I am the guy who completely shuts down when my gf tries to talk to me. I got to the point I would get quiet or I would just agree with her. We broke up for a small bit, the breakup was completely my fault. I completely understand and its justified. It has just gotten to the point that at least once a week she has a random ptsd and will completely get cold on me then bring up everything again as if it just happened again. She will get hostile and come at me with the same questions every week.
Its turned into me giving her the same answers and the same apology. I know I messed up, there is only so much apologizing and reassuring her I can do. Its giving me gray hairs going from acting like we are on a honeymoon one day then quivering in the corner.
Hey Cello, thanks for getting in touch. First of all, I would like to commend you on your self-awareness, and your taking ownership here. It sounds like you are well aware of they dynamics at work in your relationship and your part in them, and that you would very much like to change them. That attitude is the first step of any successful personal growth work!
My hope for you is that she may be able to learn some strategies to communicate her feelings in a more constructive and less agressive way that will enable you to respond to them.
When a couple can find and then practice positive new behaviors that lead to both people feeling cared for, understood, and respected…. I hope that reality is in your near future Cello! All the best to you both, Lisa. You did give me a laugh this morning.
I compliment, I praise and I say thank you. In return, I now have a husband who ignores me except when he wants to talk. If he asks me a question, he will answer it before I have the chance.
He decides what I mean, what I am about to say and then attacks me verbally. He claims to have a poor memory but can repeat what I said perfectly.
He tells me I am perfect which I am not and then insists on teaching me lessons to prove I am not perfect. Bottom line…he has changed. He is cold and indifferent and can find fault with anyone. My email and name are not your business. However, you need to wake up and understand one thing…. When a spouse attacks the very foundation of a relationship no amount of showing vulnerability or being diplomatic will help.
He stopped caring about anything but his world being perfect years ago. Hey there, thank you very much for sharing how you feel. I appreciate honest dialogue. I thought that you brought up such an excellent point, around feeling that everything you do is futile. That does happen.
While many times, people who come here for relationship advice are in situations where there is hope to create a differnt outcome, that is not always true. All the best to you, Lisa. Hey, this article really helped me. I did my best to give her some space as the person who usually pursues. Well done sir! I completely shut down when I am feeling attacked or belittled by my wife. We can be having a tough and honest conversation about the challenges in our marriage but when she makes generalizations about my behavior or accuses me of things that are not true then I am done with talking.
If I feel like she is unreasonable I can go from wanting to work things out and talk about them to completely shutting down.
It seems like a waste of time to keep talking. I can feel my body go numb as every emotion disappears from me. I am not sad or angry — just empty. Also, when I shut down I have no empathy for my wife who I love very much. She can be crying her eyes out in front of me and it is impossible for me to feel anything toward her.
I feel like I am a detached spectator watching two strangers. I feel like it would be better to divorce my wife and go live by myself because I have this colossal flaw. I know it is related to early childhood trauma, but I cant control it.
Sometimes when my wife comes at me the wrong way it seems inevitable. I think I am a good husband but I am worried by my tendency to shut down.
Lia, Thank you so much for sharing. I have to say, your insight into yourself is really a strength of yours. You have SO much self awareness, and that is always the first step of creating real and lasting change. The fact that you understand that your shutting down is related to early childhood trauma is also extraordinary. I hope that you can find a way of communicating this to your wife so that she has empathy for what you are going through in these moments, so that she can be more sensitive and understanding of you.
What you are dealing with is absolutely a solvable problem in the hands of an experienced trauma therapist. My hope for you is that if you get effective help to resolve your old trauma you will be able to stay in the ring with your wife, without your old triggers leading you to shut down.
Even better, if she is able to understand what is going on and be a supportive partner to you in your healing process, you can both come through this as a stronger, more deeply connected couple.
Be a good husband by working on yourself! Even the fact that she sees you working on this could be a huge, positive thing for your marriage. I got the message that she had stuff going on and quit writing so much. She noticed and asked about my quietness. It just escalated from there. But just to be there. And she turns into a very mean person, which, admittedly, instigates my anger.
Like how it feels on my end and what it looks like to me. Was it a nice thing to say? No, I admit that. But is it how I feel? I think she gets annoyed at me for thinking this. He does not need a babysitter! You are not his chauffeur! You do not need to do everything for him!
Your mother is a raging alcoholic! You KNOW this! Why would she need to pull herself together when she has you to do everything for her?? Then I start second-guessing myself. Am I asking too much?
Am I being the difficult one? Am I being selfish or unreasonable? Should I be more understanding? But then…I start thinking and I feel like I have legitimate intentions and concerns. I feel that best friends should be able to speak up to each other when one has upset the other. I feel that best friends should be able to speak about any problems in their friendship without it becoming a huge blowout that hurts both.
I feel that best friends should be able to resolve their problems and should want to resolve them. She seemed to read more into the less important parts of what I expressed to her and less into my main point.
Or give me details? What sucks even more is that I want to prevent something becoming a bigger problem down the line, so I try to address it with her. So I feel like I can never address anything ever.
She just visited me for a week and a half for Thanksgiving she lives in another state across the country. But then it got worse and she kept canceling our plans, which damaged my trust in her word.
Then she became moody and so depressed she was constantly putting herself down and acting like everything and everyone is against her and not in our usual joking way.
There were a lot of things that eventually added up for me. I tried to hang on, but I started losing trust and faith in her. Being mentally ill and having so many of the same issues she goes through, I can understand, commiserate, sympathize. All that just turned into irritation whenever she acted yet again as if she was a victim of something.
