not a romantic love as such but a kind of obsessive attachment. The closest anology to describe their potential separation is like taking away a child’s favourite toy.
We’ve had a mountain to climb convincing her husband that she is actually mentally ill and needs psychiatric treatment. That has been of limited help anyway so far. But he won’t allow her to see a different psychiatrist, a psychologist or relationship therapist or in fact acknowledge that there’s anything wrong with her or with their relationship. He keeps telling her to pull herself together. I’m trying my best to understand things from an asperger sufferer’s point of view, to help and reassure my cousin. Her husband cannot change, his personality is extremely inflexible. Any suggestion of separation sends her into a wild panic. And there’s no possibility of seeing an aspergers specialist (there are none where we live), even if her husband agreed to it. So the only option left is to somehow prepare her for life without him but I don’t know how to do that. She is genuinely suffering.
My question is does anyone here have any experience with this situation, with obsessive attachment, with marriage between two aspies, with managing to recognise that a relationship is toxic and extricating yourself from it? Any suggestions, useful links etc would be welcome. And many thanks for reading my post.