Eva, I’m truly sorry for how much pain you’re carrying. What you’re going through is heavy, and your feelings are real. I want to be honest with you in a caring way: I’m going to step back from offering detailed responses, because I noticed that my messages aren’t really part of the process you’re in right now.

I genuinely wish you clarity, steadiness, and relief from all this hurt. I hope you find a path that brings you peace and a sense of being cared for.

🌿 Anita

Good morning, Nea 🙂

I’ll try to answer my own question (in the message before last) by quoting your words from your last message and thinking out loud:

“His perspective has generally been that he only explodes when other people escalate or provoke him, rather than recognizing that how he responds is ultimately his responsibility”-

So, he doesn’t have to watch for how he behaves because his behavior is someone else’s responsibility.

A child growing up with this attitude is likely to feel responsible for his explosions and become hyper aware of his moods, so to try and prevent future explosions.

This hyper awareness is related to empathy. For example, you may see hurt on his face, feel very sad for him, and rush to make him feel better-before his hurt turns to anger and an explosion.

This dynamic explains the combination of a parent who severely lacks (1) personal responsibility in regard to his explosions, and (2) empathy in regard to how his explosions affect his child/ wife/ others,

And

A child feeling overly responsible for the parent’s explosions, as well as overly empathetic for how the parent feels- so to calm the parent and prevent the next explosion.

In other words, in this dynamics, it’s not a responsible and empathetic parent that produces a responsible and empathetic child.

I’ll continue a bit later.

🌿 Anita

Good morning, Dear Eva 🙂

You thought deeply and you’re clear about what you need from him.

I wonder if he ever gave you just a tiny bit of what you need?

Did he ever tell you anything like:

‘I was mean to you and you didn’t deserve it.’

Or:

‘You were so fair and good to me and I did you wrong.”?

Did you ever notice just a bit of sadness expressed on his face or in his tone of voice when you told him that he had hurt your feelings?

🤔 Anita

Good Thurs night (here), Nea:

Sincerely, you are positively special and unique. It’s difficult to come across people like you in everyday life.

It makes me wonder how a wonderfully insightful, honest, deeply introspective daughter emerges from the parenting you received.

(I will continue this in a little while)

Anita

I hear you, Confused.. 3 🙁s and it wasn’t even 7 am when you submitted this message with 3 sad-s.

“I screwed up so bad… ruined her heart”- no, no, Confused didn’t ruin a heart.

“I think (her parents) were saying she’s difficult in general, as in closed off, distant, etc.”- see, her heart was hurt before she ever met you.

And it’s your heart hurting this Friday Greek morning.

🙁 Anita

Hey 🙂 Confused:

I was pleased to read that you know you didn’t deserve those words.

Confused is a good, trustworthy young person who deserves to be treated well 👍

Well, Copilot says she’s giving you mixed signals. Do you agree?

There’s something you said not long ago that stayed on my mind. I asked you how her parents reacted to her plan to visit you (this Aug), and you said that they were happy about it be because they know that she’s “a difficult person”.

I wonder what they meant (to your knowledge) by difficult- person?

🤔 Anita

You are welcome, Nea 🙂. I’ll reply more in the evening (it’s noon here), but for now I want to say one thing clearly: I wouldn’t ask — and definitely wouldn’t pressure — your husband to say “hi” to your father. If I were you, I would step out of the referee role completely. Let your husband have full authority over how he chooses to interact with your father.

Back to you in the evening.

Anita

Good morning, Dear Nea:

This is what I see happening:

Your childhood pattern (“growing up, the pattern was often to apologize, smooth things over, or let something go in order to restore peace”) was anxiety management.

You learned that the fastest way to stop the fear was to submit. So now, in adulthood, you unconsciously want your husband to use the same strategy (“I actually ended up having an argument with my husband… part of my frustration is that I wish he could see that sometimes, in moments of anger, de-escalating or disengaging can prevent things from becoming worse — even when you haven’t done anything wrong.”) because it’s what you had to do to survive, it’s the only method you know to prevent or soothe your father’s explosions.

Part of you needs your husband to take on the pattern so that you can feel safer.

About the imbalance you pointed to (“everyone keeps coming back to what my husband could have done differently: he could have stopped talking, walked away sooner, de-escalated, etc. Yet nobody can really have that same conversation with my dad because they know how he will react.”)- people critique your husband because of the two, your husband is the flexible, reasonable, and safe person, and your father is the rigid, explosive, and dangerous person.

This is the family’s survival logic: the father cannot change. The husband can. So, everyone pressures the husband to adapt and change.

* If your husband breaks under the pressure and adapts, the consequences are not likely to be small or temporary because when a man is pressured to submit to someone who is mistreating him — especially in front of his wife — several things are very likely to happen inside:

1. He loses self‑respect. Submitting to someone who is bullying, intimidating, or disrespecting him forces him to violate his own internal boundaries. That creates shame, resentment, a sense of weakness, and a feeling of ‘I failed myself’

2. He feels betrayed by his wife. If he apologizes only because you need him to, he will feel unsupported, unprotected, and emotionally abandoned, like his wife chose her father’s comfort over his dignity.

3. He internalizes a permanent ‘lower position’. Once he submits to your father, the hierarchy becomes fixed: father on top, husband underneath, and you caught between them. Husbands do not forget this. And fathers like yours never let them forget it.

4. He becomes anxious around your father forever. He will walk on eggshells, avoid conflict, and silence himself — not because he respects your father, but because he fears repeating the humiliation.

5. He starts withdrawing emotionally from you out of self‑protection. He will stop sharing, trusting and being open- because the marriage no longer feels like a safe partnership.

If your husband breaks and apologizes, he will pay the psychological price, and the marriage will pay the relational price. Your father will not change. Your husband will not forget. You will be stuck in the middle forever, and your daughter will be seriously affected by all of this.

The only path that protects the marriage is the one where you stop asking him to carry the emotional burden created by your father.

Your mind keeps revisiting the incident (“My anxiety keeps wanting to revisit the incident, analyze everyone’s actions, talk about it again, and somehow find a resolution.”) because you’re still living inside the threat zone — your father’s house.

If your anxiety gets to be too much, it’s way better that you leave your father’s house (you wrote a couple of days ago: “we do have backup options if we ever genuinely felt we needed to leave. His brother is here, and we also have close friends we could stay with. And, of course, if it really came down to it, we could always get a short-term rental.”) than for your husband to take on your childhood pattern to any extent.

Let’s say you tell your husband something like, ‘Please apologize just this one time, it’ll take only 3 seconds to say, ‘I am sorry’, and he does just that. The effect, I imagine, would be immediate anxiety relief for you and serious damage to the marriage, a damage that can be prevented. I hope.

🌿 Anita