Why Does Her Pain Feel Like an Attack?
Welcome back to Reconnection Moments, a space where we get real about intimacy disorders and healing from sexual compulsivity. Not through willpower or shame, but by gently rewiring the brain and body back into connection. I'm Dr. Michael Barta, creator of The Reconnection Model. In each episode, I'll be answering questions I hear most from clients and therapists, and I will also be sharing fresh insights from my ongoing work.
Host:Welcome back to the Reconnection Podcast with Dr. Michael Barta. Today's episode is titled "Quit Making Her Pain About You," and we're talking directly to the man who has betrayed his partner and is trying to repair the damage. Dr. Barta, what is one of the biggest mistakes you see men make when their partner is hurting?
Dr. Barta:I think one of the biggest mistakes I see over and over again is that the man makes her pain about him. And so she's angry. She's devastated. She doesn't trust him. She asks the same question again and again.
Dr. Barta:She tells him she doesn't know who he is anymore. But he's looking at her pain. Right? He sees her pain, and he can't tolerate inside himself what he feels when he sees her pain. And this doesn't just happen in it in his head.
Dr. Barta:It comes directly back at her. She says, "I don't know if I can ever trust you again." And he says, "Nothing I ever do is good enough for you." She says, "I can't believe you lied to me for all these years." And he fires back, "How long are you gonna keep punishing me for this?"
Dr. Barta:And so, like, she gets angry. Right? And he gets angry that she's angry. She tells him how badly she's hurting, and he becomes defensive. He either shuts down, he walks away, argues with her, or starts telling her how horrible he feels.
Dr. Barta:So in other words, he's still making everything all about himself. And we have to look at what just happened. She came to him with pain by his behavior, and somehow she ends up being the problem. And that's really what I want the men to see. Right?
Dr. Barta:Your partner isn't after you going to 50 meetings a week and sponsoring 60 guys. She's after emotional connection. And this pain is going to create discomfort in you. It's going to bring up shame, your fear, your helplessness, the terror that she may leave. But if you can't tolerate those feelings on your own, you're not gonna ever be able to help her.
Dr. Barta:You're likely to do what you've always been doing, and that's trying to get rid of them as fast as you can. That's not accountability. That's self protection. Right? And I'm going to go a step further, and that's when we're being really selfish.
Dr. Barta:Right? Her pain is not the problem you need to solve. Your inability to tolerate her pain without making it about yourself is what you need to solve. It's not I'm not asking you to hate yourself. I'm asking you to become somebody that is capable of sitting in the pain you helped create without requiring her to make it easier on you.
Dr. Barta:She's telling you what happened to her. Just stay there and listen.
Host:But isn't shame a normal response when a man realizes how much damage he's caused?
Dr. Barta:Yeah. And shame can be a very real response. But shame and accountability aren't the same things. Shame is all about me. Right?
Dr. Barta:It's the focus is back on me. I'm such a horrible person. You can't be drowning in shame and still completely focus on her. Right? Your partner is crying and telling you she doesn't know what's real anymore.
Dr. Barta:And you put in your head, in your hands, and say, "I'm such a piece of shit. I ruined everything. I hate myself." That can sound remorseful, but now look what happens. She stops talking about her pain, and maybe she tells you, "You're not a terrible person."
Dr. Barta:Maybe she reminds you, "You're getting help." Maybe she tries to calm you down. Right? You hurt her. She tried to tell you what that did to her.
Dr. Barta:You became overwhelmed by what her pain made you feel about yourself. That now makes her take care of you, and that's backwards. Shame asks, what does this mean about me? Accountability asks, what did this do to you? That's a completely different orientation.
Dr. Barta:I don't need you sitting in front of your partner telling her what a terrible person you are. She should not have to abandon her pain to rescue you from your shame about causing it. Your shame, yeah, it can be real, but it's yours to manage.
Host:So when a man says, I just can't take seeing her hurt like this, what would you say?
Dr. Barta:Well, I'd say that's exactly what he needs to learn how to tolerate. Right? He needs to become capable of seeing the consequences of his choices. Not because he needs to be punished, not because he needs to live in shame, but because accountability requires the capacity to remain emotionally present when what you're seeing makes you uncomfortable. Think about what may have happened before recovery.
Dr. Barta:You had a feeling. Right? You didn't know how to manage it, so you escaped. You compartmentalized. You used sexual behavior.
