My partner tends to think that my traumatic experience is unfair to him because his actions weren’t as bad as what other people have done. He thinks my pain should be lessened because of this. He says, I didn’t cheat on you. Why is your pain the same as those who’ve been cheated on? He thinks that he might as well have just done worse things. If the outcome is going to be the same for me, I keep trying to explain why breaking trust is the key, not actions, but it’s frustrating and retraumatizing. What do I do in this situation?
My partner tends to think that my traumatic experience is unfair to him because his actions weren’t as bad as what other people have done. He thinks my pain should be lessened because of this. He says, I didn’t cheat on you. Why is your pain the same as those who’ve been cheated on? He thinks that he might as well have just done worse things. If the outcome is going to be the same for me, I keep trying to explain why breaking trust is the key, not actions, but it’s frustrating and retraumatizing. What do I do in this situation?
I want to turn the table here for a second and ask him a question. What makes you think that this wouldn’t bother me or you might ask him I know that you didn’t do X, Y, Z, but it makes me feel unsafe. It makes me feel like, I don’t know if I can trust you or if there’s more.
And so whatever his behaviors were, it’s identifying these things. I feel this way and I don’t know how to just get rid of those feelings. Do you have suggestions on how I can just get through these feelings and then push them away? That might be a question you would ask anyway. I don’t know if he knows how to be with your pain.
If you guys are going to work as a couple. He needs to be able to understand your pain, understand what it’s been like, what it’s been like for you and your fears. So that’s a vulnerable place, but we can get stuck in, well I didn’t cheat in contrast with it made me feel unsafe. So if you’re comparing it to cheating, we want to make sure that we don’t need to talk about that. We need to talk about the pain, right? I’m scared or I’m hurt. I feel like you’re choosing that over me. And that’s the communication that I would encourage you to have with him.