My wife* vs my family haha.
So, to start, my wife has recently "abandoned" her parents and a few of her siblings. She is the youngest of 5, and she was largely ignored and often totally neglected as a kid and all the way through high school (she lived alone in high school). She also has chronic trigeminal neuralgia and she has some level of never pain in her neck and face most days. She doesn't have any close friends, and she's only so close with two of her brothers.
Basically, I'm not only her husband and friend, but often a caretaker. I often drive her to work, solve simple problems or tasks for her when she can't focus due to the amount of pain she has, etc…. And of course she has many issues with depression, suicidal ideation, etc, but also she can be very irritable and plain rude.
Meanwhile, my family is largely autistic, very blunt, loud, and admittedly a little difficult to be around especially to someone like my wife who is pretty sensitive in a number of ways. She often decides last minute that she can't attend an event with them, or she drives separately to our holiday celebrations so that she can silently bail whenever needed. And No matter how distant my wife is with them, they are always reaching out to me/us asking if there is anything they can do to help with her pain or really anything that my wife and I may need.
I don't mind her being distant if that's what she needs, but what I can't stand is how critical she is of them behind their backs. When she's irritable and critical towards me, I've learned to deal with it and we're pretty good at diffusing it. She's gotten a little better at apologizing and blaming her headache. But there seems to be some mix of jealousy that I'm so close with my family and dislike of the way they are where she says some incredibly mean things about them.
The thing that set this off tonight is how we left a Christmas gathering and she mentioned how she "really isn't excited" about any of her gifts (lumping in my gifts to her too, of course, but nearly every time she starts ripping on my family she suddenly lumps me in with them). She just went on complaining about a few things my mom got her that weren't good enough, and it just hurt me to hear it because my mom was constantly asking me all these questions and fretting about if my wife would like her gifts. My mom put in so much effort in picking these things out. And my wife just couldn't shut up about how now she just has an obligation to figure out what to do with the trash she received for Christmas. I finally told her how rude she was being and we haven't talked since. She went to bed basically right away and I'm still up not being able to get it out of my mind how ungrateful she seems.
Sometimes it just seems like the kind of person she is these days, because she'll bash people at her work or bash me pretty relentlessly to the point it makes me wonder if she has any empathy at all.
I guess I haven't really gotten anywhere with this as far as looking for advice. I go to therapy, she goes to therapy (it doesn't help that her therapist is a single woman in her 40s who is always telling my wife "you don't need anyone but you and if anyone gets in the way they're contributing to your pain"), we've tried couples therapy. It seems a bit cyclical that it all boils over and then goes away, but I'm starting to get afraid that as my parents get older I'll start to resent my wife for putting such strain on our relationship. And I don't even know what to think might happen if we have kids.
I absolutely love the shit out of my family. We've always been extremely close. My parents were great, supportive parents for me growing up and still are. No matter how distant my wife is with them, they are always reaching out to me asking if there is anything they can do to help with her pain or really anything that my wife and I may need. And it just hurts me so much to hear her complain about them endlessly when they want so badly to help her.
I can't imagine living with chronic daily headache, and I don't know how much of an excuse it should or shouldn't be. I know it's awful. But is it enough to excuse being so disrespectful?
Not actually sure if I'm looking for advice at this point or if this ended up being more of a vent, but it sure felt good to get that out to someone other than my therapist.