Safety separates a damaging relationship from a healing one. When a partner shuts down emotionally, it can trigger the other's abandonment wounds from childhood. Replace criticism and stonewalling with compassionate listening and empathy to build genuine connection.
The only difference between a damaging relationship and a healing relationship is safety. And see, you have become an unsafe person. For what reason? Because you're constantly triggering the trauma that your wife has experienced from her past. So you become the antithesis of a healthy person. You become the antithesis of a safe person. You become the antithesis of being her go-to guy. Wanna know why she feels unseen and unheard? Let's talk about it. The way that you learn to deal with your emotions through emotional dissociation, shutting down your feelings, suppressing your feelings, burying them, being emotionally cut off, which served you very well in certain environments. But here's the sad part. It backfires on you in a loving relationship that requires you to be empathetic and fully connected to your wife, requires you to increase your emotional intelligence and empathy, motivation, relationship management, social skills are all part of your emotional intelligence. So the way that you've dealt with your emotions is to shut yourself off emotionally. But what you didn't know is that your wife has abandonment issues. Your wife was neglected as a child. So you being emotionally shut off, it triggers the neglect in your wife's past. So you become somebody different in the relationship. You start to shapeshift and morph into a person that now what ends up happening is you have trauma on trauma inside that relationship and you're bringing out the worst in one another. It's about how you guys deal with the conflict. It's about learning to speak to those parts of your wife. And for wives, it's about learning how to speak to that part of your husband. When the wound surfaces, how do you deal with it? Do you belittle? Do you judge? Do you criticize? Do you stonewall? Or are you emotionally available? Because it takes a mature individual. There's nothing mature about burying how you're feeling. There's nothing mature about reacting like a child and belittling another individual for the way that they feel. Nothing mature about that. There's nothing mature about invalidation. Real maturity comes from allowing somebody to have their perspective, hearing it out, and asking them the questions so you can do some reconnaissance and build a foundation of understanding about how what you do triggers them in certain ways. You want to create something healthy? Then stop taking it so personal. Someone's behavior towards you, it says nothing about you, it says everything about them. But why their behavior triggers you says everything about you and nothing about them. Understand that there's certain things that people do, and all, all their behavior is doing is it's just eliciting and provoking and antagonizing things that are— were already there, things that pre-existed prior to the relationship. You walked into the relationship with that. She brought that into the relationship. And it's your job for one another to learn how to speak to those parts of each other to create safety and security, not a place of judgment, criticism, harsh words, and the absence of love. Because that is where true love shows up. Hey, I love you, but I can't be available for you in your deepest, darkest moment? When you're in your moment of weakness, how do you want that person to meet you? Truly, when you're in your moment of weakness, how do you want that person to meet you? And see, when that person learns to meet you in that moment of weakness— because everybody has moments of weakness— when they learn to meet you in that moment of weakness with what you need, you create a safe and secure relationship. Because then people will get vulnerable. People never get vulnerable unless they sense a compassionate presence of another human being. People don't respect people that talk down to them. Let me ask you this: have you ever respected someone that talked down to you? Has you— have you ever wanted to open up with somebody that would judge you, criticize you for what was going on with you? No, you wouldn't. So how are you going to create safety in a relationship when you take everything personal, when you can't listen, when you can't empathize, and when you're shut off from your emotions and you're not realizing that understanding your partner's trauma is a love language?
