The Relationship War Room: How Raw Wounds Turn Us Into Warriors of Lost Causes
Ever asked your partner a question, made a request or commented on what they’re doing and watched them snap?
Crazy how something said so simply turned into a war.
(Interesting how the word ‘war’ when inverted becomes ‘raw’ …)
And this is it. From this raw space the angry child emerges, full of defense and blame. With you firmly fixed in their gaze.
How did you make sense of it?
Are they for real? What just happened?
You hear anger, feel rejection and see a side of your partner you don’t recognize. And in self-defense, you turn the lens inward, focusing on what’s come up in yourself rather than staying calm, then curious about their reaction.
So what just happened?
Your amygdala (the fear center of your brain triggering your fight/flight/freeze response) is protecting you. At a primitive level it’s telling you you’re not safe. It’s telling you to run (fast), defend yourself (fast) or freeze (fast) to block the painful emotions.
Our partner’s deeper thoughts and feelings are often invisible to us, yet laying dormant beneath a fragile surface that twitches when least expected. (True for ourselves as well.)
Each of us creates our own reality. We make sense of our personal histories and childhood memories. And in so doing create a meaning that may or may not be ‘true’. Yet it’s ‘true’ for us.
Past wrongs and rejections can simmer for a long time, repressed from conscious awareness until the person your partner cares most about in life (that’s you) triggers those raw (war) wounds again.
And as a couple you learn to dance to what will become a familiar tune of back-peddling and retreating, or the war room of anger and frustration. Unless you both choose to learn a new rhythm.
How can the person you once thought of as your ‘soul mate’ now feel so alien?
How can you feel so alone in your relationship, when once you understood each other so well?
How can you make sense of this behavior and still stay in relationship when everything within tells you to get out?
The inner world we each have can be deep and murky — and often only discovered in relationship with someone we really care about.
In the therapy room (I’m a relationship therapist), I’m often asked whether it’s true that we find a partner who’s like our parents. In short, the answer is ‘yes’. Yet it’s more complicated than that.
A few decades ago I dated a man whose previous girlfriends were similar to me. I didn’t really see how similar until the relationship ended and then saw him out socially with the next one.
We all could have been sisters. Similar size, similar style, similar energy. And then I saw his mother in a new light. We were all mini versions of her. And as I realize now from the distance of decades, he held many unresolved issues with his mother. Subconsciously he took his unresolved history and punished each of us ‘sisters’ in the way he wish he could have his mother.
I’m not saying we find someone who looks like our mother or father, though that can happen.
We’re attracted to someone who has both positive and negative aspects of our parents or caregivers. The person we choose is in some way a mirror image of them.
Each of us are works in progress — ever evolving. Beautiful portraits forming as we understand our needs more — particularly any unmet needs from childhood.
One of the most challenging, yet necessary things relationships need is a deep awareness of your partner’s trigger points — those ones whose genesis can often be found in childhood.
Whether that’s a feeling of being abandoned, feeling ignored, unwanted, blamed without cause, dismissed, overlooked, unloved or mistreated gives rise to a child’s internal response. The parent or caregiver’s actions seed our future relationships often before the age of seven.
This doesn’t mean you or your partner are broken and doomed forever because of unmet childhood needs.
It does mean that while parents did the best job possible, they could only do so much, only be present to our needs to the extent possible inthe busy life of raising children and trying to hold it all together. And in this space of busyness some things (including childhood sadness and loss to events that happened — or didn’t happen) may get missed.
Sometimes parents are over-stretched emotionally. Workahol-ism feels a necessity to keep the family afloat. And in these times parents fall back on their old patterns learned from their parents.
Generational cycles of coping, of dysfunction, of raw wounds gone unhealed.
If you’ve grown up in a home that you now see as dysfunctional, then emotional wounds may need deeper healing to build trust and emotional connection again with the person you’ve chosen as your partner.
The previous partner described earlier abused his partners by cheating, lying and emotionally manipulating them.
His father was an alcoholic. His mother a workaholic.
When his father died, as the eldest son he wanted to help — yet from what I understand, his mother rejected it. She replaced her loveless marriage through affairs with unavailable married men. Her two sons grew up in an emotionally disconnected world — first by an alcoholic father, then by an absent mother.
As a young man, his mother prepared him for work with one set of clothes. Day in, day out, he wore them for a year before a colleague advised him to invest in a few more items.
He felt deep shame — and blamed his mother for not investing more in him. In his 30’s and 40’s he worked on restoring his broken self-esteem by belittling and punishing women he partnered — all of whom had an uncanny resemblance in spirit, looks and style to his mother.
Few men receive the skills to communicate how they feel. They squash painful needs for acceptance between hard bones of denial.
When things go wrong in relationships, most listen with filtered intent — either to make things right again or reinforce the belief that little is going to change with the relationship’s current state.
And that’s because couples try fixing problems they don’t understand the genesis of. With tools they don’t yet know exist.
Most start with logic. Make assumptions. Blame the other. Claim innocence. Feel wronged. Believe they must make amends.
These strategies usually get people into deeper warfare as assumptions are blind spots and logic alone usually keeps people inflexible and defensive.
Do you have a choice in how you react to your partner’s emotional wounds?
Yes. Though it may feel counter-intuitive initially.
It all starts with flexibility — emotionally and mentally:
By shifting focus from yourself to your partner.
By being more curious about what’s happening to your partner on an emotional level.
By seeing the bind you’re caught in when repeating the same patterns.
By asking questions in the hope of understanding more.
Insight into your partner comes from awareness that arises because you’re paying attention.
When you set an intention to understand your partner more, then curiosity is a natural response in connecting more honestly.
Start by asking:
What part of your partner are they protecting?
And from whom?
What are their motives for acting this way?
What stands in your way from doing this?
Our ego can lead us to act with self-righteous blinkers, rarely considering curiosity as an option when our own emotions feel raw.
Ego feels more at home wearing a cloak of judgement, than a veil of vulnerability.
People make sense of what they see and hear through distorted lenses. From past experiences, old stories bought into, outdated belief systems and emotions that feel so strong they can’t believe could possibly be wrong.
These are no more than assumptions based on our own way of making sense of things. And behind our own blinkered walls of awareness we can inadvertently flick a trip wire around events and emotions left dormant and tethered to the past.
It’s as if in an untimely moment you unintentionally bait a fresh hook, and in the process snag your partner’s raw wound. And in doing so start another war.
How could we know?
We couldn’t.
What you can do is go on a discovery tour of what old wounds may still be raw.
What you can do is note how those raw spots need more tenderness than you may have realized.
What you can do is lead with compassion, a little more lee-way and a lot more awareness.
Key things to do:
Listen without judging
Remove defensiveness
Apologize for what you may have done (even if you don’t see it)
Speak in a gentle tone
Make sure you’re sitting beside or lower (not above) to reduce any threat sensations
Ask to talk about it later (so your partner’s limbic system can calm)
While this may sound simple to do — it’s anything but. If partners both choose to lead with tenderness, awareness and curiosity, then much can be achieved.
It’s a choice to grow relationally, just like it’s a choice to remain in a personal war room filled with raw emotions.
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