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Valerie, welcome to the program.

Hi Dr. Lara, thank you so much for talking to me. I really appreciate it.

Thank you.

I'm calling today about my husband. So we've had some trouble in our relationship the past eight years. He has anger issues.

In general, I would say it has trended better in recent years. There's he doesn't have as many outbursts. You know, he seems to have calmed down a bit. The health is calmer at this point.

However, the big remaining issue, and so we have one child still at home. She's 16. The other two already out of the house. There's one still at home. And so the fact that it's calmer. I'm glad about that.

But the part that is hurting me still is I feel well, I'm trying to find out if there's a way I can break this pattern. I believe that he believes me for sex.

Basically, if he doesn't get it when he wants it, he is mean. He's mean to me. It's not always yelling. It can be talking, silent treatments, you know, storming off, not telling me where he's going, snapping at me, teasing, like mean teasing.

Sometimes he does. Sometimes he does. Yes, does your daughter does your remaining 16 year old daughters see this? She she'll know that she has no idea what it's about.

But my question is, does she see this behavior? Sorry, I should have worked. Yes. Yes. And she know like all three of the how does this. Ma'am ma'am. Yes. Yes. You have participated in abusing your children by allowing them for decades to see him abusing you.

Okay. You can't escape that. You've permitted this. Okay.

I think it's child abuse to have parents doing this and the children know this is abusing your kids.

Okay. So perhaps you are not wise. I mean, it's kind of late in the game, but you are not wise to allow this to continue or to allow him to be in the home to do this.

Okay. I do. I got a little bit. Oh, you back up a little bit. Shall we start the call from the beginning? So you put the important thing first?

Well, no. Okay. Here's what I will say. Most of the time, like I would say 99% of the time, I just give in. Like if he wants it, I know in order to avoid that. That's how I should have started. I'm sorry. 99% of the time.

You know, that doesn't change anything I've said. Now you're being right.

Yes. I thank you. No, thank you. That's it's so confusing. And so I, you know, the things he says confuses me. I love, you know, I want to go into it.

But he says things that confuse me and I feel like it's my fault. If you say I'm being right, that's how I feel.

And so I do it to keep the peace in the house. And I've done it for years. It's just in the past few months. I realize this is hurting me. And it's not right. Even though it's confusing, it feels like it's not right.

And so I started trying to talk to him about it. And in the pet, I should have started this way. In the past few months, that's when the behavior has flared up. Usually I throw the sex just to get it all to calm down and everything goes back to normal.

And so I thought, OK, I'm going to stop beating into this pattern. And we're going to talk about it. We're going to work on breaking the pattern. But as it turns out, there's only one of us who's interested in breaking the pattern.

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