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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Sometimes when I work with couples, I see something that is hard to see. Two people who love each other who can’t hear each other. This often happens when there are two strong willed people in the relationship.
I know I am very strong willed. When I met my husband-to-be, I had been working on myself in my own personal counseling and I was pretty sure I was ready to meet my soulmate. And I did.
Oftentimes in our relationships our partners will speak and act in ways that seem very strange to us. We will wonder why they are doing what they are doing or saying what they are saying, and our brain will immediately figure out what is wrong with them.
After they finish, we might even tell them that the reason they are talking the way they are talking is because of how they grew up and how they now sound like their parent and how this is something that isn’t resolved.
We all start out loving our mates. This is just how all relationships begin. Everything is perfect for a time and then things start to get more difficult.
This happens to all relationships. When the difficulty begins, that’s a signal that each person has to do some adjusting to make the relationship work. Only most of us have been single before we got into our relationship and we know how to be single a lot better than we know how to be a couple.
So, when we start to get our feelings hurt, some of us build a safety wall around ourselves so we don’t get hurt anymore…
All of us who fall in love want that love to stay as beautiful as it was in the beginning. This is only natural. When we finally meet our special someone and we feel the amazing connectedness we just want it to last and last and last.
Unfortunately, there is a name for this wonderful time. It’s called the “Honeymoon” period. It’s the time when everything is perfect. You get your person, they get you, there is never a hassle or disagreement, everything is wonderful.
But this time doesn’t last forever. In fact, it probably lasts somewhere between a year or two, depending on the people. This time is designed to meet our special person and that’s about it.
When we are in a relationship with another person, we often have a hard time being ourselves. We have our own habits and likes and dislikes that are uniquely ours and not our mates. But often when we strive for what we want we create conflict with our partners.
We will never be the same as our mate. And there are plenty of reasons why. We usually think very differently than they do. If we don’t know this is very common, we might even think that there is no way that we can ever understand each other because we are so different.
Some of us didn’t get a chance to figure out what our feelings meant when we were little. If our caregivers couldn’t read their feelings it is likely they couldn’t teach us ours.
If we didn’t learn what was going on inside of us we might have a couple of different behavioral responses. In my case if I was upset I would blame the one who upset me. Since I didn’t learn otherwise, I just used this habit well into my forties.
You can see as I write this that blaming someone for my difficulty is not effective. In fact it usually makes the person you blame react with some kind of defense or their own anger…