Thoughts.com Blogs - Sorry vs shut up

Last night at marriage therapy I had a very long an intresting talk, more like me defending myself against my wife and the therapist on a point it stuns me that the therapist, at the very least, does not get. Ok..if you have ben harmed in the past by the action of another and you are trying to work on that relationship...and yes on some level I am really trying if for no other reason than I think that alot of the work I am trying to get my wife to do will help her once i go..does the past matter? Or is bringing up that past just a wall to moving forward? And if you state that given the cahnce to change those events you would do it for the most part only to get the other person you hurt to shut up about it, and not because you truly feel that what was done was a mistake and you go on to say that if all things were as they were you would do the same thing again, then is not the past relevant to the present and the future? Ok an example of what I mean: Many years ago my wife and I went on a vacation that I planned for months, a vacation I had wanted to go on for years before I met her and it was a family event...meaning MY family of three people including her. In the middle of it all we got an afternoon on our own...alone time...no kid...what did she want to do? She took a nap!!!! We could have toured intresting places, taken a number of lil side trips, maybe even acted like two people in love and had a lil fun in that bed and used the excuse*wink wink* that we took a nap. But no she took a nap. She knows that this has buggedme and hurt me deeply for years...but given a chance to fix it, if she could tell herself what to do that day, she would "maybe tell her to stay up and go just so I do not need to hear it for years but I was tired and needed a nap so I took one" her words. So am I wrong in saying that we need to talk about this and the 100's of other things in the past that she did to make me hurt, or is she and the therapist right and I should just say the past is the past and hope she never will do that again but know that she will because she did not know that it would bother me that on that day at that place in that weather her doing "X" would bother me so she will never do it again...but not seeing that if it is a Tuesday or the sun is a lil higher in the sky, or I am wearing red and not yellow like I was when she did "X" that the lesson does not transfer for her!! I always learned that you remember the past as not to repeat it, you learn from your mistakes...not dwell on them per say.. but remember and learn-maybe now I should just take the Bill clinton approach that what happened yesterday has no bearing on today....any thoughts????