Dr. Barta:You hid. You lied. You avoided. Now you're in recovery, and your partner's pain brings up feelings you still don't know how to handle. She starts crying.
Dr. Barta:You feel shame and hopeless, helpless, inadequate, and you say, I can't do this again, and leave the room. Or she gets angry and you snap back, I apologized a 100 times. What else do you want from me? Or she asks another question and you say, you know what? We've already talked about this.
Dr. Barta:The sexual behavior may have stopped, but look carefully at what you're still doing. And this is what partners report over and over and over. Right? The guy's going, Well, I'm going to meetings. I'm staying sober.
Dr. Barta:I'm seeing my therapist. This is the part that she's missing that the guys just don't understand until someone points it out to them. Right? You're trying to still escape what you're feeling. The strategy looks different.
Dr. Barta:The purpose is exactly the same. It's saying your brain is saying, get me out of this discomfort. Recovery requires something much different, and that is staying. That staying with your uncomfortable me your uncomfortable feelings.
Host:Yeah. Could you elaborate more on what stay actually means?
Dr. Barta:Yeah. It means stay emotionally present. You know, your partner says, I don't know who you are anymore. You may instinctively say, yes, you do. I'm still the same person.
Dr. Barta:Or you start listing all the things you've done since discovery. You know? You're sober. You're going to therapy. You're attending meetings.
Dr. Barta:You're working harder than you've ever worked before. None of that addresses what she just told you. Stay with her. You might say, it makes sense that you're questioning who I am after everything I've done. You believed you knew me.
Dr. Barta:I didn't show you my real self. And then you discovered that I kept this part of my life completely away from you. See, that's what's called turning towards her. She says, I don't know what's real. Your instinct may your instincts may be crying out, I need to defend the marriage.
Dr. Barta:Come on. Our entire marriage wasn't fake. And maybe that's what you want her to understand, but that's not what she needs to hear in that moment. Right? You say, I gave you reasons to question what was real.
Dr. Barta:I was withholding information from you that could have changed how you understood our relationship. Now notice the difference. You're not claiming to know exactly what you're what she's feeling. You're acknowledging the reality your behavior created.
Host:Okay, So I know some people ask, what if what she's saying isn't completely accurate?
Dr. Barta:And that often happens. Right? And it drives the men crazy, and they want to immediately defend. And it gets them in all kinds of trouble. Right?
Dr. Barta:You can't argue with perception. It's her perception. Right? Perceptions are always correct. Whether or not they fit the real story or not.
Dr. Barta:Right? She's having a perception. And why you get into trouble is because they're listening like they're an attorney. She said, "You never you never cared about me." And immediately they say, "That's not true."
Dr. Barta:Of course, I cared about you. And maybe they did care. But you just missed what she was trying to tell you underneath the words you were listening to because you were more interested in correcting the sentence than understanding the pain that was causing her to ask the question or make the statement. What she might be struggling with is, how could someone who cared about me do this? And instead of trying to correct her, you may wanna say, you know what?
Dr. Barta:What I did gave you every reason to question how I could say I cared about you. I cared about you while behaving in ways that hurt you deeply. How how can you you know, I I get how you cannot believe that. That's validation without pretending you know exactly what she's feeling. She says our whole marriage was a lie.
Dr. Barta:You say that's not fair. There were plenty of good years. Do you see how you're discounting the emotions that she's trying to express inside you or inside of her? I'm sorry. Now you're arguing chronologically while she's trying to communicate with you and trying to tell you that her understanding of her life has been completely disrupted.
Dr. Barta:Try something different. Right? Something like, I kept significant parts of my life hidden from you. Now you're having to look back at our entire relationship that you thought you knew and start questioning, well, what else didn't I know? Do you see the difference?
Dr. Barta:Do you see that she's not asking you the question? She's expressing emotions in the question, so you try something different. Right? You don't have to agree with every word she uses to understand what she's trying to communicate. Stop listening for what you can correct.
Dr. Barta:Right? Quit trying to defend yourself against her pain. That's selfish. Start listening for what you need to understand.
Host:It's great. Very helpful from the men you work with and what you hear from partners often. But the next one would be what about when she keeps asking the same question?
Dr. Barta:Well, one of the first things I want you to stop saying is I've already answered that, or here we go again, or you just completely shut down, or you get angry. She probably knows you've answered it. Imagine, she asked, how could you do this? So you start explaining your addiction. You explain your childhood.
