Here’s a question for you: How do you ask for what you need in a relationship, or make requests about what you’d like to see change, without upsetting your partner in the process? And what do you do when it seems like, no matter your intentions, your partner still feels hurt by what you’ve said?

Ethan asked me a question about this. He writes:

“I need to figure out how to communicate better with my girlfriend. I’ve always thought of myself as a good communicator. But in this relationship, I seem to often hurt my girlfriend’s feelings with the things I say. I’ve never had this problem with previous girlfriends. But it’s a real problem in this relationship.

I can’t seem to figure out how to phrase things so she doesn’t get upset. Maybe I’m being too blunt. Maybe it’s because she doesn’t like what I have to say. I’m not sure. It’s gotten to the point where I’m second-guessing whether or not to even bring something up, because I don’t want it to turn into a fight. We just moved in together recently and maybe this is stress about living together. It usually happens when I ask her to change something she’s doing.

Last night, I asked if she could find another place for her shoes instead of leaving them wherever she takes them off (and that was only because I tripped over them and then banged my knee on the coffee table). Before that, we got into a fight because I asked her if she could clean the litter for her cat more often, and she said I was being critical and judgmental. I don’t think I was. But whatever the truth is, I think I just need to find new ways to talk to her so she doesn’t get so upset.”

Dear Ethan,

Congratulations on moving in with your girlfriend. That’s a big and exciting step in a relationship, and it’s one in which there will inevitably be a period of adjustment as you learn to navigate the particular realities that come with sharing space with another person. I appreciate the ways in which you’ve recognized the importance of communicating well through the transition into living together.

And while it’s likely that some of the tension you’re experiencing relates to the added stress of moving in together, it’s also likely that a larger communication issue was uncovered by the increased intimacy of cohabiting.

One of the biggest predictors of success for couples in therapy is the ability for each partner to take a look at their own individual contributions to the relationship dynamics that brought them there.

In general, most of us have an easier time recognizing what the other person is doing to contribute to problems than recognizing our own role in unsatisfying relationship dynamics.

In its most exaggerated expression, this takes the form of two people essentially pointing the finger at each other, locked in a never-ending battle to pin the blame on the other person.

Obviously, no one wants a relationship dynamic like that.

The ability to engage in self-reflection and take personal responsibility for the impact we have on our partner is really important in intimate relationships.

It’s usually the case that when we self-reflect and take into consideration feedback we’ve gotten from our partner, we can identify some ways that we might have handled the situation differently. And yet, one of the most troubling relationship patterns that I see is when one partner is self-reflective and the other partner isn’t.

We’ve probably all heard that when it comes to relationships, “it takes two to tango.” What this means is that most relationship issues involve two partners who are contributing to the problem.

While there are certainly important exceptions for abusive relationships, in general, when we’re talking about an intimate relationship between two well-meaning individuals, it’s fair to assume that both partners are playing a role in the dynamic, even if that’s unintentional and unconscious.

So what does this mean for the situation you find yourself in now, where you haven’t been able to find ways to express concerns or make requests that don’t end up with your girlfriend having hurt feelings?

It’s clear from your letter that you’ve already been doing a fair amount of thinking about why this keeps happening. But what’s not clear is whether you and your girlfriend have had a calm conversation about what’s happening and how it might be different.

Instead, it sounds like you’ve primarily been trying to figure this out on your own. And that’s a great start. It’s an essential step in this process.

But if we take seriously the idea that relationship issues involve contributions from both partners, then one partner’s self-reflection won’t be enough to fix the problem.

At the same time, starting with self-reflection is going to give you some vital information about what might be happening here. I always encourage people to approach self-reflection in the spirit of radical honesty.

For example, let’s imagine that your girlfriend has told you that her feelings are hurt because the way you say things and your tone sound really critical. Radical honesty means taking a moment and asking yourself, “Is any part of this feedback true?”

In other words, when she’s perceiving that you’re being critical, are you able to identify actually feeling critical of her—because of where she leaves her shoes or how often she cleans the cat litter? If you can identify even a shred of criticism or judgment in your attitude toward her, that’s something to consider working through.

Because if criticism comes across in your communication, it’s almost certain that she’ll detect it. And your request will devolve into an argument.

But let’s say that you engage in radical honesty with yourself and you truly cannot identify any critical or judgmental thoughts that are being communicated in your requests.

It really seems to you, upon reflection, that you are making a direct, nonjudgmental request, but it is nevertheless resulting in an argument. So what do you do now?

This is the point at which one partner’s self-reflection can only go so far.

This is the point at which you need to engage your partner in the process of talking through this dynamic that’s emerged now that you’re living together. It probably goes without saying that the best time to have this conversation is not in the heat of the moment.

You can set yourselves up for greater success if you make a plan to talk later, when you’re both calm.

It’s important not to let too much time go by, though, because it’s harder to revisit a conversation when the details have become fuzzy. And if you’ve already found yourself wanting to avoid upsetting your girlfriend by letting things go, I imagine it would be very tempting to just move on once an argument is over.

This kind of avoidance makes a lot of sense if you don’t like conflict or tension. But unfortunately, it has the effect of perpetuating the cycle.

Once you have a plan to talk—maybe a few hours after the event or the next day—you can open the conversation by sharing your intent. This might sound something like, “When I asked you if you could leave your shoes somewhere else, my intent was that we might figure out where shoes are going to be left in our new home.”

Once you’ve shared your intent, you can ask your girlfriend to share what she experienced. “Can you tell me what you heard in what I said?” This kind of question helps you understand the impact of what you said, which might be quite different from what you intended.

This will be key in getting to the bottom of this dynamic and figuring out how to do things differently.

Let’s say that she says something like, “Well, I heard you saying that it was my fault you banged your knee, even though it never occurred to me that you would walk through the living room without turning on the light.”

Now, you might notice here that you may want to jump in and explain why you didn’t turn on a light, by saying something like, “I didn’t turn on a light because I didn’t want to wake you up!” or some similar kind of explanation.

That would be a wrong turn here, because it would take you away from understanding and likely head straight into another argument.

Instead, the important information that your girlfriend has shared here is the first part of what she said: “I heard you saying that it was my fault you banged your knee.”

This is where your previous self-reflection is going to be super valuable, because you can then share something like, “Oh. It definitely wasn’t my intention to blame you. I really was only trying to figure out how we might do things differently moving forward.”

Do you see how this way of communicating works?

Our natural inclination is often to defend ourselves and correct misunderstandings by pointing out where the other person is wrong. Or we poke holes in their arguments with the intent of coming out on top and hopefully making them see the superior wisdom in our position.

Of course, we also know that none of these approaches ever actually leave us feeling good or lead to renewed connection with our partner. But it can be so tempting to respond in this way as soon as we hear our partner share something about their experience that is based on an incorrect assumption, like your girlfriend saying, “You were blaming me,” if you actually weren’t blaming her.

Ideally, if you can stay calm and centered in a conversation like this, you can use your discovery that your girlfriend heard you blaming her to uncover one root cause of your frequent conflicts.

It might be the case that you’ve typically approached communication in your past relationships as a relatively straightforward process. You say what the problem is and ask your partner to participate in executing the solution.

For example, “I don’t want to trip over your shoes because you leave them in the middle of the floor. Can you please start putting them in the closet instead?” This may have worked just fine in past relationships.

Perhaps it’s the case that you are a low-context communicator who has been in relationships with other low-context communicators, meaning that you and your former partners approached communication by taking what’s said literally and not reading into it at all.

However, not everyone is like that. Many people are high-context communicators, which means that not everything that’s said can be taken literally or at face value.

And often, what’s said is really only pointing toward the importance of what’s been left unsaid. And to make it even more complex, everything that’s said is understood through what’s being perceived in the other’s tone of voice, body language, and facial expressions. And all of that is also cross-checked with past conversations and experiences in your relationship as well as past relationships.

So while communication might initially seem like a pretty straightforward process, in most intimate relationships, it’s highly complex and far more complicated.

This is why, for many couples, talking more is so vital, because the initial assumptions we make about what’s being communicated are often incomplete or even wrong.

Now, let’s add one more complicating factor into couples’ communication.

When we’ve been the target of a lot of criticism in the past, either from a former partner or a parent (or both), we are primed to hear any feedback or requests to change as critical.

In other words, while you might be communicating something very neutral, like, “Can you put your shoes somewhere else so I don’t trip over them,” your girlfriend might be hearing something more like, “What kind of a person leaves her shoes in the middle of the floor? What’s wrong with you?”

One way to think about this is to imagine that there is a really mean translator who’s taking what you’re saying and making it fit into the kinds of things your girlfriend has heard from others in the past.

This translator is often referred to as the “inner critic.” I’ve oftentimes called it that myself, but I think the term “Inner Critic” often makes it sound like it’s something that’s part of us or something we were born with.

It’s far more accurate to understand the Inner Critic as something that develops as a result of painful past experiences, including relational trauma.

There’s a lot here, so let me pull it all together for you.

What matters most is this: when the same conflict keeps repeating, it’s usually not just about what was said. It’s often about how it was said or what was heard. Or both.

That’s why it’s going to take both of you to figure out what’s getting lost in translation, resulting in conflict, hurt feelings, and confusion.

Changing this dynamic requires setting aside time to explore the pattern itself, rather than only talking about the individual issues where this pattern plays out.

When both partners are willing to engage in thoughtful self-reflection, underlying issues like subtle criticism, judgment, and the presence of an inner critic who distorts neutral requests will become evident.

This is a way of balancing consideration of intent and impact in communication, while supporting each other and working together to improve your communication.

So, here’s my wish for you, Ethan. May you not lose your voice in an effort to keep the peace in your relationship. And instead, may you find new and deeper ways to communicate with your girlfriend. May you grow in your ability to communicate directly with love and care, while your girlfriend grows in her ability to receive your communication fully, without the interference of hurtful and distorted translations.

~Angela

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Ask Angela is an advice column dedicated to the topic of having fulfilling relationships after trauma. Visit askangelapodcast.com to submit a question for Angela.

DISCLAIMER: This content is intended for informational purposes only and does not constitute professional medical or psychological advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other licensed health care provider with any questions or concerns you may have regarding a medical or psychological condition.

Some of the most frustrating conflicts in intimate relationships aren’t rooted in real disagreements or deep differences between partners. Instead, they begin with misunderstandings—misread comments, incomplete information, or assumptions that escalate before we have a chance to slow down and catch up with what’s actually happening.

Jo wrote to me with a question that captures this dynamic perfectly:

“My partner and I seem to be stuck in a cycle where we have huge fights that turn out to be because of a misunderstanding. But we don’t figure that out until we’ve already blown up at each other or spoiled an entire afternoon. Here’s a recent example. My partner said that he didn’t think it was a good idea to take time off work to go on a trip we’d planned to Florida. I immediately felt hurt and upset because I’ve been working overtime for several months now, and the only thing that’s been keeping me going is thinking about being on the beach with a drink in one hand and a book in the other. Unfortunately, because I felt hurt, I reacted to my husband by saying, “Fine. I’ll just go to Florida without you.” Then, he felt really hurt because it turned out that he was going to suggest a trip to Europe instead, because I’ve always wanted to go to France. But by the time I learned all that, we were barely speaking to each other. And we both felt so hurt by what was said in the fight that realizing it was all a misunderstanding didn’t help. How do we break this cycle?”

Dear Jo,

One of the most amazing things about the human mind is how much information we can take in from the outside world and how quickly we can come to conclusions about that information.

Even without trying, we can assess a situation in the blink of an eye. And in the next blink of an eye, before we even realize it, we are already responding.

This is how we’re able to go from cruising down the road singing along to our favorite song to slamming on the brakes when a dog darts out into the street. We are capable of responding so fast to emergencies that it’s almost like we’re not thinking at all. Some kind of autopilot kicks in, and we react instantaneously to avert catastrophe.

But, as your letter illustrates so poignantly, this ability to react with lightning speed can create challenges in our intimate relationships.

Whereas it might only take a second to recognize that the shape rapidly approaching the road is a dog and to put on the brakes, it’s a lot more complicated to figure out what your husband is really trying to say when he suggests that you postpone your trip to Florida.

The challenge is that our mind comes to conclusions about meaning so quickly. And if this meaning isn’t something we like, it’s followed by a surge of emotions that makes it difficult to think clearly or do anything other than react by expressing those emotions.

What you’re describing—about jumping to conclusions about what your partner has said—is what psychologists often call mind-reading.

In essence, you assume you know what your husband is thinking and where he’s coming from when he suggests postponing your vacation. And based on those assumptions, you have all kinds of strong feelings—hurt, frustration, disappointment.

And those feelings probably lead to thoughts like, “He doesn’t really care about me,” or “He always does this,” or “He’d rather sit around playing video games than go on vacation with me.” And once you’ve had those thoughts, maybe you feel entirely justified in blasting your selfish jerk of a husband who doesn’t care at all about how hard you’ve been working.

When we are flooded by strong emotions, our ability to think and reflect goes temporarily offline. We react without pausing to consider what more information we might need before coming to conclusions about the situation we’re in.

And to make this worse, our strong emotions convince us that our reaction is entirely justified. As you’ve already recognized, this is a recipe for hurtful—even explosive—conflicts that aren’t grounded in any real disagreement between you and your partner.

So if this is the case, and the mind-reading and emotional response happen in the blink of an eye, how do you start to interrupt this pattern?

Ideally, you might like to not have the strong emotional response in the first place. But in my experience, this can be a difficult place to intervene in the cycle for many people.

To some degree, how quickly we react and how strongly we react can be fairly innate.

So while some individuals are blessed with a stoic temperament that allows them to respond slowly, others are not so blessed. And for those of us who tend to be more reactive (and I put myself in this category), it can be more effective to focus on what comes after the initial emotional reaction.

Here’s what this looks like in practice.

You’ve come home from a long day of work and your husband says something like, “Do you have a minute?” And without even pausing, he continues, “I don’t think we should go to Florida. It doesn’t seem like the best use of our limited vacation time.”

And before he can say any more, you have all the feelings—hurt, anger, disappointment, maybe feeling unappreciated. You have all these feelings, and everything in you wants to lay into your selfish, uncaring husband and maybe cause him to feel some of the hurt that you’re feeling.

But this is the exact moment when you have an opportunity to break the cycle. Because there is a moment here, even though it’s really small and easy to overlook.

This is the moment when you can choose to pause and take a deep breath. This is the moment when you can recognize that you need more information, because you are actively engaged in mind-reading and assuming that you know where your husband is coming from.

So instead of unleashing all that emotion in your husband’s direction, you need to contain it—at least long enough to figure out whether it’s justified by the situation. Developing the ability to contain your emotions rather than immediately spilling them out into your environment takes practice.

Emotional containment is an important relationship skill, because it’s the lack of emotional containment that fuels hurtful arguments and destructive patterns for couples.

As with all relationship skills, it’s not fair to expect that you’re going to develop this one overnight. Perhaps the first time you try to contain your feelings, you’re only able to do it for 60 seconds before you launch into your familiar pattern with your husband. That’s still progress, because in those 60 seconds you’re already starting to break the habit of mind-reading.

When it comes to changing relationship patterns and developing new skills for partnership, progress isn’t linear. And perfection isn’t necessary—or even realistic.

When you’re able to contain your feelings, even briefly, and you recognize that you don’t actually have enough information to come to conclusions about your husband’s thoughts, feelings, or motivations, then it becomes clear that what’s needed is more information.

In other words, it’s time to ask some questions. But how you ask questions matters a lot.

There’s a huge difference between asking neutral questions like, “Can you tell me more about what you’re thinking?” or “I don’t understand. Where’s this coming from?” and questions that are laden with hostility, like, “Do you have any idea how hurtful that is to me?” or even, “Help me understand—why would you even suggest canceling the trip?”

The emotional charge you’re already feeling, paired with ingrained communication habits in your relationship, will have you leaning toward asking a question that’s already based on assumptions that may be completely wrong.

This is why giving yourself a moment to pause and collect yourself before responding is so important.

Because thinking on your feet in these moments is tricky, it’s absolutely okay to use a stock question that is completely neutral.

I like the question, “Can you tell me more?” because it’s short, easy to remember, and completely neutral.

Inviting your partner to share more information not only gives you the context you need to understand where he’s coming from, it also gives you the chance to continue focusing on containing your emotions as you listen.

I’ve written many times about the value of curiosity in relationships as a way to deepen intimacy and improve communication. One way to understand mind-reading is as the absence of curiosity.

When you assume you already know everything about your partner’s thoughts, feelings, and motivations, curiosity disappears—even though, as you’ve discovered, you don’t actually have the full picture.

If you’d like to explore this idea further, you can read more about how to heal past relationship trauma while in a relationship, and about defensiveness in relationships and how it derails connection.

Now let’s say you’re able to ask a question like, “Can you tell me more about this?” And your husband starts to share more about his thought process and where he’s coming from.

While this sounds straightforward, there are still a few potential pitfalls here.

First, you two have a well-established pattern of fighting, which means that your husband may read the emotions on your face and in your voice and react with his own emotions, even though you’re trying to do something different.

Secondly, when our emotions are heightened, it’s very difficult to hear our partner accurately, even when we’re trying. So the risk of jumping to conclusions and mind-reading doesn’t end just because you’ve asked a neutral question.

The best chance of success is to continue slowing down the process of communication.

Apart from asking neutral questions, you can slow everything down by attempting to summarize and reflect what you’ve heard. This might sound like, “What I hear you saying is that you don’t think we should use our vacation time to go to Florida?”

Or, if you’re like many of us, you might unintentionally slip your own assumptions into your summary: “What I hear you saying is that you don’t think it’s worth it to use our vacation time to go to Florida?”

The good thing is that even if you get it wrong, this attempt at reflecting back what you’re hearing gives your partner a chance to clarify, correct, or add more information so that you can come to a shared understanding of what’s being communicated.

Because this is a well-established pattern in your relationship, it’s likely that both of you need to develop these skills—pausing, slowing down, containing your own emotions, bringing curiosity to the conversation, and using reflective communication to correct misunderstandings and assumptions.

The good news is that you have a well-meaning partner who’s thinking about your happiness, even while you’re both grappling with a destructive pattern.

It’s often the case that reactivity that turns into conflict is actually an (unhealthy) expression of sincere care and value for the relationship.

Now that you understand more about the roots of this pattern, you have a better way to express that care by investing your energy into building better communication.

Here’s my wish for you, Jo. May you remember, even in moments of tension, hurt, and conflict, that you and your partner are on the same side. You are two people with strong feelings who care deeply for each other. And you are still learning how to make room for emotion without letting it take over, and how to show up for each other by developing the skills to express care through love, support, and listening.

~Angela

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Ask Angela is an advice column dedicated to the topic of having fulfilling relationships after trauma. Visit askangelapodcast.com to submit a question for Angela.

DISCLAIMER: This content is intended for informational purposes only and does not constitute professional medical or psychological advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other licensed health care provider with any questions or concerns you may have regarding a medical or psychological condition.

What do you do when you want to start dating, but putting yourself out there feels like opening yourself up to being judged, categorized, and dismissed? For many people, dating in the age of apps stirs up self-consciousness, uncertainty, and even self-criticism—especially when it feels like you won’t be seen for who you really are or what you have to offer in a relationship.

Haley wrote to me with this question:

“I’m 30 years old and I’ve never had a serious partner. In fact, I’ve never gone on more than two dates with anyone. For the last two years, I’ve been feeling super self-conscious about this. But now that I’ve turned 30, I’m truly convinced that anyone I want to date is going to see this as a major red flag and reject me without ever giving me a chance. This feels like an impossible situation. How am I ever supposed to get a date if never having dated means that no one will date me?”

Dear Haley,

I think your letter is going to resonate with a lot of readers who feel like there’s something about them or their dating history that will mark them as undateable. And also because young adults nowadays are dating later and less often than at any time in the past.

In fact, the Pew Research Center found that among never-married single adults, about 42% of adults under 40 say that they’ve never been in a committed romantic relationship.

So although it might seem like everyone you know has had a serious partner, the reality is that you’re in very good company.

I get that it doesn’t feel that way, though. Culturally, we’ve got a very strict timeline that’s imposed on teenagers and young adults. There are so many expectations, from learning to drive and starting dating, to graduating from high school at 18 and immediately signing up for more school in the form of college.

You’re supposed to know what you want to do for the rest of your life by the time you finish your education. And then you’re supposed to go out and find a professional job.

And, at the same time, you need to get a lot of experience dating and know exactly what you want from relationships, including whether marriage and kids are in your future or not. And you’re supposed to fit yourself into this cultural timeline while also coping with the never-ending stream of societal upheaval both close to home and abroad.

Whether it’s related to dating, school, or work, the pressure exerted by these artificial timelines can easily make it feel like you’ve missed your window of opportunity and now you’re destined for a lifetime of never getting what it is that you want.

I’m not saying that you’re imagining things or that it’s impossible that you might be rejected by potential dating partners for your lack of experience.

The reality is that people are rejected for lots of reasons on apps.

They’ve uploaded photos with overhead lighting and unflattering shadows. Their bio mentions time spent at the gym, or traveling, or being a foodie. They have too many photos with friends or not enough. They have a cat instead of a dog, or vice versa.

Psychologists describe this phenomenon of rapid rejection for unimportant reasons as hyper-evaluation and point to “choice overload” in contemporary dating.

And, to some degree, this makes sense. How on earth are you going to sort through a hundred or more dating options when there’s always so much else to keep up with in life?

