My [28F] husband [30M] relies on me WAY too much and is a codependent follower. How do I encourage him to find his autonomy without hurting his feelings?

Hi there, thank you for taking the time to read this and give me some advice.

My husband was raised in a family dynamic where he was constantly told what to do and was never allowed to be independent or opinionated. His family is abusive, and he has suffered from severe anxiety and PTSD as a result.

We've made a lot of progress on his anxiety and he's getting better at setting boundaries with me, but sometimes we end up in extreme situations and it frustrates the hell out of me and I end up saying things I regret.

An example was today, we were working on a project that he agreed to help me with, but he needed my direction for every single little thing. If I wasn't talking him through every step, he was immobile, frozen in place, and completely incapable of doing anything on his own. I even drew a color coded diagram of what needed to be done and a detailed checklist for him, and with those he was still unable to do anything. I kept asking him to take this step and he'd tell me I needed to tell him what to do, and it was so frustrating. The whole project took twice as long as necessary and I didn't even finish, I'll have to go back tomorrow and do some more things that could have easily been done today.

I told him that it's not fair for him to put me in the control position, that he was asking way too much of me, and that we needed to be equal partners and participants in everything we do. I asked him how we could handle this better, how I could do things differently to foster an environment where he could start acting independently and we could finally be a team, and he just shut me out. He refused to talk about it, and I just don't know what to do from here. I understand his trauma and that this is a deeply seeded issue and will take time, but I have no clue how to approach it mindfully since it can be so frustrating in the moment.

To be clear, my husband is absolutely amazing and this is like his only thing, and normally it's not an issue it's just when we have a big project or life decision like this, which will happen a lot throughout our lives, it becomes a huge deal. Plus, like, I WANT him to recognize his voice and his value, to learn to be independent and break all those debilitating ideas his abusive family put in his head. I want him to find himself and learn to lead instead of follow.

It's particularly challenging because I am a leader, I have a strong personality, and I am a caretaker by nature. I'm trying to break my own patterns as I've found those things to be exhausting and to have some serious flaws even though they are technically good things. I'm trying to learn to set my own boundaries and find my own sense of balance, and so I can't have him literally asking me to tell him step by step what to do and to be leaning on me so much.

So, Reddit, do you have any advice for me on how to help my husband learn to be independent, autonomous, and to value himself and lead his own life with me instead of relying on me to lead all the time?

Tl;dr my husband learned to follow/shut down from his controlling and abusive family, and sometimes he relies on me WAY too much and it's an issue. How can we break codependent habits and learn to be a team in a kind and patient way?

Edit: Thank you everyone for your comments. I appreciate all the advice and differing perspectives. Even those of us that try our best to be self aware can miss a lot of things and need to be called out. I will be heeding each and every comment as I know a lot of shifts need to happen all around for us to reach a better level of communication. I definitely have some work to do within myself as well. Thank you again, everyone has been super insightful and kind.

Submitted May 25, 2020 at 06:16PM by sothrowawayyy https://ift.tt/2TGdlQH