Piecing Myself and Not My Marriage

[may22]

Hi Alison,

That's really rough. I'm so sorry you have to deal with this. Yes, it is probably one of the most stressful times right now for just about every human being on the planet, so throw in some marital difficulties and it is truly unbearable.

I'm sure you have already thought about the various paths in front of you. It does sound from an outsider's perspective that your H needs to be in IC to deal with his issues. It is really not okay to treat people the way he is treating you, and to say the things he has said. Does he realize he has a problem?

I think I've told you before that my H used to have some similar issues to your H, though to a much lesser degree (he never would get into name-calling, but he can get unreasonably angry and mean about relatively small things). For years, this behavior was a big factor for me in the SSM (though he thinks the SSM also fed into it, a non-virtuous circle) and I thought it was our biggest problem/ HIS biggest problem. He had issues at work also with people thinking he was an a-hole. For the whole first year of the A, he was worse and worse and it was from my perspective why we finally went to counseling, because he was such a jerk. We spent a lot of time in counseling on this subject and finally the MC recommended that he see an IC, which he did about a year and a half ago. Again, I thought for his anger management issues, he wanted to use it to figure out WTF he was doing in an affair and what he was going to do about it.

All that being said-- he HAS worked on this in IC for the past year and a half, along with the lying and ambivalence about the A. Of course his IC is not responsible for helping him to do the "right thing" in terms of the A-- her primary goal is his mental health-- and TBH I think she is an echo chamber here reinforcing his fantasy with AP, saying things like she thinks his mental health would be better if he was with the person he really loved, and that she doesn't believe I would really stop being H's friend-- but she has consistently encouraged him to tell the truth, and also has worked with him quite a bit on his anger and how to manage it productively. I think between him working with her on this and my no longer pouring gasoline on the fire when he does get angry, those really mean outbursts hardly ever happen now. (I hadn't realized my own role in escalating these incidents until I tried as a 180 not to react... and was shocked how much better they got.) I also think to some extent it is a learned response-- he gets some stress relief out of it when it happens. Learning alternative methods of releasing that stress and finding it works can help to break those habits. But it is difficult and it takes time, and of course your H would need to recognize it as a problem and be willing to work on it.

One other probably stupid little thing I did if he went off the rails was pick up my cell phone and start recording a voice recording of our fight. It wasn't as frontal as taking a video, like I was trying to document HIM, but recording our conversation. In the moment it was not received well, nor, to be honest, was it meant well (I think I said something like I'm going to record this for MC to prove what an a-hole you are) but it really did make both of us think more about our words, and later on I could narrow my eyes and pick up my phone like I was going to do it again and he would stop and think about what he was about to say. I'm not sure you can do that in your sitch, as your H seems beyond the pale in terms of what he is saying to you and I don't know how he might be provoked with something like that. But, if you do decide to talk about it with him instead of ignore it, maybe, just maybe, it could be a tool you suggest to say maybe we can record one of our conversations to either listen to after the fact when we've calmed down and see where we each might have gone too far, or just the act of knowing you're being recorded can help us be more thoughtful about the words we choose. This might be a totally terrible suggestion. I just give it as it was a helpful weird little thing I tried.

The other thing that H was the one to actually bring up, not me, was that it was not healthy for the children to witness fights like this. And that was a huge motivator for him to stop, more so than anything else. Would your H be moved by that? That no matter how much he thinks he is justified in talking to you like this, no child should ever hear their father talking to their mother with those words?

I'm sorry, Alison. I hope you can take some time for yourself and recover from this.

I do agree that the only option to you in the moment is to disengage. You can't validate stuff like that. Maybe I can tell you are angry, I'm sorry I didn't take into consideration that you might have felt like we weren't being a team (or whatever you can say honestly in the moment) but I refuse to be spoken to like that and I'm leaving. I'm sure you al