Dr. Barta:You explain your coping patterns. You tell her what you learned in therapy. Two days later, she asked again, how could you do this? And now you're irritated. I already told you.
Dr. Barta:But maybe she isn't asking you to explain the addiction again. Again, she's trying to get validated for the emotion she has occurring inside that is causing her to have to ask the question. Maybe the first answer you gave her was information but never once touched the injury that was beneath the question. She may be trying to understand how you could know something could devastate her and still do it, how you could come home afterward and act as though nothing happened, how she could have been living beside you and not knowing, what it means that she trusted her own judgment and discovered there were things she couldn't see. Don't assume you know which part she is asking.
Dr. Barta:You gotta get curious. When you ask, how could I do this? What is the part that feels most important for me to hear right now? Now you're listening instead of defending.
Host:So you talk a lot about self protection. How does that show up here?
Dr. Barta:Well, it shows up everywhere. You know? Your partner says, I'm still furious. You say, well, when are you gonna let go of this? Right?
Dr. Barta:Sometimes this doesn't happen right at the beginning, but certainly over time, if, you know, the person who harmed, who betrayed the partner will not do the deeper work and learn to regulate their own emotions so he can finally communicate like a normal person, if there is one, with his partner, that's self protection. And I want to make it even stronger because I'm talking about myself too. That's selfish. I am thinking about me and not thinking about her, and that's our biggest problem in this whole thing. Right?
Dr. Barta:She tells you something's devastating. You explain why you did it. That's selfish. She asks you a painful question. We might reply with something like, well, you're just trying to shame me.
Dr. Barta:Do you see how we're being selfish here? She tells you she doesn't trust you, and you start listing everything you've done in recovery that proves she should. That is self protection we're talking about. You become so overwhelmed with shame that the conversation has to stop now, and everybody has to deal with how terrible you feel. This is a difficult thing to understand.
Dr. Barta:So, you know, I I have a lot of passion around this because I see it a lot, and it's like, you guys, we gotta wake up. We gotta take accountability. We gotta quit making her pain about us. We gotta make her quit paying the price for what we've done to her. And sometimes, this can be a lot more obvious, so we're gonna lash out.
Dr. Barta:I can't do anything right. Nothing I do is ever good enough. You're never gonna forgive me. Why are you still doing this to me? Listen to that last sentence.
Dr. Barta:Why are you doing this to me? She's responding to what happened to her, and you've turned her response into something that she's doing to you. And I know that doesn't make sense to us. Right? And that's the pattern I want all you guys to catch.
Dr. Barta:Your self protection does nothing but try to get you, me, out of our own discomfort. Accountability is learning to remain present while I'm uncomfortable. That's our work.
Host:You've also said something pretty strong about why men lie after sexual betrayal.
Dr. Barta:Yeah. And I get this all the time. Right? And I probably said it myself. I didn't tell her because I didn't wanna hurt her.
Dr. Barta:And since I've waken woken up, I completely challenge that now. You already hurt her. I've already hurt them. She just doesn't know it yet. If you told her the truth, you would have to watch her discover what happened.
Dr. Barta:You would have to look at the shock on her face to see her cry, to become furious, to totally shut down, to have her world blow up right in front of you. She might tell you she doesn't know if she can stay. And you would have to experience what happens inside of you while you're watching the person that you love respond to what you've done. And that's extraordinarily difficult. So often, you weren't protecting her from pain.
Dr. Barta:You were protecting yourself from how her pain would make you feel. That's you gotta remember. You're not protecting her from the pain. You already did it. The pain was done a long time ago.
Dr. Barta:She's just learning about it now, and she deserves to learn about it now so she can make conscious choices about what she wants to do for her life because we rip them off of their own life, their own agency for so long. This is really important. You were protecting yourself from how pain would make you feel. And if we don't recognize it, we're gonna keep doing it. You call your withholding protecting her.
Dr. Barta:You know what? I want us to erase that phrase from our vocabulary. No. I'm not protecting her. That's a lie I'm telling myself.
Dr. Barta:You call your minimization not wanting to trigger her. You you call avoiding questions giving her space. You call getting defensive standing up for myself. And you may call your anger a response to how she's treating you without even recognizing that she's responding to an injury that we caused. We have to become willing to look at that.