At the same time, it’s important not to assume that just because some potential dating partners might see this as a red flag, that all potential partners would see it this way.

First, remember that you’re in good company here, with over one-third of adults in your age range also not having had a serious relationship. Next, try to start seeing your lack of dating experience differently.

Most likely, you’ve been feeling self-conscious about this because you worry that it says something about you as a person—about who you are and your worth as a romantic partner. It’s actually just a neutral fact about you: you don’t have much dating experience. It doesn’t have meaning beyond that.

Not only does this not say anything about you as a person, it also doesn’t have any power to predict the future success and satisfaction that you can find in dating.

Apart from the frequent rejection that’s an inherent part of dating on apps, here’s the real problem as I see it. We are socialized to look at ourselves through others’ eyes. We imagine how others see us, and we start assessing our own worth by anticipating how we’re perceived.

In other words, we hyper-evaluate ourselves, focusing on our flaws as a way to predict potential rejection.

While this can create issues in many areas of life—from friendships and social groups to workplaces—it’s amplified by the choice overload that’s part of current dating culture.

Especially for women, although this can be true for many men as well, there’s also the cultural message that being successful in dating requires that we know how to make ourselves desirable, so that someone else will choose us.

The need to be chosen means that our attention is focused on how others perceive us. In order to be picked, we have to figure out how to make ourselves acceptable and attractive to potential partners.

Not only does feeling this need to be chosen make us even more hyper-evaluative, self-conscious, and self-critical, it also makes rejection feel like a verdict on our value.

When we see rejection as a verdict, we assume rejection by one person also means that we’re more likely to be rejected by others in the future. This isn’t actually true.

But there’s something even more important that happens when we focus on being chosen by others. We lose sight of the reality that we also have the power to choose who we want to date. When we focus on our own power to choose, we’re no longer at the mercy of others’ judgments.

Now, the entire framework of dating changes—from being chosen as desirable or rejected as unworthy—to focusing on fit.

When you’re interested in building a committed relationship with another human, the whole point of dating is to find someone with whom you’re a good fit. While what I’m saying might seem obvious, I know from the conversations I have with those who are out there dating right now that it requires a lot of intention to shift from a mindset of “choose me!” to “are we a good fit for each other?”

And when people approach dating as a process of discovering fit, experiencing rejection by others is received as “you’re not a good fit for me” rather than “you’re no good” or “you’re undesirable.”

So let me ask you something. If someone rejects you for not having dating experience, even before they have a chance to get to know you, is this person a good fit for you? I would say no, they’re not a good fit.

That’s not to say that they’re a bad person. It could be that they had a really bad past dating experience that happened to involve dating someone inexperienced.

Or it might be that they’re experiencing so much choice overload that they don’t have the time or energy to get to know you beyond the most surface-level facts about your past.

Either way, instead of feeling as though you’ve just been judged as not measuring up to some baseline standard of worthiness, you might approach this as someone saving you a lot of time and energy investing in something that wasn’t going to end up going anywhere you want to go.

Fulfilling committed relationships require a good fit between partners. They also require curiosity, patience, openness, and the willingness to invest time and energy in each other.

The reality is that hyper-evaluation and choice overload are built into the system of online dating. The result is that rejections happen quickly, without a lot of thought or information.

Developing resilience is required for navigating this world without getting bruised by frequent rejections and losing your own sense of self-worth.

And although apps are the most common way to find dates these days, that doesn’t mean they’re the only way. Don’t forget to consider other ways that you might meet partners, especially when alternative avenues offer the opportunity for more in-depth encounters.

Depending on your situation, this might mean opening yourself up to meeting others through friends, social circles, your workplace, community events, social hobbies, volunteer organizations, or other community organizations. Then there’s always coffee shops, farmers markets, live music shows, libraries.

The list is truly endless, because it includes anywhere you are likely to find other humans.

Approaching dating in this way requires a spirit of playfulness and exploration. Instead of approaching dating as a referendum on your worth and value, see if you can approach it as an experiment.

Every interaction you have is an opportunity to learn something—about yourself, about the other person, about which circumstances seem to be best suited to meeting people you connect with.

These encounters will help you gain more clarity about how you approach dating and what you’re looking for in a partner who will be a good fit. It takes practice to change your mindset about dating.

At times, you may find yourself feeling fearful and anticipating the possibility of rejection. When you notice this, great. This is your chance to make a conscious effort to move back into a mindset of curiosity, learning, exploration, and practice.

This will work best if you take all the pressure off outcomes.

Sometimes people think that being optimistic about dating requires cheerleading yourself—like rah, rah, tonight I’m definitely going to meet someone special. But this kind of approach is really just a cover for underlying fear and discouragement.

Genuine optimism doesn’t require any particular outcome at any specific time. For example, let’s say that you’ve met another volunteer at your local food bank and made a date for coffee. Approaching this optimistically sounds more like “let’s see what happens” than “this one is going to be the one.”

It’s so important not to assign global meaning to particular outcomes. That means not saying, “I knew it—this is hopeless,” when this one isn’t The One. Responding with optimism might sound like, “Oh well, that’s a bummer. I liked this one. So what did I learn from this experience about what I’m looking for in a partner?”

Dating experience is accumulated over time, and developing clarity about what you’re looking for in a partner will also take time.

Often, discovering what is a good fit involves spending some time with people who help clarify what isn’t.

So here’s my wish for you, Haley. May you give yourself permission to be a beginner and to learn along the way. You’re not behind. And you don’t have to figure everything out all at once. Over time, you’re going to learn more about yourself and know more clearly what you want in a partner.

There’s no prize for figuring this out quickly—only for staying connected to yourself along the way.

~Angela

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Ask Angela is an advice column dedicated to the topic of having fulfilling relationships after trauma. Visit askangelapodcast.com to submit a question for Angela.

DISCLAIMER: This content is intended for informational purposes only and does not constitute professional medical or psychological advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other licensed health care provider with any questions or concerns you may have regarding a medical or psychological condition.

One of the most common questions I receive is whether it’s possible for two people who’ve never had a healthy romantic relationship to create one together—especially when they’re not sure what makes a relationship healthy or how to recognize signs that it isn’t.

India wrote to me with this question:

“I’ve been dating someone for three months and it’s going really well so far. I’m trying not to get my hopes up, because I’ve never had what I’d call a healthy relationship before. I feel like I’m just waiting for the other shoe to drop. I don’t know if it hurts or helps that my boyfriend has never had a healthy relationship either. We each spent over a decade in marriages that could not be called happy or healthy. His marriage involved a wife who constantly criticized and berated him, until his self-esteem was in the dust. My ex-husband and I fought all the time and basically destroyed our marriage by saying mean things that couldn’t be forgotten. So, needless to say, this new relationship feels very foreign to both of us. My boyfriend asked me if I thought it was possible for us to have a healthy relationship, given our lack of experience in this area. I want to believe it’s possible. I can’t imagine treating him the way I sometimes treated my ex, but I guess I don’t know for sure. What do you think?”

Dear India,

When you’ve gotten hurt in the past, sometimes it can feel unbearably vulnerable to open yourself up to hoping that things can be different. Trying to keep our hopes in check and bracing ourselves for the inevitable drop of the other shoe can feel like a way to protect ourselves from disappointment.

Nearly anyone who’s been through heartbreak can surely relate to the desire to hold yourself back and stay just a little guarded in order to not be taken by surprise if things go wrong.

In other words, it’s hard to hope without wondering if we’re being naive or overly optimistic. And yet, research in this area has consistently shown that avoiding getting our hopes up doesn’t actually protect us from disappointment.

Instead, it just makes it harder for us to savor life experiences.

Believing that a good relationship is possible, even though your past relationship experiences don’t confirm this belief, requires taking a leap of faith. It means choosing to trust, even when you don’t have anything solid on which to base that trust.

You and your boyfriend are entering into something that’s foreign to both of you. It’s bound to be scary and a little intimidating. The good news is that you’re not doing it alone.

You’re together, stepping into uncharted territory, hand in hand.

While we can never know exactly where we’re heading, from my perspective, doing it together is as good a beginning as any I can imagine. There are solid reasons to hope that you two can create something beautiful together, even though you don’t yet know how to do it or what it’s going to look like.

In other words, the past doesn’t have to repeat itself, and you can create a future together that is very different from anything either of you has experienced before.

Healthy intimate relationships require a few basic things:

They require two individuals who want to have a good relationship together. They require having (or learning) solid relationship skills. And they require being willing and able to work together to figure out relationship issues that will inevitably arise along the way.

It’s never too late to develop the skills for having a healthy romantic relationship, so as long as you have a partner who is in this with you, the odds are in your favor.

That’s not to say that there won’t be challenges along the way.

Developing the skills for healthy relationships takes time and practice. And there are bound to be many moments when things go off-track and you find yourself either repeating patterns from your past relationship or reacting to your partner as though they’re like your former spouse. If (or perhaps I should say when) that happens, don’t panic.

Slipping into old, unhealthy relationship patterns is inevitable, which is why breaking those patterns requires learning how to notice what’s happened, pause, take a deep breath, and then decide how to take a step in a new, unfamiliar relationship direction.

To put this another way, giving your relationship the best chance for being different will involve being intentional about how to navigate situations where things are going—or have already gone—off track.

Especially in the beginning, it’s far more important to learn to work together to repair after old patterns have reared their ugly heads than to try to prevent these things from happening altogether. Working together in this way builds trust in each other and in the relationship as a strong container for healing the past.

So what does it look like? Let’s fast-forward your relationship with your boyfriend and imagine that you’ve now been together for nine months. Things are going well and you’re both feeling more at ease in the relationship.

Then something happens that stirs up difficult feelings for both of you, and suddenly there’s rising tension. Something about this situation feels familiar from the past. And before you even realize it, you snap at your partner and make a cutting remark in the way you would have with your former husband.

Maybe your boyfriend reacts the way he would have with his former wife. And maybe then you’re both reacting to each other and going down a road that you never, ever wanted to go down. Maybe it takes five minutes or two hours or three days to realize what’s happened.

That’s absolutely okay.

The important thing to know is that as soon as you become aware that you’ve slipped back into unhealthy relationship dynamics, you have the power to make a different choice.

Instead of continuing down that unhealthy path, you can change direction and turn toward the kind of relationship you want to have with your boyfriend.

Even better, you don’t have to do this alone.

You can invite your boyfriend to join you in turning toward the relationship you want to have. If you become aware of what’s happening while you’re in the middle of re-enacting those old familiar patterns, you can say something like, “Whoa. Pause here. This is not how I want to be interacting with you.” And then you can take a break.

Because your old pattern involved destructive conflict with your partner, it’s very likely that changing old patterns will require learning to take breaks when you get angry so you can calm down and regulate your emotions so you don’t say or do anything you’ll regret later.

Because your boyfriend’s past relationship involved being the target of constant criticism, he might need to do some individual work around regulating himself during conflicts so that he doesn’t hear any feedback from you as though it’s intended to cut him down.

Building new relationship skills—including skills for healthy conflict and effective communication—takes time and a lot of practice.

This is true for couples when neither has previous experience with healthy relationships. It’s also true for couples who are working to break unhealthy patterns in their relationship with each other. Approaching this process as one in which you’re working together and supporting each other in growing and making positive changes is vital.

While individuals certainly can do this work without the support of a partner, it’s so much more rewarding when it is something you’re doing together.

Not only is it important to be encouraging to your partner as he’s working on developing relationship skills, it’s equally important to be kind and compassionate with yourself. As with all other areas of life, when it comes to relationships, perfection is never the goal.

Working together imperfectly, with a spirit of mutual generosity and empathy, is all that’s needed.

Here’s my recommendation for where you might begin with your boyfriend. Take some time to create a vision for what you want in your relationship. As a starting place, consider everything that happened in your previous relationships that you don’t want and think about what you want instead.

For example, in your marriage, you often found yourself saying hurtful things to your spouse, presumably when you were very upset. If that’s the case, what do you want in this relationship? To answer that question, take it as a given that sometimes you are going to be very upset with your partner.

Now, instead of lashing out and saying things you’ll regret later, what do you want to do instead?

As each of you reflect on what happened in your previous marriages that you don’t want to repeat, you will start getting some clarity about your shared vision for this relationship.

To take it a step further, also think about what was missing from your previous relationships that you might want to include in your vision for this new relationship.

One positive aspect that you’ve already identified about this partnership is that you’re with someone who is equally committed to building a healthy relationship, and who understands that this will take some ongoing effort.

While every couple’s vision for their relationship is unique, when it comes to building a healthy relationship after being in unhealthy ones, one potential element of your shared vision might be making a commitment to give each other grace when old patterns suddenly show up in your relationship.

When someone is accustomed to going head-to-head in arguments with a partner, it’s easy to unconsciously react to conflict by using harsh words in an effort to gain the upper hand.

Similarly, when you’ve spent years as the target of a partner’s criticism, immediately going on the defensive when a partner brings up an issue is understandable. It will take time and effort to break some of these patterns.

Supporting each other means normalizing these reactions and not taking them personally, even while reaffirming your commitments to leave these unhealthy relationship behaviors in the past where they belong.

Because this work takes time and a fair amount of effort, remember that you’re both in this together and that unlearning old patterns is not a quick or linear process. There are going to be missteps. And there are going to be ups and downs.

So here’s my wish for you, India, that you give yourself permission to hope for good things and that you continue to approach this relationship as something that you’re building together, rather than something either of you has to figure out alone.

~Angela

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Ask Angela is an advice column dedicated to the topic of having fulfilling relationships after trauma. Visit askangelapodcast.com to submit a question for Angela.

DISCLAIMER: This content is intended for informational purposes only and does not constitute professional medical or psychological advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other licensed health care provider with any questions or concerns you may have regarding a medical or psychological condition.

There are moments in relationships when we know something needs to be talked about—but we don’t know how to begin. The words feel loaded, the stakes feel high, and even imagining the conversation can bring up anxiety or dread. This is especially true when the topic touches on money, a subject that often carries far more weight than it appears to on the surface.

Ramón wrote to me with a question that captures this tension:

“I grew up in a family where there was very little discussion about hot-button issues. Sex, money, religion, you name it—it just wasn’t talked about. As an adult, I understand that my parents had no clue how to talk about things. Even now, they’re both very conflict-avoidant. None of that helps me in my own marriage, where my husband and I have completely different ways of dealing with money. He doesn’t ever worry about money. He spends and I stress. I’ve noticed that the more he spends, the more anxious I get about how we’re going to meet our financial obligations every month. It doesn’t help that I’m an artist and he’s a financial advisor, so he makes a lot more money than I do. I don’t feel like I can splurge on big vacations every time he feels like getting away, but I don’t want to tell him no either. So I end up feeling even more stressed. I have no idea how to talk to him about this. Every time I think about saying something, I freeze. I know I need to figure this out, but I have no clue where to start.”

Dear Ramón,

Navigating difficult conversations skillfully takes a lot of practice. This is just as true for money conversations as it is for other topics that can be sensitive, emotional, or connected to family ideas about how things are supposed to be done.

Money is consistently named as one of the top five sources of conflict for couples. And yet, like sex (another topic in the top five), conflicts about money aren’t just about money. Money is closely tied to deeper values like freedom, safety, autonomy, fairness, responsibility, and trust.

At a societal level, money is often considered something you don’t talk about in polite company, which can make learning how to talk about it tricky—even within an intimate relationship.

Add to this that many people have internalized money as a symbol of worth and value, so that how much money we have can feel like a reflection of our value. When there’s a significant income disparity within a couple, this can lead to discomfort, shame, or embarrassment.

With all of that said, avoiding conversations about money is, of course, a recipe for relational disaster. At the same time, how we talk about money really matters.

The reality is that there’s no one right way to approach money, and each of us has our own unique money style. Many money experts promote their own personal approach as the one right way to do money, which doesn’t help couples who are trying to navigate the reality of two different—and equally valid—ways of making money decisions.

Even apart from income disparity in your relationship, it’s also possible (and likely) that you and your husband simply have different money styles.

So now that we’ve established the need to acknowledge partners’ different money styles, I want to turn to the larger issue of what you learned growing up about addressing difficult topics—and how that’s affecting you now. You write that your parents avoided (and still avoid) talking about hot-button issues, including money.

This means that you didn’t have the opportunity to learn how to have these kinds of conversations when you were growing up. It also means that you may have internalized an association between fear and certain emotionally charged topics. You may freeze when you think about talking about money because this kind of conversation feels forbidden. It can also feel like wading into very dangerous territory.

After all, when you’ve never witnessed a couple work through a difficult conversation about money, how that’s done remains a complete unknown.

So even though you consciously know that talking about money is important, violating an internalized rule from childhood can make it feel like you’re doing something wrong. And when you don’t know how to do it, freezing up when you think about opening the conversation makes sense.

But not talking about it isn’t going to work.

Right now, you’re experiencing something that’s very common when partners avoid addressing sources of underlying tension or difference. As your husband spends money freely, you’re becoming more and more stressed about finances.

In other words, your feelings about money in your relationship are intensifying, even though they aren’t being expressed openly.

It may even be that the more your husband spends, the less able you feel to spend money yourself, because you feel responsible for compensating for his spending. Trying to create financial balance by restricting your own spending is likely to lead to resentment over time—especially if it begins to feel like you’re the only one carrying the burden of financial stress.

When this happens, the lack of conversation around money starts to create a wedge in the relationship, where you and your husband are slowly growing apart even though the issue itself hasn’t been directly addressed.

Often, when pressure, stress, and resentment build up, they end up being released in unexpected ways. Let’s imagine that one day your husband buys yet another $10 flat white at your neighborhood café, and all of your financial stress suddenly spills out. Maybe it comes out as a critical remark or a flash of frustration. Or maybe you say something that provides just enough spark to ignite an explosive argument—one that shakes the foundations of your marriage.

The reality is that conflict avoidance is very hard to sustain over time, because unaddressed feelings are always looking for a way out.

Unfortunately, when a couple’s approach to conflict swings between avoidance and destructive hostility, it only reinforces the belief—especially for avoidant partners—that conflict is dangerous and should be avoided whenever possible.

So, given that you don’t want to continue avoiding the money conversation, and I’m sure you also don’t want to end up in a destructive conflict, what can you do instead?

To address your tendency to freeze, the first step is to get clarity for yourself about what you actually want to say.

When you have no experience with difficult conversations, it’s unrealistic—and often paralyzing—to expect that the right words will simply appear in the moment. They won’t, especially when you’ve internalized a family rule that difficult topics like money shouldn’t be talked about.

You’re going to need time and space to think through what you want to communicate to your husband: about money, about this dynamic in your relationship, and about the growing financial stress you’re experiencing.

Instead of expecting yourself to be able to have these kinds of conversations spontaneously, start by gaining insight into your pattern of conflict avoidance around money. Ask yourself questions like, “What did I learn about money growing up?” and “What am I afraid might happen if I address money directly with my partner?”

Gaining clarity about these fears—both related to conflict in your relationship and specifically about money—will help prepare you for the conversation.

When you understand what those underlying fears are, you can also begin to think about what might help you feel safer as you start working on this with your husband.

Next, it’s important to get clear about what you’re hoping to communicate once you do bring this up. You might ask yourself questions such as, “What do I want my partner to understand about my experience with money in our relationship?” “What are my concerns about money?” And “Moving forward, what do I need around money in our relationship?”

When I’m working with someone who has a long history of conflict avoidance and a tendency to freeze during hard conversations, I almost always encourage them to write down exactly what they want to communicate.

One of the experiences that often accompanies feeling frozen is having the mind go blank. You may feel very clear about what you want to say ahead of time, but once you’re face-to-face with your partner, it’s easy to lose track of those intentions—either because everything you planned to say disappears, or because the conversation veers in a completely different direction.

Think of this as preparing for a speech, and write down your main talking points. While it may feel awkward to reference what you’ve written during the conversation, afterward you’ll likely feel relief knowing that you were able to express most of what had been weighing on you about money.

Lastly, it’s important to approach this as an ongoing series of conversations about money. This isn’t a one-and-done money talk. Instead, you’re opening the door to this topic by signaling to your partner that there’s an issue here that needs attention.

This also means not approaching the conversation with the intention of solving the problem right away. Premature attempts to resolve deep-seated relationship issues often backfire, because the couple hasn’t yet spent enough time gaining clarity about what’s actually going on.

I’m adding this caution because conflict-avoidant couples often want to jump straight to problem-solving as a way of avoiding the messy middle—talking about difficult feelings and slowly clarifying the nature of the issue.

Over time, these money conversations can become an opportunity to learn how to engage in difficult conversations productively, building skills that will matter when other challenges inevitably arise in your relationship.

My wish for you, Ramón, is that once you begin having the hard conversations you’ve been avoiding, you discover an untapped capacity for navigating challenges with greater skill and confidence—and that you also come to see that your marriage is sturdier and more resilient than you may have imagined.

~Angela

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Ask Angela is an advice column dedicated to the topic of having fulfilling relationships after trauma. Visit askangelapodcast.com to submit a question for Angela.

DISCLAIMER: This content is intended for informational purposes only and does not constitute professional medical or psychological advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other licensed health care provider with any questions or concerns you may have regarding a medical or psychological condition.

There’s a point in many relationships when partners begin to notice their differences more clearly. This can be confusing and even alarming, especially if the relationship once felt easy and harmonious. Arguments may start to surface where there were none before, and partners may begin to wonder whether they’re truly compatible after all. This stage can feel like the beginning of the end—but it isn’t. In fact, it often signals an important turning point in the life of a relationship.

