Dear Maggie,
I’m at my wit’s end. My husband is just not very nice to me. He says he loves me, and he isn’t abusive and he doesn’t yell. But he’s always criticizing me. Just nitpicking about the way I do things, or the way I dress, or the way my hair looks or my makeup. Worst of all, he often does this in front of other people. Oh, I don’t know how to make it clear the way he does this. It’s not overt, like, “My wife’s a slob.” It’s more like, someone will mention housework, and he’ll make a joke, like, “Housework. You’d better get a dictionary, as my wife doesn’t know that word.” And then he’ll laugh and smile at me, and pat my thigh, as if it’s just an affectionate joke. But it’s not a joke. It’s an insult. I feel myself insulted and degraded all the time and when I try to tell him about it, he says I’m being over sensitive. And yet, living with this day in and day out is beginning to wear on me. Help!
Signed,
Tired Out & Fed Up

Dear TO & FU (Gotta love those initials!)
First, yes he is abusive. This is abuse. Second, no, he’s not joking. He’s being what the shrinks call passive aggressive.
But I don’t want to talk about him or how to make him stop or what his issues are. I want to talk about you and what this is doing to you. Not long ago, a sample of human DNA was removed from the human (just a swab) and observed in another room. The human host was then subjected to films, photos, images and sounds intended to make him feel happy, sad, aroused, angry, fearful, etc. They had electrodes measuring the reactions of the DNA and the human. And both had the same spikes and dips at the same moments. (This was repeated with the two over 300 miles apart, with the same results.) This is amazing and has implications touching every subject from quantum physics to religion. But here’s the part that’s important to you. When the man was experiencing what we’d call “negative” feelings, sadness, stress, anger, fear, his DNA twisted itself tighter and tighter, shrinking smaller and smaller, and some of the genomes changed themselves, while others shut themselves down.
Do you know what causes cancer? Changes in certain genes within the human DNA. Genetic Mutations, in other words.
By subjecting yourself to constant abuse, and the bad feelings that go with it, you’re doing as much damage to your body as if you were smoking a pack a day, or eating your way to morbid obesity or exposing yourself to toxic levels of radiation. I would go so far as to say that negative emotion is the number 1 carcinogen we expose ourselves to. That’s how important our emotions are to our physical health. We tend to think one thing has nothing to do with the other. Wrong. Dead wrong.
You need to decide that your happiness is the most important thing for you to focus on. And then you need to figure out how to create that happiness in your life, with him, without him, in spite of him, or however you need to. That’s your job, and if you don’t do it, you have no one to blame but yourself.
So be strong, and go be happy.
Good luck,
Maggie