When you grow up, you rely on your parents, or the adults around you, to learn how to approach the world, navigate life, and regulate your emotions.

This is all very well if you have good, kind, calm parents for whom your emotional and physical wellbeing is a priority, but sadly all too many children are left lacking in this department.

As a result, children whose childhood was tinged with emotional neglect or domestic abuse often turn into adults who think that such behaviors are normal – and, like the husband in this story, often think that they themselves are the problem.

Therapy and a whole lot of self reflection helps here, but for the partners of those adults, things can get more than a little bumpy.

Read on to find out how the wife’s cleaning made her husband believe she hated him.

AITA for telling my husband to stop making my evening of cleaning about himself?

I am a 33-year-old woman, and I live in a house with my husband, who is 34, and a few pets. We live busy lives and our house is sometimes a mess – though I can describe myself as a neat freak.

My husband spends an evening with friends every week, and I don’t see him until I am in bed. This is fine – I want him to go out and have fun.

While he is away, I spend my time catching up on my chores without any distractions, and I end up managing my stress this way.

I can move furniture and clean the floors without stepping on him, and I get a lot done and I feel a lot better after it’s done.

Cleaning helps me burn off stress.

He does his set of chores more often when he works from home on a slow day.

Read on to understand a bit more about this couple’s context.

My husband grew up in a house with a very passive aggressive mother. We’re talking about a mom overloading herself, refusing any help, but then getting mad when people don’t help.

She would be upset if my husband and his siblings were not done with their chores by the time she came home – it didn’t matter if they were still doing them, she’d yell at them and say it was “proof” they didn’t love her.

She wanted to be a mom but not parent, and she was pretty emotionally abusive.

So there’s the trauma factor (he is in therapy though!)

Let’s see how this trauma is affecting her husband.

Whenever I do a lot of cleaning, my husband gets very anxious that he’s not “doing enough,” and he goes into a self depreciation spiral.

It’s hard to shake him out of this mindset when he is in it, and I usually end up stopping my cleaning.

He is aware he is responding to trauma, but he spirals.

He will apologize over and over that he’s a “bad husband,” and say that he needs to do more but he doesn’t have energy and doesn’t understand how I can do so much so quickly, etc etc.

He convinces himself that when I clean so much I’m angry, resentful, and I hate him.

Uh-oh. This is really starting to affect their relationship.

I have been reassuring him that is not the case – because it’s not! It’s my stress management!

After some time, I started to feel like I was a bad person because I triggered him. I was starting to sneakily clean around him.

I did a lot of thinking and I figured out that I’m not a bad person for not wanting a clean house – and eventually I lost some of my patience after many, many spirals.

So she asked him to get help.

After a bad spiral, I told him to really talk to his therapist about this, because it’s starting to get to me.

I talked about how, when he accuses of me false things, it makes me feel bad, that I have been feeling like an awful person.

I tried to explain that I wasn’t his mother, and I don’t want to argue about my ‘intentions’ around cleaning anymore.

I explained that the cleaning was helping my stress, and I am not being passive aggressive. All I wanted was to be thanked and get a hug or kiss.

But this didn’t go down well.

He got upset with me and explained how what I said not only invalidated his feelings, but I basically accused him of being a bad, abusive husband.

We haven’t spoken about that since, because I am at a loss for what to say, though I’ve been thinking about this for days.

I don’t think I was in the wrong, but I could be. Maybe I was harsh and it did invalidate him? Maybe I approached it in a bad way, but it was good to let him know how it was making me feel.

AITA?

It’s clear that her husband is suffering from some complex trauma, and let’s be very clear: that’s a difficult situation to be in.

Despite what your loved ones are saying to you, and despite how the situation looks to them, when you are triggered it can really feel like the thing at the source of your trauma is happening to you, even when it isn’t.

And for this guy, who has been abused for not doing enough cleaning, seeing his wife cleaning is leading to him feeling like he will be abused again – so it’s great that he’s getting the help that he needs.

Let’s see how folks on Reddit responded to this.

This person, with similar experiences, agreed that neither partner was really wrong, but that their situation would require a lot of love, work, and mutual support.

While this Redditor explained that they need to fine-tune their communication.

And others discussed that he has a lot to learn in his therapy journey.

Good luck to them.

If you liked that post, check out this story about a guy who was forced to sleep on the couch at his wife’s family’s house, so he went to a hotel instead.