Ben wrote to me with a question that captures this moment exactly:

“My partner and I have been together for two years. For most of that time, everything was great, and we hardly ever fought about anything. Recently, though, it seems like we’re just on edge with each other and little things can suddenly spark into a disagreement. I hate fighting and so does my partner. But that doesn’t seem to stop us anymore. I used to think that we had so much in common and that’s what made us great together. But more and more, I’m realizing we don’t see eye to eye on a lot of things. This is where the trouble usually starts. I love her but … I don’t know if we’re as compatible as I thought we were. There’s no dealbreaker issue, just a lot of little things that are starting to get to me (and probably to her too). Is there such a thing as a couple being too different to be happy together? Or could this be a case of opposites attract? How do we stop arguing over every little thing? I’m truly sick of it and she is too.”

Dear Ben,

I want to begin by saying that I’m having a bit of an inner conflict about how to start my response to your question. Part of me genuinely wants to celebrate this new development in your relationship. Another part of me wants to say, Ugh. Conflict. I hate it. I really do hate conflict in my own relationships. And in that way, conflict is a bit like the bad-tasting medicine my parents used to make me take when I was sick. It’s unpleasant—but it’s also good for you. Or, more accurately, it can be good for your relationship.

That’s not to say that conflict is always good, or that any kind of conflict is good for a relationship. There’s a big difference between constructive conflict and destructive conflict.

Constructive conflict can bring a couple closer together. Destructive conflict, over time, breaks a relationship down by creating hurts that can’t be repaired simply by apologizing and making up after an argument.

Before we get into how to navigate conflict in your relationship, I want to take a step back and talk about where you and your girlfriend are right now.

I want to help you locate your current position on my map of intimate relationships, so you can understand how you’ve found yourself here—and how to move from where you are to where you want to be.

You’ve been together for two years, and during that time it sounds like things have been good. You’ve gotten along well, rarely fought, and generally seen eye to eye, with a lot in common. That’s wonderful. Of course, if you were still fully in that phase, you probably wouldn’t have written to me at all. You might even be thinking, We don’t need relationship advice. We’ve got this whole relationship thing figured out.

On the map of intimate relationships, where you’ve been is what I call the Enchantment Stage.

You may have heard it referred to as the honeymoon phase. It’s often said that this phase lasts somewhere between six months and two years, though the timing can vary from couple to couple. What’s much more certain is that the Enchantment Stage is temporary. It will come to an end.

One of the most common markers of this transition into the next stage is that partners begin to notice, more and more, the ways in which they are different. In the throes of new love, it’s thrilling to discover all the ways your partner is like you. Even small similarities—like a shared love of Radiohead or tacos—can feel magical and make a relationship seem destined.

Eventually, though, we begin to realize that just as we share many similarities with our partner, there are also many ways—perhaps just as many—in which we are different. She loves horror movies; you hate them. She wants to spend Friday nights in the middle of the action, while you’d rather stay home with a book. Or, to raise the stakes, she spends money freely while you prefer to save for a rainy day. Or she sees current political situations very differently than you do.

Suddenly, you no longer feel like two peas in a pod. At times, it can feel more like you’re two people speaking different languages on entirely different planets. What’s happening here is that you’ve traveled across the relationship map from the territory of Enchantment into Disenchantment.

I know that hearing your relationship has entered the Disenchantment Stage may sound like bad news. But it isn’t. I promise. In fact, it’s often a good sign, because it means your relationship is growing—like a tree stretching its branches.

The arguments and conflicts that are appearing now are invitations to deepen your relationship.

For a tree to support its expanding branches, it has to grow deeper roots. Without those roots, it can’t nourish new growth—and it’s far more likely to be blown over by the first storm that comes its way.

So how do you grow deeper roots in an intimate relationship? One of the most important ways is by acknowledging—and eventually embracing—the ways you and your partner are different.

For many people, this requires both a mindset shift and practice. It means developing the skills to talk about the individual differences that contribute to conflict in your relationship. I want to start with the mindset shift first, and then move into how to engage in constructive conflict.

To do that, we need to briefly return to the experience of the Enchantment Stage. During this stage, everything you share in common with your partner—no matter how small—has the power to delight you, because it feels like confirmation that you belong together.

Even though this stage is temporary, it’s deeply important. This is when you get to know each other and fall in love, and when you form the bond that will help sustain you through challenges later on. In the Enchantment Stage, closeness and intimacy are built on similarity.

Discovering shared traits feels good because it’s how connection is first established. So it’s natural to begin associating closeness with being the same. The trouble comes later, when that assumption collides with the reality of difference.

That collision marks the move from Enchantment into Disenchantment. In this stage, you can no longer rely on similarity to create closeness and intimacy. It’s normal to start feeling more distant from your partner—and even more normal for that distance to feel uncomfortable.

With or without overt conflict, many people begin to wonder whether they’re simply too different to be compatible. The good news is that sameness is not the only—or even the primary—source of closeness in a long-term relationship. Many couples who have navigated the Disenchantment Stage learn how to create intimacy while holding significant differences. When couples successfully make this transition, they move into what I call the Evolution Stage, where differences add energy and depth, creating a vibrant and resilient partnership.

Once you understand that differences alone don’t determine incompatibility, the question becomes how to find closeness, connection, and intimacy while making room for those differences.

One crucial shift is moving from arguing over your differences to talking about them—and learning how to work with them. Many couples get stuck here and take a wrong turn, slipping into battles over who is right or whose way is better.

At the root of this pattern is fear: the fear that differences mean one person is right and the other is wrong; that difference equals incompatibility; or that closeness requires sameness. When these beliefs are operating beneath the surface, differences can start to feel like a threat to the relationship itself.

Thankfully, none of these beliefs is true. You can avoid taking this wrong turn by learning how to talk constructively about your differences. The first step is to notice where things are going wrong in your communication—where a conversation about differences starts to slide into an unproductive argument.

You can begin by reflecting on where you might be taking a wrong turn that leads to battling over your individual differences. You might ask yourself whether you and your girlfriend are slipping into black-and-white thinking, where one perspective is right and the other is wrong. Or whether there’s a belief operating beneath the surface that closeness requires sameness, making differences feel threatening to the relationship.

Gaining insight into the deeper sources of conflict will help you know where to focus as you learn how to have more constructive conversations.

If you’d like more guidance on engaging in conflict constructively, I recommend this relationship advice column, which explores how to listen effectively during difficult conversations, and this one on how to stay engaged with conflict—even when you don’t like it.

Constructive conversations about differences almost always require a spirit of curiosity. Curiosity allows you to deepen your understanding of yourself and your partner as two distinct individuals. Over time, these conversations can become a way of using your differences to strengthen your connection.

Apart from true dealbreaker issues, differences don’t signal a lack of compatibility. They’re inevitable when two individuals come together, and they can become a source of fertility for the future growth of a relationship.

As you move into this next stage of your relationship, what matters most isn’t finding the perfect way to handle your differences, but developing a shared practice of curiosity. Curiosity helps you stay engaged with one another even when things feel unfamiliar or uncomfortable.

There’s no foolproof method here. But again and again, it’s the willingness to try, to repair, and to keep turning toward each other that slowly builds the trust and stability a relationship needs as it grows.

Here’s my wish for you, Ben, as you enter this next stage of your journey together: May you discover rich new sources of intimacy and connection through engaging in honest conversations—and even conflict—around your individual differences.

~Angela

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Ask Angela is an advice column dedicated to the topic of having fulfilling relationships after trauma. Visit askangelapodcast.com to submit a question for Angela.

DISCLAIMER: This content is intended for informational purposes only and does not constitute professional medical or psychological advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other licensed health care provider with any questions or concerns you may have regarding a medical or psychological condition.

Leah writes: My wife has asked for a separation, saying that she’s fallen out of love with me. She said that after years of not being intimate and me being selfish in the relationship, she’s done. I tried to explain to her that she was not the problem in the relationship, that the lack of intimacy was related to me having a constant headache every single day, and my extreme and constant fatigue.

Having kids has also been a touchy topic for us. She’s always wanted kids, and I never really wanted kids. But I was willing to have a child for her. So in 2022, we tried. I went through four unsuccessful fertility treatments. Finally, I had to take a break because of the emotional stress, all the poking and prodding, and lack of success. In 2024, we decided to try again, and that’s when I was diagnosed with hypothyroidism and Hashimoto’s disease. Suddenly, all the symptoms I’d been struggling with made sense.

In the midst of all of this, though, my wife’s sister got sick, so we put the baby plans on hold while I focused on my health and we moved across the country. Between the move, stress, and job changes, our intimacy and closeness suffered even more.

Fast forward to this January, when her sister passed away, and it seemed like my wife emotionally cut herself off from our relationship. She’d leave and be gone for weeks at a time, saying this was her way of grieving and that she couldn’t bear to be in the house that had been meant for her sister. I told her to take the time she needed, as long as I knew she was okay.

In June, she finally told me she wanted to separate—and that she no longer had anything left to give to the relationship. I’ve begged her to work on things, which I know I shouldn’t have done. I just felt like I’d let her down when she needed me. I know that a lot of what happened was because of undiagnosed medical issues, but that doesn’t change the fact that she felt neglected and now she’s fallen out of love with me. I’ve been working on getting my symptoms under control, and I finally feel like I can offer her what she needs. But she’s already separated herself. So I guess my question is: how do I move forward and try to mend my relationship with my wife?

Dear Leah,

When we fall in love and decide to make a full commitment to our partner, we don’t expect things to be perfect. Instead, we hope that whatever challenges we encounter, we’ll be facing them together. And we have faith that our love is enough to sustain us through difficult times.

And yet, life sometimes has other plans for us.

We settle down, all warm and cozy in our new relationship, cocooned in dreams of our future together, and meanwhile, life is busy opening doors to uninvited guests, like chronic illness, loss, and grief.

We tend to think that the success of our relationship is mostly about the choices we make—how we choose to show up for our partner and express our love and keep our relationship on the right track, so that we go where we want to go, side by side with our partner.

We’re raised on love stories that tell us that if we try hard enough, if we love with an open heart, we’ll make it to that happily ever after that floats off in the distance like a promise for the future.

We imagine that if we’re loving and committed enough, we can shape the life we dream of together. But love doesn’t grant us control — and sometimes the story life writes for us isn’t the one we expected.

Sometimes, falling in love and leaping into marriage is our initiation into the experience of being humbled by life. We wake up one day to find those uninvited guests—the loss, the grief, the illness, the infertility—are all sitting around our table, and we can’t make them leave. Sometimes, even the most committed relationship can’t withstand what life demands of us.

When you and your wife got together, maybe you already knew that she wanted kids and you didn’t. Maybe you’d already talked about how you would go through fertility treatment, and get pregnant, so that she could become a mother.

We all know that there are no guarantees when it comes to pregnancy, so I imagine that perhaps you two already knew that there might be some potential challenges along the way. But I also imagine that you both had faith that you could navigate these challenges together if that was required.

What you didn’t foresee is that you would spend years wandering through the maze of undiagnosed thyroid disease and the haze of chronic fatigue.

And during that time, hurts and fears and misunderstandings would gradually add up for your wife, as her needs and desires in the relationship went unmet.

While you were busy trying to cope with the daily demands of life with a chronic illness, the love and commitment in your marriage was slowly eroding. I hear that you feel responsible for this—that you feel like you’ve let your wife down because you weren’t there for her in the ways she needed you to be.

The reality is that no one’s at fault for this. What happened wasn’t caused by the choices that either of you made. Instead, it was more like a series of natural disasters that swept away life as you’ve known it.

It’s not uncommon for spouses of those with undiagnosed chronic health problems to interpret their partner’s symptoms as a lack of care, desire, and love.

That’s not true, of course.

But the lack of engagement, low libido, and depleted energy caused by your thyroid condition may have looked to your wife like an absence of interest in her and a lack of engagement in your relationship.

Again—that’s not an accurate assessment … but so many of us take things like this personally when they’re not about us at all.

When chronic illness enters a relationship, it often creates two separate lonelinesses. There’s the loneliness of suffering through the illness. And there’s the loneliness of feeling shut out by a partner, whose inner world has been colonized by this mysterious invader.

In your experience, with your body in distress and unable to communicate love reliably, you and your wife were no longer able to be attuned to each other. First, you fell out of sync, and then you drifted apart.

Maybe without the pressures of your cross-country move, and then your wife’s tragic loss of her sister, you would have been able to repair the rupture in your relationship.

But grief and loss only widened the gap, and your wife no longer had the wherewithal to bridge the chasm that stood between the two of you. Instead, your wife withdrew from you and from your marriage.

Grief is like chronic illness in that it saps our energy. It demands all our energy and attention to just get through the day and take care of the basics.

I can imagine that during this time, both of you were each very focused on doing what you needed for yourselves.

And sometimes, grief can bring unexpected clarity.

It’s like a light suddenly shines through the fog of grief, spotlighting a necessary change we have to make in our lives. We see what no longer fits or what feels impossible to sustain. It might seem counterintuitive to decide to end a marriage while in the midst of deep grief for the loss of a loved one. But, in my experience, grieving a sudden or shocking loss can initiate making major life changes, including divorce.

When something like this happens, the tendency is to try to figure out how it could have gone differently — and that often leads us to assign blame.

I think that’s how you’ve ended up blaming yourself, Leah, saying that you’d let her down. I see it differently. I imagine that both of you were doing the best you could in the midst of very difficult circumstances.

Sometimes, when we blame ourselves for what’s happened, it’s because we don’t want to face the truth of how life works—which is that we don’t have control over everything that happens, even when it comes to what we care about most.

Blaming ourselves and focusing on what we could have done differently is sometimes a way to avoid accepting reality. It’s a way of denying that life might be beyond our control.

Accepting reality requires being willing to grieve what’s happened. Grief, by contrast, is an act of surrender. It lets us face what’s been lost without turning against ourselves.

Letting go of the illusion of control means surrendering ourselves to life as it is.

We’re not just surrendering to the whims of the Fates, though. We are also opening ourselves to receive the wisdom that comes only when we stop fighting reality. When we stop fighting, we can accept that life requires us to live without guarantees, even when we’ve done our best and tried our hardest and lived with an open heart.

I’m not saying that there’s no chance that your wife might have a change of heart and decide that she wants to work on things again. The future is unknown and plenty of people make different decisions once they have the clarity that comes with time and distance.

What I can see as I stand where you are right now is that you have the choice to see your marriage as a success, in that you have loved truly and deeply … even if your marriage ends.

Beautiful love stories don’t always end in happily ever after. Sometimes they come to an end with a heartfelt, if reluctant, goodbye.

Those uninvited guests—illness, grief, loss—changed the shape of your marriage. But they don’t diminish the reality of the love you shared.

Here’s my wish for you, Leah—that you are able to see the beauty in what you have shared with your wife, no matter what happens next, and that you can cherish the genuine love and joy as well as the tears you’ve shared.

~Angela

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Ask Angela is an advice column dedicated to the topic of having fulfilling relationships after trauma. Visit askangelapodcast.com to submit a question for Angela.

DISCLAIMER: This content is intended for informational purposes only and does not constitute professional medical or psychological advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other licensed health care provider with any questions or concerns you may have regarding a medical or psychological condition.

Kyle writes: So there’s this girl I met online. We become good friends. She shared her poems and her writings, and I really liked them, which is how it ended up turning romantic. But it was always like one day I was her partner and then the very next day, she’d treat me like a complete stranger and behave like I did something wrong. There are so many examples of this, and I was always trying to justify her actions, telling myself she had something going on. But it would just leave me drained, always feeling like I was the only one trying and holding the relationship together by myself. I tried to leave so many times, but then she would be nice. So I stayed and stayed—until I finally left. And now I can’t stop blaming myself for whatever happened, wondering if I could have done something differently, maybe said something else to her. But I know it wouldn’t have changed anything.

I’ve heard that we should love people without expecting anything in return, but does that mean letting ourselves be treated like toys? Shouldn’t love make us feel safe? Don’t we deserve some reciprocation?

Dear Kyle,

The way you describe your experience in this relationship, I’m guessing a lot of people can relate to what you went through. Dating someone who is different from day to day—who’s hot one day and then cold the next—has a way of keeping you on your toes in a relationship.

You never know what to expect. You’re always on alert, because even when things seem fine in the moment, you know that can turn so fast it leaves your head spinning.

I get a lot of letters from people who are either trying to find their way out of a relationship like this or trying to heal after one’s over … and healing after a toxic relationship is over has been a frequent topic of past episodes of this podcast because the confusion you feel, with its peculiar mix of heartbreak and self-blame, can make it seem as though you can’t find your way to the other side of this relationship, at least emotionally, even once it’s officially over.

Psychologists call this kind of on-again, off-again attention intermittent reinforcement. It’s the same pattern that makes gambling so addictive — you never know when the next ‘reward’ will come, so you keep holding on to hope.

This is why leaving a relationship like this is so difficult, because you keep feeling like you’re on the verge of cracking the code that will shift the relationship from intermittent warmth and affection to something more consistent. In reality, just like slot machines, no matter how much effort you put into the relationships, you never actually increase your odds of getting kindness, love, and affection instead of disconnection, detachment, and disregard.

I say all this to make it clear that the self-blame and struggle to leave isn’t a failure on your part but a predictable response to a confusing and painful dynamic.

It’s also common afterward to replay every detail and wonder, “What if I had done something differently?” But that question is really about trying to regain a sense of control, not about the truth of what happened.

Ultimately, it’s the questions you pose at the end of your letter that will guide you through your healing process. It’s actually through finding the answers to these very questions that you’ll end up in a far better place than where you started out before this relationship began.

That’s important to know—that you can actually end up better off than ever before—because it’s not uncommon to feel like you’ve sustained some kind of permanent wound from the pain and hurt that comes from a relationship like this one.

Now that we’ve established that it’s not only possible to heal after this relationship but it’s also possible to grow personally through your healing process, let’s talk about each of your questions.

First, you asked whether loving people without expecting anything in return means letting yourself be treated like a toy in relationships. And then you followed up that question by asking: Shouldn’t love make us feel safe? And, don’t we deserve some reciprocation of our love and affection?

So, let’s talk about unconditional love in relationships, since that’s really what your first question is getting at.

What does it mean to love unconditionally within an intimate relationship? Does it mean allowing yourself to be toyed with by a partner who’s affectionate and warm one moment and cold and distant the next?

It’s natural to feel confused with this question. We’ve all heard that unconditional love is important. And in theory, that sounds like the ideal form of love. But when we imagine ourselves on the receiving end of this kind of behavior from a partner—or other forms of bad behavior in relationships, like being lied to, or berated and yelled at by a partner—we can immediately sense that something’s not adding up here.

Our gut immediately signals to us that this isn’t love, and it isn’t okay to allow ourselves to be treated like this within an intimate relationship.

In other words, there’s a clear conflict here when unconditional love means allowing ourselves to be mistreated in a relationship.

So, how do we resolve this conflict? Do we reject the idea of unconditional love? Do we instead go down the path of putting conditions on our love, saying to our partner, I will love you as long as you meet my conditions. I’ll love you if you never make me feel bad, or hurt my feelings … as long as you take care of your dishes and don’t leave your laundry on the floor … as long as you reassure me anytime I feel anxious or insecure in this relationship, and you don’t talk to any of your exes or your cute coworker who seems to have a thing for you.

Here, too, maybe our gut starts signalling that something is off. If we put conditions on our love, are we really loving the other person, or are we trying to mold that person into someone else, some idealized, imagined partner?

What I so deeply appreciate about this question is that it gives me a chance to write about this exact dilemma, which so many individuals have confronted in intimate relationships where there are hurtful or toxic dynamics at play.

For well-meaning people who want to do the right thing in relationships and love well, it can be really disorienting when a partner spins feedback about hurtful behavior or requests to change into something like, “You’re not loving me unconditionally if you don’t accept me like I am.”

It can be incredibly difficult to figure out how to be a loving partner in a relationship like this—where unconditional love starts looking like a license for a partner to treat you however they want and putting conditions on your love starts looking like withholding love from a partner until they behave the way you want them to.

So, now that we’ve identified the root of the problem, let’s talk about how to find your way through this seemingly unresolvable conflict.

Finding your way through this begins with making a distinction between love and intimate relationships.

I am a huge proponent of unconditional love. I believe that at the core of every person on this planet—and that includes whomever you would consider to be your biggest enemy—is someone who is deeply deserving of love, care, and kindness.

But, as much as I’m in favor of unconditional love, I’m not at all in favor of unconditional relationships.

In fact, I’m very much against unconditional relationships. That’s because not having conditions for how you’re treated by a romantic partner might work out just fine if you have a partner who’s well-meaning and has great relationship skills.

But relationships without conditions are a disaster when you’re with someone who is not well-meaning, who tends to engage in very hurtful behaviors toward you, or who has unhealed past trauma that plays out in their relationship with you.

A relationship without conditions is a relationship in which you don’t feel free to hold personal standards for what you want and what you expect in terms of how you’re treated by your partner. A relationship without standards means settling for whatever you get, even if that means your partner toys with you or treats you like a stranger when that suits her in the moment.

So, now that we’re clear on the difference between unconditional love and unconditional relationships, here’s what unconditional love looks like in a relationship in which you have standards for how you want your relationship to be.

When your standards or expectations for your relationship aren’t being met, it’s important to communicate about that. Now—to be clear—just because you communicate about the gap between how things are and how you want them to be doesn’t mean that your partner is obligated to meet your standards.

