I want to sit with you in this for a moment, because what you’re describing is honestly at the heart of almost everything I see in my clinical work.
Here’s what I know to be true, and I mean this deeply: the most painful moments in your relationship, the moments where you snap at each other, pull away, say something cutting, go cold, those are not evidence that you’re broken or that your relationship is failing. They are evidence that you still love each other enough to be scared.
An old wound makes the person you love feel dangerous.
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Ask Figlet about when past wounds surface.
Let me say that again, because people miss this.
When you get triggered, when old wounds from childhood or past relationships come flooding in and suddenly you’re not responding to your partner, you’re responding to some version of danger your nervous system learned a long time ago, that only happens because you care. You wouldn’t feel that kind of fear if this person didn’t matter to you so much.
I say this to couples all the time: moments of disconnection are a feature, not a bug. Most people are running around trying to squash those moments, trying to have a relationship with no friction, no rupture, no pain. And what they end up with is a relationship that never goes deep enough to hurt. That’s not intimacy. That’s just coexistence.
The attachment wounds you’re carrying, those strategies you developed because of what happened to you, because of the relationship models you grew up with, those strategies made complete sense at the time. They kept you safe. But now they’re getting in the way of the very connection you’re longing for.
An old wound makes the person you love feel dangerous.
Do you know you can get personalized answers to all your questions from the same wisdom that wrote this article, right now?
Ask anything about your own situation and get an answer immediately. Keep asking, think it through, work out what to do next.
No credit card required. Your first 10 messages are free.
Ask Figlet about when past wounds surface.
Think of it like this: you learned to speak a certain language of love and safety based on what your nervous system needed to survive. Maybe that language was hypervigilance, always scanning for signs you were about to be abandoned. Maybe it was shutting down, going numb when things got too intense. Maybe it was becoming small, agreeable, perfect so you wouldn’t be too much.
Your partner learned their own language, their own strategies. And now you’re both speaking different dialects of survival, wondering why you can’t understand each other.
The work isn’t about fixing yourself or becoming someone different. The work is learning to see what’s underneath your own reactivity, and underneath your partner’s. To be able to say, even in the hard moments: this is old pain meeting new love. This is not the end of us. This is us still loving each other enough to be scared.
That longing you feel, to be chosen, to feel important, to feel like you got it right with this person, that’s not a weakness. That is actually the most beautiful and human part of you. And it’s exactly what makes healing possible.
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Figs is a licensed marriage and family therapist with 16+ years of experience working with couples. He’s the co-founder of Empathi, host of the “Come Here to Me” podcast, and author of an upcoming book on relationships and the systems that shape how we love.
Read more: Attachment Styles in Relationships: How Your Love Pattern Shapes Your Bond
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