[April Masini, your AskApril]

I’m sorry you’re in such a rut, but I don’t think you want your husband to just look at your problems. I think you want him to solve them. You’re saying you want him to look at them, but how can any man look at such a mess and not want to solve them? The problem is he doesn’t know how to solve them, and he feels pressure from you to do so, so he reverts to blame or retreating into feelings like anxiety that paralyze him.

My suggestion is to take a fresh approach to this old problem that didn’t happen overnight. Come to your husband with three (and only three, so as not to overwhelm him or yourself) ideas for making things better. You don’t have to fix this problem overnight — in fact you probably can’t. But you can make small dents in the problem and sometimes taking baby steps will make you feel like you’re accomplishing SOMETHING and accomplishing SOMETHING (even if it’s small) will help you move towards a more positive approach to a big problem.

Sometimes it’s hard to accept that you and your husband can’t be everything to each other. And in this case, it might be better if you took your own feelings of anxiety and depression about your finances to a friend or family member, and tried to just work with your husband on solutions. You are both drowning each other in emotions and keeping each other from seeing solutions.

I hope that helps. Please let me know how things go. And follow me on Twitter @AskAprilcom and on Facebook at this link: [url][/url].