Counseling 8

My recent post on power turns out to have been very timely. Wife and I had another session with Counselor yesterday, and many of the same themes bubbled to the surface.

We had started off the day before (Tuesday) with a really pointless argument. Wife recently signed us up for a new cell phone plan. I thought the phone store had sold her a bunch of features we would never use, and I got heated and angry about this. Underneath it all, though, I was mostly angry that they were taking advantage of Wife's good nature; at base, I was trying to be on her side. Of course I didn't communicate any of this in a way that she (or anybody) could understand, and for all she could tell I was saying, "My God, woman, can't you even shop without screwing something up?" So she got defensive and it pretty much went downhill from there.

Fast forward to Counselor's office on Wednesday. Wife tells Counselor, "I'm really despairing. Every so often I get my hopes up that maybe we can make our marriage better, and then something happens like this fight yesterday that convinces me it's all hopeless." Why hopeless? Because (in her eyes) I was so demeaning and insulting and patronizing to her that it shows there is just no room to make any headway -- and after all, I've been like this ever since she stopped working and I think I can get away with it because I'm the only one bringing in any income, and .... Well, you get the picture. All I could say was "I swear to you that I said nothing yesterday that was meant to insult or demean you; and if we had all day, instead of one hour, I would go back through everything I said word by word to explain what I really meant."

In fairness, Wife also explained that she has been having a lot of trouble with her depression generally these days -- she thinks her medicines may be slightly out of balance, but for whatever reason she is finding it hard to keep from seeing things in the worst possible light. She did not mention that Boyfriend 5 has come back on line, and that she spent several hours before our counseling session telling him about our fight and getting his opinion on what a jerk I am. So she didn't give the whole back story behind her complaint, but I know the depression part is true.

I think at an intellectual level she may even believe that I believe that I haven't said anything to insult or demean her, but if so it is a purely intellectual understanding that doesn't touch her emotions. I'm not sure how to do that. This time around, we didn't leave Counselor's office with any great insights about how to improve our communications. But I guess it is a process ....