Wow! This thread has really taken off. I’ve not had time to keep up.
Here are my fears (nothing new here): I fear the turmoil of another protracted argument followed by the silent treatment. I fear divorce. I fear "losing" the argument. I fear a new milestone where she refuses to see my needs/wants as legitimate, and what effect that will have on me and my desire to stay committed to the relationship. I fear appearing vulnerable to her.
HD, you are no chicken – you are only behaving as you were trained. Furthermore, I’m willing to bet that EVERYONE on this board has exactly those same fears on their own list.
Finish my shower, shave, and I'm in my closet getting dressed and see that she's up, getting ready to exercise. We don't speak to each other because, well, she doesn't like to interact when she first rolls out of bed. "Don't want to confront her with this,first thing in the morning" I tell myself.
So she doesn’t like to talk when she first gets up, that’s her problem. I bet she can talk just fine when one of her friends calls. This is a control-based deflection, it is almost second nature to her, because her world revolves around her needs. The fact that you might want to talk in the morning never enters her head. She is used to getting her way.
Who kept making the excuses in your family, who was the peace keeper? Your thinking is that of an adult child of an alcoholic. You are focused only on one thing – your concern with pleasing the other person to avoid the fighting. Chrome knows this too well.
You can take and take, but eventually everyone reaches a limit and realizes that their very survival is at stake. If you take anymore, you will disappear as a person. You will be taken over and controlled by the other. If you have any natural fight within you, this is when your anger rises up and you find the strength and resolve to face the confrontation. You are nearing that point.
Don’t wait for any perfect moment to talk to her. In fact, don’t even give it a thought. Don’t worry at all whether you think she is in a mood to talk or not, speak when you are ready and when you want to. Set the stage on YOURS terms, not hers. Make her start to guess and anticipate your moods. The balance in your marriage is way to far off to one side right now. If she is in a great mood and you come home pissed about something, then just let it out. Blow up. Stop trying to rescue the peacefulness just for her sake. Let her walk on eggshells for a while.
There is a reason I think this is important. You must come to confront and get in touch with your own emotions. She must learn to get in touch with your emotions as well, to become aware that your emotions count, to learn that your emotions can and will affect her emotions, to become empathic toward others. She lives in a false world, blocking out how you feel. Subtlety will not get through. You need to shout loud and clear that your will be heard and that how you feel COUNTS.
W: I wish you could figure out why this is so important to you. I wish you could figure out why you think this is going to make you happy.
My wife has made similar statements to me. I told her that I had no intention of “figuring” anything out. I want what I want and I don’t need to justify it to her and I won’t listen to her telling me what I should like. If she does not like me as I am then she can call her lawyer. Needless to say this was just another tactic on her part. Once I called her on it, and she saw that I was making a stand for my own beliefs simply because they were my own, she stopped throwing up this argument.
Remember HD, she treats all your complaints as if SHE is the last court of appeals and she has the final say so. You play along with this way too much. You become the last court of appeals. Tell her you like what you like and you want what you want simply because you say so.
Yes, I hope to have a greater understanding of her after all of this. Yes, I hope to have a greater respect for her.
WTF? Why in the world do you need to have any better understanding of her, or at least worry about something like that at this time? This is avoidance thinking. You need to do whatever you want and let HER try to figure YOU out. You understand her well enough. She has no clue about you, mainly because she has no clue about herself. Stop assuming responsibility for her work.
I do think you are right in that if you make demands of her it will push her into battle mode and further distance you two. I think your best strategy is to not directly confront her – that like starring down a wild dog. It will just attack. Rather state what you want, as you have done, but take the position of “we” against a bigger problem, instead of you versus her. Push your agenda of everything you want, as the leader of the “we.” Keep it in front of her face, bring it up whenever you want, make her feel off balance, but do not make it a direct confrontation. Treat her “problem” (and that might be pretty big) as a third person, but let her know you are really fighting for her. Do not back down from this third person.
I think that if you tell her she must consent to sex by the end of the week, that the week will just pass and nothing will have happened. She will be waiting to see if you press the issue, and if you do she will feel justified in letting loose on you. I see the probability of her standing up to your ultimatum as pretty high, so I see no point in pursuing that. Do not feel like you are being avoidant in this. It is simply not smart to make an “attack” when you know the odds are against you. Biding your time and formulating a better strategy is not avoidant, it is cunning and it is assertive.
