Around a year and a half ago, my wife went through a few different professionals because she suspected she had some brand of OCD. She wanted to get to the bottom of it and was officially diagnosed as such, which helped her with getting some answers and hopefully finding a solution. Maybe it’s because I am more aware of it now, or because she can sometimes apologize for things that she later will paint as an OCD thing, but I’m realizing more that this is at least a partial cause in what is causing me a lot of stress. Sometimes it’s little things. It might be the fact that I didn’t put a particular item in the exact right place that will get me a diplomatically phrased chewing out. Sometimes it’s larger things like when she becomes laser focused on some obsession, and I get verbally lambasted if I get in the way of it. I’m not sure if it’s specifically something related to her diagnosis, but I can tell when she’s in a bad mood because of work or something else because typically there’s some mental rationale that allows her to take her frustration out on me.
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I’m very loyal to her and the thought of leaving her over this would never enter my mind. What’s going on in her head isn’t her fault, and she is working hard to find the right therapist, medication, etc. And aside from that, she has some pretty rough trauma in the last decade or so that wouldn’t leave anyone in the best mental state.
But in the meantime, I just have to find a way to navigate myself out of these messes. I never raise my voice, I try to reason mindfully with her, I try to be patient and rational. But it’s still so tough **walking around on eggshells** around her. Even me being tense around here when I expect some blowup is coming is reasoning enough for her to go off on me sometimes.
We recently started seeing a couple’s counselor about this, and while I can tell that they did their best to keep their feedback neutral, it wasn’t hard to read between the lines that they were saying that this was largely on my wife and something that she needed to work on.
I really don’t know what else I can do, but I can’t but feel like there’s something I could do to help her with this or something I could do to keep my own peace. Does anyone have any experience on this? What’s the best way I can navigate this?
