Needing support

Hello all,
Allow me to introduce myself; I've been married to my wife for nearly 18 years. We've had a rather rough go of it you might say. We have had marriage counseling and my wife (I'll refer to her as Bernie but that is not her real name) has had individual counseling and sexual abuse therapy. She's had a rough upbringing including an extremely domineering and invalidating mother as well as sexual abuse as an infant into her toddler years up to approximately age 5. I've had extensive counseling as well and have worked through major issues from my childhood including dealing with anger issues and being raised in a dysfunctional family. We have 3 children together and the eldest has had difficulty managing her emotions along with anxiety. I'll refer to her as Molly but that is not her real name. Molly has done an outstanding job and has made tremendous progress with managing her emotions. Molly's journey has included DBT which helped her the most by far in my opinion. Molly also did EMDR therapy and CBT. Bernie has done EMDR and CBT as well. For Bernie, the EMDR has helped her a lot with trauma from her childhood abuse experiences. I've done reading on BPD and I'm lead to believe that this is what Bernie may have. She can have some good days where she is able to regulate her emotions fairly well. There are other days where she can be quite dis-regulated emotionally and she begins to spiral down the path of negative thinking and her perceptions become very much skewed when she gets into these states. This is where things get to be too much for me; when Bernie says that I've said something which had a very rude intent to her. But she won't talk about it until she gets to a point where she blows emotionally. Then it boils over and is very dis-respectful to me. At these times she cites things that I've said which appear to be her faulty perception due to her state of emotional diss-regulation. For example, I asked on the phone if she could leave the dental waiting room to talk with me not knowing anything about the situation she may be in. I was asking if it would be ok if she left the room not knowing her situation. It was simply a question to find out if she could leave the room. She responded by saying; "I don't want to be rude!". As though I should have known it would be rude to leave. I knew nothing about her situation but she seemed to assume I did. Now if I ask her about these types of instances and say that isn't what I meant (that she should leave the room in this case) she'll accuse me of not being willing to take responsibility, that I just tell her she has the problem, that "you just can't see it", that I say things that are rude and don't even know it or can't see it. So, I don't know what to do about this and our resulting relationship. It seems like I'm better off to not bring things up with her regarding things like this but I don't want to be an image in her mind of someone that refuses to take responsibility. As well as the arguing about what I meant versus what she thinks I meant. She won't believe me when I say what I meant versus how she perceived it. I very much so dislike being libeled like this. This leads to issues with our mutual friends also where she tells them these false stories that make me out to be some kind of socially illiterate person. Then when I try to say my intention she says; 'see, you just tell me I'm wrong, you won't take responsibility, you just defend yourself'. So, she makes me the villain and the more I try to defend myself the worse things get and the more it looks like I have something to hide (marriage counseling regrets). But I feel so victimized by this. Any ideas to help me and my relationship with Bernie? Thank you all, McCone.



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