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.
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.
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.
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.
Sometimes when we get our feelings hurt, we want to lash out at the one who caused us to feel bad. This is pretty common for some of us. I know it was for me.
I grew up in a household where my mother was overwhelmed and released her frustration by yelling at her children. I know she loved us, but as a child I learned that this is what you do when you don’t like something: you yell.
When we are in a relationship and we get our feelings hurt we often forget that the person who hurt us is one we love. We might even see them as the enemy because they did something to us and it made us feel bad.
But what if we had the ability to remember all of the good qualities in the person that we fell in love with? Wouldn’t that make it a lot easier for us to return to our connection with them instead of hating them for what they did?
Yes, I know this is a big stretch for many people, but here is the thing. Most of the time when our feelings get hurt it is not intentional. We might make it into a war, but the beginning misunderstanding is usually just something that didn’t feel good.