Dealing With Ambivalence

[Vigilant1]

Thank you for your interest, Bagheera. I will present here the things she rattles off when she starts talking about how angry she's feeling. Her anger is very near the surface and seems to bubble up often in and out of therapy. It seems to her like these transgressions happened only hours or days ago. Forgiveness seems very far off, even though most of these things happened 5-6 years ago.

1. After we got married I became too preoccupied with work and focused too much on it, to the point where I worked in the evenings after dinner in addition to a full work day.
2. She insisted on "trying" right away, assuring me that it would almost certainly take a long time for her to become pregnant. When she got pregnant almost immediately, I was shocked when she told me and said something really stupid like "wow.. are you sure you want to have it?"
3. Around the time the baby was born I was having terrible sleep problems. I was on "sleeping pills" that both prevented me from sleeping and kept me awake at night. In the mornings I was such a basket case that I was almost useless when it came to caring for the new baby.
4. As a result of marital problems, our communication deteriorated to the point where we simply couldn't talk to each other. She became so shrill, nasty, and manipulative that I avoided dealing with her by shutting down her attempts to talk. A highly stupid yet common male self defense technique.
5. After we were married I felt so much pressure to be a good breadwinner and hold down my tough engineering job that I didn't really want to go out or be social too much. I was feeling a lot of work pressure then, and made the wrong choice: too much focus on career success.
6. As a result of lots of contemptuous, vitriolic, critical, nitpicking talk coming from her constantly, I began to have a hard time hearing everything she was saying. She would say things, I would forget the details, she would get furious. Lather, rinse, repeat.
7. She feels like I "became somebody else" as soon as we were married, someone who tried to force her to do things that she wasn't interested. She feels like I tried to "turn her into somebody else".
8. After the baby was born and we were already deeply ensconced in a lousy SSM, she wanted to have ANOTHER child. By then I had such grave doubts about our future together that there was no way I would go along with that. She delivered an ultimatum: we could either unprotected sex or no sex. I took no sex.

I have learned about what I did wrong in the above and have worked to make changes. As for #7, that is something I still struggle with. This problem arose because my wife seemed to have no interest in domestic activities, such as dishes, laundry, cleaning, shopping, or cooking. In those days, I felt like since I was bringing home almost all of the income, she should do some of the house stuff. And, she had agreed to that. But she backed out of it, and I responded by trying to get her to live up to her commitment.

I don't mean to be defensive. I accept responsibility for the things I did wrong and I have tried to make changes to make things better going forward - if there is a forward. My wife contributed and did any number of bad things herself along the way, but she does not yet take much responsibility for our problems, although she does take some. This is probably why she remains so angry and forgiveness seems so far off.

Please let me know if this is what you're after, or whether you'd like more details.