You Think Your Partner Doesn't Care. Here's What's Really Happening.

So you're both suffering from the same pain, and yet you don't even know it because you're only focused on your own pain. The root cause of this is not indifference, it's not dislike, it's not knowing how to handle painful, shameful emotions. You see, in our brains, when we perceive a threat, even a social threat like a small insult or a little bit of disrespect, we go into fight or flight. And the moment we do that, our prefrontal cortex shuts down and we lose the ability to emotionally self-regulate. And so we start getting reactive, and we go back to the behaviors that we learned in childhood. What happened when somebody yelled at you? What happened when you told that you don't hurt when your knee is really scraped up and it does hurt? What do you feel when you're told not to cry? You shut down, and that becomes your reaction to protect yourself when you feel emotionally hurt by somebody else.