Hi GL and Anita,

First off, I wanted to thank you both for taking the time to read through my troubles and providing me with your thoughts. I realize I was unclear about a few things that might make this easier:

GL,

I don’t believe the issues have been bottled up, on the contrary, I speak my mind often and the trouble is that the same issues keep popping up with little respite. I do believe in speaking my mind in a timely manner so I don’t give him constructive criticism or critical feedback in the midst of one of his outbursts. I don’t want him to feel that I am judging him while he is already upset over something. I want to help him overcome this problem – so while he is in the midst of a being angry or stressed out, I stay quiet, tell him that I understand and empathize with his issue and try to help out or take it off his plate.

We have improved our communication and we are mindful of using phrases like “When this happens, I feel…” or “This makes me feel this way because…” rather than accusing each other completely.

I find him manipulative, in that he is telling me I have a self-esteem/ lack of self-care issue because of which the constant stressful environment stresses me out. I think it isn’t fair for him to shuck the responsibility of being the perpetrator of unbalance/ anger in the first place. After our big blow-out with him tearing the forms, he has been holding me accountable for following a set routine with gym and waking up early etc. whilst there has been no mention of what he is doing on his end to resolve the problem. He has also taken to being distant and cold because he says he is hurting. He is apparently tired of me telling him that there is a consequence of putting us through this stress/ anxiety-laden environment and it might end in me not being able to take it any more. That makes me feel that all his words of love and expressions of unconditional love amount to nothing. In the face of me telling I have had enough and he needs to do something about his temper and negativity, I have to pay the price and deal with his hostility and practise a higher degree of self-care and self-love. This is starting to be more of a punishment and less of a fix.

Anita,

Thank you for taking the time to write back to me. I want to clarify a few things – when I say we come from two different value systems and schools of thought, I was trying to provide some context on how we are as two people and not describing his anxiety as a school of thought. We approach problem-solving differently, we deal with people and relationships differently, our approaches to work and managing our time is not the same. He embraces and sometimes creates conflicts to address an issue, I am more of a diffuser and tend to nip issues in the bud. I am far more diplomatic and he believes in being direct, sometimes abrasive to unassuming people (he swears a lot, it’s not an issue for me, just shedding some light on some ways in which we are different).

That being said, I absolutely believe that being angry with long hold-times on a call, back-and-forth over insurance claims, throwing the remote control or phone or GPS because they’re not performing as expected, tearing forms etc are a CHOICE. I get angry, I have extreme emotions, we all do, I don’t fault him for being anxious or stressed, it’s natural and I empathize – my problem is the way he chooses to express it. And ‘chooses’ is the keyword here. I channel my anger in many different ways so it doesn’t affect our dynamic and the stable environment of our household. When he sees me distressed, he automatically goes into a problem-solving mode. It affects him, he wants to fix it. When I see him distressed, I also want to help and fix it – but it is very difficult to reach him because of the frequency and intensity of his reaction.

We have been in therapy for our issues. We are reaching out to get professional help but in the interim I don’t want to feel like I’m being punished for bringing these issues to light.

• This reply was modified 5 years, 10 months ago by Bluesses.