Not long ago, the advice columnist "Dear Prudence" had a letter from a teen girl. It seems that her mother was abusive, the teen's parents divorced and her father married yet another abusive woman. Prudence put it quite aptly---and I'm paraphrasing here---"There is something in your father's psyche that makes him attracted to harridans." Hmmm....just like you and just like my father.

It's interesting that you see it all quite clearly. You are aware that it all goes back to your mother and how she treated you. You love her and that's what kids do, love their parents if only because they are their caregivers. Yet at the same time, you recognize the damage she did to you.

You don't say if you have any kids still at home. If you do, then you must get away from your wife and take the kids or else you will just be cycling the same behavior on to the next generation. Leaving a bad situation when kids are involved is never easy but it is necessary. If you don't have kids (or the kids are grown), then I have to ask---what's stopping you from leaving? Leave this toxic relationship and get some counseling in order to be sure you don't repeat the same pattern.

Don't be like my father. His mother died when he was very young and his father remarried to a widow who had a child. My father won't talk about what his stepmother was like but I know that his brother hated her with a passion. So...fast foward....my father has married 3 times---each time to a harridan. His first wife was an alcoholic, second wife (my mother) was an alcoholic and a narcissist, third wife (whom he recently left) was not a nice person. When it gets suggested to him that this all goes back to his childhood, he gets disdainful. That's too bad. Perhaps if he was capable of self-reflection, he might have been able to change the pattern.

Good for you for seeing the pattern. Now, please break away from your wife and limit your contact with your mother. There is no reason why you should have to live this way!

In conclusion, I will add---one of my brothers got involved with an abusive, unstable woman and had 2 kids with her. He was able to see how her behavior had a negative effect on the kids. So he made the decision to leave her and fight for full custody of the kids. It was a long, drawn out process but he succeeded. However, both the kids are damaged from the abuse and both have been in therapy for the longest time. My brother married a woman who took in the kids and is, along with him, raising them both. The kids call her "mom". My brother's son refuses to ever see his biological mother again and sadly, his mother doesn't even care.

Love to you Pete. Until we work through our childhood stuff we continually create circumstances in our lives that give us opportunity to repeat the childhood dramas until we heal from them.

Get some counseling, do some inner child work. When you start to heal, one of two things will happen.

1. You not accept the way your wife is treating you and she will get w/ the program, or you'll hit the road. or,

2. Your wife will lose interest in you because you are no longer submissive to her domination and she will leave.

Heal yourself and the marriage issue will take care of itself. : )

Esoterica

Totally.

My mum's chief excuse is "well your grandma was a REAL bitch, and I'm just cranky SOMETIMES, so you should damn well appreciate me"... And my exes? One of two - either really verbally abusive domineering and mood-swingy (and generally constantly leaving me for blokes who, like their own daddies or something, would beat em up and thereby actually make them *happy*), or normal but I'd get bored for no apparent reason and end up leaving (one bitterly flat-out told me: "you need a bitch who doesn't value you, else it just doesn't feel right, does it?").