Counselling's a difficult concept; the thing is she veers massively from saying it's all her fault, to basically claiming it's all to do with me. In the spirit of honesty and openness, I am pretty brutal/blunt when I get critical- but she also doesn't respond or even take anything in unless we have a row over something.
Case in point, we were discussing what to do for our daughter's birthday- and we both laid out a plan of action. I wanted to book a local soft play area my daughter loves- and offered to pay- and then wanted to invite other kids she is at the child minder's with. My wife nay-said it (for not very clear reasons), but then mostly because she had "already planned" how the birthday was going to go- and that she was in the process of hiring a bouncy castle and some other things. I yielded (it wasn't really a fight at this point), though with the proviso we try and focus the day on HER (because previous birthdays have been more gathering our friends - and as it was her 3rd and she's increasingly aware and engaged, I wanted the first birthday she really understood to be special).
The night before I asked about the bouncy castle details and about other kids her age- basically an innocuous- "What're we doing and who did you invite?"
The short version was, "A lot of OUR friends" (no kids her age she could play with) and she'd decided the bouncy castle was too much fuss.
I will be very honest in that I somewhat exploded over this (I closed the door to the kitchen so to muffle as much from our daughter as I could) and told my wife I was very unhappy, that she was focusing her daughter's birthday celebration on stuff SHE wanted to do rather than on our daughter. The crux of the response was, "She won't know. She likes it when people are over."
I then simply said she was being a bad and lazy parent, and that as she'd gain-said me organising something I knew our daughter would like it was now up to her to make good on her plans. She somewhat gave me a bit of the run-around (claiming, "I never PROMISED I'd get the bouncy castle" etc. etc.- "It's alright because I didn't tell HER.")- so far, so standardly unhealthy.
However, she STILL holds that against me, and claims it was me "insulting her" and "abusing her", rather than as I see it, legitimately criticizing her. In turn she then just avoids me/doesn't talk to me because she says I'm irrational and can't be spoken to without it leading to an argument (this gets circular, because effectively the biggest problem in our marriage is her saying she'll do stuff she then never does, so she then avoids me because she knows I'm annoyed about it... etc. etc.).
We had a big 'state of the union' discussion earlier- and three weeks later this came up AGAIN- and the thing that really upsets me is, for my part, it was about my daughter. I wanted the best for her, and already felt bad because her birthday was a weekend OTHER than the closest to her birthday (because we were doing something that weekend).
The thing is, as relatively small as these things might be, they ALWAYS end up escalating the same way, to a huge issue because neither one of us really back down, and then her response is to ignore me or pretty much avoid me for the next few days. The more that happens the more she just retreats to being on her phone, and the more I'm left (literally) holding the kid- which I don't object to, but it means if I've had a stressful day I end up feeling like a single parent with all the disadvantages of being married, and none of the support.
Heh- read this through. Talk about genderflipping a stereotype...