Talking About Your Pain to Your Spouse

From: Dr. Frank Gunzburg

If you are going to overcome the problem you face in your relationship right now, you need to start by explaining what your partner has done wrong, what the impact has been, and how you feel about it.

I can’t tell you what you should say because each situation is different and you need to express yourself from your heart. Only you can know what you need to say. But here are a few suggestions I can give you about how you should say what you need to say.

First of all, I suggest that you set the stage by giving the context of how your feelings developed. An example would be, “You encouraged me to trust you, you acted trustworthy in many ways, I believed in you and trusted you so much that I couldn’t imagine you would or could do anything dishonest in the even the slightest way. Then, POW, I was hit with the reality of what you did.”

Secondly, focus primarily on discussing your feelings. This means you should talk about how your spouse’s actions make you feel. Include what you think and what images run through your mind, but label these as thoughts and images and describe how these contribute to your feelings.

This means abandoning rationalizations and explanations, for the most part, and describing what feelings you have. Keep in mind that feelings are described most accurately with a single word or phrase, and they reflect something you can actually feel in your body.

For example, you might say, "I feel sad," "I feel angry," "I feel disappointed," or "I feel resentful." If you think about each of these feelings carefully, you can identify a place in your body where you carry them or some physical impact they have on you. These are accurate descriptions of feelings.

When you start using words like “because” or when you start elaborating too much on your feelings, you are probably getting into the realm of thoughts. This is something you might want to refrain from, except to explain how your feelings developed.

Of course, you don’t have to be perfect at this. If you stick to the way you feel about the situation, you are less likely to evoke defensiveness and argumentation from your partner. When your partner becomes defensive or argumentative, the lines of communication are bound to close down and that is something you generally want to avoid. So emphasize the way you feel.

An example of what you don’t want to say would be, “I feel that you are completely dishonest and downright mean.” In this example, the phrase “I feel” is used to introduce a thought, not a feeling. The thought presented here would probably arouse at least defensiveness and possibly anger in the recipient of this message.

Another important point is to deliver information in small packages. This is important because every human being has cognitive limitations. We can only digest and retain so much information at one time. If you try and tell your partner everything at once, some of it is liable to get lost along the way. An example might be the best way to describe this process.

So I recommend sticking to one issue during the course of a conversation. Listen to yourself and evaluate each sentence: Are you still talking on-topic? Deliver information in small bundles – find your earliest stopping point to give your partner an opportunity to respond. The listening partner needs to allow time to investigate the message that was delivered without bringing up a new topic and without defending himself or herself. The “other side” can be brought up in a subsequent conversation.

Don’t try and cover the entire issue, topic, experience, memory, problem behavior, or revelation in the first communication. It will get lost. There’s no way around that. We’re human beings. We have very limited capabilities for what we can maintain in our minds at any given time, particularly when we are talking about emotionally-laden issues.

So just get one point across. Make sure it’s delivered. Then you can go for another point. Even then, most emotionally-laden messages will not be retained after only one telling. You might have to repeat the same thing or have a similar discussion several times at different points for your partner to fully “get it” and maintain it. The listener in this case needs to be patient and non-sarcastic in listening to a previously aired issue again.

But ultimately, the responsibility for understanding the hurt partner lies with the person who caused the pain. This is why it is so important that the offending spouse be willing to do the necessary work to repair the relationship.

The rest of this communication program revolves around how the offending partner can improve his or her listening skills and develop some empathy to truly understand the pain he or she caused.

These skills are important for everyone to learn and will help improve the overall communication in your relationship if you put them into practice.

In terms of moving toward forgiveness, though, this part of the program focuses specifically on the offending partner. I strongly recommend that you read this information and practice these skills in earnest if you have hurt your partner and you are trying to rebuild your relationship.

Dr. Frank Gunzburg is a licensed counselor in Maryland and has been specializing is helping couples restore their marriage for over 30 years.

For more information about forgiving your partner and working through the past, please visit http://www.howyouforgive.com/

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