When your partner can’t hear your emotions
In my family I was the black sheep, the strange one and they didn’t understand me, I used to wonder why they thought that way. They said it was too sensitive. I was too vulnerable. I used to talk to myself, but somehow I knew that this behavior was not acceptable to others, so I would stop talking as soon as someone entered the room. I developed the art of hiding my thoughts and feelings as a child. In my head there were thousands of people who would listen to me, but with my family I just hoped that they would dismiss any expression of emotion as something that is not important, annoying or too troublesome.
In my relationships as an adult, I have realized how much I keep my emotions to myself. As a child and as a young man I was so hurt that not sharing my feelings became a survival technique, which ended up hurting me more than anyone else. It was by seeing how much I was drowning in my own pain that motivated me to change my behavior. Not talking is both a habit and a character tendency. Some of us may be born with a tendency to keep things close to our chest, but we also learn to keep things close to ourselves because someone else responded really badly in our first experiences of expressing our feelings.
Can you remember a time when you expressed how hurt you were and someone just talked about themselves without a word about you? Do you remember a time when you told someone how you felt and they didn’t know what to do and just ignored what you said? Maybe you remember a time when you shared your feelings with someone and they got angry or rejected you.
All the strange and uncomfortable experiences we have when we express our emotions can create crazy judgments in our minds about how, when and why we should tell someone how we feel.
Just this week, I had shared a feeling of sadness and got two different reactions from my friends. One of my friends was asking for forgiveness. And I was thinking, why are you sorry? You did nothing to create the sadness. But that’s what they came up with. Another friend said that he was teaching them to agree to say that you feel sad rather than trying to cover it up. We are programmed to feel that we need to have a reaction to someone else’s emotion, rather than simply feeling it without doing anything except listening to what the person is feeling. Almost no one listens to our emotions, so the first thing we want when we express our feelings is someone to listen to us.
If you notice that your partner is reacting as if he has to do or say something when you are expressing your feelings, it is due to his conditioning around the expression of emotions. If your partner can’t just be with you without feeling that they have to do something, then there is a part of them that you are activating and towards which you are alerting. This part of them is the part that is uncomfortable with feelings or the part of them that feels unable to support others. They may not know that this is what you are doing. They can get angry. But whenever your partner is upset, there is something that needs your attention about how you are feeling.
Your partner is more than capable of supporting you, but because they may have had a bad experience in the past with another person expressing emotions, they may think that it is not a good one. When your partner grew up unable to deal with strong emotions, he will surely react negatively to listening to your emotions, withdrawing, diverting, avoiding, repressing or attacking.
Sometimes your partner misinterprets your emotions because of the tone of your voice. We are educated through our culture to listen to certain tones and expressions and associate them with different emotions. So a family in China will express anger or fear in their voice with a different tone than a family in the US Even within certain ethnic regions, they will have a difference in the expression of emotions. The way you can get angry in the Bronx will have subtle differences from someone in San Diego. It all depends on the shades with which you are used to growing in your environment.
We all grow up to express our emotions differently. And we all grow up with very different reactions to the expression of our emotions.
The first thing to think about when your partner can’t hear your emotions is: What do you feel? Take as much time as you can to sit down with this. In the moment, it can be difficult to drop everything and just sit with yourself. But if that means not reacting in anger or saying hurtful words to your partner, then it is much more productive to sit down with what you are feeling. I have even found myself watching a movie or playing music that will help me connect with the feeling.
I am not the type of person who instantly knows what I am feeling. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t. Feelings are like a wash of color on a theater stage. One moment it might be a sunny day at the beach, the next moment it’s a dark corner of a nightclub. Emotions are like filters that color our lives and are not easily expressed in concepts or words. Emotions take time to emerge. So give yourself time to allow them to come to clarity and awareness. Sometimes a chat with a friend will shed some light, and sometimes just doing nothing and sitting down with yourself will be more effective.
Throughout your life, when have you found yourself most clearly about your emotions?
Once you have connected with what you are feeling, imagine what your partner is feeling. This is where you can activate your empathy buttons and understand that we are all the same. Either we want to be loved or to love. If you feel an emotion and your partner is not ready to hear it, what could make it difficult for them to hear you? Try not to intellectualize here, listen to your most immediate first response. Your first response is the closest to your intuition and is unlikely to come from days of pondering why your partner is not available to you. The less you judge your partner, the less anger and unresolved feelings you will create. It is best to focus 90% of your energy on your feelings and about 10% on the conditions that could influence your partner’s ability to listen to you.
To be heard, really heard, you must first listen to yourself. So you get more clarity about your insecurities, fears, what you need and want, and what the real emotion is. Your partner will be able to do much more for you when you have a greater sense of what you are feeling and do not project your fear onto them that they may not be available to you.
It’s too easy to blame your partner for not being there for you because you haven’t taken the time to really listen to what’s going on inside of you. Over time, the more you listen to yourself, the more adept you become at sensing when is the right time to share your feelings and when it is time to sit down with your feelings and listen, really listen to yourself. The words to express your feelings will come from a more authentic, pure and beautiful space when you have really felt what is inside you.