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Why do we do this? We hurt the one we love for several reasons:

1) Unconscious re-creation of emotional trauma - we all experience various degrees of emotional hurt and trauma growing up. Unfortunately, we form part of our identities around whatever we experience, be it love, distance, drama, or verbal or physical abuse. As adults, we may feel most alive or most like ourselves when we are feeling the same way we did as children, and so we may do things unconsciously to get our partner to trigger those feelings. For example, a person who grew up with a lot of distance may feel uncomfortable with closeness, and may sabotage it by picking fights or avoiding intimacy. Or a person who grew up in a chaotic, dramatic home may be uncomfortable with harmony and quiet and always seem to trigger chaos or drama in their relationships.

Also, as adults, our fantasy is that we will find a person who will finally give us the love we never got as children. If we can’t get the love from our original parent or caretaker, the next best thing is to get the love from someone who has a very similar personality to the person we originally feel wounded by. We’ll generally feel a lot of attraction, chemistry and intensity in our love with such adult partners, due to the interlocking nature of our emotional baggage.

But what we may not realize though, is that this person that we fall in love has the perfect tools and personality to emotionally re-create our childhood hurts. After the initial infatuation wears off and we are in a deeper, committed relationship, their fears (and ours) often get activated. And when they get afraid, they will strike out in exactly the same way that our parents or caretakers did. The result? We get wounded again. Only now it’s worse, because the very person who we hoped could give us the love we never got, is hurting us. Not because they ‘love us most of all’, but because they are unaware of their own unconscious defenses.

2) We lack the knowledge and skills of how to communicate our feelings constructively - many people may realize how they hurt their partners, and feel like they want to change that behavior, but simply not know how to change, or how to communicate what they are feeling in a constructive manner. Our culture does very little to teach us how to relate to our own feelings, and how to communicate those feelings to others in a safe, healthy way. Men especially may feel uncomfortable dealing with feelings of fear or vulnerability and may feel safer expressing anger or control when they are really scared.

So what can we do to stop hurting the one we love? We all have to take responsibility for getting clear and resolving our own emotional hurts from the past. We need to learn how to make it safe for our partners to express how they feel. We need to learn how to create a loving presence where we genuinely listen and validate our partners’ experience. We need to learn how to express feelings in ways that bring us closer, not in ways that create more distance and hurt.