This is mainly my lesson learned from a recent post in which I received a lot of great, insightful advice. It is also an update to my recent post.

https://www.reddit.com/r/marriedredpill/comments/3kkboy/dread_vs_clarity_and_how_quickly_the_red_tide/

Dread dissolves the "bitch shield" or "beta shield" . I'm thinking this is why dread is effective. It elicits the emotions in her needed to make her receptive, responsive and submissive.

Update from the previous post: I planned to take u/countpudyoola advice of

Take a minute, meditate. Tell your wife you've been stressed about your surgery and you took it out on her. I don't give a shit if it's true. But it might be. This will just give you a nice reset button on your series of fuck ups and misapplied tactics.

Like I said, our family is busy. So, I never got the chance. i never found the moment, and it turned out I didn't have to. I continued to make zero effort to communicate to her and tried to go about my business unaffected, though tensions were higher than normal and I was probably grumpier than complete outcome independence. The lingering anger made it easy to detach and see where I am on my progression. That I need to keep going and not let up. Fri night I spent with my oldest kid, and we had a good bonding time. Didn't get back until relatively late and by the time we made it home everyone else was asleep. Next morning I went to the gym just after breakfast, we had to bounce as soon as I got home and then the rest of the day was watching the kids play sports. Saturday was kids' sports day. All day. It was fun, I kept mainly to myself, cheered the kids, the usual except throughout the day the only verbal communication I initiated with the wife was logistic types. When are we leaving, when is the next game, etc.

She couldn't make a decision all day. I had to direct where to get lunch, and what to get, when to leave, etc. Someone posted in the other thread that I reverted to covert contract, and they were right. My wife reverted to confusion and indecisiveness. I would never have recognized it before I found MRP. She was asking me to make decisions and lead. She was being overly submissive. Prior to MRP, I would have shut down and been a butt-hurt, grumpy, sad-sack, pouting because I'm blaming my wife for not doing duty sex. I would have said "whatever", "I don't care" , "It doesn't matter" all day and let her take care of the whole family, including me. This time I recognized it for what it was, a need to be lead. I told her what to do. I gave her assignments. I disciplined the kids when needed and just kept moving.

That evening I'm working on my computer, getting work done on some side project and generally staying busy by myself. I went to bed a little earlier than typical weekend time and just steel myself for whatever comes next. Wife finishes the bedtime chores and makes it to the bedroom. She strips down and she's wearing her sexy underwear(didn't see that coming) and climbs in bed. No words. I stuck my thumb in her mouth and she moans. I pulled her head down and got insta-hard. Good times were had.

Afterglow, quick clean up and it's like the entire week never happened. I told her I was glad she did that and something about the 5 day dry spell. She honestly thought it had only been 2 days. The two days since the incident I described. She then started instantly talking about the surgery I'm set to have tomorrow. She's worried. She's done a lot of reading. The recovery can be hard. I blew it off, tried to steer the talk to something else. I haven't really talked about it with her other than what it is, when it's going to happen. Whaddya gonna do? It has to happen. That's relevant to the previous post, more credence to cartwheeling hamster theory I guess. I'll comfort today and hopefully things go smoothly without backtracking.

I woke up early this morning with this idea of the beta shield in my head. For years, I had said the things I wanted, but only after I let it fester and starts as anger and accusation. It never registered, just bounced off her beta shield emotions of disgust, resentment, anger, whatever. This time, even though I had been clumsy, transparent and obvious in my attempt to "do" dread, it worked because she was finally receptive to the message I was sending. The only thing I can attribute that to is the actions I took, however clumsy, were effective in drawing her to an emotional state that made her willing to listen to and act on my demands and needs. Communicate to her emotional state, one that will let you get past the beta firewall and don't waste time firing words at a non-receptive emotional state.

Maybe this is already understood by others, maybe I'm misunderstanding something, maybe who gives a fuck. It worked. Thanks MRP.