Living with somebody with Anxiety: how to survive the temper & threats

Alas, this is longer than I intended so mea culpa in advance.

My wife has always been what is described as a "worrier". Fair enough. I can deal with that, I thought. In reality, it has long been a psychiatrist-diagnosed Anxiety disorder (along with Clinical Depression). However, in the past 4 years we've had our first children, and my ability to deal with "the worrying" is seriously undermined.

The first reaction to almost - and I'm using my words judiciously here - everything is fear. But it's not mere fear, it's shouting at me if everything isn't done precisely as she wants it. Last night my little toddler asked "What's wrong, Mammy?" when he saw her shouting at me. In front of them. No self-restraint at all - just purge the fear immediately at all cost. Right there is the cause of so, so, so much pain.

I back off and go to another room and then I'm told I "never" help - and the discourse thrown at me is dominated by absolutes like "never", "always" and before I know it she has invented a big ogre of a man who has my name. For me, this embrace of such absolutist language is creating a huge problem by distorting reality and when I ask her to please use measured words, I'm accused of trying to control her, with the implication that I'm abusing her. I back off, again. And so this pattern has been going on for some time now.

The principal problem, as I see it, is she verbalises her fears without thinking past that immediate second. Last summer she asked me, on two different occasions, do I want to separate, an issue I had never ever mentioned in our 15 years together. Something was broken in our relationship as soon as that word was mentioned. For me, it was a threat. And I haven't recovered. I arranged marriage counselling, whereupon she said she didn't want to separate and wasn't threatening me but was afraid I wanted it. At that time, she had been barely intimate with me for the preceeding 6 months, if not 3 years and I was, as I told the counsellor, "withering" in the relationship where we never, ever had time together as she refused to leave the children for even a few hours.

Two weeks ago she told me that our daughter's friend's parents are separating. I asked her was she still thinking like that about us. She lost the plot, and began with "I will get sole custody..." I'm, still, in abject disbelief that she would make such a threat given that I initiated counselling after her "separation" talk last summer. This threat is still very fresh, and the fact she is a solicitor with an army of legal people around her is yet another dynamic here. She also has deep, and determined, pockets on her parental side. When I mentioned this latest threat, the counsellor suggested she get special help for anxiety but I'm internally screaming that these outbursts are being accepted when they are taking the ground from under me each time. For me these are the most fundamental issues of security and mental health, threatened.

So far, we have had 10 weeks where we've gone out together away from the kids: each time to the marriage guidance counsellor, for an hour and straight home. When I said in counselling that I wanted us to have time together, the counsellor suggested that my wife is "about 10 stages" away from feeling like she wants to do that. "Stages"? How many years more does that mean? I got very disillusioned with counselling at that point. One night after that, the meeting had been cancelled when we arrived so she agreed to come to dinner with me for that hour. It was brilliant, like the old times, and we made love that night. She says she loves me and wants to spend the rest of her life with me, as she said in counselling. But nothing since. Tonight, I will go out (to a church concert) on my own for the first time in our marriage. She doesn't want to leave the children with anybody else and because we're already asking her parents to cover us for counselling each week she doesn't want to ask them again. I feel this is another landmark of loneliness as she knows I want to go with her, something we regularly did before the kids. I've always found it deeply spiritual, and I feel the loss of that spirituality acutely now more than ever.

More contextually re the Anxiety, she seems addicted to reading the most fear-filled stories online (usually on the Daily Mail) and looking for elements of all the world's craziness in our ostensibly normal lives. To my lay eye, she is feeding this craziness and the relationship which I have is now so far from reality and in trying to solve it I'm trying to tackle this imagined world where I am somebody I don't recognise and all sorts of intentions, motivations and ill-will which I've never possessed have been attributed to me. So not only have we real issues to deal with there is this. For the record, I never drink, smoke or take any drugs, or gamble or do pornography or have any other addiction. I've never cheated on her, or wanted to. It's not that I'm intentionally "boring"; like so many others I work hard and I'm always dead tired by the time the children are in bed at 9:30-10pm (and that lateness is still a huge cause of stress, despite hiring a sleep consultant). We both have decent, secure jobs (although she earns more than me, we contribute exactly the same to all bills) so all the supposedly "big stuff" is there more than it ever has been. But this "all work and no love" is a profoundly empty, and lonely, and unhappy existence. It is getting darker when I think of my options if I have to get love outside this marriage - at most a dingy flat while I pay for my half of this house and everything else. I could leave Ireland and that would be much better for my quality of life and in particular my mental health, but my kids, whom I obviously adore and who adore me to bits, need me badly.

The most straightforward thing, and the thing which I still want most, would be to repair this marriage but how can I help somebody whose life of perpetual fear is expressed in outbursts, threats and humiliation of me?