Hi
I can list a few times (two) when my wife either physically struck me or loomed in a way that suggested she was about to or wanted to. She is by far a very quiet person and very much a forgiving and helpful person. Everyone likes her.
The problem is she witholds emotions.
I often tell people who I work with who feel put upon by a boss that if this boss were treating you different than anyone else, then your fears probably have some validity. In my case my wife is freindly, helpful, and enthusiastic around others including our children, but I often see her feelings for others stop on a dime when she is in the uncomfortible presence of me. I often feel (today for example) of what I can do to make this relationship better. Is it something I say/said? Is it my approach? Maybe I can’t make her comfortible enough to share with me?
I discuss these things with her and am treated with a resounding stare, or the ignomity of her asking me the same things I asked her + the newly acquired Shink Talk of “What does that look like to you”? I want to pull my own teeth out thinking of how I’m portrayed in and out of therapy.
I’m at this very moment feeling shame that I am not mature enough to deal with my wifes therapy (maybe it will help, but I doubt it).
I’m all over the place.

Again, I can’t explain it. It’s been going on for years. Her silence does anger me and that anger then seems to do a few things. It neatly and cleanly transfers the issue into my anger management “issues.” It seems to support her persona of the good person, and assigns blame for the very issue we disagree on me. I consider myself a very sensitive person, so this discord makes me feel very guilty and out of sorts for a long time.
I guess to keep the persona of “the good partner” you need a really big SOB to prove it. Yeah, I’ve heard it all. Mood issues. Anger issues. Being unavailible. Not being an attentive father. Guys, it hurts. it really hurts.
Then my wife sees her therapist and she seems to have developed a more self rightious way of dealing with me. I don’t know whether I’m on foot or horseback alot of the time. Then I expess my feelings and an told “It’s all about you”, or ‘It’s not all about you.” Is she right? Am I missing something? How do I cope with or reason with this? Oh, and I can’t leave out her claim that I am too dramatic. I do feel literally emotionally cut off at the pass.

Hi All

The problem in a nutshell (no pun intended) is I don’t want to break up my family. I love my Wife and at times actually feel sorry for her that she is not capable of expressing herself. I long ago gave up the notion she wouldn’t share with me. She just can’t and that must be a very lonely place to be.
I am just stuck on how I can help bring about change. I have detached over the years, but later accused of “not being present.” I even consulted with an attorney when I was very convinced there was zero hope, but relented for marraige counseling instead. The result was my Wife beat me to the punch and started seeing our former marriage counselor alone w/o even discussing it, before, during or after she went. This is her MO. No discussion, no problem. Stand in a room with your eyes shut and nobody can see her.
Now our son is going through some heavy duty emotional stuff, drugs, sex, booze and outragious behavior and verbal abuse. We did reach out for a family counselor, but my son refused to go. I wanted to go back to marraige counseling, but stopped making and cancelling appointments when she became indifferant to the idea “It’s all about you, it’s all about you!”
Any ideas? I am toying with the idea of just calling the former marraige counselor and telling her the day and the time and then following up with the same for a family counselor. At this point what do i have to lose?

Wow. These are all very interesting situations.
My case does not seems that simple. I’ve been married 20 years and shortly after we got married I felt something was wrong. I worked and my wife was finishing up her undergraduate teaching degree in science. She graduated with high honors.
To further rewind the tape, I knew early on that my wife had issues with intimate relationships and that when we got closer her opening up to me attracted me to her even more. It was bliss and it felt like our needs were both being met.
The resent with me started some time between her student teaching and about three years after we had our first child. There was just no discussion about going to work or even seeking employment.
My Wife is not a yeller whatsoever. She holds it all in and has this infuriating way of stonewalling and ignoring me. I feel that if I press her on these important issues she will crumble like a china doll. So things just drift along and I got angrier by the day and at times verbally exasperated. You could call it abuse but it was truly like nailing a lemon marang pie to a tree. It’s incredible and when she eventually got upset, I felt terrible for even asking the question and guilty for losing my cool.
I actually said YEARS ago that our family felt like we had three children and one adult. I sought out therapy and soon peeled back some patterns which seemed obvious. My Wife grew up without a Dad, nor her Mother or Grandmother. I started to hear the nickel drop. It wasn’t all me, but i was still upset that nothing was going to change. Marriage counseling went just so far and my Wife simply chaulked the situation up as me being a moody crab and me needed medication to tamp that down.
Everyone loves my Wife. She is engaging, funny, caring, smart and loyal. She is also frugal.
She just shrinks, retreats and shuts down which makes me feel like I’m bearing down on a baby seal on pack ice. In other words, this ends the conversation and then the resentment builds since I am prevented from expressing my needs and fears. I’ve expressed myself lately in very concise, unemotional fashion and have been told that everything is about me. In other words I should just man up and get on with it. Discovering this web site has clued me into this behavior as code for really saying: continue taking care of me, and by extention, our children totally ignoring the fact that she bears as much of that responsibility as I do.
I just don’t see this changing and firmly beleive, as this article says that she is in need of years of psychotherapy.
I must confess that she did see a social worker last year, but because it was our former marraige counselor I was really put off and angry that my privacy was not being protected. A great therapist, but this was just unethical and I openly objected and said so.
In retrospect, that was a situation where I should have canned the beans and just let it play out. I probably was working against my own interests and regret even taking notice of that arrangement. My fear was being painted as the devil himself, whereas the counselor probably knew me better than that. A mistake.

How should a man deal with a Wife who has these characteristics, but does it in the image of the Easter Bunny?