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This post is Part 1 of a series.
In relationships, we get hurt by our partner. It’s unavoidable. Usually the wounding is unintentional, but it happens. The worst pain we experience usually comes not from the original hurt but from the response we receive when sharing our hurt.
The Cycle of Sharing Hurt and Receiving Emotional Attack
Have you ever had the experience of telling your partner about something they did that upset you and no matter how clearly, lovingly, non-blamingly you express your hurt, somehow you end up getting emotionally attacked? Have you ever tried to express feeling victimized, even if it was unintentional, only to become the perpetrator in your partner’s story? That suddenly you’ve become responsible for hurting them and accusing them of doing something wrong, suggesting that they’ve done something they never did, or if they did do it, then it shouldn’t have hurt you? But your pain is completely ignored; it’s all about the “accusation.” In a split second, you’ve gone from being the one hurting and needing to be heard, to being the aggressor who’s attacking them. Sharing your upset, which began as an attempt to create closeness and change a situation that wasn’t working for you, creates more conflict and more distance. Instead of empathy and understanding, or the unthinkable—an apology—you receive anger, irrationality, and rejection. In a flash, what was a bid for empathy and connection has devolved into a severe rupture and a charged emotional battle. What you’d hoped would create an emotional or physical hug has catapulted you into a struggle for survival, both for yourself and the relationship.
If you’re someone who has lived this experience many times, it can be hard to know how to move the dial forward and make things better in the relationship, to convey what doesn’t work for you. While you want to make your partner aware of the ways they hurt you, probably unintentionally, so that they can stop or change the behaviors, it seems that it’s not possible, not without ending up in a huge fight or being attacked emotionally. So, what then?
For this post, I’m going to assume that you’ve already tried to explain this pattern to your partner, probably many times, and to point out that it’s not that they intended to hurt you but that they did hurt you—and this matters. Perhaps you’ve drawn the analogy of stepping on someone’s toe (or something similar), and that while the person didn’t mean to do it, it still hurt, and most people still apologize. Or perhaps you’ve shared that the mere fact that your partner’s behavior upsets you—someone they presumably love—that this should be enough of a reason to want to change it. You’ve probably pointed out (multiple times) that there’s no blame, and it’s not about your partner’s failing or inadequacy but about having your experience acknowledged and cared for. My guess is that you’ve tried many different approaches to making the situation better, to get what you need and in the long run make the bond tighter and more connected. But what if none of that works, which it often doesn’t?
As women, our instinct is to keep trying to make things better until we literally run out of steam, to keep explaining a situation that’s hurting us in a thousand different ways. We imagine that our partner will have to get it sooner or later, that we haven’t said it just right yet or at the right time or with the right intonation. We hold onto the hope (fantasy?) that they will understand that our hurt matters and is not about them but rather—about us. And then they will hear us, acknowledge our pain, know us, and want to change. Then, when they get it, we’ll be able to exhale and relax. But often, they don’t get it and never move beyond what our hurt says about them; they never make the shift from about them to about us, the defenses never relent. They don’t apologize but continue to blame us for the experience they think we’re blaming on them. Again and again, when we share, we end up more hurt, more wounded, and more attacked—even lonelier than before we opened our mouth.
Accepting That We Can’t Change Another Person
As we know, we cannot change another person. The only person we can change is ourselves. It’s a fairly easy thing to understand intellectually, but not remotely easy to accept in our heart and body. This conversation is not designed to blame ourselves even more; we’ve got enough of that if we’re with a blaming and defensive partner. But it is about recognizing where we may be contributing to a dysfunctional system, and repeating a pattern that enables it to continue. As much as I’ve always hated the question (because it suggests that something else is our fault), still, we must ask ourselves, What part am I playing in all this; how am I enabling this system to go on?
The question involves recognizing (and accepting?) that we cannot change our partner if they don’t want to change. Of this we have to be certain, and remind ourselves that we’ve already tried and tried, and tried. We’ve tried, and the results are the same; no matter how clear, concise, well-timed, and skillful our explanation, or how we reframe the problem, we’re not going to receive the empathy we so deeply crave. We’re not going to get the relief in knowing that our experience matters simply because it’s our experience. And certainly, we’re not going to get the apology we want. None of it is going to happen. Our partner’s insecurity, shame, sense of inadequacy, or whatever else stands in the way of their being able to acknowledge our hurt and own their part in it is too daunting and dangerous to get near.
In Part 2 of this series, I’ll describe the most prevalent pattern I see women repeating, the part we play that enables this defensive, unkind, and deeply unsatisfying system to go on, keeping us frustrated, sad, and stuck in our own relational Groundhog Day.
Before going any further, however, I want to first insist that we approach any self-inquiry with profound and fierce self-compassion. We must start with the understanding that when it comes to these situations, we’re often in a state of fight or flight, operating from our deepest and most primal drive—our survival instinct. We play out the pattern I will describe in Part 2—not because it moves the dial forward for us or the relationship, and definitely not because it feels good, but because we desperately need to preserve the connection with our partner, to get back to OK, keep the peace, and return to the status quo, no matter what the cost. It feels like life and death. The loss of connection with our partner feels terrifying and dangerous, like we literally won’t be able to survive it, no matter how strong we are. At the same time, our drive to protect our children, if there are children in the mix, is deeply wired into us and keeps us locked in a cycle in which we’ll do anything to restore calm in the home. The overriding sentiment is that we must hold onto the connection and get back to OK, no matter what, even if it means abandoning ourselves.
