S2 EP236 – Breaking Bonds: Are You and Your Partner Hurting Each Other?
Episode Summary
You and your partner might be hurting each other in numerous ways without realizing how and why you are doing this. Discover the various ways you might be breaking the bonds between you.
Hi everyone. Dr. Margaret Paul here with the Inner Bonding Podcast. Today I’m addressing some of the ways people in relationships hurt each other and break their bonds, often without realizing how hurtful they are being.
Are you aware of how you may be hurting your partner?
Are you aware of how your partner may be hurting you?
Are you aware of the painful feelings of loneliness, heartache and heartbreak you likely feel when you are disconnected from your loved one and unable to share love?
The sharing of love is the most wonderful experience in life. You connect and share love when both of you are open hearted with each other – kind, caring, gentle, tender, understanding, and compassionate. You connect and share love when you are both open to learning – listening well and caring about your own and your partner’s feelings, even if your partner is upset about how you might have hurt him or her.
Do you care about hurting your partner? Does your partner care about hurting you?
In close relationships, we are very sensitive to each other’s energy. Closed, protective, controlling energy – energy that is harsh, dismissive, defensive, resistant, shut down, judgmental, blaming, or angry – creates a disconnection between partners. So does complaining and being a victim. While you might cover up the pain of the loneliness and heartache of this disconnection with your own closed, protective, controlling energy, inside you are hurting and not attending to your pain.
When you haven’t learned to compassionately connect with your own painful feelings relative to your partner’s disconnected energy, and attend to your loneliness and heartache with deep kindness and tenderness, you will have a hard time caring about your partner’s hurt. You want your partner to care about how he or she is hurting you, and your partner wants the same thing, but if neither of you are caring about your own feelings, then it is likely that you are not caring about each other’s feelings either. When you disconnect from yourself by closing down from feeling your loneliness and heartache, and your partner does the same, there is no way of connecting with each other. You have created a disconnected protective circle where both of you are hurting.
The beginning of healing this disconnection is to be willing to feel your loneliness and heartache with compassion toward yourself. This awareness about your own feelings will enable you to gently speak up to your partner, saying something like, “What you are saying right now is hurting me,” or “Your judgmental tone is hurtful to me.” When you can gently tell your partner what he or she is doing that is hurtful to you, and your partner can do the same, you can each learn much about yourselves and each other.
When you react with anger, judgment, or withdrawal, your partner may not know what he or she did or said that was hurtful to you. Most of us are not very aware of our own protective controlling behavior, but when you are open to learning about it with your partner, you can learn much that will bring you closer to each other.
Relationships are fertile ground for learning about yourself – about your unloving behavior that creates the very disconnection you don’t want, and about the loving behavior that brings aliveness, joy, and passion to your relationship. The key here is to stay open to learning with yourself and your partner about your feelings and behavior. By staying open to learning about your painful feelings and your partner’s feelings, you can both learn to be kinder, gentler, more connected and more loving with each other.
Isn’t this what we all want – the sweet tender moments and the alive passionate moments that occur when we are loving and connected with each other? You will be able to have more and more of these moments as you learn how to take loving care of your own feelings so that you don’t disconnect from your partner with your protective, controlling behavior.
Are you aware that you might be hurting your partner when you don’t take responsibility for your feelings, and for your own sense of safety and security? When you don’t take responsibility for your feelings and instead ignore your feelings, you create an empty black hole inside that needs to be filled up. The empty place in you pulls on your partner to fill you up with attention, approval, or sex. Your partner may end up feeling used rather than loved when you are making him or her responsible for your feelings.
If you are a person who believes that it’s your partner’s responsibility to make you feel loved, happy, safe, and secure, then you are handing over your inner child to your partner, and your partner might resist being the loving adult for your inner child. Instead of being able to share love, you are trying to get love, and your partner might be doing the same thing, and all the ways you each try to get love might be breaking the bonds between you and hurting each other.
Partners start their relationship system early, and if they are both loving themselves and taking responsibility for their feelings, their system will be healthy. But all too often, a dysfunctional system is set up very early in the relationship.
