Feeling Unheard in Relationships: Exploring Communication, Emotional Disconnection, and Childhood Wounds

Do you ever feel like your partner just isn't listening to you, or worse, that your needs and feelings are going unheard? It's time to explore the difference between simply not being listened to and feeling unheard in relationships. In this solo episode, I dive deep into how feeling unheard often indicates a deeper problem, such as feeling unsupported or unimportant, and how this can be connected to unresolved childhood wounds.

Join me as I discuss how our communication styles and emotional disconnection can contribute to feeling unheard and how to identify and address these issues in your relationships. I also touch on the importance of active listening, power imbalances, and the role of empathy in creating and maintaining healthy relationships. As a relationship and human design coach, my goal is to provide you with tools and insights to create deeply meaningful connections with others, starting with yourself. Don't miss this episode as I share valuable tips and strategies to help you feel heard, understood, and valued in all your relationships.

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Corissa is a Holistic Trauma-Informed Coach & Narcissistic Abuse Specialist™ who empowers women after they’ve endured narcissist trauma to rediscover who they are, reclaim their power, and find the clarity and courage to move forward and live a life they love. Corissa is also a recovering people-pleaser and codependent who has endured way too many narcissistic relationships to count! She coaches not only from her knowledge and training but also from the wisdom she has gained from her own healing journey.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:09

Welcome to the Stepping Into Meaningful Relationships podcast. I'm your host, carissa Stepp. I'm a relationship and human design coach, and this podcast is designed to help you create a stronger connection to yourself so you can transform the relationships around you, whether that be with your partner, a friend, a parent, a child or your business. We will be looking at relationships through the lens of human design, and my guests and I will bring you the tools, tips and tricks to create deeply meaningful connections with others. But first let's start with you. The most important relationship you have is the one with yourself. Thank you for tuning in. Now let's get to today's episode. Hey, everyone, welcome to another episode.

Speaker 1: 0:58

So before we get started today, i just wanted to share that the podcast is going to be changing just slightly in terms of the format. So what that means is that not every week will I have a guest to interview. Going to be doing some solo episodes and I hope that you guys like them. If there are any topics that you would like me to cover in a future episode, i would hope that you could reach out to me on Instagram at Carissa Stepp, or just find me on my website. I'd love to hear any suggestions that you have or any topics that you want me to talk about, and that's it. So, as I said, things are going to be changing. So today I don't have a guest that's coming on. We are not having a conversation.

Speaker 1: 1:41

But I wanted to talk about something that seems to be coming up a lot in conversations that I'm having, and that's the difference between your partner not listening to you and you not feeling like you're being heard, right? So there's a difference between my husband never listens to anything that I say. Right, i'm constantly having to remind him to take out the trash, or I feel like we're in the situation where we've had a conversation about something and then, two days later, he's asking me a question about something that we had just discussed, and when that happens, we can often feel like, oh, it's so frustrating. My partner is just not listening to me. They never listen, and I have to constantly repeat myself.

Speaker 1: 2:22

Well, that's one thing, right, that's obviously an issue that can be prevalent or present in a relationship, but if you're starting to feel like you're not actually being heard in the relationship, that is actually at a much deeper level, and oftentimes that is typically when you feel like you're not being understood by your partner right, where maybe you are sharing vulnerably something that you're struggling with or maybe there's something going on in your life and you just need a little bit of support, and if your partner's not making time for you to have those conversations to be the support that you need to provide you with that deep emotional connection that you might need in the relationship to feel deeply understood and accepted and loved for who you are, that's when you're going to start to feel like you're not being heard right Or where maybe your needs aren't being taken into consideration. So, when we voice our concerns to our partner, or when we share that we need something from them that we're not getting, or when we share that something that happened or something that they said may have upset us in some way or maybe even hurt our feelings, if you feel like your partner is not able to or willing to engage in those types of conversations, then you're very likely going to feel very unheard, right, and you're going to feel like your needs don't matter, that your feelings don't matter. And what might happen over time, as that continues to happen, is you may actually begin to shut down right, because you start to learn that it doesn't matter, right, your feelings don't matter, your needs, your wants, your desires, you know, whatever it might be, just doesn't matter. Maybe you feel like you don't matter. You might start to feel like, okay, I'm not important in this relationship. And sometimes, when we have these feelings of you know I'm not important or I don't matter, sometimes that points back to a deep inner child wound that we've been carrying around for years. Right, and it could even be that you've ended up in this relationship because that pattern was familiar to you from growing up.

Speaker 1: 4:53

The emotions that a young child feels can be really overwhelming, and they don't have the tools or the strategies to know how to handle them. So if you were constantly told like, oh, no, no, no, you're fine, oh, stop crying, it's not a big deal, you know. Or you know maybe you were scared of for something, and they're telling you like, oh, like that's just, it's not real. Why are you getting so upset, right? That's very dismissive of how you're actually feeling. So if your parent couldn't connect with you with empathy in those moments, then most likely you as a child would have felt very unheard. You would have felt very unsupported, right?

