I Am Sad and My Partner Doesn’t Even Notice

Sometimes couples can stand even the hardest things. Take two people who love each other and who have been together for a while. He is oblivious about his wife’s feelings and she is a mess. Make no mistake, they love each other and they long to be happy, but the truth is they haven’t a clue how to get there.

Being in a relationship with the person we love is one of life’s greatest joys. Many of us long for that special person who we can just feel safe and happy and at home with. Most of us don’t need a lot. Love is really simple, a good connection, care, compassion, understanding. That’s really what people want from their beloved.

When Our Partners Can’t Listen

Most of the time when two people in a relationship feel unhappy part of the problem is that they don’t feel heard by their partner. When we feel heard and understood we often feel validated and our problems seem to dissolve and we feel better. If our partner can’t hear what’s troubling us or what we need we feel alone and isolated.

So if it’s that simple, why is it so hard for couples to do it? Most of the couples I work with want to have a better relationship. They come to counseling because they want to feel close and connected again. Both people are usually pretty earnest about their intent. They see what they want to have, but they are usually stumped on how to achieve it.

Sometimes they blame the other person because they think if their partner really loved them they would know how to make them happy. Unfortunately many couples aren’t talking about what they want and need from their partner and that makes it difficult for the partner to know what to do.

Here’s what I see when couples can’t hear each other. One person says how they feel about something, or some incident. The person talking feels bad about what happened. What they want is for their partner to understand their pain. They want an audience from the person who knows them the best. They want to feel like their partner gets what happened to them. They might even want the partner to apologize. This means that the listener is not thinking about how guilty they feel for causing the pain. This means that the listener is also not thinking of ways the partner has hurt them and waiting to respond. But that’s usually what happens. One person talks, and the other person waits to retort and sometimes retaliate. No one is listening.

In order to feel heard, validated and get some resolution, the teller of the pain needs to just tell it to the person that may have caused it. That’s it, nothing more. This is part of the healing process that couples need to repair. One pained person talks about what happened to them. The other person listens without going into their pain. Unfortunately that’s the dance that most couples fall into. One person talks and the other person tops them. This starts a back and forth with no winner and no end. Both parties end up feeling exasperated, frustrated, drained and alone.

I help couples learn a new way to communicate. Both people get their say, but they have to take turns. It really doesn’t matter who goes first, but it does matter that the listener just do the job of listening so the talker gets heard. This does not come naturally. Most of us aren’t taught that sharing our pain actually helps us heal. Many of us learn that we must fight to be heard, that we have to express our pain in order to get relief. But that style usually leaves people feeling unhappy and alone.

Once couples learn these tools of being the talker and the listener they never feel alone in the relationship again. They might even feel terrific, realizing that their mate really cares.

Join Linda’s mailing list www.lindanusbaum.com

Send your comments to linda@lindanusbaum.com

When Couples Stop Communicating

Some people stay in their relationships even when they feel distant from their partner. I’ve seen couples spend decades with a person they don’t really know, or think about. They just find a way to exist inside the relationship. It’s like they
live alone, even though they are a couple.

People who find themselves in this type of situation might wonder if their life is happy enough. They might quietly ask themselves if they could have a better life by making some changes. Maybe they resign themselves and just accept their circumstances.

I’ve worked with couples who have been together for decades. They tell me they don’t want to end their marriage. They tell me they love the other person. What I often see are two people who believe they know each other so well they don’t even see the other person anymore. They’ve become people who can answer the other’s sentences. They already know what the other person is going to say even before they say it. The curiosity and wonder about their mate has vanished.

They come to counseling to get “better”. They want what they used to have; closeness, laughter, possibilities. They want me to help them find it again, as if it’s just hidden somewhere and I can use my therapeutic x-ray vision to spot it. I wish it was this easy. I wish I could just help couples feel good about being in their relationship again.

But I know it’s not that simple. I do have good vision, and I can probably help couples see what happened to their relationship and why they feel the way they do. This is often helpful, but it’s just the beginning. The real work comes
when each person wants to have a better relationship and isn’t expecting the other to make it better for them.

If one or both people in the relationship are waiting for the other to change, that relationship is going to stay the same. It isn’t up to one person to make it different for the other. A relationship improves when both people look at themselves.
When each person starts to see how they talk, and react to the other person, then there’s a good chance for change.

In counseling each person begins to understand what he or she is about. They learn what they have wanted and needed from the other person and they acquire the skills to ask for it. If a couple wants to save a relationship it’s likely both want to see their partner happy. If this is your situation why not try counseling, dig in and fight for what you really want; love, closeness, understanding, kindness, support.

Feeling Small

Feeling small. It’s a condition everyone experiences now and then. It can occur out of nowhere. Maybe you are in a conversation and someone talks about something you don’t know anything about. You might feel small. Or what about times when someone forgets to include you in something you wanted to be a part of. You might feel small here too. Feeling small, it happens. It happens to all of us.

I think what we’re really feeling though is disconnected from others, disconnected from someone, something or an event. I think it’s a feeling we get when we are alone and we don’t want to be. I also think it’s very, very common. We all feel this “small” feeling at times.

So what do you do about it? The first thing to do is recognize that it happens and then discover what happens to you. Get familiar with the feelings inside yourself and start to put words around it. Maybe it feels like isolation, maybe it feels lonely, perhaps it is sadness, and whatever it is, begin to label it. What you will be doing is learning about yourself, and your inner world. These are essential steps to describing what is going on inside yourself.

So why is it important to understand and label what’s happening inside? First it helps us identify what’s happening with us, so we just don’t feel so terrible. Second, when we understand what’s going on inside us we can explain it to others.

So why would you want to describe feelings of loneliness and sadness to anyone, because all these feelings get evoked because you are alone. You feel disconnected from other people. If you talk about the feelings, no matter what they are, you will be connecting, which is really what the soul is missing.

I know it’s hard to let people know when you feel these feelings. These are the kinds of feelings most of us were taught to keep hidden from others. Many of us were taught to just show happy feelings and hide the hard ones; discomfort, anger, frustration, fear, worry, sadness, guilt, shame. Few people are taught that these feelings are O.K. to reveal. Few people feel comfortable saying things like, “I feel angry at you right now,” or “I am full of sadness,” and “I feel guilty about that.” These are not things that come naturally, but when we can reveal them to others we get rid of the “small” feeling.

When we know what’s happening inside us, when we can identify our feelings, we can then learn how to express them to others. Usually when we are at this stage we are not yelling, we are calmly explaining what is going on with us. When others hear what’s happening inside us almost every time they will want to come closer. A person’s natural instinct is to move toward another when they are describing something vulnerable. That is what makes us human, our ability to move toward and help others.

So when you experience those times where you just feel left out or “small”, try and remember to turn toward another. It will lead you toward the connectedness we all crave.