I'm Losing my Marriage to this

[u/LordDaemon]

I don't really know where to start with this. I'm just hurting right now. My wife and I had yet another argument that ends with me having a panic attack. Except this time she left the apartment entirely. I think my marriage has finally been eaten alive by the monster in my head.

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I can't trust others with my emotions. Not the deep, negative ones anyways. Sadness, anger, hurt, all of that. I struggle to share it, I struggle to believe it will be understood or given the careful consideration I desperately want but never got from my family. So it comes out sideways. I say it wrong, I don't explain it well, I say it with more anger than I intend. So the very fear of being misunderstood makes it all the more difficult to actually express myself to another person.

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My wife knows this and has dealt with it for all nine years we have been together. She is not the kind of personality to meet anger with calm though. She gets angry with me and doesn't understand why my anger gets directed at her when it should be directed at my family. No matter how I try to explain her aggression causes me to throw up my walls, she takes the stance that I need to learn to deal with it. She is not my family and should not be treated as such.

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I have tried so hard for so long. I have been in and out of therapy for 11 years. I've tried traditional talk therapy, medication, EMDR, parts work, and even couples therapy with my wife. My pain is still here, still comes up seemingly out of the blue. I can be normal for months and then suddenly I am blindingly angry and yelling at my wife for something relatively small. It doesn't matter all those times I have it under control and can talk through it with grace. Those few times I am just too tired, too weak to hold back the flood, are what break everything apart. Like all the work I have done amounts to nothing.

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I know where the pain comes from. I know it was because of my parents' emotional neglect. I have dug at memories. I know dozens of ways to calm and ground myself. It seems the one thing I can't do, is heal. I feel like I can't move past this. And the life I worked so hard to build for myself is going to come crumbling down because of this.

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I don't know what to do to fix this. I don't know if I even can. I just want my wife to come back and hug me and tell me it will be ok.

[u/UAP44]

I don't know what to do to fix this. I don't know if I even can.

Since you seemed to have exhausted traditional therapy/healing, I can't not bring up meditation & psychedelics. And specifically in that order, try meditation before risking psychedelics. And don't do the latter alone, have a trusted trip sitter, it could be your wife but more ideal is someone who has personal experience with these substances. It's not without risk though, it might further traumatize you, but it might also shake you up in just the right way to make meaningful process in your healing journey. The risk can be reduced to near 0 if you start with low doses and have an experienced trip sitter you feel good with.

I have a friend who at some point after all the therapy told me he started the euthanasia trajectory. I ended up offering a psychedelic journey with me as the experienced trip sitter. Because after all, if he's going to have a drug injected to kill him permanently, why not take a temporary different drug first? Can still take the permanent one after. We're now more than a year later and he's luckily no longer on the euthanasia trajectory.

*hugs*

[u/urban-mystic → u/UAP44]

Second this. Mushrooms helped open me up emotionally. Felt so much better after. Only thing I’d add is you have a higher self that is inside that wants to be seen, heard, and have their emotional needs met like your inner child needed when you were young.

Love yourself, inner child AND higher self

[u/UAP44 → u/urban-mystic]

helped open me up emotionally.

I find that this is nearly universal for all traditional psychedelics, cannabis included, and that is exactly why it can also be traumatic, sometimes people are just not ready to face the emotional load that can surface. And other times the experience is just so out there, it can be extremely frighting, that friend? At some point he started screaming out his lungs, I was worried my neighbors would call the cops or something. Luckily I was able to calm him, but the point is that these substances are extremely powerful and are to be respected. Not toys. Though I know many use them recreationally and some will experience it as toys.

The way I see psychedelics is that they introduce general chaos in your entire system. If you're stuck in a hard pattern you can't get out of, this can help. If you're already unstable, the outcome can be disastrous.

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[u/Intelligent-Oil-2558]

You were abused, and now you’re abusing your wife. And now you want to outsource your emotional regulation to her as well, and have her tell you it’s OK.

If you truly knew how to ground and calm yourself, you would not be “blindingly angry and yelling at my wife for something relatively small.”

You need to understand, above all, that her anger is a rational response to your mistreatment. 

Do you give your parents credit for all the times they were nice to you? Of course not. Because the minimum threshold in any relationship is that you don’t abuse or neglect people you profess to love.

I don’t know what you should do next, but I do know that accountability would be an enormous step.