How to help hubby ‘constantly venting’ about his life
DEAR CAROLYN: My husband and I love each other dearly and have two awesome kids. He is incredibly smart, thoughtful and wise.
Over the course of our 18-year relationship, however, he has never been “happy” or content with his work or friend relationships.
Shortly after we got married, he got a full-time management position. He hated it. He claimed the management was against him, and he was constantly venting to me about how bad his work situation was. I listened, day in and day out. I tried to suggest ways he could improve his situation, but he didn’t really want to hear it.
Then we had a baby and it made sense for him to become a stay-at-home dad. He hated it. The kids were challenging, his friends didn’t understand that being a stay-athome dad was actually a job. Again, I listened and tried to help him find ways to make his situation better.
Then he started woodworking. He’s talented, but, you guessed it. Every project was weeks of venting about how nothing goes right for him. I spent hours helping him work through his issues.
Now he’s started a new job as a teacher. I agree, it’s not the best situation. He’s dealing with junior high kids with behavioral problems. I listen as he vents. But again, nobody, not even me, apparently understands what he’s going through, and there is no solution.
He shuts down and is hurt when I tell him I’ve reached the limit of venting I can hear. I’ve suggested he go to therapy, but he argues that it won’t do any good and what will a therapist tell him that he doesn’t already know? I just want him to be happy.
— Hoping for Sunshine
DEAR READER: He is “wise” about what, exactly? Not himself, or what fulfills him, or makes him tick. Not about tedium and frustration as the very building blocks of everything good about life. Anyone’s life, his included.
Maybe he is wise about other people? But that’s tissue paper if he can’t say about himself, “I am the common denominator in all my professional and personal aggravations,” or, “I may be too close to my own problems to spot any bigger patterns.”
I don’t think wisdom is possible without humility.
Maybe your husband is indeed aware of his own limitations — the people least willing to admit them tend to be the most unnerved by their power. However, by your description, he hasn’t made peace with them as fellow travelers in life — in all lives — who can’t be denied or outrun.
Instead, he appears stuck in a childhood state of insisting it’s everyone else’s fault and lashing out when someone says no.
OK. Enough shredding of someone whose side I haven’t heard. Here’s the point: “What will a therapist tell me that I don’t already know?” demands a reasoned rebuttal. Not only the obvious one, that a therapist will have mental health credentials, objectivity and experience your husband doesn’t, but also that it’s a howler of an argument from anyone in a state of chronic discontent. Even if your husband already knows exactly what he needs to do, he apparently doesn’t have a good enough answer for why he’s not doing it.
It’s incumbent upon you, therefore, not to endorse this flawed reasoning even tacitly — because you love him and your well-being sits at the same kitchen table as his. You can speak firsthand to both the pattern and its impact on you.
But it’s also important to recognize the fragility behind the child’s-eye view, so choose your approach thoughtfully. You help both your causes if you make yourself the unfailingly safe place for him to admit frailty. “I have a different view,” you can say. “I see a car stuck in mud. You can just spin your wheels, or you can get a push from people who care and know what they’re doing. It doesn’t mean you’re a bad driver.”
One option that’s always available, in the face of even the steepest remedy-resistance from a partner, is for you to seek out professional help yourself. It’s rarely an instantaneous process anyway, especially with provider shortages, so the effort to set it up alone — i.e., showing him how serious you are — can spur a change in his thinking.
Follow through even if it doesn’t, though, because a therapist can help you out of that 18-year, “day in and day out” rut. While his complaining hasn’t improved his outlook on life, it does give him a supply of something he wants, or he wouldn’t resort to it so routinely. Emotional validation, maybe, or simply attention. Whatever it is, getting it from you is a disincentive for him to make the difficult change to more productive ways of coping.
A different response to him is the only change entirely within your control to make, too, so that’s my advice: Refuse to be his sole outlet and work to get healthier about this yourself.