My heart goes out to you as you face what sounds like an impossible situation. Dread's a horrible thing to be living with, constantly dreading a barrage of abuse. Not good for your kids to be witnessing and feeling also.
It can be so incredibly frustrating when we can't lead a person to a healthy sense of wonder. What I mean by that is you could lead them to wonder through questions like 'Do you wonder why you feel such intense emotion at times? Do you wonder what would lead to a greater sense of self understanding? Do you wonder why you feel yourself suffering so much? Do you wonder how you naturally tick under certain circumstances and what would make a constructive difference?' and you can be met with 'No, nup, don't care, not my fault/problem'. When such a lack of wonder becomes everyone else's problem, it can be hard to know what to do. It's the kind of thing we're typically not taught growing up, 'How to manage when someone else's serious lack of wonder becomes one of your greatest problems in life'. It can even become a deeply depressing problem in some cases.
I'm wondering whether you know what the anger and rage is about. Often, anger and rage are at the extreme end of certain emotions. Kind of like we could be feeling low end intolerance through to an enraging level of intolerance, low end frustration through to a raging level of frustration, low end disappointment, sadness, hopelessness, sense of emptiness, sense of suppression, self hatred, resentment toward another and so on. For some, they can't feel low, medium or even high levels of resentment for example, they can only feel resentment when it has become enraging. So it can be a matter of how to develop the ability to feel the low end of an emotion, so it can addressed, questioned and managed it before it gets to the point of causing issues.
If your wife flat out refuses to wonder about certain things that you need her to wonder about, do you know why?
