I hear this so often in my office, and I want to start by saying something important: having your feelings dismissed is genuinely painful. It’s not dramatic or oversensitive to feel hurt by it. It makes you feel invisible, like you’re talking to a wall that used to be your person.
Your pain makes complete sense.
You feel dismissed, so you protest louder.
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But here’s what I’ve learned after sitting with hundreds of couples wrestling with this exact dynamic. The partner who dismisses your feelings? Nine times out of ten, they’re not doing it because they don’t care. I know that sounds almost insulting to suggest, because from where you’re sitting, it sure looks like indifference.
Here’s what’s actually happening inside them.
They’re constantly scanning you, asking themselves one terrifying question: “Am I enough for this person?” And when they sense your disappointment or frustration, their nervous system reads it as a four-alarm fire. The shame floods in. “I’m failing them. I’m not good enough. I can’t do anything right.” And that feeling becomes so overwhelming that their system just… shuts down. They go defensive. They minimize. They dismiss.
Not because your feelings don’t matter. Because the pain of feeling like they’re disappointing you is unbearable.
You feel dismissed, so you protest louder.
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This creates what I call the Waltz of Pain. You feel dismissed, so you protest louder. You push harder. Which lands on them as more evidence that they’re failing you. So they retreat further. And round and round you go, two people who love each other, accidentally terrorizing each other.
So here’s the question I’d want to explore with you: when you try to get your partner to hear your feelings, what does that look like? Because if you’re coming in hot and frustrated (which would make total sense), their system is going to read that as “you’re a disappointment” and slam the shutters closed even faster.
The way through isn’t less vulnerability. It’s more of it, but softer. Underneath the frustration, there’s usually something quieter. Something that sounds less like “you never listen to me” and more like “I feel so alone right now and I really need to know you care.”
That softer reach changes everything. It stops triggering their shame spiral and gives them somewhere to come toward rather than something to defend against.
Think of it like this: if someone throws a ball hard at your face, you duck. But if they gently toss it to you, you catch it. Your feelings deserve to be caught, not deflected. But how you deliver them matters more than you might think.
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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.
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