Don’t Treat Your Partner like a Therapist

It’s really easy to confide in the person who is closest to you. You tell him/her all of your secrets, your pains, and your frustrations. You know that your significant other will always have your back, but be weary of being too dependent on your partner when it comes to your emotional health.

When looking for guidance, it’s good to get help from different perspectives. If you have no one to talk about your problems other than your significant other, you might have another problem. That would mean before the relationship you had friends. As the relationship continued, you spoke less and less to them. Your relationships started to evaporate. Maybe it’s other way around, and you never really had friends, so your partner is the only one you’re comfortable talking to. With both cases, having your partner be the only one to listen to your issues becomes a heavy and unfair burden placed on the person you love.

This behavior could lead to codependency. You start to use your significant other as nothing more as emotional support. When we talk about support, we’re not just talking about verbal. They have to be with you at all times, and for the most part, put your needs before his/her own. Since this dynamic is one sided, your partner will stop talking to you about their own difficulties. They take on their pain and yours, so you no longer as seen as an equal, but as a child.

No one wants to hear negativity all the time. Not even the person who loves you the most. A balanced relationship talks about everything. It has the joys, victories, laughs, along with the not so good times. These waves of emotions are always going to happen. It becomes a problem when you start to drown in negativity. Look at the texts to your significant other. Are a majority of them complaints? You might need to change some things.

What should you do instead?

Before you take any action, you must realize how this relationship developed? Maybe it’s because you didn’t have a parental figure you can share your troubles with? Maybe you saw one parent complain to another parent all the time, and now you’re shadowing the behavior in your adulthood.

With in case, the best course of measure is to maybe take your therapist-dependent relationship to… well a therapist. The most important effect of doing this is getting all the negativity away from your significant other and someone who gets paid to figure it out for you. You can then treat your partner like a partner and not your therapist.