The next day we visited Nina's brother and his wife and ended up discussing this with them - her sister-in-law was quite surprised at the outcomes and could also see that we were quite upset by it.
On Monday morning before going to work, I quickly penned an email to our counsellor (knowing that I'd be thinking about it all day if I didn't). The email was as follows:
I know that Nina has already written to you, but I felt compelled to also write.
I walked out of Saturday's session feeling like I had just been kicked in the guts - indeed, while I felt that way for the rest of the day, I was blindsided / stunned by what happened at the end of our session.
Nina and I have sought out counseling because we want to make our relationship work and to make it better. On Saturday at the end of our session, and with a few quick questions in the form of a list on a post-it note, it felt like you were telling us that we didn't have a hope and that we should set about ending things. If we wanted to give up that easily, we'd never have bothered coming to counseling in the first place.
It also felt like you were making an ultimatum to Nina - that if she didn't do the Women managing Anger course, then you would take it to mean that we wanted to end our marriage. While she seems happy to do this course, and seems to agree that it would be a good thing, it seemed a little extreme to frame it as an either or option.
The values questions that you asked were very quick, off the cuff, and without necessarily a clear common definition of what each might mean (as evidenced by my choosing to lump some of them together). Given you seemed to have placed a lot of evidence on this exercise in the very sudden doom saying of our marriage, and given my logical approach to things, I thought I'd have another look at the numbers. The attached graph shows these results (Blue = me, Red = Nina).{Graph not uploaded}
Yes, there is some difference in the first and third items - which I rated lower (4th) or not at all, but apart from those, there is a relative degree of alignment between the values we mooted. You may be right, in the long term these differences might pull us further apart (especially if left unchecked), but as you also noted, awareness of these can also help to enable us to understand and manage our differences (maybe we can even leverage off them). [PS I didn't rate education, but by my deeds, I have shown it to be important - completing a part-time MBA while working full time ... just before I met Nina.]
I noted from our previous session, and your strong response to the question that Nina's mother raised about leaving her dad that you have a very strong view about contempt being shown by one person towards another, and wonder how much what came out on Saturday around this may have influenced the turn at the end of our session (thus the ultimatum about the Women in anger course). You may have noticed that the way I deal with Nina when she is angry is to (effectively) walk away until she calms down - yes, I hear and listen, but I don't respond and usually get an apology a while later.
In our second session, we discussed that Nina suffers from depression, and noted some of the things that we'd done to try to address that - including a weekly personal trainer session. At the time you were going to look into someone who may be able to help (noting the comments we made about psychiatrists who just want to experiment with the next fad drug) - I think you mentioned something about "body work", but don't know what that means, and don't believe that we've heard anything since. While Nina may resist seeing someone, so long as she feels the environment is safe, she may give such a practitioner a go (given her observations with her mother, her experiences of a short trial of Zoloft, and probably some discussions with academics in her career, she doesn't see drug pushing psychiatrists or mental hospitals as safe). I raise this again because one of the things I often wonder is how Nina can be happy with anything if she is unhappy with or hates herself - just about every pop-psychology book makes the assertion that if you don't love yourself, you can't love others or allow them to love you. They also say that depression kills intimacy.
After Saturday's session, both Nina and I reaffirmed our commitment to each other and that we wanted to stay together. Our purpose in coming to counseling was and still is to help us to work through and understand our differences, learn how to manage them, and give ourselves better tools to help move our relationship from the downhill slope it is on to be something that is more positive and enduring for both of us.
I don't make the above comment in blind stubbornness - I love Nina, and as such I care about her - indeed, I care about her to the degree that if she seriously feels (not in a moment of anger, but with a clear head and honest heart) that her life would be better without me, then I would lovingly give her that freedom ... regardless of how lonely or empty it may leave me feeling. But this is something that she must come to herself, not a corner that she feels she's been backed into in a moment of haste.
Anyway, I felt I needed to get the above off my chest - and while I have done so in a little bit of a rush (spending about an hour on this before heading off to work), I have attempted to do it with some reflection and a clear head, which I wouldn't have been able to do on Saturday.
When she read this message, Nina indicated that she thought I sounded like I was angry - this was certainly not my attempt (but was probably a result of me still being upset, and also trying to write it before heading off to work). She also suggested that it sounded like I was sticking up for her.
We have since not heard anything back from our counsellor from either mine or Nina's emails, and I am a little worried that she may have taken offence at what I have written ... I have been thinking of writing to her sharing Nina's observations and highlighting that I wasn't trying to be aggressive or angry.
Both Nina and I are happy with our counsellor and would like to stick with her.
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