Owning Your pain isn’t the same thing as “unbridled self expression,” as Terry Real puts it. You don’t have a special right to blast your spouse or partner. Does it even make sense that you would feel entitled to treat your partner more poorly than your friends? This means getting out from under the anger that you feel and connecting with more vulnerable emotions.

What’s wrong with anger? Don’t you have a right to be angry? Sure you do. You’ve been hurt. You’ve been mistreated. You’re scared of the future. Maybe you feel like you’ve been shut out of your partner’s life. Maybe you feel like they hurt you with an affair, or maybe you’ve just been feeling like roommates for a long time. Whatever it is, there’s a reason why you feel anger. And yet - If you want something different in your relationship, if you want something to change, anger isn’t the answer.

Owning your pain means saying that there’s a reason you’re feeling anger. Some people will recognize they’ve hurt their partner, but not recognize their own hurt. Maybe you feel like you don’t deserve to have pain when you’ve caused your partner pain. Maybe you’ve had the experience of the expression of pain “causing a fight” and keep it under wraps. But what happens when you don’t express it? When you deny that it exists? When you feel like you don’t have a choice but to “stuff it.?”

What Happens To Pain.

I’ve never really seen anyone experience pain in their relationship and not have it affect their relationship. Maybe it’s further disconnection. Maybe it’s a shutdown. Maybe it’s keeping it all in until you no longer can. In any case, it can explode after stuffing it for long enough, or it can leak out. Either method gets the resentment to come out and without owning that you have pain, you send that pain right back to your partner or spouse, most likely with a little “extra” heaped on top.

Why Is Acknowledging Your Pain So Necessary?

Without acknowledgement, you can’t ask for an apology. Without acknowledging your pain, you can’t even communicate that it’s in the way of your relationship. Without acknowledgement, you can’t heal. It’s kind of like bleeding from a wound, but denying that you’re bleeding. Even if people point it out, if you refuse to acknowledge it, you can’t get treatment.

I’ll give another example here. Remember Lepers? It’s not such a big deal in the modern world, but people infected with Leprosy made star appearances more than once in the bible. People lose limbs when they have Leprosy. But the mechanism of action isn’t that Leprosy rots your limbs and they fall off. It attacks the peripheral nervous system, and you aren’t able to feel injuries that normally would cause pain. It is a disease of attention. Similarly, denial or suppression of hurts in your relationship can deplete your relationship. This is damage that denial of your pain can cause.

Why Do People Deny it?

Sometimes you yourself don’t want to acknowledge it. Sometimes you’ve tried to call it out, but you get minimized. Sometimes people react to their pain, and the other person fights back or dismisses it. Sometimes it ends in an unproductive fight. Sometimes, you were raised in a family that didn’t fight and swept everything under the rug.

Whatever the reason, not owning your own pain makes it impossible for your partner or spouse to help you heal. It makes it impossible for them to really know you. And don’t you want to be known by your partner?

If you are in Minnesota, I can help you and your spouse embark on that journey to peace. Let’s set up a free and confidential consultation to get things moving in a positive direction.  I’m in Edina and serve the greater Minneapolis area. You can reach me by phone: 612-230-7171 or email through my contact page. Or you can click on the button below and self-schedule a time to talk by phone or video.