It was good to see the kids again last night. As much as it pisses me off to admit it, I missed my wife - a little bit. She is at least making an effort at this point. That was really all I was looking for. Hopefully the meeting with the therapist goes well.
Clean - the reason I am somewhat hesitant is because my wife has been there to see the therapist by herself a couple times already. Even if my wife was trying to be objective in her description of the situation I think that would be an impossibility. Her 'perception' of reality seems to have diverged dramatically at some point with mine. There were even several points in time where I began to question whether I was the crazy one.
For example, there would be situations where I would witness a conversation with someone else (person A for sake of clarity) and my wife would be pushing for them to do something that she wanted. Person A was clearly hesitant, but my wife was completely oblivious to the social cues that Person A was exhibiting. Once she talked Person A into what she wanted I would hear her describe that conversation to someone else (Person B for sake of clarity), and her description of the conversation was so different from what I saw that I had to think back to the conversation to question what I saw. Her description to Person B would go something like "Person A is so great. He said he would be more than happy to do that for me. We get along great." I would even go back to Person A sometimes to as objectively as possible get their impression of the situation and I would hear something like "your wife sure is demanding. I wouldn't be able to deal with that." Maybe this is what people talk about when they describe 'gas lighting', but the thing is that I think my wife actually believes what she is saying. It is really bizarre, and sometimes I go back and forth on whether she knows exactly what she is doing and is acting or if she really is that 'crazy'. If she was acting it seems like she would have tripped up somewhere along the way though.
I have tried to ignore it and just worry about my own affairs, but I have found that to be impossible. It has had a serious impact on my life, because people avoid both of us now.
I did talk to a therapist over the phone a few times about this. He was one of my old doctor's from NYC. At the end of the day though, we just talked about the situation. I need solutions to the problem, and a precise plan on how to execute it. Talking about it seems like it just goes around in circles. He did tell me that it would be impossible for me to assess the situation in any accurate way, because I am so close to the situation.
Sometimes I feel like I got dropped off on a desert island with a schizophrenic and then had to argue with them over the color of the sky. After a while, especially in a situation where you are socially isolated, I think anyone would start to think "well, maybe I am the crazy one...the sky must have been green all along." Another alternative would be that we are both crazy.