If, for example, you’ve told them that you really don’t like that they’ve made plans to go out for dinner and drinks with the office hottie, this doesn’t mean that they now have to cancel their plans. Ideally, you can have a conversation about it, where you can each share your thoughts, feelings, and perspectives about the situation.

There are many ways to express care and love in a relationship without necessarily changing your own individual preferences or perspectives. Healthy relationships make space for partners who have different needs and desires that are sometimes in conflict.

If the gap is too great or the issue is non-negotiable for one or both partners, this may indicate that you and your partner aren’t a good fit and that you want very different things from a relationship. That’s okay—it happens. And it doesn’t mean that what you or your partner wants is wrong or bad. It just means that you’re probably not going to be able to find that together.

But what do you do when you really want to be in the relationship and you share your concerns about how your partner’s behavior is affecting you, and they say something along the lines of, “You’re supposed to accept me for who I am. If you’re asking me to change, you’re not loving me unconditionally.”

What do you do when your partner makes it clear that they’re not going to change, and if you have a problem with that, it’s your problem to deal with?

This is where unconditional love in a relationship is so important. That’s because one aspect of unconditional love is acceptance. You see, if your partner makes a demand that you accept them for who they are and they’re not going to change, it’s essential for you to accept that unconditionally. Accept that they are communicating clearly to you that they’re not going to change for you.

Once you’ve accepted that, you can figure out what you want to do. In my experience, this is where people get stuck, especially in toxic or unhealthy relationships. When you’ve confused the idea of unconditional love with unconditional relationships, and you think that if your partner isn’t going to change, it’s easy to conclude that you just have to figure out a way to live with your partner’s hurtful behavior. You have to tolerate being mistreated.

That’s only true if you don’t have standards in a relationship.

When you have standards, you can ask yourself whether or not the relationship fits with those standards.

Now, in the case of your partner going out to dinner and drinks with their co-worker, you might talk it through with them, and they might say, “I hear where you’re coming from. I’ve never felt like there was any flirtation coming from this coworker. Honestly, I can tell you for sure that while I really enjoy their company, I’m not interested in this person at all beyond friendship. But I really do value their friendship, and I’d like to find a way to keep that. So, what do you think might help you feel more comfortable?”

And it might be that once you’ve talked about it, and you recognize that they care about your feelings even though they are not willing to cut off a friendship they value, you decide to stay in the relationship and work on your insecurities.

On the other hand, when your partner insists that they’re not going to change and that your feelings are your problems, it’s likely that the relationship doesn’t meet any decent standard for love, care, and respect.

In this case, unconditional acceptance of your partner is going to require that you consider their words and re-evaluate whether this relationship is working for you.

This is where your other questions come in—Shouldn’t love make us feel safe? Don’t we deserve some reciprocation? Ideally, we should have a baseline of safety in our relationship that’s created through mutual care and love. But this doesn’t mean that we should always feel comfortable and secure in the relationship.

Healthy relationships challenge us and invite us to grow—and this kind of personal growth rarely feels comfortable.

In other words, safety doesn’t mean the absence of conflict or challenge — it means knowing your partner is for you, not against you, even when you disagree.

When it comes to deserving reciprocation of our love and care in a relationship, things get trickier. Healthy relationships definitely involve reciprocity in the form of mutual love and care.

But reciprocity in love isn’t a transaction — it’s not ‘I gave, so you owe me.’ It’s the natural back-and-forth of care that makes a relationship feel steady and mutual.

Love is a gift because it’s given freely and without obligation. In other words, your choice to love someone doesn’t obligate them to return your love.

When you’re in a relationship that’s not healthy and there’s no love flowing back to you, it’s time to take a clear-eyed look at this relationship and ask yourself: does this really meet my standards? In other words, once you unconditionally accept your partner and how they’re choosing to show up, is this a relationship that you want to be in? If not, and you’ve already communicated what’s not working for you, acceptance means accepting that your partner doesn’t want to change.

Unconditional acceptance in this case means accepting the relationship isn’t going to work and turning your attention to how to leave.

The truth is that we don’t need to be in a relationship with someone in order to love them unconditionally. You can love your partner and still recognize that the relationship is not good for you and needs to end.

You can wish them well and have empathy for whatever struggles they’re experiencing that are interfering with their ability to show up lovingly and consistently with you.

Real unconditional love begins with how you treat yourself. That’s my wish for you, Kyle—honoring your own worth, holding high standards for your intimate relationships, and refusing to settle for anything less than mutual care. That’s the love that will carry you forward into a relationship where safety, affection, and reciprocity can truly flourish.

~Angela

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Ask Angela is an advice column dedicated to the topic of having fulfilling relationships after trauma. Visit askangelapodcast.com to submit a question for Angela.

DISCLAIMER: This content is intended for informational purposes only and does not constitute professional medical or psychological advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other licensed health care provider with any questions or concerns you may have regarding a medical or psychological condition.

Heather writes: How do you overcome the apathy that accompanies ending a bad relationship? The apathy I feel about everything makes me feel like I am stuck in a bad relationship with myself now. It's as though the lies I told myself and my own mental contortion killed the part of me that I thought I would save by ending the relationship. I used to care so deeply. Now it feels like I don't care about anything besides just living to survive. How do you even begin the process of caring about yourself again when that well dried up and filled up with dry and suffocating dirt a long time ago?

Dear Heather,

One mantra that I find particularly helpful when I’m in the middle of a challenging life situation is simply to remind myself: “Don’t take stock too soon.”

In other words, when we’re confronting very real difficulties in life, when we’ve lost someone we love, or we’ve put everything we had into turning a passion project into a business, only to see it fall completely flat, or we’ve gone through a difficult breakup that should have felt like a relief but it doesn’t—it’s easy to imagine that where we are now—how we feel when we’re in the thick of it—is where we’re going to stay.

We tell ourselves things like, “I’ll never love again,” or “I’m a complete failure,” or “I’ve killed the part of myself I was trying to save.”

All these things we tell ourselves are statements of how our situation feels to us. And as feelings, they are real and they deserve to be honored.

But, thankfully, how we feel now doesn’t magically gift us with the power to predict the future. Feelings are temporary. They move and shift and change and, most importantly for this situation, they pass. No feeling is permanent. So, if we don’t like how we feel, it’s okay. We just need to keep going.

The reality is that, most likely, we will love again. If we try, try, and try again, we very well may succeed. And, when we give ourselves time, care, and attention, that part of us that seems to have died as a result of what we went through in a bad relationship comes back to life once we’ve moved through our grief and sadness.

You’ve done a really brave and good thing by leaving a bad relationship. It seems like this should be rewarded by an immediate feeling of relief. But that’s not what’s happened.

Instead, you feel flat, like life is nothing more than going through the motions, putting one foot in front of the other. But without any destination in front of you that you’re moving toward, what’s the point? The spark of your true self—that self you were trying to save by getting out of this relationship—seems to have gone out, smothered by all the painful things you did to yourself just to stay in that relationship for as long as you did.

Healing after a bad relationship begins right where you are now. It begins with apathy.

Underneath the apathy, there’s a well of grief and probably a fair amount of self-recrimination as well. In some ways, when the two alternatives in front of you are apathy or seemingly unending grief, apathy might feel easier.

Also, it’s possible that apathy is the result of your emotions going offline for a while after being wrung out day after day in this relationship.

Bad relationships keep us on an emotional rollercoaster. Our whole body is constantly braced for the next bad thing that’s coming. It’s exhausting. And now that you’re out of that stress and emotional intensity, your emotional self may just need to check out for a while to recuperate.

This is all to say that it’s important during this time that you not take stock too soon, believing that where you’re at now is where you will be in the future or that you are permanently changed for the worse as a result of this bad relationship.

I’m sure I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know when I say that healing takes time. But even though you already know that, it may feel difficult to believe right now.

Without knowing when things will start to feel different, when you might care again, when the part of yourself you tried to save by leaving this relationship might show up again, it can seem like it’s never going to happen and it’s better not to get your hopes up only to be disappointed.

Another way to think about where you’re at now is this: as long as you were in that relationship, you were in survival mode. Now you’re no longer in survival mode—even though it feels like you’re just surviving and not really living.

Instead, you’re at a way station on the road to healing and recovery. But it’s a way station that seems to be located in the middle of an emotional desert. And as far as your eye can see, there’s just more of the same.

But deserts are deceiving places. Even though they can look barren, there’s a lot that’s happening underneath the surface. Seeds are lying dormant, just waiting for the right conditions to sprout.

Roots are growing deeper and deeper in search of water. Topsoil hardens as a way to protect what’s going on underground. And during harsh conditions, desert animals retreat underground—not because they’ve given up, but because that’s how they survive.

So, perhaps, it is with you too. Maybe what looks like apathy—what feels like numbness and just going through the motions—is not the absence of life, but the subtle work of healing and growth that’s happening beneath the surface.

Often, this inner work happens in our depths, outside of our conscious awareness. Because we can’t see it, we don’t realize that it’s happening. And yet it is. While what you are experiencing on the surface of life feels like apathy and emptiness, the body’s innate capacity for healing is at work within you, conserving energy and protecting your tender new growth.

Perhaps, as a result of this painful relationship, you are growing deeper roots, becoming more resilient, more grounded. And, even if you can’t feel it yet, it’s entirely possible that you may be getting ready to bloom when the conditions are right. And like a desert after rainfall, this might happen all at once—and it will seem as though you’ve returned, wild and beautiful and radiant. And very much alive.

You can’t speed up the healing process. And you can’t force this part of you to come back to life before it’s ready. What you can do is trust that there’s more to what’s happening here than what you can see on the surface. And while you’re waiting, you can take small steps toward relearning how to care for—and about—yourself.

This begins with allowing yourself to rest as much as you need to. Rather than interpreting this need for rest as apathy, you can honor the essential role that rest plays in healing and recovery. You can close your eyes, take a long breath, and then imagine the growth that’s unfolding below the surface, in your inner depths where your true self resides. You can let yourself nap and dream and replenish the resources that were exhausted by the process of surviving this relationship.

If you’re used to being always on the go, doing things, being proactive, and keeping yourself busy and maybe distracted, allowing yourself to rest might feel strange and foreign and wrong.

It might be difficult to tell the difference between resting and simply wasting time or doing nothing.

I would encourage you to think about the difference between downtime that’s genuinely restorative and downtime that’s just a way of passing the time. One easy way to tell the difference between restorative downtime and other forms is how you feel when you’re done.

Some activities, like scrolling social media, binge-watching shows, or numbing out with other distractions, tend to leave you feeling no better off than when you started. There’s nothing wrong with any of these activities, and they can be a way to zone out when you’re exhausted. But, they also have a tendency to leave you feeling more disconnected and adrift, especially when they’re overused.

Restorative downtime, on the other hand, promotes your process of moving through what you’re experiencing and often leaves you feeling better than before.

Restorative downtime is very individual, but it can include things like listening to music while you pet your dog, journaling, taking a nap, drawing, sitting with a cup of tea while you have a good cry, walking with a friend, or just staring out the window and noticing the way the sunlight peeks through the trees.

These aren’t big, dramatic acts of healing and self-care.

You don’t have to hike the Pacific Coast Trail or run a marathon or post daily inspirational quotes on Instagram. These are simple, small, sacred acts to remind yourself, “I’m still here.” They are a way to start remembering what it feels like to be present in your own life, instead of consumed by someone else’s.

And, on that note, Heather, I am wishing you these moments of grace and quiet and calm, when you are able to get glimpses of presence and peace, when you can sense that where you’re at now isn’t where you are going to be in the future. I am wishing you little windows into the healing process that is unfolding within you right now—and maybe even a little bit of anticipation for the beauty that’s still to come.

~Angela

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Ask Angela is an advice column dedicated to the topic of having fulfilling relationships after trauma. Click HERE to submit a question for Angela.

DISCLAIMER: this content is intended for informational purposes only and does not constitute professional medical or psychological advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other licensed health care provider with any questions or concerns you may have regarding a medical or psychological condition.

Jazmin writes: I never learned how to communicate with a partner. That just wasn’t a reality in my life growing up. I’m on my third relationship, which also happens to be my 2nd same sex marriage. It’s by far the healthiest relationship I’ve ever had in my life! I freaking love this girl and her intelligence. She offers so much insight when it comes to communication, emotions, and points of view. We’re coming up on 6 years together. We are at a point where all she feels is resentment. And she isn’t really interested in doing any more work without me putting in all the effort I didn’t at the beginning of the relationship. I’m struggling bad—trying to figure out what to do for this relationship as she continues to wait on me to figure out how I’m going to do it. How do I begin to start fixing this thing that we are in?

Dear Jazmin,

First off—can I just say congratulations on being in the healthiest relationship of your life with a girl you clearly adore? That is no small thing when you grew up without learning the essential skills for healthy relationships, including how to communicate with your partner. And it’s absolutely something to celebrate, even while you are facing the reality that your wife has reached a point where she’s burned out from putting in all the effort to keep the relationship going.

Your situation is one that many people are familiar with. You fall in love, head over heels, make a commitment to each other—even get married—and then you discover midway into the relationship that you don’t actually know how to do a healthy relationship because you never learned. You didn’t have any role models, except for those who showed you what not to do.

But when we don’t know what to do instead, it’s almost inevitable that we either slip into the unhealthy relationship dynamics we witnessed as a child. Or, we try to do the exact opposite of what we learned, which actually ends up also being unhealthy.

As long as your girl was putting in all the effort to keep the relationship going in the right direction, you were probably propelled forward through the power of all the emotional labor she was putting in. But when one partner is trying to pull the other along the path toward having a healthy relationship, resentment and frustration are a foregone conclusion.

It doesn’t feel good to be doing all the work on the relationship. And it also doesn’t feel good when it seems like your partner is trying to make you change. It’s natural at that point to resist, to dig in your heels a bit, and also to start to think that it’s your partner’s responsibility to get you to change and if you’re not changing, it’s on them to work harder or better to get you to change.

That’s not a fun dynamic for either person. And so, thankfully, your wife gave up on this and now she’s waiting to see what you do in response.

It can come as quite a shock when your spouse suddenly stops overfunctioning in the relationship and instead pulls away after years of unequal emotional labor. For you, this shock is offering you the much needed wake-up call about what it really takes to build a sustainable intimate relationship.

Despite all the fairy tale messages to the contrary: on its own, love is not enough.

Love is an essential quality—and, based on your letter, it sounds like you’ve got an abundance of love for this intelligent woman you’ve committed yourself to. And that’s great, because that’s going to serve as your motivation for doing the hard work of addressing your relational trauma from childhood (meaning, at the very least, the absence of healthy communication when you were growing up) and developing the relationship skills you missed out on learning.

If you’re like many people, hearing from your partner that she is done trying to fix the relationship created immediate panic. Suddenly, finding answers to the question of how to fix a relationship can feel like an emergency.

At the same time, the reality is that there are no quick fixes for longstanding problems in a marriage.

When one partner has been putting in the work and carrying far more than their share of the emotional labor, there are no big gestures or promises that are going to solve this. What your wife is waiting for isn’t a promise to change (which she probably won’t believe at this point).

She’s waiting to see whether you can make ongoing, sustained efforts to address your contributions to the issues in your relationship. In other words, as she withdraws from the role of the overfunctioning partner, she’s waiting to see if you can step out of the role of the underfunctioning partner and really show up consistently and grow into an equal partner who shares the responsibility for creating the kind of marriage that both of you want.

Given that you grew up without the chance to learn relationship communication skills, it makes sense that you may have coped with this lack by just trying to avoid wading into relationship waters where you felt inadequately prepared.

Emotional avoidance is really common for those who grew up in unpredictable, scary, or isolating home situations. Keeping your head down and hoping that things will blow over quickly in your relationship may have felt like the best available strategy.

Even though you didn’t intend to emotionally abandon your wife in your marriage, you probably did. And alongside her resentment, she might also be experiencing loneliness and even grief about how things have gone so differently than she’d hoped.

So let’s break this down so you can figure out how to fix your relationship when it seems like it’s on the verge of breaking.

The first step is identifying what the problems are. My guess is that your wife has been trying to talk to you about these problems for a long time, so hopefully you can do this first step pretty easily.

Let’s say that, based on the feedback you’ve gotten from your wife, you recognize that she’s not happy about your tendency to shut down when she tries to talk to you about something important. She’s also noted that you avoid coming back to important conversations that were left unfinished. And you have a tendency to lash out if she tries to push you to talk when you don’t want to.

She may have also asked you to initiate difficult conversations to address your concerns in the relationship, instead of hijacking conversations she initiates about her concerns. Or maybe you know that your tendency to be defensive is a problem in your relationship. Or your tendency to turn on yourself in self-hatred every time she gets upset or feels hurt, so that she ends up comforting you instead of the other way around. Or maybe it’s that you never talk about your feelings.

Whatever the specific issues are, once you’ve identified them, you can start the process of self-reflecting and figuring out what’s contributing to these issues.

It can be really helpful to have a notebook or a document where you can write down your answers to these questions and focus on getting more clarity as you think through the questions.

So, if your wife has given you feedback about what you do in your interactions with her that is not working for her, here are some questions you can ask yourself:

Why do I do this?

When did I first start doing this?

Could this be a way of protecting myself? If so, what am I trying to protect myself from?

What’s getting in the way of me doing something differently?

Note that these are questions to ask with curiosity. It’s not an opening to berate or criticize yourself. You’re trying to get information here, and because your relationship patterns are likely the result of painful past experiences in relationships—either from childhood or previous romantic relationships—you deserve to be treated with compassion and kindness as you engage in this process of self-reflection.

So, what does this look like in practice?

Let’s imagine that your wife has expressed that she is tired of trying to talk to you about issues because you get defensive any time she brings up something that’s bothering her. You interrupt, interpret everything she says as an attack, and then divert the conversation by introducing your own complaint about her.

Why do I do this? When you ask yourself this question, you might recognize that when your wife talks to you about something she’s unhappy with in your relationship, it sounds like she’s attacking you. And so, you defend yourself and then you go on the offensive to get her to back off.

When did I first start doing this? As you think about when this first started for you, you realize that this has been your reaction to previous partners as well. And you can even remember doing this with your best friend in high school.

Could this be a way of protecting myself? What am I trying to protect myself from? When you consider whether this reaction might be a way of protecting yourself, you think about being a kid and how you couldn’t show any sensitive feelings or your family would start making fun of you. And you realize that having a big, angry response was the only way to get your family to back off.

What’s getting in the way of me doing something differently? When you ask yourself what might be getting in the way of doing things differently with your wife, you realize that you have no idea how people sit calmly and listen to a partner express dissatisfaction or unhappiness. And you wonder if maybe that’s something you can work on, because you realize that your wife seems to have the ability to listen to feedback without immediately getting reactive and hostile.

While problems in a marriage are related to what you are doing, other times, it’s about what you aren’t doing.

If your wife has given you feedback about things you don’t do that are causing problems in your relationship, here are some questions that can help you get deeper insight:

Why don’t I do this thing my partner wants from me?

Does this thing feel scary? Or just hard?

Why is it scary or hard?

Do I want to do this thing? If so, what do I do to make it happen?

So, let’s imagine that your wife has expressed frustration about the things you don’t do. Let’s say that you know that your wife is frustrated because you never talk about your feelings, so she doesn’t know what’s going on inside you, and it’s hard for her to feel connected to you. Let’s go through the questions and see how they can help you gain more self-insight.

Why don’t I do this thing my partner wants from me? When you ask, “Why don’t I share my feelings?” you might at first draw a blank. But then you realize that you are rarely even aware of how you’re feeling, except for when you feel angry.

Does this thing feel scary? Or just hard? When you ask yourself, “Does talking about my feelings feel scary … or just hard?” you realize that it’s both. It’s hard to know what you are feeling, but you also can’t imagine sharing that you’re feeling sad, or disappointed, or afraid.

Why is it scary or hard? When you ask yourself this question, you realize that it’s hard because you don’t have any practice doing this. And it’s scary because it feels too exposed to share these kinds of feelings, like you’re opening yourself up to being hurt if you were vulnerable like this. You might realize that you learned early on in childhood to keep your feelings to yourself, to go to your room if you felt sad or hurt, rather than try to talk to a parent about it.

Do I want to do this thing? If so, what do I do to make it happen? This is such an important question because in order for change to be sustainable within a relationship, we have to find our own inner motivation for making changes. It can’t simply be because our partner wants us to change.

Asking yourself if you actually want to start talking about your feelings is going to require some radical honesty on your part. Once you’re clear that you genuinely want to change—for yourself, not just because your wife wants you to—then you can focus on figuring out what relationship skills you need to develop in order to change your patterns and address issues in your relationship.

This is an important and courageous step that’s going to require you to get outside your familiar comfort zone. Your courage and commitment to venturing into the unknown deserve to be celebrated.

But I also want you to be prepared that your wife may initially be less enthusiastic to see you changing than you might imagine.

While you might imagine she’d be happy that you’re finally doing what she’s been requesting for a long time, it’s essential to remember that she’s built up a lot of resentment and frustration. That’s why it’s not uncommon for over-functioning partners to react with anger when their partner finally starts making changes.

She may wonder why it took so long for you to take her concerns to heart. Watching you change shows her that you have been capable of change all along. If she’s like many individuals I’ve worked with over the years, her reaction might be something like: “Oh, so you can change. You just chose not to until now. It didn’t matter to you how much I was suffering or the toll this was taking on me. All you actually care about is not losing this relationship.”

