When Your Relationship Feels Broken

Sometimes when people call to find out about couples counseling I can hear panic in their voice. I can sense a feeling of worry and fear. Something broke and the person on the phone doesn’t know how to fix it and that’s why they are calling.

This is a terrible place to find yourself: not knowing if you can make it in your relationship, wondering if it’s broken, and daring to hope it can ever be better. All this is pressing on the individual who is making the call. It’s a helpless kind of feeling. It’s as if their past experience amounts to nothing, and they must do something radical to survive.

Many of us lash out at our mates when we get upset. This is a habit or pattern we might have used since childhood. It might have worked then, but I have a feeling your partner is not very crazy about it and wishes it would stop.

I know, I lived this way for years. I would get upset and yell at the person who hurt me. I learned this as a little girl and continued to use it well into my forties.

All couples start out beautifully. Each person loves the other and there is a belief that the amazing union will last forever. But as we all know in a year or two things start to change.

It’s not that we stop loving our mate, it’s just that since our heart is so open, we get hurt when there is a misunderstanding. Sometimes these disagreements can separate us and keep us from connecting. This is pretty common too.

But when there is a mate who feels they have to leave the relationship in order to feel good about themselves well that is another situation entirely.

Many times, in relationships people ask their partner to try and change their behavior. This happens often where someone likes things done one way and the mate wants it done differently.

It would be just great if everyone in a couple were to say, “Fine, you do it your way and I will do it mine,” without any disagreement. But that is usually not the way humans are wired.

Many of us in relationships dream of having the perfect life with our mate. But how many of us actually wish that our partners were different? I bet there are a number of us.

This is when we know in our minds what kind of partner we want. We look at our current mate and we think, “If only they would be like this, or do these things, then everything would be perfect.”

This is not unusual at all. When we find the person we want to love we might have been wishing for this for a long time. We might have even wished that this person would look and act a certain way too.

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 come to our relationships with the way we navigated our life before we met our beloveds. Every one of us has a habit of how we handle difficulties, problems or our need for change.

This is just how humans work. So, when we meet the one we love and they love us and we are mad about them, it is very hard to believe in that moment that they will not understand everything about us.

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.

I'm retired.

Tag Archives: unhappiness

When Your Relationship Feels Broken

What to do With Anger

When a Partner Cheats

If We Can’t Change Our Partner

When We Wish Our Partner Were Different

What to Do About Broken Trust in a Relationship

When One Partner Stays Quiet

Changing Our Harmful Relationship Habits

How Our Habits Crush Our Connections

Try Starting Over