Dear Belle:

Your  last line is “I want to desperately get back to being calm again”. Recently, you wrote, “I have been very, very angry at my husband and I am unable to deal with the overwhelming rush of emotions… my rage boils over sometimes”.

My guess regarding the source of your rage is that for a long time you paid a high price for calm in your marriage: your husband did not listen to you for a long time. He claimed that you tend to overreact. So you made peace best you could to not being listened to and you were careful to not overreact, you pushed down your feelings, suppressed them best you could and .. under- reacted to stressors, best you could.

“I used to tell him not to get friendly with her because of our bad blood but he never listened… My husband says that, he didn’t listen to me because he didn’t think she would go this far. He thought I was overreacting“.

It is possible that you agreed to the open marriage arrangement so to keep the calm. But you weren’t okay with it. Maybe it was easier for as long as you didn’t know who is the woman or women involved in his life, if any.

With the escalating stress at work, a close friend dying, the finding out who the woman he was involved with is, and the remembering of the betrayal by that woman, a former friend.. all that stress was added to the stress involved in the usual pushing down of your anger at your husband for not listening to you, for causing you to shut down much of yourself. And so, the anger rose up to the surface and is overwhelming you.

Is any of my guessing correct?

anita