While you might believe that putting yourself aside and focusing all your attention on the other person’s feelings and needs is loving, this is anything but loving. Compromising yourself is a form of control. Your hope is that if you are wonderful enough and sacrifice yourself enough, you will avoid conflict, and the other person will give you the love you are seeking. But ignoring your own feelings and needs is not only a form of control, it’s also a form of self-abandonment, and it sets up unrealistic expectations with your partner. Trying to be the best caretaker you can be to try to have control over getting the other person’s love and approval and avoiding conflict will eventually backfire and hurts both of you. By ignoring your own feelings and needs and doing everything you can to avoid conflict, you are disrespecting yourself and making sure that your partner has no respect for you, which means he or she may see you as an object to be used. The more you are invisible to yourself, the more disrespect and demands you may receive from your partner.
On the other hand, being demanding that the other person live up to your expectations also cause pain. The demanding end of this dysfunctional relationship system often starts slow and gradually builds to becoming more and more demanding of the other person. If he or she doesn’t meet your expectations, you might criticize, blame, chastise, berate, threaten, ignore, yell at, belittle, discount, ridicule, lecture, debate, and argue with your partner. Your intent is to gain control over getting the other person to completely give him or herself up and focus only on filling your emptiness and needs with their love, approval, attention, sex, devotion, time, and adoration. You become the taker, making sure to keep your partner feeling guilty and responsible for your feelings of security and self-worth. You want your partner to attend to you instead of to him or herself. You see your partner as an object to service you. You crazy make your partner by accusing him or her of being selfish when he or she doesn’t want to do what you want, when in reality you are the one being selfish. This is how you attempt to stay in control.
As your relationship starts to decline, you move more and more into thinking and behaving as a victim of the other person’s choices. This leads to more fights or to distance, lack of passion, lack of fun, and a complete inability to communicate about anything, even minor situations. In discussions, you seek to be right, win your point, and make your partner wrong. You tend to see this is a competition for who is the good one and the right one. Or you just collapse and give in, seeing yourself as a victim.
At this point one or both of you might withdraw, spending less and less time with your partner, spending it alone or with other people, or in front of the TV. You might be convincing yourself that your misery is completely your partner’s fault, and that you picked the wrong person, again. Both you and your partner feel hurt as long as neither of you take responsibility for your own feelings, needs, behavior, and choices.
At this point, one of you might seek counseling or you might see a couple’s counselor, which can be very helpful. But all too often, you seek counseling
to get your partner to change, rather than deal with your own controlling behavior of being a taker or caretaker. You might find yourself telling the therapist everything your partner does wrong, using the therapist’s office as just another arena to prove that you are right and your partner is wrong, or you are the good one and your partner is the bad one, rather than being open to doing your own inner work. Perhaps you are convinced that it’s your partner who needs to learn and practice Inner Bonding, not you.
If your goal was to create a miserable relationship, you have succeeded. Now you can righteously leave your partner and do the whole thing again, which is what will likely happen if you don’t do your own inner healing work.
One of the most common complaints I receive in my work with relationships is “We hardly ever have sex.” Often one person is angry and complaining around this issue, and the other person might feel guilty, withdrawn, or that something is wrong with them that they don’t want sex with their partner. Both people might be feeling hurt by this issue and be blaming each other for it.
If you are the one who wants sex and your partner doesn’t, you might want to notice that anger and complaining are not at all erotic, so your anger and complaints are sure to turn your partner off. Anger and complaining are a form of control, so when this is the dynamic, your partner likely feels hurt and used regarding having sex.
Neediness is also not erotic. Both men and women tend to be turned off by someone who “needs sex to feel loved and validated.” Most women are not attracted to little boys, so women are generally completely turned off by a man who approaches her as a needy little boy, needing sex to feel validated, safe, and secure. Likewise, most men are also not attracted to needy women, women who need to have sex to feel validated. Neediness and emptiness come from self-abandonment, which means that you are not taking responsibility for your feelings of self-worth. You have not learned to love and validate yourself, so you look to your partner to do this for you, which is generally a huge turn-off for your partner. Your partner isn’t going to be turned on to you and will feel used when you are using sex to feel full and validated.
