It’s easy to spot resentment. You can feel its power and its force. Resentment is like a wall of dislike coming at you and you have no way of getting around it.
You know it is there, you wish it would not be, but everything you have done has not made it crumble and it is a mystery to you as to how to dismantle it.
I have worked with many couples that experience this.
Broken trust in a relationship is something you and your loved one can come back from, but it takes delicacy, the desire to rebuild, and effort.
Sometimes in a relationship people do things that cause the trust to break. Let’s say one person calls or texts someone outside of the relationship. This can have a devastating effect on the other person.
Sometimes in a relationship there is a difficulty where one of the partners might be attracted to someone other than the mate. This can also lead to some flirtation, some exchange of emotion, and even even more.
When this happens, there is a big rift between partners. The one who was cheated on often feels betrayed and can’t believe their mate would do that to them. Their heart feels torn and they might even wonder, “How in the world can I heal from this?”
When we love, we love deeply. In that deep love there is an unwritten feeling of truth. We love and we trust. But what happens when the person we love is hiding things from us and we find out, sometimes years later?
I have worked with and I have known personally people who have suffered at the hands of their partners, and all of them did not know something was going on.
Being unhappy in a relationship is pretty common. Having an affair because of that unhappiness is also pretty common. When people feel lonely they will do almost anything to relieve the loneliness, including starting a relationship with another person.
I have counselled several couples where one of the mates turned to another to relieve whatever they were feeling. Usually they think they will never be caught by the other, but it often happens that the other already knows.
As someone who is interested in what causes behavior, I am convinced that the madder you are, the more wounded you have been. It’s hard to think of an angry person as in pain though. Most of us want to get away from someone who is angry. We feel their fierceness and we just want to back away and not have anything to do with them.
I tried to calm him down. I did so three times. The fourth time I just let him rage, and that’s exactly what he did. He raged and raged and raged. And when he was done he got up and left the room. I continued with the wife and soon after the session ended. I felt a lot of emotion in the session and a lot of it was mine. I felt helpless to help him. I felt very sad for his inability to find a way to be understood by his wife. I felt him trapped inside himself and having no way to express himself except with a big booming voice that no one could tolerate.
Relationships cause hurts. We don’t want them, but they occur. This is just the way it is when two humans live and interact in a close and intimate way. We have a different kind of openness with our partners and when we get stung by them we get really hurt, I mean really hurt.
It feels as if they never really knew us at all, because if they did, how could they hurt us so badly? And if we get hurt, how long do we hold onto the pain of being hurt? Some of us can’t let go and we carry that hurt around inside us for a long time. In some cases it can last for years.
Being confident takes practice. But building confidence in ourselves and then applying it to our partner might just get us some great results.
If you are human, you have felt jealous. You might even have some early memories of really feeling the pain of jealousy when you were young. I like to think it’s pretty common for all of us as we grow up to experience the hurt associated with being jealous.
But why do we keep feeling it and how to do we deal with it when we grow up and are in what we consider an adult relationship? Why is it we often still get re-injured or we re-injure our mate and it always centers around jealousy?
As a couple counselor I work with people in relationships. Often the difficult issues surround feelings of jealousy. So let’s talk about it and understand what happens to us and our partner when we feel it.
I was thinking about jealousy the other day and how it can be so difficult in relationships. What brought on this thought was me thinking about telling my husband that I was going to meet a male friend, a colleague, for coffee. I was thinking about how he doesn’t even blink when I tell him these things.
He knows about my friend and I guess he doesn’t feel threatened in any way. I don’t know this to be true but it is what I think he thinks. Maybe I will ask him. But on the same subject I do know he was telling me about a dinner he was going to with some of his male friends. I asked who was going and he read the list and I heard a woman’s name.