Loving Someone Who Struggles to Feel Safe
Recently I wrote about establishing safety with yourself after trauma and how hard it can be to accurately read whether your partner's behavior is neutral, annoying but harmless, or genuinely unsafe when your internal alarm system has been messed with in your past.
Marina Rosenthal
In response to that post, a reader wrote in and asked:
I am curious what you'd suggest if you've identified that your partner's system is the one that's really sensitive? I spent a couple of years deeply examining myself and working to fix my side of the street. It has become clear though that his smoke detector is very sensitive. I'm working to take responsibility for the parts that are my responsibility and to offer care and connection overall. What else can I do in this situation?
In my prior post, my focus was for you to self-evaluate your own alarm system. Do you tend to over-perceive harm? Under-perceive it? Or are you prone to a chaotic mixture of the two?
But the reader's situation is common too. How can you proceed when you see (over many contexts and situations) that your partner's interpersonal sensitivity is very high? You can and should still validate their emotions, but it might get tricky if they're asking is for concrete behavior change or specific forms of repair which feel inappropriate to you based on the context.
Today, I'm talking about the other side of this equation: how to think about about your partner's alarm system without pathologizing them while still offering authentic care.
I'll explore:
- whether you're dealing with a sensitivity problem...or a defensiveness problem,
- how you can show up for your partner even when you can't commit to behavior change or offer explicit repair,
- why you shouldn't focus on analyzing them or determining why they're sensitive,
- and how my partner and I navigate my sensitive alarm system in our relationship.
Let's get into it.