Why Do Relationship Hurts Arise?
When you decide to make a commitment in a relationship, you can go through
both fear and excitement. The fear probably is about, “have I made the
right decision?” and “am I going to be able to have my own time and be
myself?”.
To have an intimate and loving relationship, you know you do not have to
spend all your time with your partner, nor do you have to meet all their
needs. However, when you are with your partner, you want to be present with
them. Being present with your partner and getting to know each other can
bring up differences and disagreements. This is normal and most times the
relationship can navigate through and adjust to the differences.
The part of an intimate love sexual relationship that we a not told about,
is that your relationship is the perfect place for your healing and growth.
This means, what trauma or woundedness that has happened to you in
childhood and life in general, comes up in your relationship. This is when
it becomes tricky, as the behaviour and attitude of your partner may
trigger your trauma and pain to rise to the surface. This is when you may
want to hide it and your behaviour may become unhealthy for the
relationship. In other words, your partner is a ‘mirror’ for you, to see
your own pain.
You see, you have three aspects within yourself that are crucial to
understand when trauma and pain arises. These three aspects are the
‘Functioning Adult’, the ‘Wounded and Hurt Child’ and the ‘Adaptive and
Reactive Child’. For your relationship to work in harmony, you need a
‘functioning adult’ most of the time, but everyone has a ‘wounded and hurt
child’ within, of varying degrees of pain. This is the past trauma aspect
that creates havoc in a relationship. When your ‘reactive and adaptive
child’ surfaces, which is the part that is always angry, aggressive and
manipulative, it will do anything to protect your ‘wounded and hurt child’.
For your relationship to be less ‘painful’, so to speak, your ‘reactive and
adaptive child’ needs to be minimised within your relationship. The way
this can happen, is allow your ‘wounded and hurt child’ to come out and be
present when necessary. What this means, is you need to totally own and
share your ‘hurts’ with your partner. When you own and feel your
‘woundedness’, the healing can start. If you deny this part of you, healing
cannot start.
Of course, this can be very vulnerable as you may be rejected by your
partner. On the other hand, if your partner is present with you and truly
listens to your story of the pain, you will heal and release the pain and
move to pleasure and flow.
This is the same for your partner. When both of you can listen to each
other, you will allow the pain, healing and pleasure to be present and so
the paradox of an intimate love relationship is experienced. This is where
true emotional connection occurs and fun and playfulness thrives to
experience more pleasure rather than pain.
In our couple’s therapy practice, we have created an Intentional Dialogue
for couples to be present and listen deeply so healing takes place.
For support, contact us at Love Life Matters, covering the Gold Coast and Tweed Heads area.