I tell you this so that you won’t be discouraged from working on yourself and building new relationship skills if you’re met with this kind of surprising response. Investing in your personal growth is valuable no matter what.

Focusing on your own reasons for growing and changing will help you not look to your partner for positive feedback and appreciation of the efforts you’re making. If she gives that positive feedback, great. If she doesn’t, it might be because she’s too resentful and burned out by how things have been in the past to have anything left in her tank right now. Or she’s waiting to see whether this is real and you are actually changing, rather than reacting out of a temporary state of panic.

Remember that you don’t have to get this right every time. Learning new relationship skills is an ongoing process that inevitably involves a lot of mistakes. But you can always try again. You can come back and say, “I’m sorry for that. Here’s what I wish I would have done instead.”

And on that note, Jazmin, I am wishing you the self-compassion and kindness you’ll need on this journey as you ask yourself the hard questions and start learning new ways to show up in your relationship with honesty and openness.

~Angela

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Ask Angela is an advice column dedicated to the topic of having fulfilling relationships after trauma. Click HERE to submit a question for Angela.

DISCLAIMER: this content is intended for informational purposes only and does not constitute professional medical or psychological advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other licensed health care provider with any questions or concerns you may have regarding a medical or psychological condition.

Nicole writes: I am in the middle of going through a breakup with my one-year-old baby’s father. We got pregnant right away after dating for a couple of months and decided to have our baby. It has been a very tumultuous relationship, as we both have our fair share of trauma. I felt there was genuine love and care for one another, but our traumas got the best of us. I do want to have a healthy relationship with a man and show my son what a healthy relationship looks like. Still, I’m also terrified to get into another toxic relationship. I know it’s going to take time to heal, but I am wondering how much time a person should take to heal? Also, I’m open to hearing any thoughts on dating or finding a healthy partner while having a child. I know it’s important not to bring just whoever around our children.

Dear Nicole,

I deeply appreciate the sentiment at the heart of your letter. Recognizing the generational legacy of trauma and committing to doing what it takes for that legacy to be resolved through your healing—instead of passing it on to your child—is courageous, inspiring work.

Oftentimes, we only become aware of our childhood trauma when we are in the midst of re-enacting it in a traumatic relationship with a partner. Your letter highlights something that is often overlooked in discussions of toxic relationships and the impact of trauma on intimate relationships.

There are many relationships in which both partners are genuinely loving and want the best for the other person and yet—trauma still ends up creating toxic dynamics that are hurtful and destructive to both people.

Our cultural love story is all about falling in love and living happily ever after. And our cultural story about breakups focuses on the experience of falling out of love.

We don’t have a cultural story about loving someone and the heartbreak that ensues when we have to end that relationship because it’s just not good for us (or the other person).

Letting down our guard in order to be close to another person often activates relational trauma. When we’ve been hurt in the past, we’re aware that being open and unguarded means that we might get hurt again. That’s scary.

The traumatized part of us—that part that is dedicated to keeping us safe, even if it needs to keep others at arm’s length—is alert and hyperreactive to any sign that we’re about to be hurt, let down, or betrayed. It lashes out or withdraws to a safe emotional distance or sabotages intimacy to reestablish that safe distance. But distance feels scary too, so then we try to come close again … and so the cycle goes, over and over again, until one or both people realize that the relationship just isn’t healthy.

Leaving a relationship like this—in which there was genuine love and care alongside the toxic dynamics—is really hard and it deserves time for healing.

There is often grief about the loss of the positive aspects of the relationship as well as grief about the unfulfilled potential for what the relationship could have been, if only trauma didn’t get in the way. An important part of the process of moving on after this relationship involves making space for the complexities of mourning a complicated relationship like this.

You can be sad that it’s ended and also recognize that it had to end.

Now you’re starting to think about being open to dating again. You want to have a healthy romantic relationship, but you don’t yet trust yourself to successfully avoid getting into another toxic relationship.

One of the important steps in healing after a toxic relationship and preparing yourself for the experience of opening yourself up to new love is looking back over the toxic relationship, with a focus on identifying the red flags that signaled the presence of harmful dynamics.

I want to be clear that this process of reflection is not about being hard on yourself for missing those red flags, or overlooking them, or explaining them away.

Just because we can see things clearly now doesn’t mean that we should have been able to see them at the time. As they say, hindsight is 20/20, and love is blind.

So be kind to yourself as you start this process of looking back to see what you couldn’t see at the time. As you start to recognize those red flags—even though you maybe didn’t see them at the time—you’re going to start to feel more confident that you can recognize a toxic relationship.

Relationships happen in real time—and, oftentimes, when conflict erupts in a relationship, we’re so caught up in the intense emotions and stress that we don’t recognize the red flags signalling “Danger! Danger! Get out now!”

Our bodies pick up on them, but our conscious minds don’t register what our bodies are trying to tell us. That’s why taking time after the relationship is over to sort through what happened can help in learning the valuable lessons that difficult relationships offer us.

So, let’s say that one of the red flags that you identified in your last relationship was that your partner subtly undermined your sense of reality by dismissing concerns you brought up about the relationship. And now you’re dating someone new, and a few months into the relationship, your new partner makes a joke that hurts your feelings and when you say, “Ouch. That wasn’t funny,” they respond by rolling their eyes and saying, “Well, I didn’t realize you had no sense of humor.”

Now, maybe in your last relationship, you would have dismissed a comment like that by telling yourself that they’re having a bad day. Or you might have turned on yourself by saying, “Yeah, why am I so sensitive? It was only a joke.”

But now—because you’re committed to listening to yourself and your feelings, and you’re more aware of the early ways in which relationship red flags show up, you pay closer attention.

Maybe you respond by trying to talk about it more, saying something like, “Your response doesn’t feel good to me. If I share that something felt hurtful, I expect that you will take that seriously rather than responding by telling me I don’t have a sense of humor.”

The benefit of speaking up is that your new partner is going to give you further data about whether you’re truly observing a red flag.

If they say, “Sorry. I think I was embarrassed that my joke didn’t land. I should not have said that. Actually you have a great sense of humor. I just made an unfunny joke,” then you know that this is someone with whom you can talk through things and reconnect.

On the other hand, if they were to say something like, “Why are you blowing this out of proportion? Do you want to pick a fight?” then you know that you are interacting with someone who is unwilling to self-reflect, take responsibility for their actions, and make amends where needed. Instead, this is someone who will blame you if you raise a concern in your relationship.

At that point, you will have evidence that this relationship is likely lacking any potential to be healthy, caring, connected, and mutually supportive.

Trusting yourself is key to dating again. You need to trust yourself to be able to recognize red flags. And you need to trust yourself to act on those red flags. In other words, you need to trust that you won’t get hooked into hoping that a partner will change and grow, even when there are no actual indications that they are actively invested in changing and growing.

You need to be able to trust that you can disengage from a relationship when it’s clear that you’re repeating patterns from the past.

While there’s no set timeline for how long it takes to heal after a breakup or after a toxic relationship, you can also trust yourself to know when you’re ready to wade back into the dating pool again.

Having a support system will help with this. That might mean a handful of close friends who you know will tell you the truth, even if you don’t want to hear it. That might mean having a trauma-informed therapist or other helping professional who can support you through the ups and downs of dating.

One of the best strategies for making the shift away from toxic relationships toward healthy relationships is to raise your standards for what you are looking for in a partner and what you want in a relationship. Having a child is helpful in this regard. First, as a single parent, your time is probably pretty limited.

Therefore, anyone you choose to spend time with romantically has to be worth it, right? Instead of tolerating a mostly-okay-but-nothing-special dating situation, raise your bar and aim for spending time only with those who are worth the expense of the babysitter and the effort it takes to have a night out when you have a little one at home.

Also, when you have a child, even if you’re not bringing anyone around your kid, you can still be mindful of whether this is someone you would want to have around your child.

That likely means, at the bare minimum, someone who treats you well, someone who has decent emotional regulation skills (in other words, someone who doesn’t lose their temper or vent their bad moods on anyone in their vicinity), someone who is kind and caring.

Alongside raising your standards for what you’re looking for in a partner, consider what relationship skills you might need to develop.

Healthy relationships don’t just happen. Even when we have good intentions for what we want in relationships, we need to be able to rely on solid relationship skills to navigate the challenges that come with any long-term relationship.

This is especially true when we grew up with models of what not to do in relationships, rather than models for having healthy, fulfilling partnerships. Learning what to do when your trauma gets triggered so it doesn’t play out in your relationships is important. Knowing how to communicate through difficult topics, how to identify and talk about feelings, and how to navigate conflict will serve you well with your future romantic partner. And these relationship skills will also be equally valuable in your relationship with your child.

Remember, you don’t have to have a romantic relationship in order to teach your son what healthy relationships look like. Your relationship with your child is a place where you can start practicing new relationship skills right now.

Having a solid base of skills for healthy relationships is kind of like having a compass when you’re navigating the wilderness. It doesn’t mean that you won’t encounter rocky terrain. It doesn’t prevent you from stumbling or even taking a wrong turn at times.

But having strong relationship skills does give you a way to reorient yourself when you get off track.

And when you’ve taken the time to reflect on what went wrong in your last relationship and what you want for your future relationship, you also have an inner guidance system that will tell you: This feels wrong and uncomfortably familiar. Or: Yes, this feels strange, but I like it. I could get used to someone being nice to me, even when they’re having a bad day.

And on that note, Nicole, that’s my wish for you: to create a life with your child and your future partner that doesn’t resemble your past. That feels new and good and strange in ways that help you know you’re in the unfamiliar territory of love that’s genuine and true, and also healthy and nourishing.

~ Angela

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Ask Angela is an advice column dedicated to the topic of having fulfilling relationships after trauma. Click HERE to submit a question for Angela.

DISCLAIMER: this content is intended for informational purposes only and does not constitute professional medical or psychological advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other licensed health care provider with any questions or concerns you may have regarding a medical or psychological condition.

Karen writes: I want to improve my communication skills. I can't seem to communicate with my husband. I think I need help in fully listening to him and then answering him directly. He likes short, accurate answers: “yes” or “no.” His thinking is black and white and I am more of a gray thinker.

Dear Karen,

It is often the case that our innate communication style isn’t automatically a good fit with our partner’s communication style. As you describe in your question, this mismatch between preferences around communication can be the source of frustration and challenges with communication in a relationship.

The good news is that as a species, we humans are very adaptable.

We are fully capable of learning new skills throughout the lifespan, which means that you and your husband can work together to understand more about how to bridge the gap between his direct, cut-to-the-chase communication style and your indirect, context-rich style of communicating.

There is no one right way of communicating, and communication styles can vary greatly between individuals and also between cultures.

In high-context cultures, much of the meaning of what someone says is not apparent on the surface. It’s in subtle cues, including tone of voice, body language, shared cultural understandings, and most importantly, in what’s left unsaid.

High context communication is indirect and nuanced. And if you don’t understand the context, you won’t really understand the meaning of what’s been said. By contrast, in low-context cultures, most of the meaning is carried within the words themselves. Communication is fairly direct and explicit. There’s far less need to be able to read between the lines in order to figure out what’s being communicated.

The differences between high-context and low-context communication don’t just apply to cultures. They also apply to families and to individuals as well.

Learning how to improve communication in a marriage requires us to be willing to learn how to speak each other’s language.

When your husband is asking you to give him a straight answer, he’s essentially asking you to speak his low-context language. That’s great, as long as there’s an understanding that this can go both ways. In other words, your husband can also work toward developing his skills at deciphering your more nuanced communication.

So, let’s break this down. You write that you need help knowing how to fully listen to your husband. Given that your husband prefers black-and-white, yes-or-no communication, my assumption is that he’s pretty straightforward and says exactly what he means.

If that’s the case, you might be having difficulty listening to him because you’re attuned to listening for what’s left unsaid. In other words, you might be so focused on trying to read between the lines that you miss the meaning that’s actually contained in his words.

For example, let’s say that it’s a Saturday afternoon and you invite your husband out to lunch, because it seems like a good way to spend some quality time together. And he says, “I’m not hungry.”

As a high-context person, one natural response to this is to interpret this as an indication that he’s not interested in spending time together, since you may assume that this meaning was communicated in your question.

Some people, especially those whose emotional safety during childhood depended on reading between the lines of everything that was said, might even think, “Oh no, he’s mad at me. What did I do wrong?”

In this case, a natural response might be to anxiously ask, “What’s wrong?” But to the low-context partner who’s just said that they’re not hungry, such a response can be confusing and even frustrating.

In my experience working with couples in which one partner is high-context and the other is low-context, it’s not uncommon for arguments to start this way, with high-context assumptions about what the other person is saying that are incorrect or about low-context obliviousness to the real meaning of what’s been said.

So, as someone who naturally occupies the grey space of nuance between black and white, how do you give your husband a yes-or-no answer when the more authentic response is almost always it depends?

One of the first things that you can do is give yourself some space to at least listen to yourself, to sort through all the factors that need to be considered before you arrive at a yes or no response to his questions.

You could also try being direct and clear about what factors you are taking into account as you consider his question. For example, if your husband asked you to lunch on a Saturday afternoon and you weren’t hungry, but you suspected he wanted some quality time with you, you might say something like: “Hmm. That’s a good question. I ate a late breakfast, so I’m not particularly hungry. And I had planned to do some gardening this afternoon. But I would like to spend time with you today. Let me think about this for a while, and then I’ll let you know.”

This way, you have a chance to share a window into your thinking and the context that factors into your decision, while also respecting his preference for a clear yes-or-no answer.

You might then come back with something like, “I think I’ll pass on lunch, but I’d love to go to dinner if you want to,” or “Sure, let’s go to lunch. I’ll probably only have a coffee, but it will be nice to go out with you.”

I briefly touched on the influence of trauma or difficult family dynamics during childhood—in which our emotional safety depended on being able to read between the lines of all communication with the family.

While your difficulty communicating with your husband might simply be a matter of different communication styles, it’s also possible that it’s more than that.

Communicating openly, directly, and authentically requires the freedom to say what’s true for us without the fear of being punished (either subtly or not-so-subtly). Feeling comfortable and safe being ourselves depends on knowing that our preferences are given equal weight and respect within our relationship, even when they’re different from our partner’s preferences.

In other words, it’s possible that you may have difficulty giving direct, yes-or-no answers to your husband because you’re apprehensive about how he will react to what you say.

So, for example, if you really don’t want to go to lunch, because you’re not hungry and you already made other plans for the afternoon, you might respond indirectly so as not to upset him.

You might say something like:

“There’s a festival downtown today. Traffic’s going to be a mess.”

“Last time we went to lunch there, they forgot your fries. And you didn’t like your sandwich.”

“I thought you had plans with your sister at 3:00 to help her move.”

“You said last night that you wanted to start eating in more often to save money.”

For many indirect communicators who want to avoid disappointing or upsetting their partner, these kinds of responses seem entirely natural.

But notice that not one of these responses actually answers the question that was asked, which was “Do you want to go to lunch with me?”

In these cases, indirect communication is a self-protective strategy for avoiding conflict or a partner’s difficult feelings.

When you’ve internalized the expectation that it’s your job to take care of others’ feelings or keep others happy, it can feel nearly impossible to say what you actually think or want if you expect that it’s not in line with what someone else wants from you.

If this feels true for you, the first thing to consider is whether this relates to what you learned as you were growing up. Breaking out of the role of people pleaser is challenging. But it’s also essential in order to have authentic relationships with others, where you’re able to show up as yourself.

The second thing to consider is whether this expectation for you to be a people pleaser is shared by your husband.

In other words, are there consequences for you if you express preferences that differ from your husband’s preferences? If he wants to go to lunch and you don’t, what happens? Does he give you the silent treatment for the afternoon or make passive-aggressive comments? Does he find ways to criticize you or pressure you to change your mind? Any of these responses suggest that this is an area of your relationship that needs attention and perhaps some professional help to recalibrate in a healthier direction.

But maybe he doesn’t do any of these things. Maybe he just feels disappointed that you don’t want to have lunch with him. This is an entirely appropriate response, but it might feel really bad when you’ve internalized a belief that it’s your job to make others happy.

People raised to be people pleasers often have a terrible time tolerating others’ disappointment. If you tell your husband no and he’s disappointed, it might feel like you’ve done something wrong—even if he doesn’t see it that way at all.

If you think your difficulty communicating directly with your husband is due to your fear of his responses, and it’s also true that his responses are not designed to punish you for being honest, this seems like a good invitation to start breaking out of that old, outworn role of people pleasing.

Fair warning: this can feel really uncomfortable. Each time you give your husband an answer that isn’t the one you think he wants, it can feel like you are doing something wrong. It can feel like you’re being a bad partner or even a bad person.

Just keep going. It gets easier with practice. With time, you’ll begin to see that your husband’s disappointment—when you want something different than what he wants—is actually okay. You’ll see that he’s a grown man who is fully capable of handling his own disappointment—just like you are.

With time, you’ll develop more confidence in your husband’s ability to manage his own emotions. And you’ll develop more trust that you can speak your mind without being punished for it.

When you sense that your authentic answer is going to be different than your husband’s preference, you can help yourself gain the courage to express yourself by first saying, “Let me think about it for a bit and get back to you.”

This response helps interrupt your impulse to people-please and give whatever response you think your husband wants to hear. When you’ve given yourself a bit of breathing room, you can figure out what you really want and then decide how to share your preference with your husband directly, by saying something like, “Thanks, but that doesn’t fit in with my plans” or “I don’t think that’s going to work for me” or simply “No thanks.”

As a last reminder, if you identify responses by your husband that seem designed to get you to go along with his preferences and against your own, this relationship dynamic needs to be addressed.

This isn’t a communication difficulty. It’s a larger issue in your relationship that will have a lasting impact on trust, connection, and intimacy.

And, on that note, Karen, I am wishing you clarity and confidence to embrace your authentic communication style and your individual preferences within your relationship.

~ Angela

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Ask Angela is an advice column dedicated to the topic of having fulfilling relationships after trauma. Click HERE to submit a question for Angela.

DISCLAIMER: this content is intended for informational purposes only and does not constitute professional medical or psychological advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other licensed health care provider with any questions or concerns you may have regarding a medical or psychological condition.

Al writes: I have a habit of listening and interrupting my spouse when she talks, because I feel the need to respond to something she said. How can I move away from this behavior? I know it’s not fair to her.

Dear Al,

As hard as this is for me to admit, reading your question is like looking into the mirror. I’m a great listener with most people in my life. My work as a therapist depends on my ability to listen well and listen deeply.

But put me into a tense discussion with my partner, when I’m inwardly churning with lots of feelings, and suddenly I lose my ability to truly listen. The Interrupting Gremlin overtakes me, and my partner can barely get out a whole thought before I’ve jumped in to respond.

Obviously, this is not great. Listening well is one of the simplest (but not necessarily easiest) ways that we can communicate to our partner that they matter to us.

Even though we typically think of being a good communicator in terms of how well we speak and share our ideas, thoughts, and feelings, good communication actually relies on our ability to listen. And this is where many people struggle.

So, let’s talk about what gets in the way of good listening and how you can work with each of these stumbling blocks so you can learn how to be a better listener in your relationship.

I think it’s important to begin by repeating something I say a lot, which is that even though there is a unique set of essential communication skills for couples, we’re never systematically taught what these skills are.

So, unless we are lucky enough to grow up in families where we have great role models for how to communicate in an intimate relationship, we’re basically left to our own devices, figuring it out in real time with our partner, and inevitably making lots of mistakes along the way. If we grow up with models for what not to do, we have to work even harder to break bad habits of communication that we internalized early in life.

If you think about your own habit of interrupting your spouse, you might be able to recognize some of the things that trigger your interrupting reaction.

While interrupting is often viewed as evidence that we are not listening, in reality, if you weren’t engaged with what your partner was saying, it would probably be a lot easier to just sit there and let her talk without jumping in to add your two cents.

In other words, it’s not that you don’t care about what your spouse has to say—it’s that you care a lot.

The solution isn’t to care less, of course. The solution is to develop the capacity to better contain the feelings that get stirred up inside of you when you are listening to what your spouse has to say.

My guess is that you’re feeling a lot of inner emotional discomfort and interrupting is part of your way of relieving or discharging that emotional discomfort.

Building your capacity to contain that emotional discomfort is one step toward being a better listener.

One way to start building your emotional capacity is to focus on intentionally taking deep breaths when you feel the impulse to interrupt. Taking intentional, deep breaths does two things at once. First, it gives you something to focus on doing instead of interrupting. Second, it helps to soothe the intensity of those feelings that are coming up.

Listening well requires that we’re calm. The more emotionally activated we get, the more likely we are to interrupt. Emotional activation also makes it more likely that we will misunderstand what our partner is trying to say.

While this often isn’t recognized or acknowledged, when we are in a difficult, stressful, or upsetting conversation with our mate, we are hearing two voices at once.

One is the voice of our partner speaking to us. The other voice is an inner voice—it’s our inner translator that interprets and sometimes wildly distorts what our partner is saying.

Here’s how that works. Let’s say your partner says, “Would you mind taking out the garbage. It’s starting to overflow.” That’s a request—Will you take out the garbage?—followed by a neutral statement of fact—it’s starting to overflow.