Speaker 1: 5:30

And so that pattern becomes very familiar when you end up in a relationship with somebody who's basically doing the same exact thing, right? Oh, i'm tired and I just wanna decompress right now and I don't really wanna have this conversation. If they're doing that to you, it's gonna feel familiar from when you were a child, so you may be very kind of understanding of that, right, and you may make excuses for that type of behavior. If it continues to happen over and over and over again. Eventually at some point you're gonna start to realize, like wait a second, i've never considered, right, we never get to have the conversations that we need to have, and you might start to notice that your relationship starts to fall apart, right? Whether you're in an unhealthy relationship or not, these are things that can happen when we are putting our relationship and the people that are important to us on the back burner.

Speaker 1: 6:20

So just to give you a few different ways in which, or reasons why, you might be feeling unheard in your relationship, here are some possibilities Again. It could be a lack of active listening, right, where your partner, when you're trying to have conversations with them, they are maybe not paying full attention to you, right? Maybe they're distracted because they're on their phone. Maybe they're paying attention to something going on on the television or something going on behind you, around you. It's really important that your partner is actively listening to you when you are talking to them about something that is obviously important to you. I mean, they should be doing that all the time, but just for the sake of this conversation.

Speaker 1: 7:01

There could be just communication styles and differences. That can sometimes cause a reason why someone might feel unheard in a relationship, right, so that can. If they're very contrasting styles of communication, then that can lead to a lot of misunderstandings, right, and it can make you feel very unheard. So, for example, your partner might just be very upfront and blunt and to the point and explicit in their communication, right, where maybe you tend to be a little bit more subtle or rely on nonverbal cues and you're hoping that he's gonna pick up on the fact, maybe that you're upset by your body language or by your tone of voice and that may not translate. He may not understand that. He might feel like, oh gosh, i have to be a mind reader with her. Right, so that could be another way why someone might feel like they're not heard.

Speaker 1: 7:53

There can also be an emotional disconnection, right, and this is when there's a lack of emotional intimacy or understanding between partners. So, like I was talking about, you know, if one partner is feeling like they're constantly or consistently being ignored, right? Or if their emotions are constantly being invalidated by their partner, then they're not going to feel heard or even valued in the relationship. There can also be a power imbalance, right. So we're, you know, in a relationship where maybe one partner significantly has more power than the other, right, that's like a controlling dynamic in the relationship, and obviously this is very prevalent in unhealthy relationships, right, where you have, for example, a narcissist or one partner who is trying to constantly control everything that's going on with their partner, right, or in the relationship or within the family, right. So the partner with the less power is going to feel unheard because, again, like, their opinions, their needs, their desires, their feelings are just going to be completely disregarded.

Speaker 1: 8:59

Another thing is prioritization of needs, right? So if one partner is consistently prioritizing their own needs and desires over their partner, the other persons, then it's going to create an environment, again where the other person's going to feel very, you know, deemphasized, right, or unheard or, again, not important, and then also unresolved conflict. So when there's lingering conflict that's going unresolved, it can create this deep sense of frustration and then resentment starts to build, right, where people feel like they're not being heard, especially if a lot of the conflict is around the same things over and over and over again, right. So when conflicts are not effectively addressed and resolved, it can be really difficult for both of the partners to feel validated and understood. So it's important to kind of maybe assess in your relationship if you're feeling unheard.

Speaker 1: 9:57

Where in these six different you know areas that I just highlighted, you know where maybe you're struggling most in your relationship. Obviously, if you feel like you know you're with somebody who you have no emotional connection with right, so there's no deep emotional intimacy And you feel like there's a power imbalance or that there's a deemphasizing of your needs in the relationship, or where you're fighting over the same things over and over and over again And you find yourself apologizing but you know constantly for things that you didn't even really do And they're never apologizing or taking accountability, then those are clear red flags that are going to be something that you should be aware of, because you may be in an unhealthy relationship, right, you might be actually in a relationship with a narcissist So I hate to throw that word around because to me, you know, it comes out sounding like such a label, but really what it is is it's just this blanket term that describes, you know, maladaptive patterns of behavior and traits that they have adapted in their lives as a result of deep wounding, right Generally from some sort of childhood trauma. So this is just some of the things that I wanted to share with you today.

Speaker 1: 11:14

I hope you guys enjoyed this episode. These are going to be short and sweet And that's all for today. Until next week, be well. If you're hearing this message, that means you've listened all the way to the end, and for that I am truly grateful. If you enjoyed this episode and found it valuable, would you mind leaving us a review wherever you listen to podcasts and sharing it with others? If you'd like to connect with me for one-on-one coaching or human design reading, you can find me on my website or on social media. Also, if you have a topic you'd like me to discuss on a future episode, please DM me. Be sure to tune in next week for another episode of Stepping into Meaningful Relationships.