By Dr. Alisa Bartel, PhD, Licensed Psychologist · Rose on Rainier Trauma Therapy, PC
No.
I am putting that first because I know how you got here. The late-night Googling, searching for a community who will understand and validate you, possibly even a Zillow search for a 1BR apartment. This is a question people ask a screen, not a person.
So: no. And now let's talk about the actual feelings, because "you're not a bad person" is useless if we aren’t talking about why you’re really asking that question.
The ones spouses tell me about eventually
Not in the first session. Usually somewhere around the fourth, after a long pause, and often prefaced with "this is going to sound terrible."
That you resent him. Maybe not for any one thing he did wrong, but the accumulation of the things over the years, for the fact that his problem gets to be the household's problem while yours does not have a name much less a household focus.
That you miss the person you married and you are not sure that person exists anymore, and grieving someone who is sitting right there in the recliner is a specific kind of lonely.
That you are angry at the mission. At the unit. At the department. At an institution everybody around you treats as sacred, which makes the anger feel like blasphemy.
That you sometimes want him gone for a few days just so the house can breathe, and then you feel guilty for it - or you don’t.
That you have thought about leaving. Priced apartments. Run the numbers. Not as a plan, just as a place your mind goes at two in the morning.
That you feel invisible in your own marriage and you cannot say so, because the second you do, someone will remind you what he has been through. Maybe even uttered the statement that you knew what you signed up for (lol).
If you found one of yours in that list, good. That is what the list is for.
Why none of it makes you disloyal
Feelings are information about your situation. They are not verdicts on your character, and they are not commitments to act.
Resentment usually shows up where there has been sustained, unacknowledged output. That is not a moral failure. You have been giving for a long time in a system that has no mechanism for noticing. Resentment is the receipt.
Grief shows up because you lost things. Not hypothetical things, but years, a version of him, a version of you, a whole imagined life that was supposed to start after the next deployment or the next promotion or retirement. Nobody held a service for any of it. In couples work, I find grief far more often than the communication problem people came in for, and unrecognized grief is remarkably good at disguising itself as anger, criticism, distance, or the sense that you two are roommates now, if that.
Anger at the institution is not anger at him. Most spouses have never been given anywhere to put it, so it leaks onto the nearest person, who is usually the one who also gave that institution everything.
And wanting out, sometimes, is not the same as leaving. I have sat with a lot of spouses who love their partner and cannot keep doing it this way. Both of those are true at once. Holding two true things is uncomfortable, which is precisely why people try to resolve it by deciding they must be a bad person.
Having it and acting on it are different jobs
This distinction is most of the relief, so I want to be clear about it.
You can feel resentment and still show up. You can want to be alone and still choose the marriage. You can be furious at him on Tuesday and defend him to your family on Wednesday, and neither one is fake.
What you cannot do indefinitely is pretend the feelings are not there. That is the part that costs you.
What suppression does over time
You already know that pushing it down works. Right up until it doesn't.
Suppressed feeling does not evaporate, just relocates. It shows up in your jaw tension, your stomach aches, your sleep disruption, the headaches that started somewhere around year six. It shows up as flatness, where you stop feeling the bad things and discover you have also stopped feeling most of the good ones. It shows up as a fuse so short that a kid spilling juice can produce a reaction neither of you recognizes.
And it shows up in the marriage as distance, because you cannot be close to someone while running a full-time operation to keep half of yourself out of the room.
Naming a feeling is not indulging it. It is the step that makes it possible to begin confronting it.
If you have never said any of this to another human being, a consultation is a reasonable place to say it for the first time. It is free, it is about twenty minutes, and you are not obligated to anything after.
Where this goes
Here is what I have watched happen more often than not: spouses who finally get to say the forbidden things, in a room where nobody flinches, tend to get less reactive at home rather than more. The feelings stop having to shout.
A fair number of them stay in the marriage and like it better. Some decide it needs to change substantially, and then work out how to say that. A few decide to leave, and do it with clarity rather than from the bottom of a bad month. I support all three, and I am not steering you toward any of them.
My office is where these feelings are allowed. Not tolerated. Allowed, expected, and taken seriously as information about a hard situation you did not create.
That work usually starts as individual therapy for spouses. If the sheer size of it makes weekly sessions feel like one more obligation you cannot carry, the Spouse Intensives are built for that. And if you are both ready to be in the room together, that is couples therapy, though plenty of spouses do their own work first and I think that is a perfectly good order to do it in.
The short version
You are not a bad spouse. You are a person who has been doing something extraordinarily difficult, mostly without recognition, and having feelings about it is the most predictable outcome imaginable.
You did not ask for this and you could not have known what you were getting into. Both of those are allowed to be true alongside how much you love him.
Schedule a free consultation. In-person in Colorado Springs, online across PSYPACT states.
This article is for general education and is not therapy or medical advice. If you are in immediate danger or thinking about harming yourself, call or text 988 (press 1 for the Veterans Crisis Line). If you are unsafe in your relationship, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is 800-799-7233.
Dr. Bartel specializes in combat trauma and PTSD treatment for military service members, veterans, and their spouses and families. She provides in-person therapy in Colorado Springs and telehealth services across 42+ states.