But your inner translator hears something very different. Your inner translator distorts the message and turns it into a criticism, like, “I shouldn’t even have to tell you this, but since you’re so oblivious to the state of the garbage and since you never actually do what you say you’re going to do, I guess I have to say it. Take out the garbage, you lazy jerk.”

Now, obviously, I’m exaggerating a bit. Maybe your inner translator wouldn’t distort your spouse’s statement so extremely. But while your particular sensitivities may very well be different here, we all have an inner translator that distorts what our partner says at times. We hear criticisms and judgments and complaints that trigger our insecurities and self-criticism and shame in ways that make us very reactive.

Learning how to distinguish what our partner is saying from what our inner translator is saying about what our partner is saying is vital for being a better listener and a better communicator in your relationship.

One of the easiest ways that you can start to disentangle what your spouse is actually saying from what your inner translator is saying about what your spouse is saying is to engage in reflective listening.

This is a way of listening to what your spouse is actually saying and trying to hear the core of her words. Now, in the example I gave above, the content is simply a request for you to take out the garbage, followed by a bit of context: It’s overflowing.

But, of course, much of what’s shared in conversations has a far deeper, more significant emotional core. For example, if your partner were to say something like, “You’ve been working late every night for the last two weeks and I feel like I’ve hardly seen you,” the emotional core of that message would probably be something like, “I miss you. I wish we had more time together.”

This is where communication so often goes wrong when we’re not able to listen well, especially when we have experienced a lot of criticism and blame in past relationships or in childhood.

If we are sensitive to being criticized, our inner translator is likely to hear any variety of a partner’s communication of “I would like things to be different from what they are” as a criticism of us as a partner.

Our inner translator might take our partner’s expression of “You’ve been working late so often that I’ve hardly seen you,” and turn it into something like, “You’re choosing work over me. You’re really letting me down and I’m unhappy with you.”

If we hear something like that, interrupting to defend ourselves is going to be almost inevitable. We might say something like, “That’s not fair! I was here last Tuesday night and you were gone at yoga all evening!”

Or, if we feel even more intense feelings, we might pull out the big guns and say something like, “That’s rich coming from you! You’re hardly ever here, and when you are, you don’t even want to spend time with me. You just want to order me around and complain about what I’m doing wrong. Nothing’s ever good enough. No wonder I would rather be at work.”

You can see with this example how quickly things go off track in conversations when we’re not able to distinguish between what our partner is saying and what our inner translator is saying.

The simplest way to interrupt our own inner dialogue instead of our partner is to really focus on the words that our partner is saying and then to take a guess at the emotional core of what our partner is saying. We don’t have to get it right, by the way. But we do need to try.

That might sound like, “What I hear you saying is that with the amount of overtime I’ve been putting in, you’re feeling like we need to reconnect.” That’s a pretty good restatement of what your partner said, which goes a bit further by guessing that your spouse might be feeling disconnected and wants to spend more time together. If you’re feeling like your spouse is unhappy with you, you can follow up with something like, “It sounds like you’re not happy with me for taking these extra hours.”

Notice how different this is compared to responding to a perceived criticism by going on the attack.

Here, you’re not assuming you know what your spouse means. You’re taking a guess at it by saying, “It sounds like you’re not happy with me taking on more work.”

This gives your spouse the opportunity to affirm your guess, by saying something like, “Well, if you remember, I did express concern about the toll this might take on us, when you agreed to these extra hours.”

Or, if your guess was off track, your spouse might say something like, “I’m not unhappy with you. We made this decision together. I just miss you, and I’m looking forward to when things go back to normal.”

Feeling misunderstood is something nobody enjoys. When we feel misunderstood—especially by our intimate partner—we want to clarify ourselves.

So, it’s possible that feeling misunderstood by your spouse might be at the root of your impulse to interrupt instead of listening. If being misunderstood is particularly upsetting to you, so that it makes it difficult to listen and really take in what your partner is sharing, it’s okay to ask your partner to pause so you can get clarification.

The key is to do this calmly and without taking over the conversation.

That might sound something like, “I don’t know if I’m hearing you correctly, but I’m getting the impression that you think it was my choice to take on this overtime. But actually, I wasn’t asked. I was told I needed to fill in.”

Saying, “I don’t know if I’m hearing you right” gives your partner the chance to clarify if there is a misunderstanding. And it’s not defensive or a counterattack, so it’s not likely to derail the conversation or take it away from what your spouse wants to share.

Sometimes, when conversations often devolve into arguments over whose perspective is right and whose is wrong, you may assume that listening openly and without interrupting is the same as agreeing with what your partner is saying. But that’s not really the case.

Listening is about trying to genuinely understand your partner’s perspective and experience. You can be an amazing listener without agreeing with your partner’s perspective. In the example we’ve been working with, she might respond to your attempt to clarify by saying something like, “I know you say you didn’t have a choice about working overtime, but I think if you’d really tried to get out of it, you could have.”

At this point, your impulse might be to argue with her perspective and to prove to her just how wrong she is about this. This is the root of many couples’ habits of battling about every difference of perspective in their relationships.

A happy, healthy relationship doesn’t require that you and your partner see everything the same way. That’s not actually healthy, nor is it realistic.

Instead, a happy, healthy relationship requires that you and your partner seek to understand each other’s perspectives and individual experiences. You can respect each other’s perspective without having to agree. Just as humans are gifted with two eyes and the slightly different perspectives we get from our eyes create our depth perception, partners’ different perspectives enrich a relationship with more depth than it would have were we to always see things exactly the same way.

And on that note, Al, I am wishing you a wonderful adventure as you learn to be a better listener. May you keep the Interrupting Gremlin at bay as you learn to distinguish the voice of your inner translator from the voice of your spouse, and as you get to know her better through listening with an open heart.

~Angela

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Ask Angela is an advice column dedicated to the topic of having fulfilling relationships after trauma. Click HERE to submit a question for Angela.

DISCLAIMER: this content is intended for informational purposes only and does not constitute professional medical or psychological advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other licensed health care provider with any questions or concerns you may have regarding a medical or psychological condition.

Phil writes: I’ve learned I was gaslit for 15+ years in my marriage before I left. I was always the problem. Now that I’ve left, how do I know that I’m not that person? I know my heart is good and true, but what if she was right? I’m having trouble believing myself, and that I’m actually good instead of just acting good?

Dear Phil,

One of the reasons I started this relationship advice column is because I know how easy it is to feel alone in the experiences we have—in our intimate relationships and also in our relationships with ourselves.

For instance, this question you ask—how do I know I’m actually good and not just acting good?—probably feels to you like a question you’re asking because there’s genuine reason to doubt your goodness.

I’m guessing that if we were chatting about this, you might justify questioning your goodness by telling me about how you weren’t perfect in this marriage, and that you said and did a lot of things that you regret. You might explain that these things you did are evidence that you’re actually not a good person, no matter how much you want to believe that you are.

I’ve worked with many people who’ve been partnered with someone who engaged in gaslighting. Partners who do this make you doubt your own reality, your own memories, your own experiences within the relationship. They invalidate you at every turn, and leave you feeling confused and unable to trust your own sense of things.

So while you might assume that you’re questioning your inherent goodness for valid reasons, I don’t think this is the case. I wouldn’t even be able to count how many people I’ve worked with who’ve struggled with the exact same self-doubt in the aftermath of an emotionally abusive relationship that was characterized by gaslighting.

In other words, you’re not alone. And you’re not questioning your goodness because you’re not good. You’re questioning your goodness because that’s what we do when we’ve experienced gaslighting for 15 years.

I hope that comes as a relief to you, but I understand if you still suspect that you’re the exception to the rule that I’m laying out here. It takes quite a bit of time to really come out of the psychological and emotional disorientation that results from having your ability to trust your own reality undermined at every turn.

It’s not possible to stay in a marriage like this for 15 years and hold on to your own sense of reality. The only way that you were able to sustain this relationship for so long was by taking all the blame and doubting yourself whenever your spouse presented a wildly distorted version of reality that just wouldn’t line up with yours.

Here’s something else that I’ve observed over the course of my work with hundreds of people.

You know who agonizes over whether or not they’re a good person? People who want to be good. People like you and me.

You know who doesn’t agonize over whether or not they’re a good person? People who refuse to consider their own role in interpersonal problems; people who always think someone else is to blame for their difficult feelings or frustrations or challenges in life.

In other words, people who gaslight others do not agonize over whether or not they’re good. They don’t fret over their behavior or second-guess their inner motivations.

So, as strange as it might sound, the fact that you’re questioning whether or not you’re a good person speaks to your deep desire to be good, to be kind, and to treat others well. It speaks to the fact that your inner moral compass is intact and functioning effectively, even as you are trying to get your bearings again after this relationship.

Now that we’re clear on that, let’s talk more about what happened in your relationship and why your sense of reality—including who you are as a person and how you show up in relationships—ended up so confused, so that when you try to see yourself clearly, it’s more like looking into a series of funhouse mirrors, each of which distorts your features in bizarre and disturbing ways that make it impossible for you to even recognize yourself.

In a nutshell, here’s how an emotionally abusive relationship involving gaslighting works: One partner looks inward while the other partner blames outward.

Here’s what I mean by this. One partner (that’s you) looks inward to consider what might be causing conflict or issues in your marriage. The partner who looks inward is open to feedback from their mate and engages in self-reflection in response to concerns that are expressed.

When we look inward, we consider how our actions are contributing to problematic patterns in the relationship. We’re willing to question our own perspective on the situation. We try to look at things through our partner’s eyes, to see what they’re seeing. We know we have potential blind spots. And we take personal responsibility for our contributions to relationship problems.

When both partners are open to hearing the other’s perspective and engage in self-reflection, looking inward provides a strong foundation for building a healthy, happy relationship and working through the inevitable issues that arise in any long-term relationship.

But what happens when one person looks inward, to consider their role in problems, while their partner blames outward—pointing the finger at external factors (most often their mate) as the source of problems?

Let’s imagine this for a moment. (Although I’m guessing that it won’t be too hard for you to imagine since you’ve already lived through this.)

Let’s say you and your partner have planned an exciting vacation. Your preference is to get to the airport early, but your partner prefers to arrive with just enough time to catch the flight without having to wait around.

So the day comes, your partner sleeps in and then rushes around packing, and then she wants to stop for coffee on the way to the airport. You’re feeling super stressed about the possibility of missing the plane, but aside from a few reminders about the time, you try to stay quiet.

Halfway to the airport, your partner realizes she doesn’t have her ID. And, long story short, you miss your flight. She immediately erupts at you, saying, “This is all your fault! If you hadn’t been rushing me, I wouldn’t have forgotten my wallet. This is one more example of how your anxiety ruins everything.”

And you immediately think: What should I have done differently? Maybe I should have just made sure she was up earlier, and then I wouldn’t have had to say anything about the time? Maybe I should have suggested packing last night instead. But that probably would have ended up being a fight too. I was feeling anxious this morning and I’m sure that didn’t help things. If I hadn’t said anything about the time, we’d probably be on our flight right now.

The thing that makes gaslighting so insidious in a relationship is one person’s tendency to blame the other when things go wrong, while that person internalizes the blame and focuses all their attention on figuring out what they should have done differently in order to get a better outcome.

Over time, the inward-looking partner’s sense of reality becomes more and more skewed as they try to understand the distorted version of reality presented by the gaslighting partner. We keep trying more and more new and different things to keep our partner happy and prevent ourselves from being blamed when things go wrong. And that requires trying to anticipate how each action we take might backfire or upset our partner in some way.

When we work so hard to see the other person’s perspective that we completely lose touch with our own perspective, we inevitably become confused.

This is why it can be very helpful to seek outside perspectives from our friends and loved ones. In the example I just gave, getting an outside perspective from a trusted other might sound like saying something like, “Well, we missed our flight because she forgot her ID. That morning, I had reminded her twice what time it was and what time we needed to board the flight. And so, she blamed me for rushing her and she said it was my fault we missed our flight. I’ve completely lost perspective at this point because it feels like everything’s always my fault. What do you think?”

Sometimes, even just saying it out loud to someone else can be helpful because it gives you a chance to hear your own voice. You start to see that the reality inside your relationship is very skewed and distorted.

You might be able to see that something must be off if everything is always somehow your fault. But when we’ve been the target of gaslighting for years, it becomes very difficult to think clearly.

Oftentimes, I compare it to living inside a snow globe, where there’s a constant swirl of accusations and blame, which makes it nearly impossible to see anything outside the storm of confusion and self-doubt.

In your marriage, you may have thought that it was your job to prove to your spouse that things weren’t always your fault.

You might have thought it was your job to prove your good intentions as a way of defending yourself against blame and recriminations. You may have operated in this relationship as though you were guilty of whatever accusations your spouse threw at you, unless you could prove yourself to be 100% innocent.

Emotionally abusive relationships often work like this: We are guilty until we prove ourselves innocent.

But it’s never your job to prove your good intentions, especially to someone who’s committed to misunderstanding you and who’s skilled at twisting anything you say or do into something bad.

Healthy relationships don’t require that we prove ourselves or our goodness beyond a shadow of doubt. Healthy relationships are formed by two loving partners who want the best for themselves and each other, and who give each other the benefit of the doubt.

So, now that you’re out of this marriage, let’s talk about how you can start to have a healthy relationship with yourself—one that assumes your goodness instead of demanding that you prove it.

The first thing to do is to notice that you’ve internalized the voice of your former spouse. This inner voice is likely offering an ongoing stream of commentary on your choices, actions, feelings, and intentions. It’s this internalized voice of your former spouse that demands you prove beyond any doubt that you are good.

If you try to do this—if you engage with this voice—it will respond by dredging up times in the past when you didn’t handle things perfectly as evidence that you’re definitely not as good as you think you are.

In these moments, when you catch yourself engaged in this inner dialogue about whether you are or are not a good person, just stop.

Take a breath. Remind yourself of this: I don’t need to prove to anyone that I’m a good person. Those who know me and love me know my heart and my intentions.

Now, if you remind yourself of this, that inner voice of your former spouse is very likely to keep talking. It will pipe up with something like, “Oh sure. But they don’t know you like I know you. I know what you’re really like.”

My advice is: Don’t argue with this voice. Just notice it.

If it helps, imagine this voice like a dark cloud passing across the sun, creating momentary shadows. Just breathe, resist engaging with this voice, and let that cloud keep moving.

Remind yourself: I care about being a good person. I care about being kind. I can be kind to myself right now and give myself the benefit of the doubt.

For all of us who care about being good, relationships are about living in alignment with our values.

We are all unkind sometimes. We get angry, we feel hurt, we lash out, we say something we regret. When these moments happen in healthy relationships, they’re followed by a repair and often an apology.

That might sound something like, “Wow. I was way out of line. That had nothing to do with you. I’m sorry I said that.” Then we might take some time to look inward, to self-reflect and consider what’s going on with us and how we might handle similar situations in the future in ways that are in alignment with our values.

Being kind to yourself is just as important as being kind to others. And for those of us who have been in abusive relationships, the path toward learning how to be kind to ourselves often requires far more effort and attention than knowing how to be kind to a partner.

And on that note, Phil, that’s exactly what I wish for you: that you’ll remember how to be kind to yourself. That you’ll let go of the need to prove to yourself or anyone else that you’re good and instead just trust yourself. And then, you’ll take that energy and you’ll put it toward tending to your own heart and healing, and learn how to give yourself the grace that you give to others.

~Angela

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Ask Angela is an advice column dedicated to the topic of having fulfilling relationships after trauma. Click HERE to submit a question for Angela.

DISCLAIMER: this content is intended for informational purposes only and does not constitute professional medical or psychological advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other licensed health care provider with any questions or concerns you may have regarding a medical or psychological condition.

Matt writes: I’m very much aware of my flaws and shortcomings. How do I convince my spouse or help them realize they also have issues to work through?

Dear Matt,

Can I just begin by saying how much I appreciate that you are aware of—and willing to own—the personal challenges that you bring to your relationship? I wouldn’t call these things “flaws” because I don’t believe that we humans are flawed.

We all have things that we bring into our intimate relationships as a result of past relationship experiences that create difficulties for ourselves and for our partners. And we all have parts of our personalities that will generate friction in our relationships.

For example, we might have a tendency to lose track of time and always be late wherever we’re going. Or maybe we weren’t blessed by the gods with infinite patience. We might be very reactive to stress. Or we might tend to assume that our partner can read our mind, when really they can’t.

Growing up in my family, it was totally normal to talk to people who were in other rooms of the house, just by raising your voice and speaking very loudly (a.k.a. shouting) so they could hopefully hear you wherever they happened to be.

I still do that, even though my partner has asked me not to. But I forget, and I do it without even realizing that I’m doing it. Let’s just say this communication habit of mine drives my partner slightly bonkers. Is that a shortcoming on my part? Perhaps it is. I try working on it, but I get distracted—I’m thinking about something else, and suddenly catch myself yelling from room to room.

The point is that some old habits are difficult to change. We all have unique quirks that are partly personality and partly our upbringing. And, as I always say, there’s never a requirement to be perfect in our relationships.

We don’t have to be perfect. But what is important is that when our partner explains the impact that our behavior is having on them, we take what they say seriously and think about how we might do things differently. We make an effort, even if those efforts fall short on occasion.

The willingness to consider the impact we have on our intimate partner is especially important when we have past trauma, either from childhood or previous intimate relationships or both.

Trauma and painful relationship histories almost inevitably show up as “issues” in our current relationship, at least until we’ve worked through them. In order to work on these issues, we have to know what they are. We have to be able to recognize them. And we have to admit—to ourselves and our partner—that they’re there.

So, when you say that you’re well aware of your flaws and shortcomings, I think what you’re saying is that you’re conscious of the particular issues and tendencies that you’ve brought into your relationship, you see that they’re creating problems, and you’re taking responsibility for working on these issues so they don’t impact your partner so much.

Before I address your question of “how do I convince my spouse that they also have issues to work through,” I want to highlight two relationship skills you’re demonstrating in your willingness to work on your own issues: self-reflection and personal responsibility. These are both skills that are vital for creating healthy, happy relationships.

When it comes to interpersonal relationships and understanding patterns of conflict or disconnection, self-reflection is our capacity and willingness to look inward and consider how we are contributing to troublesome patterns in a relationship.

Self-reflection is what’s needed when our partner gives us specific feedback about how our actions, choices, and tendencies are affecting them. For example, if our reactivity or short temper is making it difficult for them to bring up concerns in the relationship, it’s our job to be open to feedback and self-reflect on it.

This means taking in what our partner has shared, considering it, trying to understand where they’re coming from, and thinking about how we might feel in their shoes. And if we do see where our partner is coming from—if we recognize that we seem to have an unusually short temper—self-reflection also involves asking ourselves if we want to change and, if so, how we might go about making changes.

In other words, there’s a lot that goes into self-reflection. Within the context of intimate relationships, it requires that we’re willing to take seriously what our partner shares with us, instead of immediately dismissing or denying their experience.

But that doesn’t mean we have to agree with our partner’s perspective.

For example, if we’re chronically late and our partner says, “You know, I’ve realized that the reason you are always late when we have plans is because you’re self-absorbed and you think your time is more valuable than mine,” we might disagree with their perspective on why we’re chronically late. And yet, we can still take in the feedback that our lateness is affecting our partner and then engage in self-reflection to understand more about why we’re always late and how we might change.

So that brings me to the second relationship skill I mentioned: personal responsibility.

Once we self-reflect, and we recognize that our actions are impacting our partner negatively, even if we don’t agree with their perspective on why we’re doing the thing we’re doing, we can still take responsibility for our actions and determine if we want to make changes.

In my case of talking loudly to my partner when he’s in another room (sometimes with the door closed), his initial conclusion was that I wanted him to get up and come to me, instead of me moving to where he was. This interpretation of my motives wasn’t correct, but it did make me think about why I do that and whether I wanted to change.

If I was guarded and defended and wanted to deny my issues, my tactic here would have been to argue with his interpretation. I might have engaged in blame shifting, pointing out how problematic it is that he makes incorrect assumptions about my motives. Or I might have dismissed his concerns by pointing out that none of my previous romantic partners had complained about this communication habit.

But none of those reactions would have acknowledged the impact my behavior was having on my partner or taken personal responsibility. And none of these responses would have resolved the issue in our relationship. Instead, these approaches of blame shifting, denial, minimizing, and misdirection would have left my partner feeling frustrated and like his feelings didn’t matter to me.

Now that we’ve taken a look at these two essential skills of self-reflection and personal responsibility in intimate relationships, let’s talk about your question: How do I convince or help my spouse realize that they also have issues to work through?

My simplest and most straightforward answer to this question is this: You can’t. You can’t convince your spouse to look inward in self-reflection if your spouse isn’t willing to do this.

The truth is that we can never convince someone else of anything—no matter how clearly we can see it and articulate it. No matter how supportive or encouraging we are. No matter how gentle or forceful we are with our words.

We as humans don’t like to be convinced of anything. In fact, if we sense that someone is trying to convince us to think something we don’t already think, to believe something we don’t already believe, we actively resist. We dig in our heels and stick to our guns.

Think about the last time someone tried to convince you of something, and recall how you responded to that. If you’re like most people who sense that someone else is trying to make them change their mind about something, you probably thought of all the reasons why what the other person said was wrong.

In other words, trying to convince your spouse that they have issues to work on is likely going to have the opposite effect that what you want.

Your spouse is going to poke holes in your argument and point out all the reasons why what you’re saying is wrong. They might demand you prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that they have issues. And when you can’t do that, they might point to your issues (the ones you’ve already acknowledged) as the real source of relationship problems. And then you’re really stuck.