And listen to her second question even more closely, she asks why you think making love will make you happy?
I still believe Mrs HD has a lot of narcissism in her. A statement like this from someone like her should be read as: Why does Mrs HD think making love will make HER happy? She believes this statement and is projecting it into HD, deflecting her own issues by trying to turn it around on him. HD, did you ever ask her why making love does not make her happy? Did you ever ask her point blank what her problem is, ask her to spell it out in explicit detail so you can fully understand it? This means she has to make herself understand it to communicate it to you.
Note for the record: she didn't ask him any questions. She told him what she wishes. She's not engaging him at all, she wishes he'd deal with it all on his own.
Exactly. And look at what this accomplishes. It keeps the focus on HD. He is always one step behind, just slightly off balance trying to explain to her. She has her game on quite well. Typical narcissist ploy.
I still think it is useful for HD to know why he wants sex once a week.
IMO, it is important to know why you have certain dysfunctional behaviors, know your FOO, to have any hope of coming to terms with those behaviors and stopping them. I see no point in questioning functional behavior or your own preferences. They just are, and that’s good enough. Now to your point Fearless, if HD has a need for sex for personal validation or insecurity that is harmful to the relationship, than he might want to look into it. But at this time I do not know how he or anyone else would know this. If the relationships can be stabilized and a reasonable sex life re-established, then this question might be answered.
To me, her comments/questions shows that she doubts that he knows himself.
I agree that this could be true, and I think it is true to an extent. But I do think HD is finding himself. I also think that statement could mean that she does not know herself. A lost and angry person can also lash out at others as a projection of their own confusion. In other words, I believe that even if HD knows exactly what he wants, his wife’s insecurity could still cause her to continually test him.
This is where I think the Blackfoot model can break down. A strong, confident, assertive and compassionate alpha male should generally give comfort to most women. But for someone severely traumatized, I don’t think any alpha male model can overcome the insecurity created by that trauma. A severely damaged person will not necessarily follow a healthy model.
Fearless, I agree that it is good to seek “truth, knowledge, strength, whatever,” but that cannot be done when more basic needs are unfulfilled. People do not care about democracy, liberty, dictatorship or anything else when they are dying of starvation. Only food matters. Once HD resolves these basic needs, then he can have enough peace of mind to focus on higher ideals, IMO.
When he states the want and she responds with fog, illogic, accusations, Buddhist quotations, etc. -- don't y'all see: ALL of that is coming from her, and when he does not reply, it's CLEAR that all of it is coming from her. THAT'S what being in the crucible is all about. You turn up the heat on yourself.
Very true. But before HD could get his wife into the crucible and turn up the heat on her, HE needed to step into the crucible first and turn up the heat on himself. His frustration with his own avoidance is his own crucible, one that he has been putting off for years. I think Mrs HD knows this. She knows that she does not have to respond to him because he has not responded to himself.
HD, I seriously recommend that you keep on the path you are going and try to better get in touch with your anger. This denial of yours is extremely harmful to the marriage. And because of this, your wife is in fact the PERFECT match for you, and vise versa. Funny how that karma works, isn’t it. What does her Buddhist meditations have to say about that?
When hairdog states his want, SHE makes HERSELF miserable with all of her bluster, flapping, and flailing. If he gets into a convo with her about it, she turns the blame on him. When he is mostly silent, there is no fight and she has a harder time blaming him.
I think Mrs HD gets miserable because she sees that her manipulations are not working and she is losing control. I don’t think she sees any of her own stuff. She can’t.
I've tried to read some past HD posts and I thought I saw one about HD enjoying his daughter's gymnastics because he had time for himself and the other about not getting a massage because it was too emotional. Both instances say to me that this is a person that needs to care for himself. Again my own personal experience is similar.
Agreed. I think HD was conditioned in his FOO to be a martyr. I also think his growing anger could be from a growing realization that he does not want to play this role any more.
Hairdog, I think you are doing great. Do not back down on your resolve. Focus on one thing and one thing only – what YOU want. Don’t be afraid to express it, just as you expressed your fears earlier in this thread. But don’t do it as a martyr, do it as someone staking claim to what is rightfully his and making no apologies for it. Your wife is no more guilty of you not having these things as you are. It truly is a “we” problem. Communicate it in terms of “we.” But in your own mind, for now, only think of it in terms of “me.”
