When having a negative emotion causes a bigger problem

[Anonymous]

How do we get out of this cycle?
Sometimes my husband will do something (or fail to do something) that I find irritating or thoughtless. He’s not doing it on purpose. They are not huge things, but they affect me. Here’s a couple of examples off the top of my head. He and l are coming separately to our kid’s athletic event. Neither of us has ever missed a game. He gets to the game first and learns there was a sudden change in venue and goes to the new place without thinking to let me know. I find out when I get there and no one is there, so I miss the first quarter of the game, when our kid had an amazing play. Wien I got there, everyone was all excited about it. Husband could see I was disappointed and got defensive, saying he didn’t not tell me on purpose.

Another recent time they were getting up very early to go somewhere together and I was leaving for a short trip that evening after bedtime. He sent our son to bed early because of the early wake-up, without letting me know, and I didn’t get a chance to say good-bye before my trip. Again; he didn’t do it on purpose but also again, he got aggravated when he saw my reaction. Apparently, I “sighed toward him” and “had an expression on my face.” So, he does the thoughtless thing AND gets mad at me? I get that it’s an accident; that’s why I don’t say anything to him. But I also felt disappointed and have nothing like a poker face, so it’s obvious. When I do stupid stuff like that, I’m extremely apologetic.

There’s always some small thing that just devolves and turns way bigger than it ever needed to be.

[Anonymous]

My DH does this too. My therapist once described it to me as "a very mild form of DARVO" and if you google DARVO, you might agree.

Basically it's a way of deflecting blame for things by going on the attack. So the problem becomes your annoyance with him instead of whatever he did to provoke the annoyance.

I handled it by literally explaining this dynamic to my DH (during a time when we were not having this kind of fight) and explaining how frustrating it is because it makes me feel like I can't just feel annoyed, disappointed, or irritated. We basically talked about how he needs to learn to tolerate me being a little annoyed at him, even mad at him, and not try to twist the situation to make it impossible for me to feel that. Even if he "didn't mean to" do the thing that bugged me. It's just life. Sometimes he gets mad at me about stuff I didn't mean to do and I just accept he's mad, apologize, and then move on.

He needs to understand that just letting you be annoyed, apologizing if he did in fact do something wrong (even something small like forget to text you that the event had moved), you will get over it much faster than if he does this thing where he tries to make an end run around your feelings. What he's doing is creating the very resentment he's trying to avoid.