The other challenge we run into when we try to convince a partner that they have issues that need attention is that we’ve now taken responsibility for getting our partner to recognize they have issues. If they refuse to acknowledge those issues, we feel like it’s our job to figure out exactly the right words we need to say to convince them—to finally get them to see what we see.

Taking responsibility for getting our partner to change is a trap. It’s a trap that can keep us stuck for a long time if we don’t realize that it’s actually impossible to convince anyone else to change or even to acknowledge that our perspective has validity.

But just because you can’t convince your spouse to work on their issues doesn’t mean that you’re powerless. Just because your spouse doesn’t see that they have things to work on doesn’t mean that you can’t share your experience of how their issues are affecting you and your marriage.

You don’t have to stay silent about the impact your partner is having on you, just because they might not agree with your take on things. But you also don’t have to convince your partner that your perspective is right.

In other words, you don’t have to convince your spouse at all. And you also don’t have to justify your experience or perspective. You have the right to express how you’re affected by your spouse’s choices and behaviors in the relationship, whether or not they agree with you.

As you start speaking more openly about your experience in your marriage, you are inviting your spouse to begin to self-reflect and take personal responsibility for their role in relationship challenges.

One strategy for inviting self-reflection is to ask questions. You might say something like, “Have you ever noticed you have a tendency to shout from one room to another when you want to get my attention?” Or, “Have you ever noticed that when I’m really excited about spending time with my friends, you have a tendency to remind me of chores that need to be done around the house?”

These kinds of neutral observations, phrased as questions, can be effective because you’re not offering an interpretation of why your partner does something. You’re simply sharing your observations and your experience.

Then, the next time your partner does the same thing, you can say something like, “Do you notice that you’re doing that thing again?” Sharing the impact it has on you might sound something like, “I want to share my excitement with you. But when you start criticizing my friends, I feel deflated, and it makes me not want to talk to you about things I’m excited about.”

One essential quality of a loving relationship is care. In healthy relationships, we care about how our partner feels. We care about how our behavior is affecting our partner.

If, after sharing your experience and perspective, you don’t have the sense that your partner cares about their impact on you, this is a potential warning sign of deeper trouble in the relationship.

Your feelings and experience should matter to your partner. That doesn’t mean that they need to immediately conform to all of your preferences and change everything about themself in order to make you happy. It’s not our job to make our partner happy.

But what it does mean is that your partner should be open to hearing your experience and be concerned about your feelings. Rather than dismissing your feelings or arguing with your perspective, they’re should be open to figuring out how to resolve the issue and find solutions that work for both of you.

Finding solutions to relationship problems requires moving beyond attempts to assign blame or determine who’s at fault for relationship difficulties. Relationships flourish when both partners are willing to self-reflect and take personal responsibility for changing destructive patterns of behavior.

And on that note, Matt, I am wishing you the clarity and confidence to share your perspective with your spouse and the freedom of no longer taking responsibility for convincing them to acknowledge their issues.

~Angela

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Ask Angela is an advice column dedicated to the topic of having fulfilling relationships after trauma. Click HERE to submit a question for Angela.

DISCLAIMER: this content is intended for informational purposes only and does not constitute professional medical or psychological advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other licensed health care provider with any questions or concerns you may have regarding a medical or psychological condition.

Andy writes: When faced with a difficult conversation or moment, I have the tendency to shut down. I withdraw into myself and just freeze up. My head goes blank, and it's difficult for me to focus on the conversation at hand. What are some effective ways to work through this? I struggle to even be willing to understand my girlfriend's point of view during arguments. Also, growing up with parents fighting constantly has affected me in so many ways. How do I keep my parents’ fighting out of my current relationship?

Dear Andy,

As you already realize, being open to our partner during a difficult conversation is absolutely essential for the health of a long-term relationship.

But that doesn’t mean it’s easy.

Even without past trauma and difficult childhood dynamics like the ones you experienced with your parents’ fighting, it can be really difficult during tense moments with an intimate partner to stay calm enough to think clearly, listen to what our partner is really saying, and then be able to express our own perspective thoughtfully.

There’s a lot going on during difficult conversations, so let’s unpack this bit by bit. Let’s start with your experience of shutting down and freezing up during conflict. Once you shut down, your mind goes blank and, at that point, you aren’t really able to follow what your girlfriend is saying because you’ve stopped taking anything in.

What you’re describing is a nervous system response to stress. It’s your body reacting to your current situation based on what it has learned in the past.

We don’t get to choose how our nervous system reacts to these kinds of situations—it’s like a hardwired mechanism that the human body evolved over millennia in an effort to keep us physically and psychologically safe.

Shutting down, going blank, freezing up—that’s all part of the “freeze” stress response. Biologically, our bodies are designed to activate the freeze response under very specific conditions—specifically, our body initiates a freeze response when it determines that we’re in a situation that’s both dangerous and inescapable.

That doesn’t mean that your difficult conversations with your girlfriend are actually dangerous or inescapable, of course. It’s just that your body believes they are.

I’ll spare you the in-depth neuro-scientific explanation of this. But, suffice it to say, when we’ve been repeatedly exposed to very intense stress or trauma in childhood, our nervous system goes a bit haywire. Even decades later, it still overreacts.

If there are even mild similarities between what’s happening now and what happened in the past, it’s like our body makes the decision that it’s better to be safe rather than sorry.

It then activates the whole trauma-based freeze response even when what’s happening isn’t actually dangerous. And because our body reacts far more quickly than the speed of conscious thought, we often slip into a freeze state before we’re fully aware of what’s happening.

As you know, this makes conflict resolution in a relationship pretty challenging. It can be pretty frustrating to try to work with this kind of stress response, especially when it kicks in automatically and often even before you have a chance to decide how you want to show up for an emotionally charged discussion with your girlfriend.

The good news is that even though we don’t get to choose how our nervous system reacts to stress, we can still work with our nervous system and with our intimate partner to ultimately develop the capacity to have the difficult conversations that are so essential to loving relationships.

The key to working with your body is first to remember that even though your freeze response is causing difficulty in your relationship with your girlfriend now, it’s trying to protect you and keep you safe.

So, before we go further, take a moment to feel gratitude for your body’s protective mechanisms. This is the first step in learning how to work with your body instead of trying to override your body’s stress response.

The most effective way to start expanding your ability to engage in sensitive conversations with your partner is to focus on expanding your “window of tolerance” for the discomfort that accompanies communicating about hard things. What that means is that you develop the capacity to contain more discomfort without your system powering down completely. This is going to require that you discover some strategies that are personally effective for soothing your nervous system.

The process of expanding your window of tolerance takes time, which means that your ability to hang in there while having a challenging conversation will gradually improve as you practice staying calm.

Essentially, this is the work of dissolving your body’s association between interpersonal conflict and danger. Over time, you’ll be able to re-train your body to associate these kinds of uncomfortable discussions with more positive feelings of connection and mutual understanding.

So, let’s talk about what this process of building your window of tolerance looks like within the context of your relationship with your girlfriend. Let’s say that you’re going about a regular Saturday morning, tidying up the kitchen after a dinner party that went late into the night, and your girlfriend walks into the kitchen and says, “We need to talk.” Immediately, you notice that your heart starts to race, your breathing is shallow, and your muscles are tense. You sense danger, and your whole body is bracing for what’s coming.

These kinds of physical responses are signs that you’re on high alert and you’re already close to your capacity for coping with the emotional distress that accompanies conflict.

If we were to think of the window of tolerance as though it were an electrical circuit, your system just got a sudden surge of input and it’s on the verge of being overloaded and unable to process what’s happening. When an electrical circuit is overloaded, the system flips a breaker.

That’s what shutdown is like: it’s your body’s built-in safety mechanism for preventing overload. Again, it’s designed to protect you. But it makes conflict resolution nearly impossible, unless you know how to work with your tendency to freeze.

So, back to morning in the kitchen with your girlfriend, what do you do? There she is, standing there in front of you, with her eyebrows drawn together like she’s definitely not happy with you. And your mind is racing through everything that’s happened in the last 12 hours to try to pinpoint what you’ve done wrong and why she’s upset. At this point, your typical reaction might be to say something immediately like, “What’s wrong? What did I do?”

But this time, because you’re working on expanding your capacity to handle relationship stress without getting overwhelmed and shutting down, you focus on taking a slow, deep breath and you remind yourself that—whatever it is she wants to talk to you about—it’s not an emergency.

You can actually pause and take a moment to settle down, calm your body, and remember that even though these kinds of conversations feel scary, nothing dangerous is happening here.

In my experience, once a partner understands these kinds of trauma-based stress responses, they can be a great support as we work toward finding ways to help ourselves stay present in difficult conversations.

So, ideally, in this imagined scenario, your girlfriend is already aware that you react to her attempts to talk about issues by getting stressed and potentially shutting down. She knows this because you’ve already talked to her about it.

You’ve said something to her like, “Hey, I know we’ve been having difficulty working through important issues because I shut down when we talk about hard things. My mind goes blank and I just freeze up … and that’s why I never have anything to say during these conversations. I just want you to know that I get how frustrating this has been for you. It’s frustrating for me, too. I’m in the process of trying to figure this out. I’m going to try doing a better job telling you when that’s starting to happen, so that I can calm down and do a better job listening to what you have to say.”

Because you’ve said something like this, your girlfriend already knows this is something you’re working on. And hopefully, she wants to support you in this work.

So when you say to her, “Give me a moment here. I’m feeling like I’m about to get overwhelmed. I don’t want to shut down completely,” she’ll know what it is you’re talking about. And she’ll hopefully give you the space to calm down. Maybe she might even say something like, “Good idea. Take some time. I’ll be in the bedroom when you’re ready to talk.”

When you grow up with parents who engaged in scary forms of fighting, learning how to have difficult conversations is necessary and vital work.

When you develop the skills for conflict resolution in relationships, you’ll ultimately discover that these kinds of conversations nurture a deeper connection and create a more resilient relationship with your partner.

So it’s important to be patient with yourself, and it’s also important to be persistent in your efforts. One way you can do this is by setting aside time to talk with your partner about how you two can work together to shift this pattern in a more positive direction in your relationship.

Having a plan already in place for what both of you will do when you get overwhelmed means that all you need to do in the midst of conflict is focus on executing your plan.

Anticipate that you are going to need a lot of practice with staying engaged when conflict does arise.

Remember that difficult talks don’t have to take place in one single conversation. When you’re expanding your capacity for conflict that doesn’t overwhelm your system and trigger a freeze response, you will most likely need breaks in the midst of the discussion.

How long those breaks need to be depends on how long it takes to get yourself back into a calm, centered, and grounded place where you’re able to think clearly and really listen to your girlfriend. Sometimes all that’s needed is five minutes in a separate room. Other times, it might take a few hours. Or you may need to sleep on it and revisit the conversation the following day.

Rome wasn’t built in a day. Serious issues are rarely resolved in one conversation. And the more you can approach topics as a series of conversations, the more effective you will be at developing your window of tolerance.

For many individuals who freeze during relationship conflict, the temptation is to try to avoid difficult conversations if at all possible. This makes a lot of sense. As humans, we tend to avoid discomfort whenever possible. So, my caution for you is that when you need to take a break from a discussion to calm down, make sure you come back to the conversation as soon as possible.

In addition to circling back to issues your girlfriend raised, learning how you can initiate difficult conversations will help you build your emotional capacity for hard talks. It will increase your sense of confidence in your ability to confront issues in your relationship directly, so you’re no longer just reacting to your girlfriend’s attempts to bring up sensitive topics.

Like any relationship skill that’s worth developing, learning how to have positive and productive conversations around difficult issues takes practice.

There will likely be times when you surprise yourself and have an easier time listening to what your girlfriend has to say than you would have predicted. And there will be other times when you get flooded and overwhelmed, and you shut down before you’re able to pause the conversation. That’s completely expected, and it doesn’t mean your efforts aren’t getting results.

Just keep practicing. Keep breathing. Keep taking breaks when you need to and keep coming back to the conversations. Over time, you’re going to notice that you’re able to maintain your balance during conflicts that really would have thrown you for a loop in the past.

And on that note, Andy, I’m wishing you courage, confidence, and the chance to discover safety in your relationship, even during difficult conversations.

~Angela

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Ask Angela is an advice column dedicated to the topic of having fulfilling relationships after trauma. Click HERE to submit a question for Angela.

DISCLAIMER: this content is intended for informational purposes only and does not constitute professional medical or psychological advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other licensed health care provider with any questions or concerns you may have regarding a medical or psychological condition.

Julie writes: If both you and your spouse have past trauma and poor communication skills, is it possible to heal together and learn how to have a better relationship? What if one spouse is more receptive to the journey than the other?

Dear Julie,

The short answer to your question is yes—it is possible to heal past trauma together and develop the relationship skills that you and your spouse missed out on learning earlier in life.

In fact, intimate relationships can be a container for healing past trauma. This is because what is hurt in connection heals in connection. In other words, healing past relational trauma (the kind of trauma that happens in relationships, most often in childhood with parents or caregivers) works best when we are able to establish a relationship in which the qualities of a healthy relationships are consistently present.

What makes healing past trauma together with your partner tricky is that it requires that both of you begin developing the skills for nurturing a mutually fulfilling relationship while also changing those patterns in your relationship that are not constructive to creating a strong relationship.

Before we talk about how to build new relationship skills, let’s talk about the equally important step of recognizing and changing relationship patterns and dynamics that are rooted in past trauma.

When partners have individual histories of relational trauma, these dynamics often run on autopilot in the background of a relationship without us even being aware of them. We might have habitual ways of interacting with a partner that feel completely natural but which are actually interfering with having a healthy relationship.

Gaining awareness of these patterns in our relationship—and specifically our own contribution to this pattern—is one of the first steps toward healing past trauma and stepping out of old, unsatisfying, destructive relationship dynamics.

A lot of these trauma-based relationship patterns show up in how we communicate with each other.

Maybe we shut down at the first hint of conflict, or we explode or lash out or hear any feedback as criticism. Maybe we slip into immediately apologizing for everything under the sun if our partner sighs loudly. Or we perceive our partner expressing a different perspective on a topic as though they are saying that our perspective is wrong.

Maybe we struggle to listen to our partner when they try to share something important with us. We interrupt or jump in to tell them what they need to do to solve their problem. Or we argue with details of what they’re saying in ways that take the conversation far off-track.

This work of gaining awareness of our own contribution to unsatisfying patterns in our relationship takes time and care and attention. It also takes a lot of self-compassion and self-kindness, especially when we realize that we’ve yet again fallen into unconscious patterns that we’re trying to change.

When you’re considering how to make changes in how you interact with your partner, to start to move things in a better direction, it can be helpful to imagine your relationship like a dance.

When you change up the rhythms in your interactions and you try out some new dance moves, your partner will likely respond differently. This may not happen immediately, but when you are persistent in your efforts to change your part in an unhelpful relationship dynamic, your partner’s responses will likely shift as well. This is especially true when both you and your partner would like things to change in your relationship.

It’s often the case that one partner takes the lead in recognizing that something in the relationship needs to change and takes the first steps along the journey to building a stronger and more satisfying relationship.

Given that you are the one asking these questions, I’m going to assume that this is the case for you. The good news is that you don’t need your spouse to see what you see and to be equally committed to making changes in order for you to start taking steps in the direction that you want your relationship to go.

Often, couples get stuck in what I think of as the you change first and then I’ll change power struggle, in which neither partner wants to make the first move by stepping out of their part of the pattern. People who are resistant to changing their own contribution to relationship issues sometimes feel like focusing on their role is equivalent to admitting that they’re the problem in the relationship.

Our real power—and freedom—in relationships lies in our willingness to change our own patterns. We step out of those futile attempts to get the other person to change and we create the possibility for something new to emerge within ourselves and potentially within the relationship as well.

We are never constrained or kept waiting by a partner who is uninterested in changing.

Of course, eventually, your partner is going to need to step out onto the dance floor with you. Otherwise, the work you put into developing your relationship skills will result in a widening gap in the relationship that creates more distance and disconnection.

Sometimes, the fear of growing apart can work against the desire for having a healthy relationship. This is a difficult position to be in, because essentially we feel forced to choose between trying to make ourselves be satisfied with a relationship that’s not really working or investing in our own growth, which may result in an unbridgeable distance in the relationship.

We find that this fear is often most intense before you take the leap and start working on developing new relationships skills. Fear of the unknown can keep us stuck in the familiar (even when it’s unsatisfying).

Yet, most individuals we’ve worked with who decide to start working on their relationship skills discover that either their partner joins them on this adventure or they come to a point where they accept that the relationship is not actually a good fit for them any longer.

Once you have clarity about what you would like to change, then you can start learning how to develop the relationship and communication skills that you missed out on. When you want to improve your relationship, building better communication skills is a great place to put your focus because communication problems inevitably affect so many areas of a relationship, including emotional intimacy, trust and security, physical intimacy and sexual connection, and decision-making and problem-solving.

This means that investing your energy in learning how to communicate well can create improvements across the board in your relationship.

Learning how to communicate well in an intimate relationship takes time, practice, and attention. Communication in intimate relationships isn’t like communication in other areas of our life. It’s not as simple as learning how to clearly get across what you want to say.

In order to communicate well in an intimate relationship, we need to have a connection to our own inner emotional states (emotional awareness) and be able to put names to our feelings so we can recognize what we’re feeling and communicate those feelings accurately (emotional literacy).

We need to be able to listen to our partner and distinguish between what they’re actually saying from what our inner voice is saying about what they’re saying (attuned listening). As listeners, we need to develop the emotional capacity to be able to cope with hearing things that we don’t necessarily want to hear, things that might be hard to hear—about how our partner feels or how our actions or choices have affected them.

We need to have the ability to empathize with our partner’s experience, to put ourselves in their shoes and see things through their eyes. And we need to have the skills to communicate that back to our partner, so they know that we get where they’re coming from.

We need to have a willingness to embrace individual differences, to welcome the ways in which our partner is different from us so that differences don’t become the battlefields on which so many couples end up getting stuck for years or even decades.

And of course, we need to have the ability to navigate conflict constructively, so that difficult conversations can bring us together with our partner, instead of pushing us further apart.

These are all communication and relationship skills that can be affected by past trauma. But the good news is that communication skills, and relationship skills in general, can be learned.

Even if we missed out on learning these skills when we were young, it’s never too late to develop the kinds of relationship skills that help create emotional connection and mutual understanding in relationships. The benefits of investing in yourself this way go beyond improving your relationship with your intimate partner and extend into your relationship with yourself as well as your relationships with others who matter to you.

And on that note, I am wishing you well as you begin to gain clarity on the patterns you’d like to shift in your relationship and courage as you take those first steps in a new direction in your relationship.

~Angela

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Ask Angela is an advice column dedicated to the topic of having fulfilling relationships after trauma. Click HERE to submit a question for Angela.

DISCLAIMER: this content is intended for informational purposes only and does not constitute professional medical or psychological advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other licensed health care provider with any questions or concerns you may have regarding a medical or psychological condition.

Jess writes: How do I foster growth in a relationship when the other person is unwilling to put the necessary time aside weekly to communicate openly. I admittedly get flustered easily and raise my voice unintentionally. I think it’s because I feel that I’m not being heard every time I ask to talk about things going on. It’s always “tomorrow” or he finds a way to make me the aggressor. How do I fix this? He does not believe in therapy whatsoever—please help.

Dear Jess,

It sounds like you’ve identified a clear pattern in your relationship that you’d like to change, but you haven’t quite figured out what to do in order to change it.

Your question is an important one, because it highlights a situation that many individuals find themselves in—wanting to change what’s happening in their intimate relationship but having a partner who is unwilling to engage in the process of making changes.

Some partners are uninterested in working together to improve their relationship because they don’t think anything needs to change. Others want things to change but see the issues as stemming from their partner’s behavior and don’t think they themselves need to change anything at all.

I hear that you are already thinking through the ways you might be contributing to the patterns in your relationship that you would like to change—getting flustered and raising your voice when you don’t feel heard or when your concerns are met with avoidance.

And you’ve already realized that your partner’s response to you bringing up issues is often something along the lines of I don’t have time for this right now. Let’s talk about it tomorrow.

But tomorrow never comes and you’re stuck waiting for the eternal tomorrow, that day that’s always in the future. It’s never the right time. There’s always something more important, more pressing and immediate that needs attention first.

So you raise your voice. You get louder and bigger and more dramatic as a way to signaling that the communication issues in your relationship are actually important and need to take priority. Now you’ve become the aggressor. You’re too loud, too angry, too unreasonable. There’s no way to have a conversation now, when you’re so worked up. It will have to wait. First you need to take a deep breath and calm down and then maybe tomorrow you can talk about it.

And on it goes like this.

Because a relationship is something that’s created between two people, fostering growth in the relationship is something that requires both partners be engaged and invested in growing together.

Growth as a couple isn’t something that one partner can do alone.

So if you can’t singlehandedly foster growth in your romantic relationship, what can you do?

You can foster your own growth as an individual. You can focus on growing in who you are within this relationship as well as who you are apart from this relationship.

When we’re in a relationship with a partner who isn’t interested in going to therapy and doesn’t want to talk about issues with communication or any other issues, we can have a tendency to turn all our focus and all our energy toward fixing the problems in the relationship.

We fixate on cracking the code to get our partner to come to therapy … or read this amazing new book on relationships … or listen to this podcast episode that describes exactly what’s happening and lays out the solution so clearly.

