You know, I want to be honest with you about something right off the top. The idea that you can have a difficult conversation without any fight, without any mess, without any traffic jam… that’s not actually the goal. And I think chasing that goal is part of what makes things worse.
Here’s what I mean.
You rehearse the conversation and never have it.
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When you go to your partner and say, “Hey, something happened and it hurt me,” you think you’re just sharing information. But what lands inside them, on the deepest biological level, is something that sounds like, “You’ve disappointed me. You’re not enough. You might lose me.” And their organism, which is millions of years old, is going to react to that. Not because they’re broken. Because they love you. The more it threatens them, the more it means they care. That’s actually a beautiful thing, even when it feels terrible.
So the traffic jam is coming. Accept that.
What you can do is go in with your eyes open. Before you even start, know this: you’re going to say something from a place of real hurt, it’s going to activate their attachment fear, and for some period of time, things are going to get messy. Maybe five minutes. Maybe five days, depending on where both of you are in this work. But you’re not on the wrong road just because you hit traffic.
Now, here’s the thing that actually changes the conversation. There are three things you need to hold at once, and most people only hold one.
One, you know how you’re hurting and you want to be heard. That one comes naturally.
Two, you need to recognize that the moment you’ve just created is genuinely hard for them. They just found out from the person they love that they let them down. Have some real empathy for that. It’s not easy to do when you’re hurting, but that’s the work.
You rehearse the conversation and never have it.
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 bringing up hard things.
Three, zoom out and see both of you in the same frame. You’re both hurting. You’re both seeing the other as withholding love. That is a sad, painful moment for two people who love each other. Can you feel that? Not just your pain, but the pain of the whole picture?
If you can hold all three of those, you’re giving your partner something remarkable. You’re saying, “I’m hurting, I’m telling you about it responsibly, AND I know this must be hard to hear, AND I see how this puts us both in a difficult place right now.”
That’s not a guarantee of a smooth conversation. But it changes the quality of the mess. Over time, with practice, the boxes of suffering get smaller. The traffic jams get shorter. And eventually, you earn the right to have those calm, emotionally attuned conversations you’re picturing. But you earn that right by going through the mess together, not by jumping over it.
One more thing. If you can say out loud at the start, “I need to tell you something that hurt me, and I don’t expect this to go smoothly, and I know it’s going to be hard for both of us,” you’ve already done something extraordinary. You’ve named the traffic jam before you’re in it. That’s not weakness. That’s the most honest, loving thing you can do.
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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: How to Stop Fighting and Start Communicating in Your Relationship
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