Linda's Relationship Counseling Blog

Staying Together Through Anger and Adversity

Every couple goes through difficult moments. No one couple has a perfect relationship. All couples have challenges, misunderstandings, hurt feelings, angry events and more. This is a natural and normal life. The problem for most couples though is that we get hung up in the difficult parts and can’t see our way through.

When something hard happens and we feel disconnected, unloved, or disrespected, we can sometimes believe that our partner doesn’t care for us, or worse, doesn’t love us. This is a terrible feeling of rejection, and if you are in a relationship, you have experienced this moment. Everyone has, if they’ve lived with another person that they’re close to.

All of us carry around a lot of feelings all the time. That’s just a characteristic of being human. Many of us carry around some deep love for our partners yet we don’t tell them about it. I am sometimes amazed during counseling sessions, when I will ask a man if he loves his girlfriend or wife and he’ll say, “Of course I do,” and then look over at her and say, “She knows that.”

He doesn’t tell her he loves her. He tells me he does and that she knows it. He accepts the fact that she already got his love declarations and assumes that’s all she needs. He already told her this and so it will always exist.

Well…

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 we get into a scrape with the person we love we often wind up in a difficult place. We sometimes hurt and feel unloved. Maybe we get mad at our mate and sulk or lash out. These are very common positions that many couples engage in. No one likes them. They are difficult and unpleasant.

As a couples specialist I am always trying to understand how to explain relationships in the simplest ways so people can improve how they interact with the person they love. And as I was thinking about this concept it occurred to me that there are really two places we end up occupying after a fight. We are either doing something about our partners or we are doing something about ourselves.

There are probably lots of people in your life you say you love; parents, cousins, siblings, children, friends, neighbors. If we think about our community, we might feel close and loving toward many people. But if you look closely, they don’t all feel the same.

Learning how to overcome anger can be a struggle, but you can definitely do it if you put your mind to it.

I was thinking about all the people we know who get mad. You know who they are. They are the ones we are careful around because we don’t want to get them upset. They are the ones who get mad out of nowhere and then there is a problem.

We all know someone or some people like this. Maybe it’s you. I know it’s me. When I was a little girl if something didn’t go my way I got mad. This is what I saw my mother do when she was disappointed or frustrated. This is what I learned to do too.

The perfect relationship is something many of us aspire to have.

All humans dream. All of us have ideas and desires and dreams about being happy in a a perfect relationship. We all long for everything to work out just right, so we can be happy. This longing is how most of us are wired, and it’s a hard road to be on.

I was talking with my cousin’s husband the other day and I felt myself wanting to stress a point from my experience. It was a memory from my history that was really important to me, yet he was talking about something that was equally important to him; it was not in agreement with, and different from my story.

It felt like we were getting ready to disagree about parts of the story when I realized how important we as humans feel about our particular memories. It’s as if the way we think about things is so vital to our way of presenting ourselves in the world and to each other. This moment gave me some insight as to how we as partners in a relationship might want to argue to the death with our mate over memories that we perceive as not remembered correctly.

When we think about describing ourselves to others, most of us probably think of ourselves as kind people. If you are in a relationship than you would probably tell people you love your partner. If you think of extended family you might say you love them too.

But I know in my own life, when I was struggling to make something of myself, when I look back, I don’t see myself as being kind. Yes I was always nice when I was feeling good. But when I felt bad, no one got kindness.

When I was mad I stayed mad and everyone around me knew it. Kindness? Are you kidding? I was MAD, and that’s where I stayed.

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.

I'm retired.

Linda's Relationship Counseling Blog

Staying Together Through Anger and Adversity

Does My Boyfriend Love Me? How Can I Tell?

My Husband Ignores Me. What Do I Do?

Conflict in Relationships: Help Make Peace, Not War

Why Love Can Feel Different

How to Overcome Anger, Because Mad Makes a Mess

Why The Perfect Relationship May Not Be What You Think

Why Our Experiences Are So Important

Learn Kindness for Your Relationship

How Your Husband / Wife Doesn’t Mind-Read, & Why It Matters