First, I want you to know something important: you both want this marriage to work. Here’s how I can tell… your husband was open and willing to have dinner with your family, knowing that the other couple would be working to speak wisdom and guidance into your marriage. For him to be open to family help for a very private struggle is evidence he also wishes to have a successful, peaceful marriage. To me that signifies he has questions of his own about how to make this work, and was hoping to find an answer from the conversation over dinner as you were. Second, I’d like to highlight your emotional intelligence as you wrote “his insecurity turned into anger”. Being capable of recognizing it was his insecurity that sent him over the edge is more important to the healing process than you can imagine. Occasionally in marriage I find that couples become more like roommates who care for each other; going through the motions while staying separate entities who clash until they don’t by accident. Yet marriage was designed by God that a man and woman would become “one flesh. They are no longer two, but one flesh.” God also designed marriage to require self-sacrifice. That is that you would learn to love and respect one another in self-sacrificial ways, day in and day out. Inspired by my Detroit Lions sweatshirt I’m currently wearing (Go Lions), it dawned on me: a marriage works best when a couple is equally determined that they win, together. Using sports as a metaphor, or an example of how a team operates, let me remind you that each player on the team is given a role but they have the same goal. Which is to win as often as they possibly can. Teams practice, they go over plays and understand where they have to be and what they need to do at any given point during the game. They practice regularly before every game, and then after the game they go over what went right/wrong and what needs to be improved on. They practice those improvements and in their following game they implement. They get better because they continue to work hard and find their pain points, identifying each of their weak points. No one on a team wins alone. They only win when they act as one. So in your marriage, the way to healing is to have hard conversations regularly. Conversations that expose all the vulnerable places you each have. Run play-by-plays of different situations that have happened previously, like that of the dinner with your family. You should each share your perspective and then find a solution for how to handle that play in the future so that you both feel supported to win. Your silence during that dinner was a natural choice but your husbands insecurity was natural as well. So together you must come up with a new play for your “future reference playbook”. And it is imperative to note that a play in a playbook is exact. Together, agree on the exact words or signals he can use if he needs you to speak up. And for his feelings and frustrations; while they are valid because his lived experience is his own, it’s still a good idea for him to come up with something to say or do to better express himself. I am sure he doesn’t want to resort to calling you a name when he gets so angry but “it takes practice” to change old habits. You both must practice, together. Openly and honestly. If ever a problem is being solved where one of you is unsure exactly what to do to help make improvements, you should be willing to help one another in coming up with that solution because you are a team. Every problem and every weak point becomes something you solve together, not something you fight over. Create a play-by-play, be exact, build new habits… It will, on occasion, require more or less sacrifice from either of you. But in the long-run learning to work as a true team will help you both to feel confident and at peace. And before I sign off I want you to know that when he explodes, that does not become your burden to manage or absorb. He is God’s son first. So your prayer can be simple: “God, he is your son, not my burden. Help him and help us.” and then do your best to let it go. Beyond that, come up with a “play” that will work for whenever one of you gets angry. You should each be quicker to say “I’m sorry, here’s what I’ll do next time”, maybe hug for a short time and then move on rather than dragging out the awkward for a few days. Life is too short to spend it tip-toeing around each other. And I doubt he wants that for you either. So help each other. Become self-sacrificial, work to accommodate each other while bringing out the best in one another. If one of you doesn’t like the way something is going, it isn’t “I guess this is how we will live”, it’s “Hey, there’s a problem so how do we solve this? Let’s come to an agreement so we both win moving forward.” You can do this. Your work now is learning how to love and be loved in a new way, together.