Marriage Counseling & my marriage

[New_Wife]

Update if you've read my stuff before (however briefly), and if you haven't - cool - it's all new.

 

Husband and I went to premarital counseling for 5 or 6 months. We got married about 2.6 years ago, and have had a rough go of things after the honeymoon phase wore off.

 

First, the obvious:

 

We bought a house,

Moved to a new county -which happens to be-

The same county as my dysfunctional fam of origin,

I had 3 major surgeries,

He's step-fathering 2 of my children,

We've each had some employment troubles at different times,

and

There have been gambling issues.

 

In short, not much to start out a new blessed union, right? (giggle)

 

There have been two particularly foul episodes in our marriage that just about did us in. The first, he lost his temper in an argument and grabbed & shook me while yelling in my face. He was probably more freaked out than I was the following day - and I was freaked out. I, however, have been abused before - whereas he'd never seen anyone (himself included) lay hands on a woman in anger. He didn't know he had it in him. He agreed to anger management & when he didn't follow-through after a few months - I left.

 

Thus, we began marital counseling upon my return. We did not click with the first counselor, and I think we honeymooned ourselves a bit through it - things were good for a bit - and we were "fixed!" Ta Da! All better.

 

The second one happened last week - well - over the last few weeks actually. I'll spare you the details if you haven't already read them - but he lost his temper again after being busted in some lies, and ended up grabbing my arm BUT stopping before he did any further physical contact this time. He still yelled like a crazy man - but at least there were no bruises. In any event, we got to our counselor's office tonight - for our scheduled appointment - and we dumped it all out there.

 

Okay - here's the part I don't get, and maybe I don't need to - but it helped. We'd communicated only through email for the better part of this week - with but the most terse of civil exchanges otherwise. I put all of my feelings out there, he responded briefly, and then I sent this long list of true/false questions to him based on his reply. Long and short of it - we were moving information to each other - even if in a really limited fashion.

 

So there we were tonight, letting it all hang out (seriously), and somehow things that I've missed - cues - she mentions when he does, and that goofy little cartoon lightbulb goes off above my head. A couple times she's noted that he looks confused at something - and I find out that something I did or said that I thought couldn't be more clear was anything but for him.

 

The rest I'm not really going to go into great detail on out of respect for the fact that a lot of it I'm not sure I'd want him to share with anyone, so I'm not going to - but - this is my rambling way of saying that the marital counseling is giving us something we've been sadly lacking in the form of hope and some understanding.

 

Counselor said "Believe it or not, I think this is the most hopeful spot I've seen the two of you in for this marriage" (paraphrased, probably poorly), to which I said "Can I go with 'not'?" After laughing, she explained that we were both basically broken, humbled, raw AND ready to keep trying/rebuild. After a few hours have passed - I can see that as hopeful, but at the time I thought she was out of her tree.

 

So yeah - MC - good.

[OpenBook]

The bruises are coming. Get out, NOW.

 

If you instead feed yourself a bunch of excuses why you can't leave, and decide to stay with him - then prepare yourself to become his personal punching bag down the road.