We start to believe that if our partner isn’t invested in working on problems in the relationship, it’s because we haven’t yet figured out exactly what we need to say in order to get them to see what we see.

In other words, we take responsibility for convincing our partner to change.

Which is a strange place to find ourselves, because we know that it’s not possible to change anyone else.

Not only can we not change another person, we also can’t convince them that change is needed. We can see for ourselves that things could potentially be so much better if only issues were addressed, but we can do nothing to actually make someone else see what we see.

The antidote to this situation—in which our focus and energy gets taken up trying to bring an unwilling partner along with us on the adventure of growing together—is to turn our attention back to ourselves and really get clarity about what we can do for ourselves.

So let’s take another look at your question and see what doors of opportunity swing open once we consider what you can do for yourself.

To find these opportunities, we’re going to imagine that your partner stays exactly the same as he is right now—always saying that you’ll talk tomorrow and unwilling to ever set aside time today to work on communication issues in your relationship.

The first thing you can do is to stop expecting something different from your partner.

In other words, give up the project of trying to make him see how vital it is to stop avoiding and start addressing the issues in your relationship. Let go of your sense of responsibility to get him to grow. He either will grow or he won’t, but as you have no power to sway things one way or the other, there are better places to put your attention.

Now that you’re no longer focused on getting him to change, ask yourself what you can do to change your part in this communication cycle you’ve gotten stuck in.

If you can approach invitations to talk about relationship issues with the understanding that your partner will most likely avoid, dismiss, diminish the importance or urgency of the conversation, or ask you to come back tomorrow with your concerns, and you know your tendency is to get flustered and raise your voice, and you also know that your partner will point to this behavior and call you the aggressor—how can you sidestep this trap?

Knowing what you know about how your partner will likely respond, and understanding that you can’t change his response, what can you do differently to break out of this tired, unfulfilling pattern in your relationship?

The question you posed was “How do I fix this?” Now that you understand that you cannot singlehandedly fix a relationship problem, because you can’t fix your partner’s contribution to the problem, you can ask yourself a new question.

It might sound something like, “Given how my partner is, and knowing I can’t change him, what do I want to do differently here?” Some other related questions might be, “Instead of getting flustered and raising my voice, how might I respond when my partner responds in his predictable way?”

Usually when I pose these kinds of questions to individuals I work with, they misunderstand me at first. They think I’m telling them that they should be satisfied in a relationship where their partner always refuses to communicate. They think I’m encouraging them to settle.

To be clear, I’m not saying you should be okay with how things are. But I am encouraging you to stop trying to change the reality of how your partner is. That’s because trying to change another person doesn’t get you any closer to having the kind of relationship you want to have.

The alternative is to shift into a different mindset about your relationship, where your focus is on whether this relationship is a good fit for you and, if it’s not, figuring out if it has the potential to become the kind of relationship you want to have.

As you are observing and gathering data in order to answer the question of Is this relationship a good fit for me?, you can also be making efforts to become more of the person you want to be in an intimate relationship.

Consistently feeling unheard in an intimate relationship can stir up a lot of painful feelings.

Being on the receiving end of a partner’s dismissiveness and disregard can lead to emotional dysregulation, which then results in getting upset and raising your voice. This is especially true if you have a history of close relationships where there was a lack of care and emotional attunement. In other words, a partner’s dismissiveness can activate relational trauma from childhood and/or previous romantic relationships.

If you know that this is the case for you, you can focus on developing the skills for emotional regulation that will help you soothe painful feelings that arise when your partner responds as he does—by dismissing you.

As you focus on learning how to communicate directly, saying the things you need to say, without raising your voice, you can pay attention to whether this makes a difference with how your partner responds to you.

While you’re working on your ability to stay calm and expand your capacity for holding the difficult emotions that get stirred up by your partner’s predictable responses, you can approach these experiences as opportunities to practice being the kind of partner—and person—you truly want to be.

Relational trauma shows up in many different ways, depending on our unique past experiences in relationships.

Personally, I’m someone who tends to be reactive in conversations with my partner. I raise my voice without realizing it. This tendency of mine would be a bad fit in a relationship with someone whose relational trauma gets activated by raised voices.

It’s possible that your partner is shutting down because your raised voice is triggering his trauma. Given that he avoids talking about communication issues in your relationship, the only way to test this out is to see whether anything changes if you’re able to approach him in a calm manner and pause the conversation when you notice that you’re starting to become emotionally dysregulated.

As you continue to collect data in your relationship—finding answers to the questions of Does anything shift in the relationship when I change how I show up in these interactions? and Is this relationship a good fit for me?—you are also simultaneously investing in your own personal growth.

You are building your own capacity to stay emotionally regulated during difficult interactions, learning how to communicate clearly, divesting yourself of the impossible task of convincing your partner to change, and creating a stronger relationship with yourself.

Learning more about your own core wounds from childhood can give you new insight into how these early experiences might be contributing to the dynamics in your current relationship.

For example, many people learn in childhood that the only way to get nurture from a parent is to provide a parent with emotional support. In adulthood, this often turns into taking responsibility for a partner’s psychological and emotional growth and development, even when that partner is unwilling to change and demonstrates disinterest in their own personal development.

This kind of work is not easy. But it is very valuable. Spending time reflecting on patterns that were developed in your past—and how these patterns play out in your present—can help you reach a greater level of self-insight, self-awareness, and self-compassion.

One last note: just because your partner is unwilling to go to therapy doesn’t mean that you can’t go. Many therapists offer services for individuals that are relationship-focused, which means that you can be working on your own relationship patterns whether or not your partner goes with you.

By itself, this likely won’t “fix” your relationship but it will likely give you much more clarity about what’s happening in your relationship and it will give you the chance to develop valuable relationship skills.

And on that note, I am wishing you the freedom that comes with no longer trying to fix a relationship singlehandedly and instead focusing on your own adventure of self-discovery and growth, both in your relationship and beyond it.

~Angela

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Ask Angela is an advice column dedicated to the topic of having fulfilling relationships after trauma. Click HERE to submit a question for Angela.

DISCLAIMER: this content is intended for informational purposes only and does not constitute professional medical or psychological advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other licensed health care provider with any questions or concerns you may have regarding a medical or psychological condition.

Mila writes: “What can I do so that in difficult conversations where my partners raises issues he has with my behavior, I do not directly fall into defense mode but keep listening to what my partner has to say?”

Dear Mila,

What I appreciate so much about your question is that you’re seeking ideas for what you could do differently in your interactions with your partner. This willingness to consider how you might change your reactions to your partner highlights the fact that defensiveness isn’t your natural state of being in your relationship.

To some degree, defensiveness is something that nearly all of us struggle with from time to time.

But for those of us who’ve been in relationships characterized by criticism, blame, and attack, it can be exceptionally difficult to recognize the difference between criticism designed to tear us down from constructive feedback and the genuine expression of concerns in a relationship.

I’m guessing that at one point in your life, you needed to be on your guard in relationships. Being defensive was a survival mechanism designed to protect you and keep you safe.

It was a way of coming to your own defense. Even though you don’t need that any longer — at least in this relationship — that doesn’t mean it’s easy to simply turn it off.

Even though this response has more to do with your past than your present, this response is ingrained. It’s automatic. And, like a home security system that’s set off by wind rattling the windows, it’s terribly unsophisticated.

It can’t tell the difference between situations in which you’re actually the target of unfair blame, criticism, and verbal attacks and situations in which your well-meaning partner is expressing genuine concerns or giving feedback and the impact you’re having on him.

In other words, all it takes for you to feel attacked, at least unconsciously, is that your partner is expressing he’s not happy with something to do with you.

The difficulty is that once our defensiveness has been triggered, instead of being able to hear what our partner is actually trying to express, everything gets distorted into a criticism. Because we feel like we’re being attacked, it’s really hard to recognize that we’re not actually under attack.

But the good news here is that just like a security system can be adjusted to stop reacting to every gust of wind, you can learn how to distinguish the differences between hurtful attacks in a relationship and invitations to grow in your ability to stay connected and open, even when your partner shares something that’s difficult for you to hear.

One of the challenges with changing our responses in an intimate relationship is how quickly everything seems to happen when there’s an issue with our partner.

Our defensiveness has already kicked into high gear before we’re even consciously aware of what’s happening.

This is why it’s so difficult to stop ourselves from reacting defensively to our partner. Our reactions often happen before our awareness catches up.

Before I talk about how to shift an ingrained pattern of defensiveness, I want to take a moment to actually honor your defensive response.

Trauma-based responses like defensiveness so often cause enough difficulty in relationships that all we want to do is figure out how to get rid of them. We forget to pause and actually feel a sense of appreciation for these responses that are trying to protect us and keep us safe.

When viewed through the lens of understanding, you can recognize that your reactivity to perceived attacks is actually a way of coming to your own defense.

It’s a way of standing up for yourself. The fact that it’s causing trouble in your present day relationship with your partner suggests something really positive: nowadays, you don’t need the same defenses that you needed at some point in the past. That’s great news.

So now that we’ve taken a moment to appreciate your defensiveness, let’s explore how to get this part of you to stand down and make space for a present day life that’s not colored by your past.

Let’s talk about how to move from being in a reactive, guarded position in relationship with your partner to a position that’s open, listening, and responsive.

As I mentioned already, we usually focus on breaking old patterns of relationship behaviors by trying to prevent ourselves from reacting the way we have in the past. This doesn’t tend to work straightaway because these reactions are automatic and unconscious and by the time we realize what’s happening, it’s already happened.

So instead of aiming to prevent yourself from being defensive, what if you learned instead what to do as soon as you realize that you’re gotten sucked into that old pattern again?

Here’s what I mean.

Let’s say that your partner tries to talk to you about your chronic lateness. He says, “When you were 30 minutes late to my parents’ house last weekend and you didn’t even text me, I felt really hurt. We’ve already talked about this so many times and I’ve shared with you how it feels to me like you don’t value my time. And then it happened again. I don’t really know what else to say and I’m starting to wonder whether my feelings matter to you at all.”

Let’s imagine you hear this as an attack and you get defensive. And you say, “I knew you were going to throw this in my face. I don’t control the train lines. You act like I never make it anywhere on time. And it’s like you expect me to be perfect. Plus, it’s not like you’re never late.”

This time, once the words have left your mouth, you realize: Oh no—I’m going it again. And so, instead of doubling down on your defensive reaction to your partner, you take a deep breath and say, “Wait. Give me a minute. Can we start over again? I realize that I’m feeling attacked and I’m getting defensive.”

And then you take a few more breaths and ask your partner to say again what he shared with you, so that you can focus on really trying to hear what he’s saying.

When you do this, you might notice some interesting things. You might notice that the first time he shared his concerns, what you heard was something along the lines of: You’re a terrible partner. You always let me down. I’m so disappointed in you.

When you focus on really listening the second time around, you might hear: I feel really hurt. Since we’ve talked about this before and it happened again, I’m not sure whether you care about my feelings.

In other words, instead of hearing your partner’s attack on your character or value, you hear what your partner is actually trying to express about his feelings and how he is affected by your lateness.

Making this shift takes a lot of practice. Changing an ingrained pattern like defensiveness in a relationship tends to happen in stages.

First, you catch yourself after it’s already happened. Once you’re aware this has happened, you can initiate some kind of a do-over, where you start at the beginning and work on responding mindfully and intentionally, instead of reacting based on past patterns. From my perspective, it doesn’t really matter if you become aware of what’s happened immediately afterward or three hours later (or days later). It’s never too late to ask for a do-over and try again.

In the next stage of change, you start catching yourself when you’re in the middle of reacting defensively. That’s what happened in the example I gave above. You’re able to halt the conversation in its tracks before it goes further off course, take a deep breath, and try again.

It’s only in the last stage of change when we’re able to prevent ourselves from reacting defensively.

In this stage, you might notice yourself beginning to internally react. You might notice yourself feeling stressed or defensive or hearing your partner’s words as an attack, but there’s another part of you now that’s able to say, “Hold on. He’s not attacking you. He’s talking about his feelings when you were late … not saying that you’re a terrible person.” You might even imagine that you’re speaking directly to the reactive part of yourself, as though it’s a younger version of you—one who’s in need of some reassurance and support.

Then, you can take a deep breath and focus on really trying to hear your partner, so you can respond to what you’ve actually heard.

In terms of becoming an attentive and caring listener in an intimate relationship, one of our favorite practices that we recommend to couples and individuals who struggle with reactivity and defensiveness is what we called the attuned listening practice.

It’s quite simple—though that doesn’t mean it’s easy.

The attuned listening practice is a way of slowing down the conversation, which is absolutely essential in order to move from being reactive to genuinely responsive.

Here’s how it works. Instead of immediately responding to what your partner has said, first you need to make sure you’ve actually understood what your partner was trying to communicate to you.

This practice of attuned listening goes beyond simply repeating back to your partner exactly what he said. Instead it’s about amplifying the emotional heart of the matter.

In the example I used above, an attuned listening response might sound something like, “I hear you saying that you were really hurt by my lateness last weekend. And especially because we have talked about this so many times, you’re left doubting whether I really care about how my lateness feels for you.”

In our experience, individuals who were frequently criticized, berated, and blamed find the practice of attuned listening to be very difficult initially.

Acknowledging the impact we’ve had on someone we love often induces a wave of shame. It’s as though acknowledging our impact confirms all the worst messages we internalized about ourselves early in life. This isn’t true, even though it can feel very true in the moment.

Although it’s challenging and uncomfortable, learning how to engage in attuned listening can ultimately be a way of developing shame resilience and healing childhood wounds. It’s a way of discovering that we don’t have to be perfect in our relationship.

Hurt is inevitable in any close relationship, which is why learning the skills of repairing that hurt is so essential.

So, Mila, you asked how to stop yourself from falling into defensive mode every time your partner brings up issues in your relationship. I can’t say for sure that you’ll ever completely eliminate your tendency toward being defensive.

But what I do know is stopping completely isn’t necessary, because you don’t have to be perfect in any of your relationships. Instead, you can focus on building new relationship skills that will help you stay present with your partner and communicate care when he shares his own experience in your relationship.

As you practice these skills, you’ll find that defensiveness no longer dictates your interactions with your partner.

And on that note, I am wishing you the small, steady steps of progress that lead you in a beautiful new direction.

~ Angela

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Ask Angela is an advice column dedicated to the topic of having fulfilling relationships after trauma. Click HERE to submit a question for Angela.

DISCLAIMER: this content is intended for informational purposes only and does not constitute professional medical or psychological advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other licensed health care provider with any questions or concerns you may have regarding a medical or psychological condition.

Halle writes: “How do you release the grief and hurt of being treated badly by someone you cared for deeply?”

Dear Halle,

Grieving the end of a relationship in which you were treated badly is really hard.

When a relationship like this ends, there’s often a lack of validation from others about your need for space and time to grieve the end of the relationship.

It may even be the case that those who care about you are actually celebrating the end of the relationship.

For example, your friends—who’ve been following along with all the ups and downs of this relationship—might respond to your news by saying things like, “Good riddance!” or “You’re so much better off without them!” or “Finally! It’s about time!”

These are meant as expressions of love and they’re coming from people who love you and who see that you haven’t been treated as well as you deserve. But being surrounded by others who treat the end of your relationship as good news can end up creating more confusion, isolation, and guilt that complicates your ability to properly grieve your breakup.

It’s understandable that friends react this way. After all, they didn’t experience the good parts of the relationship. They only heard about the bad parts. They’re operating according to the black-and-white relationship rule of “When someone treats you badly, you should leave the relationship as quickly as you can.”

But sometimes the heart wants what it wants … even when it knows it’s supposed to want something different.

The truth is that we don’t have a cultural love story that involves having to end a relationship because it’s just not good for you. When we fall in love, we think there’s going to be a happily ever after. We mistakenly believe that relationships only end if two people stop loving each other. A relationship that ends even though you still love the other person (and maybe they love you too) feels completely wrong.

The reality is that we leave hurtful relationships because we have to, not because we want to. We finally accept that there are no other options other than to end it. There’s no way to be in the relationship and also be psychologically, emotionally, and physically well. We finally see that the relationship can’t be fixed and it’s not going to get better. And part of us knows that we deserve something far better than what we’re getting.

At the same time, what makes it hard to leave these kinds of relationship is the fact that the relationship isn’t all bad.(That’s the part our friends so often overlook.) There were good parts about the relationship and about our partner.

I’m guessing that for every ten bad moments you can remember about this relationship, you can also probably remember something really beautiful that happened. And the weird thing about toxic relationships is that, because the ratio of bad to good moments is so skewed … those good moments taste far sweeter. Even though they’re few and far between, if you’re like most people who’ve been in a toxic relationship, you probably find that you’re able to recall the good moments with a power and clarity that you can’t summon up when you’re trying to remember what was bad.

It’s the loss of the sweet moments that can be especially hard to grieve. That’s because it’s these beautiful moments, rare as they were, that gave you a window into what the relationship could be—if only you could figure out how to get more of the good and less of all the hurtfulness, the meanness, and the disregard.

Those sweet moments became the foundation for what you imagined the relationship could become, if you kept the faith and stuck it out long enough to figure out the secret code to getting the good without the bad.

And in order to grit through the hard times, that dream of how it could be felt more and more real as you spent more time imagining it…even if it never became real in actual reality.

Grief isn’t just about the loss of the partner—it’s also the loss of the dream of what you imagined for the relationship. And just as painful is the realization that someone you loved deeply did not care for you in the way you deserved.

Healing the heartbreak of being hurt by someone you loved takes time and requires learning how to be tender toward your own pain. So let’s talk about what makes the breakup grief process more challenging after the end of a relationship where you’ve been treated badly.

The Breakup Grief Process

All breakups can be painful, but there are some particular aspects of hurtful relationships that need more attention during the grieving process.

While the relationship itself has ended, you still may have lingering emotional connections that will take time to dissolve. On top of that, you likely have a lot of unresolved questions about how someone you loved could have hurt you so deeply.

Toxic (or otherwise unhealthy) relationships can end up tapping into and reinforcing core wounds from childhood relationships. These are beliefs like, “It’s my job to earn love from others,” or “I’m not lovable the way I am,” or “I’m too much” or “I’m not enough.” When we internalize these kinds of beliefs about ourselves and how we need to be in relationships in order to receive love, we are more vulnerable to ending up in a toxic relationship in which these kinds of messages are reinforced. These kinds of unloving relationships in which we’re mistreated can feel normal. Or we can unconsciously feel driven to prove to ourselves that we are worthy of love by trying to earn it from a partner who withholds consistent care, kindness, and loving attention.

Here are three practices for grieving a toxic relationship:

1. Acknowledge reality.

Grieving after a hurtful relationship involves coming to accept that we don’t actually have the power to make another person treat us well or love us properly. The absence of love and kindness isn’t evidence that we don’t deserve love. If you find yourself ruminating on what you could have done differently in order to earn love—instead of mistreatment—from your former partner, experiment with what it feels like to simply allow yourself to feel sad, instead of blaming yourself for what happened in the relationship. For example, you could try a simple mantra like, “I’m sad that ______ wasn’t capable of loving me consistently and kindly.” This kind of mantra has the benefit of acknowledging reality—they weren’t capable of healthy love—without trying to assign blame or figure out how you could fix this situation. Accepting reality, instead of arguing against it or trying to change it, is a key foundation of being able to grieve what happened in the relationship.

2. Release blame.

A big part of what keeps individuals emotionally tangled in a toxic relationship, even after it’s over, is trying to allocate the correct portions of blame about what went wrong in the relationship. Most likely, if you were in this relationship for a long time, you got very familiar with taking on all the blame and responsibility for what wasn’t going well in the relationship. It’s important to release that self-blame. Whenever you find yourself going down the route of blaming yourself or thinking about what you could have done differently, a simple reminder like, “I deserve to be treated kindly and with love” can help to redirect you onto a path of healing. Honestly, that may not feel particularly believable at first. Your Inner Critic might try pointing out all the mistakes you made along the way, as if to say that you did deserve what happened. That’s not true, even if it feels true right now.

Another misstep individuals can make along this part of the grieving journey is to imagine what your former partner might say—they might pile on the criticisms and suggestions of everything you should have done differently. As much as possible, do not engage with these kinds of inner dialogues. You probably spent a lot of time in your relationship trying to convince your partner that you deserved to be treated better. You don’t have to do that any more. You don’t have to prove to any kind of hostile audience (even the one in your head) that you deserve to be treated kindly and with love.

3. Engage in self-care.

Even after they’re over, toxic relationships have a way of taking up way too much mental and emotional space in our lives. Part of grieving after a breakup involves rebuilding your relationship with yourself. Carving out time to invest in doing things that you find particularly meaningful and healing is important. What those things are can be completely unique to you. Consider what kinds of activities help you feel re-energized, restored, and reconnected to yourself and make sure that you’re prioritizing time for yourself in these ways. Consistently treating ourselves with care and kindness is a powerful affirmation that we are worthy of being treated well by others, too.

And on that note, I’m wishing you continued healing as you gently surrender past pain and allow it to transform into a deep and true knowing of what you deserve in your relationships moving forward.

~ Angela

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Ask Angela is an advice column dedicated to the topic of having fulfilling relationships after trauma. Click HERE to submit a question for Angela.

DISCLAIMER: this content is intended for informational purposes only and does not constitute professional medical or psychological advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other licensed health care provider with any questions or concerns you may have regarding a medical or psychological condition.