When You Think Your Husband Is Overreacting . . . Again

Hurt Feelings Create A Cycle

When we hurt our man’s feelings, we compound the hurt by communicating to him that he shouldn’t have been upset by what we said or did. So he gets mad. Or he withdraws. And then we get hurt by that. Or we huff and get mad because he’s mad and we don’t think he should be. All because we don’t see his hurt, his wiring, his needs. Or we don’t see them as legitimate. So we miss the deep truth. We roll our eyes at his “ego” and never realize: he doesn’t have an ego. He has a deep well of self-doubt.

Because we missed the fact that our actions legitimately caused him pain, because we miss the deep truth underneath it, we do those things again. We hurt him again. He gets mad and withdraws again. Then we get hurt again. And pretty soon our marriage is hurting. All because of a sneaky trap we never saw.