Is there a gentle way you can help your spouse feel safe enough to explore your concerns with you? People who take everything as a criticism are often fragile, even though their reactions to legitimate complaints may be to become angry. If there is no way you can help him to feel “held” and valued enough so that he can truly hear you, he might benefit from some individual therapy. In a therapist’s office he may be able to access his own vulnerability, and then become more sensitive to yours.

Achieving balance in a complex family life can be very difficult, as you know so well. As wife/mother you are called upon to give to everybody, and this can be of course exhausting, and become the source of some resentful feelings, especially if you haven’t been getting enough sleep and loving attention yourself. By loving attention, I am not just referring to affection, kissing, hugging, sex, etc., but the provision of your husband’s labor with respect to house and child care. When a couple establishes itself as a real working partnership, where one spouse can rely on the other for real physical help, the sense of friendship and affection usually become a natural outgrowth of this. Of course, your husband may be also feel deprived of the understanding and support regarding the stresses of his working life, and carry his needs for nurturing attention home, especially as he sees himself “putting out fires” at his job. A first step toward healing might be to try some active listening, or mirroring. You can find a description of this in Hendrix’s “Getting the Love You Want.” Basically, it involves sitting down when your children are asleep and both of you are relatively peaceful; begin with one of you revealing a problem, protest, etc, to the other. Your partner can only listen at this point, and not reply defensively, such as to say, “yeah…but…etc.” When you are finished, it is your partner’s job to say with as much empathy as possible, something like, “so what I hear you saying, is, …is that right?” If the content or tone of voice is wrong, you get to say “no,” and the process continues until your answer is “yes.” Then reverse roles. This is an empathy building exercise, and may feel like an awkward way to talk to each other at first, but can be very productive. Before strategies for real problem solving can go forward, emotional understanding is necessary.

I heard the anger and pain in your response. Doing everything one can to sustain or even repair a relationship, and find it out of control, going nowhere, and really unresponsive to one’s efforts can make any sentient being feel helpless; when we feel helpless, we feel angry. Of course that experience is only the first step in healing. The second task to gradually accept that one’s inability to change the course of a relationship had meaning. Often the meaning had much to do with the existence of incompatible needs, values, desires, etc. The manner in which power is distributed between a couple and the manner in which power is activated are highly influential in setting the tone of a relationship. For example, one couple may be able to navigate pretty smoothly through most everyday living with humor, patience, courtesy, etc, and on the other extreme, a competitive, even violent tone dominates conflict situations. Of course, there are many gradations of these behaviors. I hope you find some of this helpful.

Regards,

John Gerson, Ph.D.