Wife ashamed of her home and cars / I'm addicted to conning and blaming

DEAR ABBY: My husband is threatening to leave and my 9-year-old daughter is distraught because I am embarrassed about our home and our cars. We live in an affluent suburb, but we're not one of the rich families. My daughter wants to invite friends from school over, but I'm mortified about their parents seeing our home or cars.

I know these things shouldn't matter. I love my husband, but he says I'm ruining our daughter's self-esteem and disrespecting him by being embarrassed by a life he works hard to provide. What's wrong with me, and how can I get past this? I don't want to lose my family. —EMBARRASSED IN OHIO


Abby's Reply
:

DEAR EMBARRASSED: What makes a home warm and welcoming isn't whether it has been professionally decorated. Your problem isn't that you're ashamed of your house or cars. It's that you lack confidence in who you are. Your feelings stem less from what material things you lack than misplaced priorities.


When your daughter's friends visit, cookies in the oven, a welcoming smile and a willing ear if one of them needs a trusted adult in whom to confide will be more appreciated than whether your couch is new or there's a late model car in the driveway. Many children from families who supposedly "have everything" are starved for plain old-fashioned personal attention.

I often recommend psychological counseling, but in your case, perhaps you would be better served by talking to a spiritual adviser about the difficulty you're having with appreciating how much you have for which to be thankful. —Abby

Gabby's Reply:

Hi Ashamed: You ask, "What's wrong with me," I say absolutely nothing. You have a problem and you have yet to address the cause of it (to define it accurately)  and so it persists.  You present a valid point about the consequences of living outside your socio-economic class, for some it's not unlike walking past a homeless person wearing expensive tattoos and jewelry.

What's so is you feel uncomfortable and embarrassed and you believe it's because of the reasons you've given, but when you stated your reasons (in your letter) the problem didn't disappear. This is because you haven't gotten to the truth yet. Once you tell the truth, of what's really bothering you, you'll have an entirely new set of problems.

Experience tells me that you are not in-communication with anyone. You have lapsed into doing your imitation of communication with your husband and daughter. How do we know? We know because when communication takes place problems disappear, conversely, when talking takes place problems persist.

It's even possible that you have never been in communication with anyone and that the moments of love you've had (emotional experiences) with your husband, were but unconscious "happenings." I say this because once one knows how to cause communication to take place the ability stays with them for life. That is to say, all it takes is for one person to intend for communication to take place and the other joins in the co-creation or they extract themselves from the conversation/relationship. I.e. "I don't want to talk about it." or, "Don't ever mention that again."

You can tell you've been stuck using the adversarial communication model because of the withholds. If you'll look back, even before you met your husband, but certainly on the first date, you found yourself withholding certain thoughts; this is one of the primary characteristics of the adversarial communication model. Most likely you had not had any experiences of communicating openly, honestly and spontaneously, (zero thoughts withheld) in your family; sponteneity for most sounds like a "real good idea" until they come across a thought they are afraid to communicate. Could this be a consequence of your unacknowledged deceits-withholds with your parents?

Withholding the first thought is the beginning of the commitment to mediocrity in a relationship. In fact, your breakdown in communication reveals that that's where you are now, back when he said something that was a clear indicator of where he was heading; had you been conscious, and operating from integrity, you would have said your truth and he would have realized that you would not be aligned with him on his path.

When you withheld certain thoughts from your husband during your first date (always for excellent reasonable reasons) you compromised your integrity. It's quite common for couples to have only a few peak experience of simultaneous joy during their engagement and few, if any, thereafter. Neither of you have been taught how to create and recreate joy at will through a single sit-down conversation.

What you're looking for is the first time in your life that you compromised your integrity; you let something slide that didn't feel good.  With him, it's possible you wimply voiced an objection to moving into the neighborhood that was not comfortable, and you didn't make sure he "got" your consideration and so you still have it.  It could even be that you went along with a huge mortgage, one you've never been comfortable with, because you know that without his income you'd have to sell the house; alarm bells rang but you surrendered, ostensibly as a gesture of teamwork and partnership, but in truth surrendering is how you manipulate him into providing for you.  It appears that you attracted and married someone who has been leading you in ways that conflict with your integrity. You both are presently ripe for bankruptcy; that is to say, your leadership-communication skills are supporting him in behaviors that lead to bankruptcy. That you intend that he ignores your feelings suggests he believes that you'll submissively go along with it if he declares bankruptcy and cause others to lose money. His treatment of you reveals that he is on the way down; such arrogance begs to be humbled. Put another way, you, using your leadership-communication skills, have been unconsciously intent on having him crash and burn so as to teach him what you need to learn.  

Could this be a karmic consequence of a conscious choice you made in high school, to not have a career to fall back on, to con a guy into providing for you?

It could be said that you've been asked to wear fancy jewelry when in truth you're of the opinion that such ostentation is inappropriate in a world in which people are still homeless and hungry. Possibly you believe that what would make you happy is a life of sufficiency, one that supports generosity and community service, rather than showy accumulation and ostentation. For some it's uncomfortable to socialize with people who are unconscious prattlers, those who talk about things that don't add to the aliveness of others. Few conversations at your present social get-togethers make a positive difference in your community—evidenced by lots of badmouthing and gossip.

In any case, you've sold out. You've set it up for him to invalidate your brilliant intuition, your feedback, after which you made him wrong. This is abusive of you. It doesn't speak well of how you've been using your equally powerful leadership-communication skills; you've been leading him in a way that supports him in verbally abusing you, speaking condescendingly to you, ignoring your considerations. He's supposed to know that your happiness is of paramount importance. Men who commit themselves to serving their spouse are rewarded ten-fold. That you are unhappy, and nothing you've said works for you, reveals that you both need relationship coaching. I recommend that you begin by doing The Clearing Process, by yourself, (it's free). I suspect his arrogance is such that he would refuse your invitation to do a clearing—you both are dragging around life's unacknowledged perpetrations into each present-day interaction affecting all outcomes.

It looks to me as though you have been unconsciously masterminding a divorce by accumulating sufficient reasons—this, instead of simply leaving.

Re: ". . . but he says I'm ruining our daughter's self-esteem and disrespecting him by being embarrassed by a life he works hard to provide." This is a blame statement. That you set him up to dump such crap in your space is abusive of you. Who trained him to speak to you that way? Notice that he has no sense of equal partnership, of your service that empowers him to do well financially. I'm concerned about how you will handle who gets what during, what appears to be, your eventual divorce settlement.

What must he have been thinking, buying into that neighborhood? What's his plan for you about the house if he dies? —unless you've insisted on a humongous life insurance policy (and ensure that the premium is paid each month, assuming he doesn't commit suicide) you'll be scrambling for mortgage payments and most likely have to sell and move.

That you unconsciously intended, and put up with, this abuse indicates that you are addicted to abuse, to abusing and to being abused. If you recall he was into blaming back when you were first dating also. What did you make more important than being treated with respect?

I have more but first I need to have your feedback after reading my reply. —Gabby

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Last edited 12/7/21

 

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