You Try To Be Vulnerable. Your Partner Just Hears An Attack.
Why Sharing Your Inner World Blows Up In Your Face
Welcome to Love Notes For Real Life! This is my space away from the noise of social media to dive deep into all the tricky, nuanced relationship topics you're struggling and puzzling over. Yes, it's a paid newsletter, but I promise it's worth it! For just $5 a month, you get weekly+ explorations, advice, and insight from me—a psychologist, high conflict couples therapist, and author. I hope you join the party!
Your partner has asked you to be vulnerable. To show up with emotion. So you do. You share the thoughts and feelings you've been holding back. You get a bit messy.
And then? They don't like what they hear or see.
They might find the depth of your pain (or, let's be real, your anger) frightening or overwhelming. They back away or tell you you're being scary.
Or they see your emotional expression as manipulative. In their eyes, you're trying to "make" them feel or respond a particular way.
Or they feel attacked. They focus on the things you said about them, not all the feelings you're offering up.
You end up in a double bind. They want to more vulnerability? Well, this is what it looks like! It starts to feel as though what they're actually asking is for you to receive their emotions with softness, and that's fair, but does it not go in both directions? Or maybe the subtext you read is that they want emotion so long as you share a limited range. They get to prescribe the feeling.
So you stop sharing the feelings altogether. It feels better not to be understood than to be told again and again that you're doing vulnerability wrong.
If this is your pain point, you're going to want to keep reading. Today I'll run through why your attempts to share your feelings keep backfiring...and what to start doing differently for real-deal reciprocal vulnerability.
Let's go.