Oh, that lands hard. Let me sit with that for a second, because what you just said carries a lot of weight.
When your partner shames you for your past, I need you to understand what’s actually happening underneath that. Because in my 16 years of doing this work, shaming a partner for their past is almost never really about the past. It’s about the present. It’s about fear.
Here’s what I see in my office all the time. Your partner brings up something from before you were together, something you did, some version of you that existed before them, and it feels like a verdict. Like a life sentence. Like no matter what you do going forward, you will never be free of it. And that is an unbearable place to live in a relationship.
But here’s what I need you to hear about what’s happening on their side, because this is crucial. When someone keeps going back to your past, their body isn’t dwelling. Their nervous system is scanning. They’re not trying to punish you, even if it feels exactly like punishment. They’re asking, in the only way their fear knows how to ask: “Are you still that person? Am I safe with you? Can I trust who you are now?”
The past becomes the evidence they reach for when they don’t feel secure enough in the present.
Now, that doesn’t make it okay. I want to be crystal clear about that. It is not okay for shame to be the currency of your relationship. Shame shuts people down. Shame doesn’t create connection, it destroys it.
Think of it like this: imagine if every time you walked into your home, someone reminded you of every mistake you’d ever made before you lived there. You’d stop wanting to come home, right? That’s what chronic past-shaming does to intimacy.
What I need to know is whether there’s a specific wound underneath what your partner keeps bringing up. Did something happen between you two that broke trust? Because if there was a real betrayal, the repair work looks different. You can’t ask someone who’s still bleeding to stop pointing at the cut.
But if this is about your sexual history, your ex-relationships, choices you made before you even knew them? That’s your partner trying to manage their own insecurity by making you carry their shame. And that will hollow out your relationship from the inside.
You deserve to be witnessed, not prosecuted. Your past made you who you are today, and that person chose to be with them. The work isn’t erasing your history. The work is helping your partner see that your past brought you to them, not away from them.
Because here’s the thing: we all have a past. The question is whether we’re going to let it poison our present.
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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 Shame Destroys Relationships
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