He has been married for over forty years. The last five have been dominated by a belief that his wife was unfaithful. He has become angry and irritable. He thinks about it all day, every day. He replays the imagined scenario over and over and over. She denies anything happened. The only evidence he has is a middle of the night door opening and closing, seeing his best friend walk past a door way and then his wife returning to bed. The "evidence" is sketchy at best. He has not left her but he wont believe her either. He looks for evidence of her crime at every opportunity. He sees it in the fact that doesn't talk to her "other man" and that she does. He sees it in her distress and in her lack of distress. She describes herself as anxious and he figures that "must be" because she really did do it. He punishes her at every opportunity for her disloyalty by cranky, snappy and irritable.
The interesting thing is that it is only a small step to other paranoid thinking. Paranoid people find evidence where there is none, they look for the tiniest confirmation of their belief, they see patterns where there is only randomness. They find a conspiracy of secrets and lies when other people see innocence. they see signs and symbols of the "truth."
In this case it is interesting that his daughter has been diagnosed with paranoid psychosis.
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