It can be incredibly demoralizing to repeatedly approach your partner with your hurt feelings, disappointments, and frustrations, and just get a defensive reaction from them! If your partner seems to not care about your feelings, can’t listen deeply to you, and doesn’t seem willing to change the behavior you find so upsetting, what can you do about it…short of leaving the marriage? This is a question nearly every couple living unhappily or headed for divorce struggles with…and a very important one at that.
The fact is, we cannot make another person change. That is simply common sense. However, our partner can want to change in a lasting way if they really sense the suffering one of their behaviors is causing us. Our partner’s willingness and ability to change their behavior will typically only arise when we can both get past our defensive reactivity, and that requires the ability to communicate through conflict and arrive at genuine understanding and empathy for our each others’ experience.
Being able to put aside our defensive reactions and genuinely understand and be touched by each other’s suffering is a game changer. Many if not most couples cannot do this without professional help, but it is a common accomplishment of the right kind of marriage counseling.
I know, we were talking about your partner’s defensiveness, not yours, but the task is the same for all of us. Let’s take a moment and imagine what your partner is thinking and feeling that might explain why they are either oblivious to our needs or resistant to our requests for change. Are they feeling acknowledged, unconditionally loved, respected, and like their needs and feelings are being heard and appreciated by you? Perhaps they perceive your upset with them as a rejection, or a judgment that they are inadequate. Believing that would make most of us defensive! Therein lies the problem. In order to get through to our partner, we need to be able to express our needs to them in a way that doesn’t put them on the defensive, even though we are feeling mighty upset already. Not easy!
What can help to empower you in this situation? You can become a first-class communicator yourself! Once you learn how to much more effectively engage your partner in communication around your feelings and concerns your chances of having an impact will increase significantly. Just as importantly, you can learn to respond to your partner’s communication in a way that will cause them to feel accurately heard, validated, and cared about. This often has the effect of making them more willing to give you the quality of attention you need, and the heart-felt motivation to meet your concerns and needs in a way that works better for you.
It may not seem fair that you will have to take this on, and you may be right…it’s not exactly fair, but it may well get you what you need. It will require you to understand how your own behavior and communication style can improve. There actually are ‘ABC’s’ that you can learn about effective communication. This learning begins with finding the humility to realize that you have, perhaps without realizing it, also been contributing some to the problems in your marriage, even if your partner has been awfully difficult to live with. My mentor, Harville Hendrix, PhD, has often said, ‘you can be right, or you can be married!’
By the way, your partner may believe that all the problems in the marriage are your fault! Even in that case, learning to listen, validate and empathize with your partner can begin to reduce the distance between the two of you. Most of us will need the support of a relationship professional to accomplish this, but it is very empowering and satisfying to be coached in doing something that is actually working to turn the situation around. Ultimately both you and your partner will have to share this responsibility, regardless of who takes the first step.
Accepting that something of the greatest importance needs to be accomplished, regardless of who is ‘at fault’, is the first step. The next step is to learn what needs to be done and how to do it. Getting the right kind of help can make what seemed impossible, very doable!
(Photo Credit: bored-now) / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
