The following text is from one man to another, as they try to get under the surface and understand their wives. They could be describing me (or the pre-aware me), before I decided to face and figure it out. And also parts of The Husband, I think. A work in progress.
This sounds like my wife. Something in her past is driving her fears and her need to control everything. While she knows she has these fears, the counseling did help her to better see how they manifest in everyday life. She could not really see this before, and it is important, I think, that I bring this to her attention when she starts acting that way again.
If your wife is like mine (and I really think she is), then her whole life has been spent protecting herself from reliving some trauma she experienced as a child. So she has this tough shell around her that she KNOWS she perpetuates (she flat out admitted as much, didn't she?) She probably believes she is a good, generous, caring person and cannot understand how she could be seen as so mean by you or others (at least as she rationalizes it in her mind). She probably thinks she is just a victim of circumstance, doesn't understand why she is villanized, blah, blah, blah..
You, like me, have a certain amount of rescuing behavior, again probably from your FOO. Being the nice guy is really trying to be accepted and loved, not because you don't think your deserve it, but you know no other way to get it. Your wife needs a protector against her fears. You need to rise to that role, meaning she needs to see you as capable of confronting the dragons in her life. The problem I had with this idea is that when I would do so, it took control away from my wife and her anxiety would set in. So on one hand my wife wants me to take control to protect her, but she does not trust giving up that control to me (or anyone else) because it is just too scary. Damned if you do, damned if you don't. This where the counselor helped my wife to understand the catch 22 she put us both into.
