Does the dog ever catch it's tail?

[RJ]

Karen, you are right about the mexican standoff and Honeypot has some great points.

Mrs Nop

I have read the SSM a number of times. H has never even gotten halfway through. He only brings it out and pretends to read it when he's pissed at me. I have also read Passionate Marriage by Schnarch and I have to say, I found it a bit heavy going. Especially when your concentration is interrupted constantly.

So, tell me what you are doing and how often are you doing it to work on this issue?

At the moment I'm just trying to get through day by day. The events of the weekend have left me very guarded.

I'm going to try and work on things like conflict resolution as this is a major problem for us. Last night H was trying to help by bathing one of the kids. He lost his temper with him for doing something silly like a kid will do (yelling at him and calling him d*ckhead - makes my blood boil) and instead of showing how pissed off I just said 'please don't call him that'. I then waited until my son had gone to bed and said to H something along the lines of 'I know you were trying to help but it really makes me upset and angry when you lose your temper after 10 minutes with the kids and I feel like I should just deal with them myself so I don't have to worry about this happening'. He replied with something along the lines of 'you do it too'(lose temper, not call names). He was quickly reminded that by the time I get to that stage I've been dealing with two of them ALL day! (I admit that some days my tether is short) Well, he had the sh*ts but we ended up cuddling on the couch instead of one of us going to bed annoyed. If we can continue working on this I think it will help everything else along.