Most people, especially women, need some interaction and emotional intimacy to feel connected enough to want to have sex. Do you spend most of your free time watching TV or on the Internet, or doing frivolous or mundane things, so that by the time you get into bed and may want to have sex, your partner is too bored with you or too disconnected from you to be interested? Are you a couch potato?
Are you withdraw? Do you shut down your feelings and are totally absorbed in things other than being present with your partner? Are you too busy to interact with your partner? Do you wait for your partner to initiate connection or initiate sex? Are you passive, taking no initiative, protecting against rejection instead of taking responsibility for what you want?
Do you take no physical responsibility? Are you sloppy? Do you come to bed smelling badly? Do you eat poorly and don’t exercise and then get sick often and do not have a lot of energy? Do you come to bed intoxicated, giving your partner the message that you need to be under the influence to have sex with him or her?
The real key to never having sex is to do some or all of these things and then deny that these behaviors are the cause of your lack of sex. You can continue to be angry and complain only as long as you take no responsibility for these choices.
Another aspect in a dysfunctional relationship system might be possessiveness. I often hear from my clients statements such as:
“I freak out when my husband even looks at another woman. I trust him not to wander, so I don’t know why this upsets me so much.”
“My partner spends too much time with her friends and family. What’s the point of being together if she’s always gone a couple of nights a week?”
“My wife wants to go back to school now that the children are older. She doesn’t need to work, so why does she want to do this? It’s going to take up way too much of her time.”
“My husband has to go out of town for work a lot. I feel so angry about this. What about me?”
“I love to dance, and my husband doesn’t, so why does he get so upset when I dance with someone else – even with another woman?”
What’s going on here? What is behind this possessiveness?
Possessiveness is the result of self-abandonment. Self-abandonment often creates deep feelings of insecurity. When a person is possessive, it is because they want their partner to fill up the emptiness and take away the feelings of insecurity that come from self-abandonment. And your possessiveness is hurting your partner.
If you are possessive, do you believe it is your partner’s responsibility to make you feel loved and secure? This is a huge false belief, and here’s why:
Even if your partner spends all his or her time with you, never looks at another person and is very loving to you, you will still feel insecure and empty inside if you abandon yourself by:
- Ignoring your feelings
- Judging yourself
- Turing to addictions to self-medicate, and
- Making your partner or others responsible for your feelings
Imagine that you have a child who you ignore, judge, medicate and try to give away to others. Will this child feel secure? When you abandon yourself, you are abandoning your inner child, which always creates insecurity, no matter how loving your partner is to you. While your partner’s love makes you feel better for the moment – just as any addiction works to make you feel better for the moment – it cannot heal the insecurity that is being caused by your own self-abandonment.
If you are at the other end of possessiveness:
- Do you feel responsible for your partner’s insecurity, and believe it is your job to make your partner feel secure?
- Do you give yourself up and not do what you want to do, out of fear of your partner’s reaction?
- Do you do what you want, but lie about it?
If you do any of these things, you are contributing to your partner’s insecurity rather than helping him or her learn to become inwardly secure. Care-taking your partner serves to reinforce your partner’s false belief that you are responsible for making him or her feel secure. Enabling your partner in this way perpetuates the problem.
Your responsibility is to tune in to how lonely and heartbreaking it feels to you when your partner doesn’t support you in doing what brings you joy, or in just being who you are. Your responsibility is to focus on taking loving care of your own inner child, who feels anxious and unloved when you abandon yourself to care-take your partner. By learning to take loving care of yourself in the face of your partner’s controlling behavior, you not only heal your own anxiety; you become a role model of personal responsibility, which may help your partner learn to take loving care of himself or herself.
It is important to accept that no matter how loving you are to your partner or how much you give yourself up, your partner will become secure only when he or she learns to be loving to himself or to herself.
Do you try to take responsibility for your partner’s feelings?
William and Sophia consulted with me because Sophia was ready to leave their marriage of 12 years. The only reason she hadn’t already left was because of their two children.
