How We Punish the People We Love

In a couple’s session with my husband, he told me the most important thing for me to shift would be my disrespectful tone. For a few seconds, I was speechless, then turned to our practitioner to protest, "I don't know what he means."

But the more I thought about it, the more I did know. 

Often, when impatient or annoyed, I allowed a tightness to inflect into my voice that communicated disdain — as if I knew best and he should know better. The superiority of it was unmistakable. It wasn’t what I was saying, it was the way I was saying it: annoyed, dismissive, and cold.

It wasn’t sexy in the slightest — and certainly not a tone that made him want to be close to me.

In the session, our Russian practitioner raised her eyebrows and held me in her unblinking gaze for a lengthy silence. I continued by defending my intentions.

"I'm not doing it on purpose," I protested. 

But the clarity had landed. The space between my actual behavior and what I wanted my behavior to be felt physically uncomfortable.

We all knew, in that session, that my tone was a choice. My feelings, wherever they came from, were not something I needed to control.

But my tone? Absolutely.

After the session, I reflected on how I didn't want to admit the way my vocal tone impacted him. Of course the disdain and impatience were painful for himto receive. Of course they poisoned the intimacy and warmth he felt for me, in the aftermath.

I came face to face with how readily I used my tone as a retaliation strategy during conflict — and the way it actually shut down communication between us.

Shifting my tone made the biggest and most immediate difference in my marriage. I didn’t change what I said, but I changed how I say it. Less contempt, more warmth. I taught myself to slow down, drop into my heart, and speak from that place.

And it changed everything.

Retaliation as a Self-Protection Strategy (that Always Fails)

Retaliation is a way of punishing our partners and it takes many forms. It’s usually subtle, because we can’t get away with more overt expressions (like verbal or physical abuse) without jeopradizing the relationship. 

In intimate relationships, retaliation often looks like rolling our eyes, sighing in disgust, or that “disrespectful tone” I mentioned before. We might even slam doors, delay responding to messages or calls, or give our partner the silent treatment.

If you find yourself reaching for these moves whenever conflict arises, explore Safety Strategies That Always Fail.

Retaliation always seeks to wound our partners and it always wounds our relationship.

During conflict, our tempers get the better of us and less-mature parts of us take the wheel. “I’ll give them a taste of their own medicine,” we might say to ourselves.

We know our bad behavior won’t help things. But in the heat of the moment, we’re more oriented towards what hurts than our shared needs for connection and care.

Retaliation means lashing out. Instead of communicating our needs in a way our partner can hear, we wound them. "Let's see how they like it," we might think to ourselves.

There’s a desperate bid for connection, behind retaliation. Part of us thinks, “If I show them how much this hurts, they’ll understand." It’s childish logic to think that hurting someone, when we're hurt, will make things better.

In reality, retaliation creates a negative feedback loop of pain – especially when our partners withdraw to protect themselves. The more they withdraw, the more we retaliate. And the more we retaliate, the more they withdraw.

When we retaliate, part of us doesn't want to fight fair.

Instead of navigating conflict in a way that supports repair, we protect ourselves by going on the offensive. But the false protection of retaliation isn’t real and doesn’t last.

The cost of retaliation isn't worth the momentary rush of power we get from wounding our partners.

When we retaliate, we teach our partners that their vulnerability is dangerous and will be used against them. We erode our partners’ trust and their faith in our ability to resolve conflict. 

Even though we apologize after, the damage is done. And the wounding we’ve inflicted often goes much deeper and lasts for far longer than we realize. The contempt that retaliation communicates lingers, for our partners, long after we've apologized and moved on.

Retaliation as Grandiosity and Entitlement

Retaliation is anger that learned the only way to be heard is to be hurtful. When we don’t get the response we want, we raise the stakes and retaliate. In the moment, we feel entitled to wound because we feel wounded.

Repeated retaliation feeds grandiosity and entitlement.

We feel powerful when we put our partners down. But it's a false empowerment, created from shaming the person we love most in the world.

In reality, retaliation is disempowering to us and our relationships, because we're no longer fighting fair.

When we try to feel safe and powerful by hurting our partners, we harm them and our relationships.

It's essential that we see the impact, so that we can shift it. That's why retaliation is so important to change.

Hurting the people we love is never okay. Anger and frustration don’t justify retaliatory behavior.

For more on anger in relationships, explore How We Let Anger Sabotage Our Intimate Relationships.

Often, the part of us who is retaliating learned how to do this in childhood.

Maybe we saw our parents retaliate during conflicts with each other and we picked it up as an unconscious strategy, not realizing the damage it does. We may not have learned another way.

Maybe we retaliated against our parents in protest, to communicate anger at our unmet needs for their attention or care.

When our childhood anger didn't have anywhere to go, retaliation was a way to express feelings that otherwise went unnoticed.

But as adults, it’s our responsibility to notice our needs and communicate clearly to get them met. It’s better for us, our partners, and our relationships.

How to Heal Retaliation in Intimate Relationships

If we don't change how we retaliate against our partners, they stop wanting to get close to us because we're simply too scary.

We're no longer emotionally safe because we weaponize their vulnerability.

Connection, especially physical closeness and sexual intimacy, gets rarer and rarer because our partners need to protect themselves from the painful impact of our retaliatory anger.

It's not that we don't have good reason to be angry. But instead of expressing our anger in a way that can be met and responded to, we lash out in pain and hurt the very person who wants to help.

It's self-sabotage at its finest.

Here's how to stop.

1. Take accountability.

Own how you retaliate. Acknowledge, to your partner, that what you’re doing, saying, and communicating has an impact on them and your relationship. This part is uncomfortable and non-negotiable. Your ability to clearly name your actions and their impact puts the focus on you to do things differently.

2. Cultivate empathy towards yourself and your partner.

Become willing to hear, see, and feel the impact your retaliation has on your partner. It’s a sobering experience because you don't want to behave that way. Letting yourself feel the recoil of your poor behavior and how discordant it is with what you truly want is an essential step towards change.

Once you see the impact, resist the urge to bully yourself into being better. Instead, offer understanding to the part of you who retaliates and, at the same time, set clear limits.

3. Learn how to repair.

Retaliation creates wounds that take time to heal. You might be carrying past experiences (or unresolved trauma) that activate self-protection when connection doesn’t feel possible or safe. These need to heal.

I encourage you to get support if you need to, from me or another couple’s specialist who knows how to work with complex trauma (CPTSD) and developmental trauma from childhood.

And for the repair work itself, start with The 7 Steps of Relationship Repair.

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When we stop retaliating against our partners, we start creating the kind of warmth and connection that actually resolve the issues instead of making them worse.

We rebuild trust and our partners feel safer to be affectionate with us again. Intimacy recovers in the emotional safety we create for ourselves and the relationship.

This takes discipline. The maturity we cultivate when we clean this up is the foundation for enduring and deeply satisfying intimate relationships.