How do I foster growth in my relationship without my partner’s help?
Jess writes: How do I foster growth in a relationship when the other person is unwilling to put the necessary time aside weekly to communicate openly. I admittedly get flustered easily and raise my voice unintentionally. I think it’s because I feel that I’m not being heard every time I ask to talk about things going on. It’s always “tomorrow” or he finds a way to make me the aggressor. How do I fix this? He does not believe in therapy whatsoever—please help.
Dear Jess,
It sounds like you’ve identified a clear pattern in your relationship that you’d like to change, but you haven’t quite figured out what to do in order to change it.
Your question is an important one, because it highlights a situation that many individuals find themselves in—wanting to change what’s happening in their intimate relationship but having a partner who is unwilling to engage in the process of making changes.
Some partners are uninterested in working together to improve their relationship because they don’t think anything needs to change. Others want things to change but see the issues as stemming from their partner’s behavior and don’t think they themselves need to change anything at all.
I hear that you are already thinking through the ways you might be contributing to the patterns in your relationship that you would like to change—getting flustered and raising your voice when you don’t feel heard or when your concerns are met with avoidance.
And you’ve already realized that your partner’s response to you bringing up issues is often something along the lines of I don’t have time for this right now. Let’s talk about it tomorrow.
But tomorrow never comes and you’re stuck waiting for the eternal tomorrow, that day that’s always in the future. It’s never the right time. There’s always something more important, more pressing and immediate that needs attention first.
So you raise your voice. You get louder and bigger and more dramatic as a way to signaling that the communication issues in your relationship are actually important and need to take priority. Now you’ve become the aggressor. You’re too loud, too angry, too unreasonable. There’s no way to have a conversation now, when you’re so worked up. It will have to wait. First you need to take a deep breath and calm down and then maybe tomorrow you can talk about it.
And on it goes like this.
Because a relationship is something that’s created between two people, fostering growth in the relationship is something that requires both partners be engaged and invested in growing together.
Growth as a couple isn’t something that one partner can do alone.
So if you can’t singlehandedly foster growth in your romantic relationship, what can you do?
You can foster your own growth as an individual. You can focus on growing in who you are within this relationship as well as who you are apart from this relationship.
When we’re in a relationship with a partner who isn’t interested in going to therapy and doesn’t want to talk about issues with communication or any other issues, we can have a tendency to turn all our focus and all our energy toward fixing the problems in the relationship.
We fixate on cracking the code to get our partner to come to therapy … or read this amazing new book on relationships … or listen to this podcast episode that describes exactly what’s happening and lays out the solution so clearly.
We start to believe that if our partner isn’t invested in working on problems in the relationship, it’s because we haven’t yet figured out exactly what we need to say in order to get them to see what we see.
In other words, we take responsibility for convincing our partner to change.
Which is a strange place to find ourselves, because we know that it’s not possible to change anyone else.
Not only can we not change another person, we also can’t convince them that change is needed. We can see for ourselves that things could potentially be so much better if only issues were addressed, but we can do nothing to actually make someone else see what we see.
The antidote to this situation—in which our focus and energy gets taken up trying to bring an unwilling partner along with us on the adventure of growing together—is to turn our attention back to ourselves and really get clarity about what we can do for ourselves.
So let’s take another look at your question and see what doors of opportunity swing open once we consider what you can do for yourself.
To find these opportunities, we’re going to imagine that your partner stays exactly the same as he is right now—always saying that you’ll talk tomorrow and unwilling to ever set aside time today to work on communication issues in your relationship.
The first thing you can do is to stop expecting something different from your partner.
In other words, give up the project of trying to make him see how vital it is to stop avoiding and start addressing the issues in your relationship. Let go of your sense of responsibility to get him to grow. He either will grow or he won’t, but as you have no power to sway things one way or the other, there are better places to put your attention.
Now that you’re no longer focused on getting him to change, ask yourself what you can do to change your part in this communication cycle you’ve gotten stuck in.
If you can approach invitations to talk about relationship issues with the understanding that your partner will most likely avoid, dismiss, diminish the importance or urgency of the conversation, or ask you to come back tomorrow with your concerns, and you know your tendency is to get flustered and raise your voice, and you also know that your partner will point to this behavior and call you the aggressor—how can you sidestep this trap?
Knowing what you know about how your partner will likely respond, and understanding that you can’t change his response, what can you do differently to break out of this tired, unfulfilling pattern in your relationship?
The question you posed was “How do I fix this?” Now that you understand that you cannot singlehandedly fix a relationship problem, because you can’t fix your partner’s contribution to the problem, you can ask yourself a new question.
