u/CreatineShits45

TL;DR wife abuses the word “sorry”. After years of discussion, I no longer associate it with healthy conflict resolution and it actually triggers me.

I am starting to have an anger reaction to the word “sorry”. I feel horrible saying that, but it’s true. It’s a genuine trigger for me at this point, which makes me feel like a dick. I’m definitely going to sound like a dick in this post but this is after years of cyclic discussions around this issue and non-compliance with therapy.

My(32M) wife (27F) had a traumatic childhood. Her use of the word “sorry” is fueled by anxiety over conflict resolution. This has increased heavily since having children.

She says “sorry” for things she should not apologize for, I always tell her that she does not need to apologize, everything is fine. I have tried multiple ways and tones of saying this. She does it anyway. Explicitly for herself. Multiple times. I ask her to stop, I tell her it’s starting to bother me, she’ll just say “I know I shouldn’t but I just want to, I’m sorry”.

She says “sorry” for. Things I would have forgotten in 5 seconds. Minor things that most people don’t notice. She says “sorry” repeatedly bringing them to light over and over, which actually irritates me even more.

She says “sorry” for things she SHOULD apologize for. She hardly ever adjusts the behavior. If I don’t give in, she pouts for days, or say things like “you don’t care about me” or she will give me a laundry list of excuses, which makes the original “sorry” feel extremely fake.

I have explicitly told her it bothers me. She still does it. Dozens of times a day. Cluster bombs of the word “sorry”. She acknowledges that she does it to alleviate her own feelings. She acknowledges that it bothers me. She does it anyways, repeatedly. Now it’s a respect issue.

It wasn’t like this when we were dating. It’s beginning to anger me. I hear the word “sorry” and am having a genuine physiological reaction to it. It feels manipulative. It feels like she’s lodging that word in my brain over and over without consent. We are at the point where she says sorry for saying sorry too much. It’s disorienting. It doesn’t mean anything at all to me anymore. I actually hate that word and want to remove it from the English language entirely. She just needs to stop entirely. I don’t even care if she needs to apologize or not. I just don’t want to hear it anymore. It makes me sick.

My wife repeatedly said “this is why I am suicidal” to me after I did not immediately forgive her for saying “I hate you” to me during an argument. She knows this is not okay, we have talked about it before.

She was repeating it as I was asking her to stop. She just kept saying “well it’s just how I feel”

I ended up puking from the stress. She helped and offered me water and antacids as I was spitting blood into the sink. I thought maybe she realized she went too far. It felt like she was caring for me.

Started by telling her “So that was not okay” Wanna know how she responded???…. “Well it’s just how I feel”

Wow.

This was traumatizing to me. I have not been able to sleep for days and I am having nightmares about her faces and words and knives.

Memories flooding back of emotional coercion that I did not realize was happening. That fucking face she makes all the time I am realizing is contempt. All the times she called me horrible shit for asking for something BASIC, or lied directly to my face about what she was doing. Absolutely inexcusable selfishness.

I did tell her I was suicidal once, but it was a CONVERSATION. Literally 2 hours later she’s losing her shit at me WHILE I AM AT MY DESK WORKING, because I asked her to be more careful with her engagement ring, which she lost 5-10 times a week.

I have not felt like myself for years, and I don’t right now but I feel as if I am waking up and I do not see the same person at all. I can’t even sleep next to her. I’m having nightmares and symptoms of PTSD. I have been doing research in narcissism lately and I feel like I got bit hard by a covert.

Trigger warning about physical violence, but to be clear I have never experience that from her.

I feel like I’m unwell. There has been very clear explicit and frankly fucked up emotional abuse lately from my wife and I feel as if I am having symptoms of PTSD or CPTSD. One of those symptoms is nightmares. Here’s one:

Been sleeping on the couch because I’m wide awake in bed next to her after a recent event. We were sitting across from each other at a dining table. I thought it was weird that I couldn’t see anybody else, even though I know they were sitting around us. I only saw her in super high resolution detail looking right at me.

She seems normal, but then out of nowhere she throws a knife at me. It startles the fuck out of me and I jump. As I look back up at her, she is a bumbling crying mess. Before I can even say anything or process what happened, she starts talking, spewing raw emotion, hardly getting her words out. Some mixture of:

“I’m sorry, i love you so much and you are my soul mate and you deserve better and I never meant to hurt you. I hope you don’t think that, I hope you don’t think I would ever hurt you on purpose. I don’t want you to hate me.”

Then I calmly say:

“…but you threw a KNIFE at me.”

She flashes me one of those looks. The displeased squint eye side grimace face that she makes when I say something that suggests she was wrong.

She throws another knife at me and I jump awake. She’s snoring loudly in the other room.