Dr. Barta:Sometimes you're still protecting yourself.
Host:So what should the man do when he notices this happening?
Dr. Barta:Well, there's no magic formula. Right? But there is a sequence that we can follow. We notice what's happening inside of us, and and we we don't go into shame. Right?
Dr. Barta:We know what's what we're feeling inside of us. Right? And this you guys, this is gonna take some practice because we, I'm sorry, suck at feeling. Right? We have for years, and we gotta get in touch with learning how to feel.
Dr. Barta:I mean, it's time to time to do that. K? We're adults now. Let's let's feel these feelings that we've been avoiding our entire life. Right?
Dr. Barta:And to the benefit of my my work, I have never had anybody die from feeling. So that's good news. Right? But notice what happens inside of you. Your chest gets tight.
Dr. Barta:You feel ashamed. You're getting angry. Right? We're we're gonna respond. We wanna defend ourselves.
Dr. Barta:We wanna explain. We just want the conversation to stop. Then we regulate ourselves. Again, you gotta practice this. But unless I'm regulated, then nothing's gonna work.
Dr. Barta:I'm gonna responding be responding from my fight or flight or my shutdown instead of from my authentic self, my frontal frontal brain. We notice what we're trying to manage. Regulating doesn't mean making the feelings disappear. It means becoming capable of having them without having to defend or dump them back on her, then turn towards her. Listen for what she's actually trying to tell you, which is always everything she says, even if she's screaming at you and telling you she hates you.
Dr. Barta:She's trying to express her pain. She is never talking about your worth, even though she will say things that seem like she's attacking your worth. Just get that in your head. That's not happening. Right?
Dr. Barta:Listen to what she's trying to tell you. Don't assume. Get curious. Validate what makes sense about her response, given what happened. Own your part without adding but and stay.
Dr. Barta:You're not trying to fix her. If you are, the reason you're trying to fix her is so you don't have to feel pain. You don't have to make her feel better because here's the story. If you're doing that, you're doing it for yourself. You don't have to produce a perfect response and say, oh, if I get it right this time, then she's gonna not be mad.
Dr. Barta:We're not even paying attention to the pain. Right? We're, again, fixing, managing, controlling and trying to manipulate someone so we don't have to feel something. You have to stop, I have to stop running from what her pain brings up inside of us, because every time you can remain present instead of escaping, defending, attacking, or shutting down, you're practicing something that may have been missing long before the sexual behavior ever began. You're learning how to remain connected even when connection is uncomfortable.
Dr. Barta:And my friend, that's what's called recovery.
Host:What's the message you most want the man listening to this episode to hear today?
Dr. Barta:Well, I want them to hear that your history matters. Your your pain matters. Your shame matters. And there are reasons that we learn to escape difficult emotions. And understanding those reasons is an important part of your healing.
Dr. Barta:But your partner doesn't have to keep paying for your pain. You cannot use your wounds to avoid looking at hers, and you can't make the pain you caused her primarily about how terrible it makes you feel. Well, boohoo, right? We did it. Own it.
Dr. Barta:Paying attention to what happens the next time she's hurting. When she tells you she's angry and you feel yourself getting angry back, She tells you she doesn't trust you, and you immediately want to defend everything you've done in recovery. She asks another question, and you hear yourself thinking, Here we go again. You guys, that's the moment. That's where your recovery can happen.
Dr. Barta:Notice what's happening inside of you. Regulate it. Turn towards her. If she's hurting, listen. If you feel shame, manage your shame without asking her to rescue you from it.
Dr. Barta:If you wanna defend yourself, try to become more curious. If you want to lash out, regulate. If you want to run away, just stay. Her pain is not an attack on your recovery. Your ability to remain present with her is part of your recovery.
Dr. Barta:What she tells you, what this has done to her, don't tell her you know how she feels because you don't. Ask. Listen. Validate what she tells you. Validate the emotions.
Dr. Barta:Own what you did and stay. She's carried enough already.
Host:Well, thank you, doctor Barta. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Reconnection Podcast. And if you'd like to learn more about Dr. Michael Barta, the Reconnection Intensive, visit drmichaelbarta.com.
Dr. Barta:Thanks for joining me today. If you want to learn more about how this healing happens, visit drmichaelbarta.com. And if this episode spoke to you, share it with someone who might need to hear it. Until next time, keep reconnecting.