Especially if she allows people to take advantage of her. That led to me trying to talk to her for the final time and when she only lashed and and it escalated, I had to say I was done. When I looked back at those instant messages, I realized she misunderstood my comment as criticism of her and her family, and not the general statement I had meant it as.
It only developed into a problem when she was overwhelmed by things and fell into deep depression. But then I thought, no, I still tried to be a friend.
I may not have always been a pleasant person, but I still always tried. Extremely difficult and depressing, but a learning and growing experience nonetheless. We talked about non-consequential things a bit.
I made one last final attempt to repair our friendship by sending her a song I felt said exactly how I felt, and she responded via a long email a week later. We eventually got back to where we were up until last Sunday. Jae, thanks so much for sharing your story. I totally agree, there is NOT enough helpful info out there around how to deal with turbulence in a friend relationship.
Stay tuned for an artice or podcast about friend relationships on the Growing Self blog! In the meantime, I think that there are a lot of relationship counselors and coaches that would probably be open to working with you and your friend.
My two cents. This sounds like a really important relationship to you, and I hope that she is open to doing this with you. All the best, Lisa Marie Bobby. I really do love her but I dont know how to handle this situation.. Doug, you too are describing a situation that is not likely to change unless you two get involved with some great couples counseling. Clearly, you care about your partner very much. But the communication pattern here is not one that is sustainable.
Take it to a great couples therapist, and be open to the process. A really good couples counselor will create an environment of emotional safety, but will also actively prevent you two from engaging in the old, unhelpful patterns. Then you can create solutions. It is mystifying. I hope that you get her in to couples counseling where you can begin having the types of conversations with her where you start to understand the needs and intentions underneath the behavior.
If I do something wrong that affects her. When she does something wrong that affects me. Even in a place where I just describe an action or remind her of an agreement we have made. How does one get into a place where issues can to be addressed without her shutting down and blaming me for bringing them to her? Or I need to just live my life affected. Trying not to affect her. What do I do?
Is it the type of thing where I just have to come to terms with the fact that I will have a partner that hurts me? Or just have to just stop being hurt by the things she does that hurts me? Is that a slippery slope that will lead to her future infidelity that will be my fault because I am bothered by it?
You know, emotional enmeshment is something that takes down many relationships. I would highly, highly recommend couples counseling here: This dynamic is only going to get worse over time, without intervention. Depending on how reactive you each are, and whether or not you are able to regulate your feelings to the point where healthy interactions are possible, your couples therapist may recommend that you do some individual growth work as well.
It may be the case where you both have to work on yourselves before a different kind of relationship is possible together. You seem like you have a lot of clarity about the nature of the problem and that is a great start. Now, do something with it! Get thee into couples counseling! My fiance and I have been together for a year. In that year he has been in a mental hospital put there by his spouse at the time , jail put there for defending me from said spouse after she physically assaulted me , and has been through a lot emotionally.
Throughout all of this chaos, we remained strong and powerfully in love together. Facing each obstacle as a team. The world around us saw how happy and strong we were. He shut down once after his longest, 3 week stay in the hospital and was depressed for about a month. I knew he needed that time and he had a bit of savings to survive on.
Throughout that month, however, he spoke with me regularly. Was able to feel good with me. Recently, his divorce is finalizing and it seems the paperwork overwhelmed him. He shut down, stopped going to work, but this time, stopped talking to me as well.
I panicked and went through every stage of emotions you can. I regret some of my behavior. No matter how I communicate it to him, he seems just dazed and lost. Not only does the culture demand him to be strong and composed, but there is a neurological obstacle to these conversations as well. Women can feel and speak at the same time. Interestingly, men actually have to switch from speech to emotions and back, which takes a lot of energy and focus.
When this sort of conversation about gender differences is started in a company, one of the first things you will hear is that women are born better and more prolific speakers. However, even though this idea originates from psychological findings, the disparities are truly not that big. To be more exact, a analysis of studies, performed by Hyde and colleagues, showed that the belief that females are more verbally skillful is not at all scientifically substantiated, not for any aspect of verbal processing same goes for math and science skills among males.
The differences in the abilities that were found were actually slight and meaningless. Therefore, if you were convinced that it is a nature given trait of yours that you have to communicate in a certain way, it may not be completely true. What is closer to truth is that in Western culture, girls are believed expected to be more talkative and verbally adapt, and boys not to talk much, especially not about emotions. So these expectations are actually the ones that do cause a sort of a Pygmalion effect.
Parents raise their children in accordance with cultural beliefs, and that is what causes adult women to speak about twice as much as men. While men view conversation as a means to an end, some women not all just like to talk, and can go on and on without pausing.
Instead, many men will just shut down. Relationship do: Remember that a conversation goes two ways. Slow down, edit yourself and ask for feedback. Your girlfriend made you angry today. You know she means well, but how could she think that was the right thing to do?
You want him to listen, nod his head, give you a hug and make you feel better. He can barely even follow your train of thought. Their responses might make you angry: Some men think listening to a rant means validating what they perceive as whining. Men naturally respond to problems by trying to fix them, so if all you want is for him to listen, let him know.
So remember to thank him for caring enough to hear and support you, Leahy says. And then, maybe switch to a lighter subject. Relationship do: Embrace your differences. Strong relationships happen between people with different interests.
The past is the past, and any problems you worked through are ancient history. Nothing will get resolved! If you want your relationship to go the distance, both you and your partner have to be open-minded and willing to work on improving your communication, and the first step is acknowledging and trying to break any bad habits that prevent you from communicating in a healthy way. Once you and your partner are on the same page about how to communicate effectively, there's no relationship obstacle you won't be able to tackle together.
Tamara Hill , licensed and nationally certified mental health therapist. Lori Bizzoco , relationship expert.
0コメント