If you like the therapist you are seeing, continue to go to him/her. Go by yourself if it will help you work your way through your husband's childishness. Cause that is what it seems like to me. He is acting like a child. I am thinking along the same thoughts as you. He will use it against you at some point. He is keeping track of all the bad times between you two. And what he may be writing may not even be the way it is. Will you remember what the fight was about 4 months, 6 months, a year from now. He can whip out a journal and say, look, look! You were mean to me. You are right, it would seem like you would have to watch every word you said in this marriage. You couldn't be yourself.

I just also want to add that in the morning after I calmly told him that it's upsetting to me that he's keeping track of our fights for the future,

he told me that he was mad at me for "picking the fight" and "wanted to burst in a fight but decided against it because he loves me". In his opinion I just picked another fight by asking calmly if he was keeping record (because I found him holding his phone during our argument and him screaming "don't hurt the kids" to a committed mama like myself, as if recording, suspicious). And then I found out about journaling for the last year.

To me that is invalidation of the feeling. He's saying he's mad at me for being upset with him, but because he loves me he forgives me for having that feeling.

He he also keeps saying that if he wanted a divorce, he'd not survive through all the crap I make him deal with (not sure what that means) and he'd just leave.

Did you get any help from your previous thread in the Marriage Forum?

I'm waiting for my appointment with the counselor who my husband doesn't want to see. I also asked him to make a couples therapy appointnebt and waiting for him to do so. He picked his own counselor.

I'm sorry that you are still not being treated the way a loving husband should treat his wife. I don't know you, but everyone deserves to be loved without rules, score-keeping, penalties, gaslighting, malice and pain.

I'm a little upset and disappointed having learnt about him journaling.

Like said above, I do believe it IS score keeping. He expects me to act like nothing happened and be all sweet, but I can't. He gets mad I'm not all happy and shining and then either withdraws or yells....I'm at wits end how to act around him.

I can't recall- do you have children with him, lucky?

I do, a preschooler and a toddler.

Honestly, whatever the therapists have said, he is an abuser. He is score keeping and building up what is to him a body of "evidence" to castigate you with at an unspecified future date, and trying to make _you_ feel guilty for being unhappy about this. He is accusing you of "picking a fight" when you ask what his motivation is for recording your argument and doing what looks suspiciously like manufacturing "evidence" (yelling "don't hurt the kids") and then trying to make himself look like the good guy by saying, "oh but I forgive you because I love you".

This man is a borderline (if he hasn't actually passed clear over the line) sociopath and IMO the farther and faster you get away from him the happier you will be in the long run.

Colleen is right, this is controlling behavior. Save your kids and yourself.

He sounds nuttier than rat poop in a pistachio factory. Seriously, I think he has mental health issues.