After their daughter died, a couple of 42 years stopped talking to each other. When one partner tried to discuss what they needed, the other shut it down. Tim Arrigo explains how unspoken needs mask deeper trauma, trapping couples in cycles where one person manages the other's emotions and nothing ever feels right.
After the loss of your daughter, did you shut down?
I guess yes, in a way, shut down.
Okay, you know, my other marriage, when, when there's disconnection, a lot of times the disconnection happens because you don't express what your needs actually are in the marriage, and your wife doesn't express what her needs are either.
I'm glad you brought that up, Tim, because I just had the conversation with her about that last week. I said we have to sit down and discuss our needs and expectations in this relationship, and And I basically wrote down a few things and I was ready to talk about them, but she did not want to talk about anything. She goes, she goes, basically she said that if, you know, I know my needs and that's it. So she's shut down as far as expressing what those needs are.
So basically the problem that you both had, because nobody stays in a marriage with a person for 42 years and is emotionally disconnected, the person is emotionally disconnected from them, and they don't become emotionally disconnected from that person as a result, or deal with their emotions in unhealthy ways. Also, it's like most people, when they express what their needs are, they don't know what their needs are. They just want somebody to accommodate their own triggers or trauma. So it's like, it's not that I want you to meet my needs, although I express it that way, it's that I want you to accommodate every time I'm triggered. And it's a never-ending goalpost of how I want you to act to make me feel better on a daily basis. So it becomes codependent, where I rely on you to act and behave a certain way, but these expectations that I place on you so that I can feel better and not so triggered when I'm around you. So that becomes basically making you responsible for making me feel better, and then in essence blaming you for why the marriage is unhealthy. But yet no matter what you do, if you jump through a thousand hoops tomorrow and wear a different hat today and different hat tomorrow and a different hat the next day, it doesn't matter. It's irrelevant because nothing that you do is actually going to fix it, because I've already— I'm already locked up in my own problems. And until I own that and I come out of denial, there is no fixing anything, right? So right now, would you say that's where your wife is?
