Thanks for the background on your W. I thought there was something like that in her past. Like Haphazard says, there are some major loss issues going on. I recall you two go to your own counselors now. What was it about the joint counseling that caused you to reach an impasse? Basically finger pointing that you are the source of her problems, not her FOO? That would make sense. She is SOOO like my wife.
This FOO stuff may not be worth dragging up for some people, but for her it is the 800 pound gorilla. I do not see how it can be avoided. What I see is a woman so hurt but so angry with her parents. It sounds like she is angriest with her father for obvious reasons, and what she really wants is for her dad to hold her again. That her dad continues to favor her sibling and ignore her is constantly rubbing more salt in the wound.
She is shut down to the pain, hates men for what has happened to her, but is caught in a catch 22 because what she really wants is validation and acceptance from men, what she believes to be the source of her pain in the first place. So her emotions secretly pull her toward men but her intellect repels her from them. That is a damn hard way to live a life.
Understand this one point very clearly Hairdog. Her father is a tough, domineering, masculine man. That is the model she learned as a child and that is what she is comfortable with. What she wants is this type of man, but in a caring, empathic version, what she wishes her dad would be. What she is NOT comfortable with is a compliant, supplicating man. As a child I doubt she ever knew such a creature existed. She has learned to respect raw power, that is what her dad showed her. So your shows of strength are on the correct path.
Do not fear her reaction to your strength. She has a Pavlovian response to strength in men and she automatically expects to be heartbroken. She needs to re-associate strength in men with security and protection. That is your core task and it will not be easy but I think you are more than up to the task.
The good part is that she will NOT leave you and she is tough as nails so you do not need to worry whether she can handle tough love. She can. But I believe it is critical that your show really strong signs of strength TOGETHER with lots of empathy and compassion. That post I made to you last night, recounting the incident with my W in counseling, is a good example of just what I am talking about. Standing up to her, but not against her, rather fighting FOR her in a strong way for the explicit purpose of protecting her is what she wants to hear, IMO.
That is the one very select language that my wife will hear. Almost everything else she will block out. My W has spent her whole life, as your wife has, justifying why she needs to protect herself from the world. From her past experience, it is hard not to agree with her. She is doing what she had to do to survive, plain and simple. Nevertheless, she is fully aware of the false defenses she has created and she would really like to be free of them. Every now and then you will get a glimpse of this. Her comment to you in the hospital that she knew she had not been a good wife is the perfect example of this. It was a temporary crack in her shield and you could see into her soul. I believe these types of cracks are the truest representation of what a person really is. They should never be ignored.
I believe you could still follow up on that comment and make great headway with it. She may be able to “out-logical” you right now, but that is only because you do not understand her. Once you see the house of cards she has built, it is almost child’s play to dismantle her defenses and replace them with compassion. Just remember that every thing she says is a deflection to protect herself from her fears. So focus your comments on soothing those fears of abandonment as you push one deflection after another to the side. Your strength must be in deflecting her deflections with compassion for the wound that becomes exposed that piece of her armor is removed.
The other aspect of her FOO I want to mention concerns her mother. I believe she empathizes with her mother as the victim of your father. Part of why she is a lawyer representing women is likely because she is replaying her need to protect her mother from her father. But at the same time, her mother did not protect her as she should have. Her mother was weak and I think she hates that weakness in women because it causes them to be subjugated to men. Since your wife is a fighter by nature, she has vowed not to ever let a man do that to her. So she became a lawyer. Makes sense to me.
But again, what is it that she really wants? I am betting she wishes her mother had been strong enough to protect her from her dad. As much as she misses the love of her father, I think she misses the love of her mother even more. But she was so hurt and became so angry, I am thinking she has cut off being vulnerable to this most feminine of emotions. In so doing, she has cut of that part of herself which is feminine and vulnerable. It is a conditioned response.
I personally think you will not make the progress you need as long as you two see separate counselors. You need to come back together at some point. You also need to keep hammering away at Mrs HD. Water torture is fine, but I think it is also important to show some more assertiveness from you, especially to reprogram her conditioning.
