Sorry, long post warning:
I am 46 and my wife is 34. We were married around 5 years ago when she became pregnant. There was a gun-shot wedding and since we have had a little boy who is 2 to add to our daughter is nearly 5. The previous 2 years were quite wonderful, I want to say that I love my wife and I adore our 2 children more than life itself. Most of the time, she is warm, caring, fun and funny, a pleasure to be around at other times she is horrible. It seems she can be nice one minute and quite mean the next, several times in the same day.
There were fights and arguments before, but hey, I thought that was normal, but for the last 4 years it seems like its a whole new ball of wax. These are the characteristics that began not long after the arrival of our first-born;-
Our relationship has been dominated by her frequent rages, including hitting and containing extreme verbal or emotional abuse, it mirrors the behaviour of a child-like temper-tantrum. She takes 2 to 3 days to calm down from one of these and when I try to talk to her about it she usually refuses or will conveniently deflect all blame upon me for making her angry.
She is super-sensitive to the smallest criticism and unintentional slight. If you joke with what might be termed poking fun, she takes it as a personal attack. Her method of fighting back is quite nasty and immature. She never apologises for anything, if she does it is brief and matter-of-fact. Sometimes I think she is only says this out of obligation rather than sincerity.
She lies about things and sometimes appears to be unaware of the fact she is lying at all. Im not sure whether this is a deliberate selective amnesia or whether she genuinely does not know. She accuses me of gaslighting which I believe is a projection and sometimes she tries to rewrite history. I have caught her out several times with this and she then accuses me of making things up or she simply disengages, in both cases it is usually accompanied by a huge outburst of anger. For instance, friends have informed me of her reckless driving. As the mother of my children, I am very concerned about this aspect of her thrill-seeking behaviour. She likes to binge drink and comes home very late at times, she always tells me she is sober and then spends the next day recovering from a hangover. I have stopped asking her what she did and who she was with for fear of another bout of absurd rage. I hate to think she may have been unfaithful, but I believe she is quite capable of revenge sex during these angry other wife phases. If she has, right now I dont want to know, as it seems this may be just part of a much bigger or more important problem per se.
She seeks revenge about perceived things I have done or things that she perceives I have done and generally seems to have a warped reality. At times it feels like she wants me to hate her as the vengeance is out of all proportion compared to the alleged crime. Often the only times I can really know what she is feeling is through her projections, for instance, she has accused me of behaving like a child, sometimes she calls me a little girl (!) when she rages and I try to defend myself. When she says she hates me, I feel quite strongly that she is projecting her own shame or guilt for the way she behaves.
She is controlling and engages in passive-aggressive behaviour all of the time (something else she accuses me of, that and mind-games) I believe that is focused on maintaining control, to the extent of rejecting acts of love and kindness which appear to be cast aside from a feeling of her entitlement, despite her behaviour. She seems to treat these attempts to draw her away from a hate cycle as an attempt at manipulation and has accused me of this directly. If I try to state my case she continually interrupts my thoughts, the object appears to create confusion with regard to my own point of view and to disregard it or to make me out to be the root cause of all the difficulties we have. It comes across as terribly self-centred, in fact the whole thing is very selfish indeed.
I have tried so many times to talk with her about our marital difficulties and she just fires back anger, hate, and above all blame, she uses the most convenient excuse to avoid the topic and can only see things through a negative lens that obliterates all of the good times we have had. When she does raise the issue, it seems she does so with a series of accusations and if only I did this, if only I were like this. All the time my voice is lost in a messy grey fog and nothing is ever fully fixed.
If her friends were to read this, they would probably be in disbelief and could possibly accuse me of being the one who is nasty and corrupted by hate. Around 8/9 months ago we moved to the country so that she could be nearer her old school friends and one of her best friends in particular, who has 2 children of similar age, so I also feel I have sacrificed, again, to appease her. This seems to work for a while, but the old patterns and cycles of behaviour have kicked and the floors of our new abode seem to be covered in egg-shells.
I feel like Im going insane, am I the only one who sees the real person behind the mask, who cuts a miserable, lonely figure seething in hate? Does everyone else, other than me only see a fun-filled, jolly and caring lady? I am convinced that others only see nice wife which is the same wife I long for, to be with me and our lovely children all of the time because she can be utterly adorable at times. Above all, I am scared for our 2 children who I fear may be damaged in some way already and I want to know how I can best help her. I am at a bit of a loss with all of this, help me to help her and our kids please.
In saying all of this, I recognise my own behaviour as a contributing factor, I have also said regrettable things and behaved quite dreadfully out of frustration, injustice and anger. I have blanked her out, dismissed her ridiculous and wild raging fantasies by telling her EXACTLY what I thought of her episodic terrorism in very plain, if not harshly accurate terms. Some of our fights have been monstrous and of course, one person cannot have an argument. What I do know is that there is a cavern of inequality in our relationship and I am clear when I state that whatever I have said and done is utterly dwarfed by the pain and hurt she has inflicted upon me.
At times I do not understand why, but I do still love her in spite of her attempts to systematically drain all love energy and hope from the core of my being. What I also feel is that all this surely is a syndrome or a condition and therefore must have a name bipolarism? Narcissism? Manic depression?