My wife's midlife crisis

[ciluzen]

I'm sorry Face-man...and sorry to those I might offend with what I'm going to say, even though I am guilty of doing just that same behavior that I'm going to mention.

I feel that it is incorrect and not really all that helpful to say that someone is "not rational", "broken", "fractured", "crazy", "a narcissist", etc. We need to remember; we have been hurt by our partner's behavior, so our view of their behavior is biased and only from our perspective of a left-behind partner. Portraying their behavior as if it is wrong and ours is right is actually going to be very unhelpful in the long run. Hey, I've done it. I have tried to read my XH's mind and tried to analyze his behavior alone as the issue. I made no progress, though until I stopped trying to always see him as various types of confused and broken and started to look at why my behavior might trigger certain behaviors in him.

Instead of trying to soothe yourself with, "It's they who have the problem, not me" or even "it's mostly not me", there is actually another way of looking at it which requires more work on your part, but yields more longer lasting results.

That is to see that the problem is between you. The problem is with your relationship; meaning, how you are relating to each other and communicating. If you can actually listen or pay attention to clues, know what it was like growing up and how their life shaped their views, sometimes you can take a deep look at how they are actually viewing your actions...you might be surprised at how their percepton of what you feel are your fairly innocent reactions can be read as threatening or dismissive.

Example: My XH always did things with his family; he always had a brother with him and his parents were involved in everything he did, even going to boy scout events with him as volunteers. They were inseperable, too, and seldom did anything apart. His only trip alone with the scouts was described as "traumatic" because no one from his family was with him. I, on the other hand, was often alone as my siblings were over ten years older. My parents, too, did a lot of activities separately, and encouraged me to be independent.

So guess what? Everytime I would try to do something on my own, XH would see it as me not liking him or not loving him. If I allowed our children to go to summer camp or to spend the night at a friend's house, he felt that I was being selfish and cruel. Not mind-reading; he would actually say that.

So was he confused or broken? Was I? Or was it just that we could not at the time realize that our views were shaped differently in the way we were raised and discussion and understanding needed to happen to create a solution that we both felt safe and secure with. A compromise.

You are actually lucky, Face-man. When your wife is talking, you can actually ask her questions to better understand how she is interpreting the things that she is sharing with you; those parts of her day she speaks about. What does that mean to you? "Tell me more about that"."How would your family handle that, because mine would have done x,y,z and I wonder how another family would have handled it?" And lots and lots of validation.

Think of a problem between you as a ball. Each of you can only see about half of the sphere, but opposite sides. Talking to get info allows you to see her side more clearly and see the problem more thoroughly. She may not see your side, but if just one of you can see it in its entirety, that's more helpful. Its worth a try and what else have you got? Viewing her as broken with no real vision of how to fix her?