This post is Part 2 of a series.
In Part 1 of this series, I wrote about the experience of telling your partner that he’s hurt you only to be blindsided by his anger and defensiveness. I described the shock of setting out with the intention to create connection, feel understood, receive comfort and acknowledgment, and maybe even an apology, and instead, to be slammed by your partner’s emotional attack.
Furthermore, I described what so many women assume when this happens, namely, that the reason they got attacked was that they didn’t use the right words, didn’t frame their hurt in a way that their partner could understand or hear, or that they picked the wrong time to share their truth. For instance, maybe their partner had had a bad day, or the restaurant was loud, he was hungry, or he was in some other less-than-perfect state. Whatever the cause, it was her fault for expecting him to empathize with her when she had chosen the wrong moment to ask.
Clearly, had she been more skillful at expressing her hurt, her partner would have taken responsibility for his actions and felt remorse for having caused her suffering, even if it was unintentional. He would have been able to set aside his own ego and hear her; her hurt would have mattered—because she matters to him.
No matter how many times, in how many “languages,” they explain why they were wounded, why they are entitled to compassion, and that their hurt is legitimate, they still haven’t chosen the right words to explain it and still haven’t gotten it just right. Women, in their mind, remain the problem.
And so women hatch another plan and another script for the next time their partner hurts them—a new strategy to properly explain their suffering so that he can hear it. They stay on this treadmill of scripts and strategies until they’re out of words and realize that it’s not their failing or wrong words that are causing his anger. At that stage, women need a new plan to make sense of their partner’s lack of empathy and angry defensiveness.
Often, the new strategy is the pursuit to “win” our partner back. Women take on the role of the perpetrator, the character in their partner’s movie who did something bad by suggesting that he had hurt them. Women take on guilt and often apologize for having wounded their partner with their “accusations” or for not appreciating how good and well-intentioned their partner is.
But even more than guilty, women feel afraid. When they experience conflict in the relationship, even if they know they deserve to feel upset and that their pain is legitimate, they’re frightened by the potential repercussions they will face from their honesty. The punishment might come in the form of their partner’s anger (more of it), rejection, withdrawal, abandonment, or a threat to their financial and family stability. When the stability of the relationship is threatened, even temporarily, women switch into emergency gear and will do almost anything to get their partner “back,” smooth the relational waters, and restore the bond with the one who, paradoxically, was the cause of the initial hurt.
Conflict sets off every emergency bell in our nervous system; it literally overrides our rational front brain. No matter how clearly we know intellectually that our pain is legitimate, that we’re deserving of empathy, that this is unacceptable, and that we will be okay even if our partner is angry, nonetheless, when he is triggered because of us, all bets are off. Rationality goes out the window, and we enter full-on survival mode, abandoning ourselves in the interest of relational survival.
At the deepest level, we believe that we must restore the bond no matter the cost, and we must hold onto the relationship, no matter how much pain it causes us. And the thing is, for most women, it’s so easy to make nice, get our partner back, make them like us, and pretend like it’s all okay. We smile, laugh at their jokes, rub their shoulders, tell them how much we appreciate them, have sex with them—we do what we do because we’re terrified of the broken bond. It’s what we’ve been trained to do and are so good at—making it work for the other person regardless of what it does to us. We know too well how to pretend like what they did to us is okay. It’s all okay as long as they like us again—we won’t be bad girls again.
And yet we know, even as we’re throwing ourselves under the bus, that this approach of winning them back is unhealthy, unfair, and profoundly unkind—to us. It lacks self-respect and self-compassion. But the stronger drive wins out and decides that what we really need and the best way to take care of ourselves is to restore the connection. We’ll get to higher-level functioning choices, like authenticity, courage, and self-worth, and we’ll be able to self-advocate and stand in our own truth… once we’ve gotten him back. But even as we tell ourselves this fib, we’re not convinced that it’s true.
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In Part 3 of this series, I’ll address the ways to step out of this pattern and break this cycle. How can we better withstand conflict, anger, and defensiveness from our partner and walk through this difficult process without allowing our reptilian brain to take over? Because, in fact, it’s this very survival system—taking responsibility for their inability to empathize, then taking responsibility for getting them to “forgive” us—that re-wounds us again and again. And most importantly, it’s what keeps us stuck in unhealthy relationships. It’s this system that makes it impossible to move the dial, not just in the relationship with our partner, but more importantly, in our relationship with ourselves. We can’t ever control our partner’s behavior, but we can indeed be self-compassionate and discerning with our own. Stay tuned.
