When We Blame Our Partner

Many of us bring our old childhood habits into our relationships. They appear whenever our feelings get hurt and if we haven’t worked though these old patterns, we will use them on our partners. Like blaming them when we get hurt.

I grew up getting mad at the people who hurt me. I know this is not a good way to let people know they hurt you, but I was not trained to do any better. My single mother was overwhelmed trying to manage three rambunctious children and she often just got frustrated and yelled at us.

This is what I saw, so this is what I learned. When things didn’t go my way, I yelled. Of course, when I grew up, I didn’t yell that much, but when I really got my feelings hurt, I did. It took a while to figure out that I was bringing a lot of the chaos into my life by just getting angry.

Every human has patterns in their lives that they use over and over again. Some of these are necessary, but others might get in the way of a good relationship. So, how do we change those difficult patterns? By using our natural and always present awareness.

So, what is awareness? This is the part of all humans that can look at our own behavior and say something like, “Wow, I shouldn’t have yelled at my partner,” or “Why didn’t I say something when my mate hurt my feelings?”

All of us create our habits when we are little. I know it would make more sense if we could make them when we are fully grown, but that is not how humans work.

We all have to figure out life as a single digit little person. Let’s say you had a perfect family and your mother and father and siblings were always kind and caring. If this happened to you then wonderful. You are probably a fully formed human and your habits might be fantastic.

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.

We all make interpretations about our lives. Something happens to us and then our mind tells us a story about what happened. And if you are in a relationship with someone you love, you may be constantly interpreting what your partner does to you and why.

This is just something to look at. And if this article helps, great. But when I learned about my own interpretations, I thought it was very useful, and maybe these thoughts will be useful to you as well.

I often do this, where my husband will do or say something, I will feel something and then I will wonder why he said or did what he did. Maybe when I explain it this way you can understand it too.

Often when people get their feelings hurt they take what happened to them and re-run it through their brain again and again. Sometimes we can see that we should have said something different, and sometimes we just get madder and madder.

This situation happens in all our relationships, especially with the people we are really close to. I know that when I used to get mad at my partner I would just “stew” over what happened. It was as if I was marinating in the juices of what was done to me.

The more I sat in the stew the madder I got. You see how this works? We get our feelings hurt, something normal that happens in relationships, and then we run it through our minds over and over and over.

When you get into misunderstandings or disagreements with your mate, what do you do? All of us have a reaction, and that is normal. People will not always understand each other even if they love each other dearly. And when the misunderstandings occur, most of us get our feelings hurt.

Sometimes those hurt feelings cause us to either pull our hurt feelings inside ourselves and say nothing. Other times, we do the opposite and lash out at those who hurt our feelings. This combination of systems plays out often in relationships.

All of us in relationships get our feelings hurt. I know I do. It happened again last night. I worked late and then came home. My husband had prepared dinner and had been waiting.

I felt the pressure but sometimes things can’t be helped. I had some details of my work to continue as I sat down at the table, texting and completing my duties. I was involved with tasks on my phone.

And while this was happening, something was also happening with my husband. He got very, very silent and stopped being there. He was of course sitting there eating, but I could not feel him anymore. I just left.

I was listening to a friend talk about her childhood. She grew up in a city, surrounded by streets and buildings. She talked about how in the middle of a certain street there was a break in the concrete and a tree grew up through the ground.

This tree was so unique that if you drove that street, you would have to drive around the tree. That tree lived and thrived, even though everything was aimed against it. And that tree was full and amazing and it had to squeeze itself through cracks in the street.

All we really want from the one we love is to know that we matter, and we are special to our partner. It is a very specific feeling that we must receive from the person we love. Because we love them so much, we must feel they love us just as much. And we feel it so fiercely when we don’t get it.

And when that happens we end up feeling as if our mates just don’t care enough. I saw this recently in a client. She was hoping to see her beloved for a special day but the partner had other things to do. On any other day, this might have been OK, but not on this day.

I'm retired.

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