Hi all,
My wife of 20 years suffers from anxiety and stress and has been taking medication since before we met. In the last month things took an unexpected turn: We'd begun to actually talk about wider issues and, slowly, issues with her childhood came to the surface. Her mother appears to exhibit a lot of traits associated with narcissism and, from what I'm hearing, behaved very oddly toward my wife and brother-in-law from when they were young. My wife was always picked up on little details like not wearing pretty clothes, not wearing make up to go out, having undesirable friends, not eating in a satisfactorily demure way and so on. Every "fault" was met with angry outbursts and my wife was always made to feel like she had failed her mother. Reactions could be extreme. For example, the family was holidaying abroad. Someone said something out of place so the holiday was cut short and they all had to return home with my mother-in-law sulking. It seems that everything has to revolve around keeping her mother sweet and there is hell to pay if that doesn't happen. My wife is regularly told that she's not to visit if she doesn't have a happy face on and that her mother has "done parenting". My wife isn't allowed to talk about work or anything that is bothering her because it upsets her mother so she has to pretend all is fine if she wants to pop in. When my daughter went off to university, my wife was naturally upset because our eldest had left home. Not once did her mother ring or visit to see how my wife was coping despite the fact that she went through exactly the same when my wife left for uni and so should have understood my wife's feelings. My brother-in-law has all but walked away because he got sick of being constantly made to feel small and I sympathise with him 100%. Whenever my wife does have an outburst it's down to her to grovel for forgiveness which is either grudgingly given or met with disdain. Things came to a head recently and, in my anger, I told my father-in-law how my wife had been made to feel and that, from my perspective, my mother-in-law wanted her kids to be either carbon copies or extensions of herself and wasn't able to cope with them having their own ways of living their lives. This "revelation" went down very badly and I'm in the dog house for saying what I said. At first my wife understood why I said those things and was relieved that she'd finally begun to unpick her own emotions but now she's angry with me because, rather than have a relationship with her parents (albeit an abusive one on her mother's side), she now has no relationship at all (they've stopped all contact with us now). I'm really concerned because, even though I feel the truth needed to be said, I wish it had been handled better and now I seem to have permanently damaged our relationship. I don't know whether this is just a stage that we have to work through or if it's the beginning of the end. Any advice on how to salvage the situation would be so welcome right now.