“I feel trapped in this marriage,” Sophia told me in our first session. “I think that I still love William, yet as soon as he walks into the house, I want to get away from him. Everything he says annoys me. I don’t know what’s wrong. I just know that I have to get away.”
I spent some time learning about their backgrounds. William had come from a perfectionist mother whose love was conditionally based on his doing things “right.” As I spoke with William, it became apparent that he had learned well to do things right, but that he was totally out of touch with his feelings. He operated from his head, constantly trying to say the right thing to control how others saw him – and especially how Sophia saw him.
The moment he opened his mouth Sophia felt pulled on to give him attention and approval. Her response to this was to resist by totally shutting down to him. She didn’t want to be controlled by him.
Both William and Sophia were abandoning themselves.
William had completely abandoned himself and instead was making Sophia responsible for his feelings of adequacy and lovability. Sophia was also abandoning herself by withdrawing. Neither one was taking care of their own feelings – their own inner child. William was trying to control, and Sophia was resisting being controlled, which created a completely stuck system.
I worked with both William and Sophia with Inner Bonding, helping them to learn to move their focus inside their bodies instead of staying in their minds. There was much pain within both of them from their inner abandonment – pain that they both believed was being caused by the other person.
Sophia agreed to stay in the relationship while they worked on themselves. Because they were both devoted to learning to take care of their own feelings, change happened fairly quickly. William stopped pulling so much and learned to do Inner Bonding when he felt insecure. Sophia stopped resisting when she felt pulled at and instead started to take loving action for herself, disengaging and telling William that she didn’t want to be with him when he was pulling on her. She was able to create enough space for herself that she no longer felt trapped.
Sometimes partners each pull for different things.
Jacob and Emma consulted with me for a very similar situation. In this case, both of them were pulling for different things, and both were resisting. Jacob was pulling on Emma for sex, while Emma was pulling on Jacob to deal with his feelings. Emma resisted having sex and Jacob resisted taking care of his feelings. Emma was overly focused on Jacob, constantly suggesting ways that he could think about things and do things to feel better. Her behavior towards him was highly controlling and invasive, and he responded by shutting down emotionally. At the same time, he would constantly do things for Emma, hoping that by caretaking her she would be turned on to him. Needless to say, they were completely stuck in their system.
I worked with both of them on completely accepting that they had no control over the other’s feelings or behavior. Both were convinced that they were just trying to be helpful to the other person. It was very challenging for both of them to accept that their “helpfulness” was controlling, since both of them were very addicted to being helpful as a way to attempt to control each other. As each of them took their eyes off the other and started to take care of themselves, their relationship gradually improved.
I’ve been working with couples for 54 years, and over and over, I see relationships healing when both people are willing to do their inner healing works. Relationships can even heal when one person is doing Inner Bonding, because when one person changes their end of the system, the system can change.
However, if you are with a partner who believes that you are the problem and has no desire to take responsibility for themselves, it might be time to leave. Of course if there is physical or extensive emotional abuse, it is time to leave. If you are in a relationship with a narcissist or a sociopath, please don’t expect any change. For a person to heal, they need to be aware that they are a major part of the problems between you, so if they are in denial about this, then don’t expect any change. At this point, you will need to either fully accept the relationship as it is or leave it. If you learn to take loving care of yourself, it will become clear to you what you need to do.
You have the best chance of healing your relationship, stop hurting each other and re-establish your loving connecting when both of you are open to learning about loving yourself by taking responsibility for your feelings of self-worth and security, as well as for your physical health and spiritual connection. The practice of Inner Bonding is a very powerful way of doing this healing work.
I invite you to join me for my bi-monthly masterclass and receive my live help, which you can learn about at https://innerbondinghub.com/membership.
I invite you to heal your relationships with my 30-Day online video relationship course: Wildly, Deeply, Joyously in Love.
And you can learn so much about loving yourself and creating loving relationships from my new book, “Lonely No More: The Astonishing Power of Inner Bonding” and from our website at https://www.innerbonding.com.
I’m sending you my love and my blessings.
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