08/26/2026
Her husband was talking to her... but she was hearing her dad.
This came up in a coaching session recently, and I felt like it was important to share because I see versions of this happening ALL the time.
My client and her husband were at an event when he shared something that had bothered him earlier that evening. He wasn’t yelling or attacking her. He was giving her his perspective. But she immediately felt criticized, got defensive, shut down, and they barely spoke the rest of the night.
Later, she realized something: she knew this feeling. She’d grown up feeling criticized by her dad. So in that moment, she wasn’t only hearing what her husband was saying. She was hearing it through years of what criticism had meant to her.
There’s the pattern.
She recognized it, went back to her husband, and apologized for how she’d reacted. When she told me about it, I celebrated that awareness with her—and then asked, “Now that you know you were hearing some of that conversation through an old wound, would you be willing to go back and hear what your husband was actually trying to tell you?”
Not to agree with him. Just to get curious. Because what if there was something valuable in what he was trying to tell her that she literally couldn’t hear while she was defending herself?
Sometimes the person standing in front of us isn’t the only person we’re responding to. We’re also responding to experiences from our past that taught us what criticism, rejection, conflict, or disappointment means. And we may not even realize we’ve brought them into the room... until we recognize the pattern.
If the same reactions keep showing up in your relationship and you’re ready to understand what’s underneath them, comment PATTERN and I’ll send you my free Relationship Pattern Assessment™.
Because when you change the pattern... you change the relationship. ❤️
(I got permission to share)