Any one of us who has lost someone special due to death, knows this terrible pain. It is in most circumstances unbearable because we haven’t felt anything like it ever before and it drops us to our knees.
I know when my brother died suddenly I couldn’t breathe. I know I didn’t want to breathe. I was just in such turmoil I couldn’t tell which end was up. I am wondering if you have felt this way too?
All relationships include someone being disappointed at some time. There is no escaping this feeling. This happens because you and your partner are different. You may want to do something that you like and your partner will say NO.
This leads to disappointment. I have experienced this feeling so many times I could not count them. And I have had to understand some of the things about this interaction to not take the experience personally.
We all want to feel connected to the person we love. So, why is it so hard, when we get our feelings hurt, to feel connected? Why does it feel as if we are miles away from that space and as though there’s no way of getting back to it?
Getting hurt by the one we love happens in all relationships. Look back at your family when you grew up. Did you ever get your feelings hurt by someone? Maybe this happened because you fought with a sibling. It might have happened because you disagreed with a parent.
I was at a dinner party recently. The host, a good friend of mine is a wonderful cook. She had planned this meal with great care. But during the evening, before the meal was ready, she began to get increasingly uncomfortable. She was worried about the main dish and whether it would be cooked through. She was also stressed about a side dish that took too much preparation in the last minute. I could feel her panic, and so could her son.
Her son asked me if I knew what was wrong with his Mom. I knew she was struggling to make sure everything turned out right. But even knowing this and understanding her, it still didn’t help her child. He was worried that he might have done something, or that she was mad at him or something else was happening with her. He didn’t know what was bothering his Mother because she wasn’t saying anything either. This lack of understanding then left him feeling uncomfortable too.
This is a funny question, but I think it’s a feeling that a lot of us can relate to. I know if I look deep down when I am worried or unsure of something, I can probably identify the root of this feeling and it has to do usually with me and that something is often, “I am not enough.”
I don’t say this out loud, but I feel it inside myself. I feel less than and that might explain why I worry sometimes. This is very common. A lot of us wonder if we are enough. And the “enoughs” can come in all kinds of variety, “Am I smart enough? Am I attractive enough? Am I successful enough?”
Everyone who has ever loved another has been hurt by the one they love. There is no relationship in the world that is without pain. It’s just not possible. Now that’s not saying there aren’t people who just don’t fight or get upset. There are probably lots of couples out there that don’t get mad at each other. But that is not the majority of us, and those that NEVER disagree or fight, well I can’t imagine having every thought in my head mirrored perfectly by my mate.
As humans who live close together we are bound to see that we are different than our partner. It is that difference that leads to quarrels and disagreements. Most of us feel very strongly about the way we look at things and the way we like to think. We are attached to our view of the world, including how things should be done in our home.
Remember the beginning of your relationship? You know, when you were falling in love with your special one. Remember when everything was perfect, the most wonderful perfect you could have ever imagined? This is what most of us as humans dream of, a perfect time and space with the one we love.
Everyone and every couple starts out this way. And most of the people I meet in my practice are desperate to get back to this wonderful, terrific space where both people understood everything about the other and there was peace and harmony and everything.
Most of us in relationships get disappointed. Some of us get disappointed a lot. I believe that if we feel let down by someone it’s because they didn’t know what we wanted. But when we are involved with another person it’s easy to just believe that since they know us so well, they will always know what we want.
We usually only notice that things aren’t right when we didn’t get what we wanted. Then we know how to react, we get mad. “How could you have done that?” “Why didn’t you think of me?” These questions are important. They tell the partner they blew it. But sometimes in relationships the partner is left wondering how this situation even happened.
All of us in relationships want to feel accepted and received by the person we love. It’s a longing we all share and impossible not to feel. We crave our person to see us and to remind us that we matter. We need to feel valued by the one we love and we hunger for these reassuring moments.
So the idea that we may NOT feel loved, necessary, or that we matter to our mate is, in my opinion, one of the worst things we can feel.
When people get upset, some of us just naturally think people know. It’s not uncommon to believe that if we get our feelings hurt, the person who hurt them knows what they did. We also sometimes believe that everyone else might know what happened too. Our thoughts, especially when we get our feelings hurt, are very strong and convincing.