My wife and I have a baby and a toddler who take an absurd amount of energy every day, my wife and my family can’t stand each other, so I effectively don’t have an immediate family, but the catch is my wife is not a nice person.
So I’ve given up my family for a person who is rude, demanding, impatient, doesn’t show empathy, and is extremely controlling, but shows a nice face to everyone else.
The thought of divorce makes me sick to my stomach because of how difficult of a process it is, trying to explain all the changes to my toddler, how much harder solo parenting is, and being in a marriage and a home had a ton of financial and practical benefits, but I’m just so tired and lonely and sad.
I’m in therapy and we’re in couples therapy, but she started pulling away the first time the therapist challenged her so I don’t have any hope for genuine change.
It’s just a Groundhog day of exhaustion, loneliness, and misery, and the only person left in my life i could lean on is at the core of the problems. I’m not going to kill myself, but things are so dark right now.
The problem is that things are rarely as black and white as intentional isolation. It’s more like due to a million small interactions and her and my family not tolerating each other, doing what she wants, not talking to my family, etc just become the easiest option.
To be fair, she isn’t all bad and I’m not all good either, i have some very poor communication habits that come out during arguments.
The real problem is that it’s almost never explicit that she’s the problem and our disagreements/arguments almost always end up at a disagreement about our perceptions of her tone or body language or word choice and things like that
In my experience most people who behave this way don’t do it consciously, it’s just that they see other people who might have some of your affection as a threat, and react to them emotionally that way. It’s not necessarily planned or intentional, and they might not be aware of it.
But, that’s a supposition based on what you’ve said, with no direct experience of your particular situation.
This is a balanced perspective, and that’s good, but it does beg the question - has she ever made you feel like you were the entire problem?
I’ve been right there. There is always an excuse or a reason that you are the one at fault because you misinterpreted her, and you’re overreacting. This is typical behavior for a narcissist, everything is always someone else’s fault.
One suggestion I’ve heard for situations like this is, when things are heated and emotional and something nasty gets said, make the other person stop and then repeat what they just said again, in the same words and tone, and ask them to listen to themselves. If convenient, have them do it to their reflection in a mirror. The point is to make them process the behavior consciously. To be effective, it does require that person to be partially accepting that they might be causing a problem with their behavior, and to assess themselves in good faith.
BUT, I am not a trained therapist, so maybe run that by your therapist first.
The reason it’s so damn hard to believe none of out is conscious is that she easily, rapidly identifies the exact same behavioral in her mom, and i have told her repeatedly and clearly what she is doing and examples that directly reflect those behaviors she’s pointed out in her mom.
That, coupled with the fact that she is not stupid, I’d say a decent bit smarter than her mom, just makes it so hard. She either has an ENORMOUS blind spot regarding a ton of her own behavior, to the point where she is utterly incapable of analyzing her own behavior critically, or there’s some degree of conscious awareness. Both are equally unacceptable in my mind.
As for the repeating stuff, I could try that, but I’m 98% sure that the moment I did, she’d repeat it how she BELIEVES she said it, which is perfectly nicely. Again, either she’s utterly unaware of how nasty she is, or she does know and is lying about it.
One vaguely related fact that does support the supermassive blind spot theory is that for our entire relationship she has insisted she has curly hair. Not wavy, curly. Now, the reality is that she is a Caucasian redhead, with unambiguously straight hair, so to watch her vehemently disagree with me when we’re both looking at what is to me a fact that is so obvious and undeniable, is bizarre