AHHHHHHH!!!!

I am such a dumbass. I spend all of this time trying to help people and even counseling people in their marriages. Then, I fall on my face with my wife Teresa, treating her horribly. She was feeling a lot of stuff because of the holidays, because of a great deal of dysfunction and pain from this time of year in her childhood. She was acting out of that, and was complaining. I was tired and crabby, and I was sick of the holiday myself. Rather than listen to her and support her, I got defensive and told her, basically, that she needed to stop her whining. Then I compounded the problem by hiding behind some kind of moral and relational superiority by stating that I was just trying to challenge her, as if it were for her own good. God, who is gracious and merciful, let me know that I am a dumbass.

I have no idea what it will take to retrain myself. I need to reorient my entire thinking process, so that when I am in situations like that, I can make better choices. Afterward, it is easy to see the whole stupid path I took, but in the moment, I do not deal with my wife in some kind of vacuum. She and I are intimately involved in each other's lives, and it is near impossible to break away from that. There has to be a way, though, to be involved emotionally with her, but to still choose to serve my wife lovingly.

The most important thing I can do for her is to help her feel important, safe, and loved. I don't want to do the opposite any longer. I hear people say, Dude, you're just a guy, and that's what guys do. I simply don't accept that. I want to put on the new man and do away with the old. I am tired of settling in my marriage. I want to be an exceptional man and an exceptional husband. Any less would be selling myself short of who God created me to be.