Hi, this is Linda Nusbaum. It's been amazing being able to help everyone for so long, but it's time for me to retire. The site is up for archival purposes, but I've closed my practice.
Thank you.
All of us have habits we bring into our relationships. Some of them are very good, but some of them can bring about pain and hardship to our partners. And if we have those bad habits, what can we do about them?
Plenty! But the first thing we have to do is understand what it is we are doing.
All of us in a relationship savor when we get along with our mates. We love the times when we are connected and when nothing pulls us away from that connection.
But when our feelings get hurt… well, that is usually another story altogether. We often just stew in our own discomfort and stay isolated from the one we love. This is very common with couples. I have even experienced it in my own relationship.
All of us are good people. We all intend to do well with people we love. Sometimes we are not our best and that is when difficulty can arise.
Here is a way to remember your goodness and it is a practice that might work for you. Let’s say you got into an argument with your partner. You might start to tell yourself something about your behavior, or their behavior and stay angry for a time.
This is suffering. Yes, an argument did happen. That’s what occurred. But the difficulty is inside your mind where you might be rehashing what happened, why it happened, and how you could do better or how your partner could do better.
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?”
One of the hardest things to teach someone in a relationship is to stop getting angry at their mate. I know because this is how I grew up and this is the response I used every time I got my feelings hurt.
I know there are many, many people who suffer from this and it is a big problem for those of us who get mad. But there are ways of understanding what we do and helping ourselves do something different.
It’s funny how we couple with our partner. Some of us are fixers in the world. If there is a problem, we always in our mind look for solutions to help out. Other times we get our feelings hurt and we are the ones who need their service.
But these two roles are very delicate in a relationship with two very different people. If you are coupled with someone who is always trying to fix or help or give you suggestions, sometimes this might be great, but other times you might just need something else.
Often when couples fight there is a whole swirl of emotions from each partner. And if it is a big argument then there might be a lot of distance between the two as each person soothes their hurt feelings.
It sometimes takes days or weeks for some couples to come back together again, and when they do it’s likely they don’t talk about what happened that tore them apart in the first place.
As a couple’s therapist I find it so reassuring that almost each couple I help has two different types of people in the relationship. One person is expressive and forthcoming and the other one is silent and isolates.
In the beginning of any relationship these traits are not seen. We are all so busy just finding our person that we are entranced with them and they are for the moment, perfect.
But after a several months we all start to see that what we thought about them is not exactly who they are. You see what we do is put them into our minds as the perfect person. We fit them into what we have been wishing and waiting for.
Many of us in our lives end up in situations that we hadn’t expected. We find ourselves just planted in a life and we might even wonder, “How did I get here?”
This is not uncommon, especially in relationships. We enter the relationship with the highest of expectations. And it might sound like, “I love this person. They love me. We are so happy. I have never felt like this before.”
This is a wonderful feeling. The problem comes when it changes and then we wonder what we were thinking. “Was it really so great I didn’t notice things about my mate that I should have seen? Did I miss some of these important cues?”
All of us have the capacity to love our partners. And there are times when we do and feel so close to them. There are also times when we can’t feel any further away because we got our feelings hurt.
Many of us in relationships vacillate between loving our mate and wishing they were different because the part that we don’t like keeps grating on us.
This is pretty common. Many of us wish we could design our partner to be just what we want so we can be completely comfortable. Some of us don’t even want to hear what they have to say because our needs are not getting met.