– Short Stick

I’d advise first taking a deep breath.

On the surface, you’re asking what happens when spouses have needs that appear to be in conflict. Consider this question instead: How can we support each other in getting our needs met? That reframe immediately puts you on the same team – team we want everyone doing well – rather than pitted against each other, vying for limited resources (time).

Having any kind of deep talk while sleep-deprived is hard but try to set some ground rules for this conversation. Such as: I am feeling depleted. I know you have needs, too. I want to hear what they are and understand why they are important to you, and can you do the same for me? Can we both agree to not dismiss what the other person says they need and just accept they are important? Can we then make some practical adjustments and check in a couple of weeks to see how it’s working? Treat this like an experiment.

It’s very possible you both can’t get all your needs met at the same time; there are only so many hours in the day and a 1-year-old in the mix. But if you two can figure out how to tackle the schedule together, you may unearth some creative solutions, and you’d have some shared buy-in to make changes happen.

But beneath the schedule, you’re carrying a lot of unresolved stuff that makes sorting out the practicalities of your shared life very charged. It’d be helpful for you to get clarity within yourself about these deeper feelings, because left unaddressed, they’ll resurface any time you’re feeling depleted.

For instance, I am picking up on lingering anger over the nicotine deception. Some resentment that you had a child, which almost sounds like it was more for husband’s sake than your own. Rage that you are bearing such a heavy physical toll for this. Fear over what his addiction could lead to. Your reaction to his nicotine use, as you identified, clearly comes from your childhood, and your trauma is real; but is there some work for you to do here so you’re not projecting the intensity of this history all on to your husband? He clearly has a go-to stress response, which will probably come up again whether he partakes or not; can you accept that? You may also want to ask yourself if you’ve taken ownership over your own decisions in your relationship – because, in the end, you did make decisions. You can journal, think on this, talk with a trusted person. You mentioned your husband getting individual counselling; you may want to consider that for yourself if that’s an option.

In the meantime, revisit some of the narratives you’re repeating and add a little empathy to the mix. Your husband stressed while you were pregnant? That is … normal. Sometimes when we are in the thick of scary physical changes or health challenges, we don’t get how difficult it can be for our loved ones to bear witness, especially if they feel helpless. But what you endured doesn’t mean your husband wasn’t also allowed to be worried over your health, or overwhelmed by the enormous responsibility of becoming a father. There’s room for all of this. So if you want to avoid him hiding his stress-induced nicotine urge in the future, he’ll at least need to feel safe enough to disclose his feelings rather than having them dismissed or labelled “distorted”.

There’s even another way to look at the fact that it took you “melting down” for him to seek help. Could it be that he didn’t have a reason to take care of himself like that until he woke up to how desperately you needed him to? In this version of the story, he does make changes when it’s necessary for you. You can still be angry over how bad things had to get for him to see that. But the trick now is to learn how to make changes – together – before unfulfilled needs turn into crises