It's not fear that is my enemy- I'm not spineless by any means. My issue is more of being protective of my W at my own expense. This protectiveness is now fading fast as I look to protect my interests and the interests of my kids.
I get the "watch out for your self respect" a lot, especially from people who don't know me intimately. It's a reasonable concern, however fortunately I have a large reservoir of self confidence/self worth/self esteem to tap into. If the means justify the end for a cause worth fighting for (i.e. my M and family) I can absorb a lot of punishment without a lot of long term negative impact. Believe me, if my well starts to run dry in this regard my W in particular is going to be in serious trouble.
You get that "watch out for your self-respect alot" from people who don't know you and I'll tell you why, regardless if you feel like you have a "large" resevoir of self-respect & self-value (which I still doubt), you communicate the opposite to people indirectly through your actions and possibly it's because you're a nice guy and don't know how to do anything other than that.
My issue is more of being protective of my W at my own expense.
This communicates in a very big way that you don't respect yourself.
You have this image of your wife that you can't let go of, where she is pretty & perfect and can do no wrong so you put her up top on a pedestal to be viewed & admired where you can keep her up above you and cement in your head that she's better than you and you need to go above & beyond to take care of her when she isn't taking care of you and you convince yourself afterwards that it's ok when in fact it's not ok and you're ignoring the fact that she is treating you badly and you still want to take care of her: you have a self-value & self-respect problem, plain & simple, you can argue with me if you want but that's just how it is and you wrote it yourself, you're protecting her at your own respect - bad move as a man, and your wife knows it so she takes advantage of it.
This can be very hard to let go of at your end and has become a bit of an addiction which leads you to ignoring bad things she does to you and not being honest about who she is, what she does to you and who you are.
What you are doing is ignoring the bad things she does to you and rewarding her actions by protecting her at your expense (your words).
Protecting her at your expense means that you do feel pain because of how she treats you, even if you want to make it seem like it's only a small amount of pain and you can handle it. That pain is feeding your ego, that's how the ego survives and gets fed, through pain.
Stop ignoring the bad things she does to you. Acknowledge it, respect yourself enough to say "this isn't right!"
Another piece of advice, putting your wife on a pedestal, protecting her and doing things for her even though she treats you badly and doing all of this at your expense kills the attraction between you & your wife. This part has caused the problems in your relationship, you didn't set boundaries, you weren't a strong man in the way you should have been, you didn't communicate that you respect & love yourself and she can't respect you if you don't respect yourself and how can she love someone & treat them properly if they don't respect themselves enough to do the same?