It might sound something like, “Given how my partner is, and knowing I can’t change him, what do I want to do differently here?” Some other related questions might be, “Instead of getting flustered and raising my voice, how might I respond when my partner responds in his predictable way?”
Usually when I pose these kinds of questions to individuals I work with, they misunderstand me at first. They think I’m telling them that they should be satisfied in a relationship where their partner always refuses to communicate. They think I’m encouraging them to settle.
To be clear, I’m not saying you should be okay with how things are. But I am encouraging you to stop trying to change the reality of how your partner is. That’s because trying to change another person doesn’t get you any closer to having the kind of relationship you want to have.
The alternative is to shift into a different mindset about your relationship, where your focus is on whether this relationship is a good fit for you and, if it’s not, figuring out if it has the potential to become the kind of relationship you want to have.
As you are observing and gathering data in order to answer the question of Is this relationship a good fit for me?, you can also be making efforts to become more of the person you want to be in an intimate relationship.
Consistently feeling unheard in an intimate relationship can stir up a lot of painful feelings.
Being on the receiving end of a partner’s dismissiveness and disregard can lead to emotional dysregulation, which then results in getting upset and raising your voice. This is especially true if you have a history of close relationships where there was a lack of care and emotional attunement. In other words, a partner’s dismissiveness can activate relational trauma from childhood and/or previous romantic relationships.
If you know that this is the case for you, you can focus on developing the skills for emotional regulation that will help you soothe painful feelings that arise when your partner responds as he does—by dismissing you.
As you focus on learning how to communicate directly, saying the things you need to say, without raising your voice, you can pay attention to whether this makes a difference with how your partner responds to you.
While you’re working on your ability to stay calm and expand your capacity for holding the difficult emotions that get stirred up by your partner’s predictable responses, you can approach these experiences as opportunities to practice being the kind of partner—and person—you truly want to be.
Relational trauma shows up in many different ways, depending on our unique past experiences in relationships.
Personally, I’m someone who tends to be reactive in conversations with my partner. I raise my voice without realizing it. This tendency of mine would be a bad fit in a relationship with someone whose relational trauma gets activated by raised voices.
It’s possible that your partner is shutting down because your raised voice is triggering his trauma. Given that he avoids talking about communication issues in your relationship, the only way to test this out is to see whether anything changes if you’re able to approach him in a calm manner and pause the conversation when you notice that you’re starting to become emotionally dysregulated.
As you continue to collect data in your relationship—finding answers to the questions of Does anything shift in the relationship when I change how I show up in these interactions? and Is this relationship a good fit for me?—you are also simultaneously investing in your own personal growth.
You are building your own capacity to stay emotionally regulated during difficult interactions, learning how to communicate clearly, divesting yourself of the impossible task of convincing your partner to change, and creating a stronger relationship with yourself.
Learning more about your own core wounds from childhood can give you new insight into how these early experiences might be contributing to the dynamics in your current relationship.
For example, many people learn in childhood that the only way to get nurture from a parent is to provide a parent with emotional support. In adulthood, this often turns into taking responsibility for a partner’s psychological and emotional growth and development, even when that partner is unwilling to change and demonstrates disinterest in their own personal development.
This kind of work is not easy. But it is very valuable. Spending time reflecting on patterns that were developed in your past—and how these patterns play out in your present—can help you reach a greater level of self-insight, self-awareness, and self-compassion.
One last note: just because your partner is unwilling to go to therapy doesn’t mean that you can’t go. Many therapists offer services for individuals that are relationship-focused, which means that you can be working on your own relationship patterns whether or not your partner goes with you.
By itself, this likely won’t “fix” your relationship but it will likely give you much more clarity about what’s happening in your relationship and it will give you the chance to develop valuable relationship skills.
And on that note, I am wishing you the freedom that comes with no longer trying to fix a relationship singlehandedly and instead focusing on your own adventure of self-discovery and growth, both in your relationship and beyond it.
~Angela
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DISCLAIMER: this content is intended for informational purposes only and does not constitute professional medical or psychological advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other licensed health care provider with any questions or concerns you may have regarding a medical condition.
about angela Amias, LCSW
Angela Amias, LCSW is a relationship therapist and nationally-recognized expert on trauma and relationships. She’s the co-founder of Alchemy of Love, which provides trauma-informed relationship programs and resources. She’s also the founder of the Institute for Trauma Informed Relationships, which provides training and education to therapists and coaches who want to help their clients heal past wounds and create more fulfilling relationships.
As an expert on trauma and relationships, Angela has been featured in numerous publications, including Today, Oprah, Cosmopolitan, The Independent, Well + Good, Inc., Forbes, Business Insider, Salon, MSN, Women’s Health and the Toronto Sun.
