When You Become What You’re Hurt By: Why We Repeat the Pain We Don’t Want in Relationships

By Melissa Chana, MA, LPCC Counselor & Trauma Coach

Relationships show us the truth we try hardest not to see.

Not because our partners want to hurt us, but because the unconscious mind and the nervous system recreate what is familiar.
And what is familiar is often what is unresolved.

This is why you can be deeply wounded by your partner’s lack of emotional attunement one day, and then without meaning to - offer them the very same lack of attunement the next day when they come to you for support.

It feels confusing.
It feels unfair.
It feels like betrayal inside yourself.

But it’s not.
This is how the nervous system protects you.
This is the mirror effect.

What the Mirror Effect Really Is

Psychology defines projection as placing your inner experience onto someone else. The mirror effect is deeper than that.

It’s when the wound you’re most sensitive to becomes the behavior you unconsciously reenact, often you are not even aware you do it.

Not because you are cruel.
Not because you lack empathy.
But because your nervous system is in a survival state that cannot give what it didn’t receive.

This is how the mirror shows up in relationships.

The Example Most People Never Admit Out Loud

The Emotional Attunement Loop

You have a deep need for emotional attunement - presence, listening, softening, connection.
You express something vulnerable about how your partner hurt you.
Your partner responds with defensiveness, minimizing, blame, or dismissing.

You feel gutted.
You feel alone inside the relationship.
Your attachment system goes into alarm.

You express your pain with anger and attack.
They apologize the next day.
Then they share that the way you reacted while you were upset hurt their feelings too.

And in that moment, you shut down.
You get angry again.
You minimize their hurt.

You blame them.
You tell them “ I can’t deal with your feelings right now, YOU are the one who hurt ME!”

You now become the one who cannot attune.

Not because you don’t care.
But because your nervous system is still in danger mode, and when the body feels unsafe, empathy goes offline.

This is the mirror effect.

You repeat the very experience that wounds you. We can go years, sometimes our entire lives, without recognizing this pattern in ourselves. Instead, we blame the other person completely, as if our life depends on it. Relationships fall apart in this environment, yet every time we convince ourselves it’s not our fault.

Why This Happens: A Trauma-Informed Explanation

When you don’t receive emotional attunement in a moment you desperately need it, your system goes into survival mode.
This is not a choice. It’s biology. Often this triggers survival wounds from childhood when the adults in your life were not safe for you to share emotions.

What happens inside the body:

• Your threat detection system (amygdala) fires
• Your rational, relational brain (prefrontal cortex) dims
• Your ability to empathize or stay open collapses
• Your defenses rise to protect you from more pain
• You lose access to the very skills you wanted from your partner

Studies in attachment science, Polyvagal Theory (Porges), and trauma research (Van Der Kolk) show that when the nervous system shifts into protection, it prioritizes one thing: survival.

In survival, you can’t offer emotional safety.
You can only seek it.

So when your partner comes to you with their hurt the next day, they unintentionally trigger the part of you that hasn’t recovered from the day before, or the part the never recovered from childhood.

Your body says:
“My pain wasn’t met. I can’t meet yours.”

This is not immaturity.
It’s not selfishness.
It’s not moral failure.

It doesn’t mean you’re a narcissist.

It’s the nervous system trying to prevent complete collapse.

Shadow Work: The Part We Don’t Want to See

Carl Jung described the shadow as the parts of ourselves we reject.
In relationships, the shadow usually includes:

• our fear of being invisible
• our defensiveness
• our shame
• our unmet emotional needs
• our fear of not mattering
• our tendency to shut down when overwhelmed

When these parts are unconscious, they take the wheel.

The part of you that feels painfully unseen can, in a triggered state, become the part that makes someone else feel unseen.

This is not hypocrisy.
This is a trauma imprint expressing itself under stress.

Seeing this in yourself without shame is where healing begins. You start by noticing the moment you react in the very way that hurts you, that’s the mirror. When you can pause and say, “I’m doing the thing I never want done to me,” you shift from blame to awareness. It doesn’t mean your partner is a psychopath. It simply means you both have unhealed trauma and two dysregulated nervous systems trying to protect themselves at the same time. From that understanding, empathy becomes possible.

Patterns Become Clear When You Ask the Right Questions

Instead of “Why did I do that?”
Try:

“What state was I in when I did that?”

“Was I reacting to them or to what they reminded me of in my past?”

“Did my behavior match my values or my fear?”

These questions shift you from self-blame into self-awareness.

Once you understand why you mirror the pain you carry, you can interrupt the cycle. With care and empathy for yourself and your partner. You can soften in your pain.

Breaking the Mirror Effect

Here is how couples begin shifting out of this dynamic:

1. Repair the State Before Repairing the Story

You cannot have a healthy conversation in survival mode. When your nervous system is in fight, flight, freeze, or fawn, your brain isn’t wired for connection. It’s wired for protection. In that state, you lose access to empathy, nuance, and the ability to hear or be heard. You’re not thinking, you’re defending.

This is why regulation has to come first. Your body must settle before your mind can make sense of anything. That can look like: taking a slow walk, breathing into your belly instead of your chest, pausing the conversation for 20 minutes, placing a hand on your heart, rinsing your face with cool water, changing rooms, grounding your feet on the floor, or simply saying, “I need a moment to come back into my body.”

Once the nervous system softens, the conversation becomes possible. Words only work when your body feels safe enough to use them.

2. Name the Trigger Without Blaming the Partner

“This reminded me of an old wound” is completely different from “You hurt me on purpose.”
One acknowledges your internal experience. The other assigns intention, blame, and malice.

When you say “This reminded me of an old wound,” you’re naming the trigger without attacking your partner’s character. You’re letting them into your emotional world instead of making them responsible for all of it. This creates space for connection. It signals safety. It keeps their nervous system open instead of putting it on defense.

But when you say “You hurt me on purpose,” their body hears accusation. Their system shifts into protection. They stop listening and start defending. Suddenly you have two dysregulated nervous systems trying to survive each other.

The reality is that most relational pain isn’t about the moment. It’s about what the moment touches inside you. Old emotional memories of being dismissed, minimized, abandoned, blamed, or unseen. Naming that truth out loud changes everything.

Instead of:
“You don’t care about me.”
Try:
“When that happened, it hit a really old place in me. I felt how I used to feel when no one cared.”

Instead of:
“You’re doing this to hurt me.”
Try:
“This stirred up something familiar and painful. Can we slow down so I can explain what came up?”

One opens the door.
The other slams it shut loudly.

3. Allow Both Realities to Exist

Your pain is real. Their pain is real.
They don’t cancel each other. They coexist.

This is one of the hardest truths for high conflict couples to hold, because most of us grew up in environments where only one person’s feelings were allowed at a time. Someone had to be “right,” and someone had to be “overreacting.” Someone had to be the victim, and someone had to be the villain. It was not safe to share emotions or hold the emotions of those in your home. It was all survival.

But adult relationships don’t work that way.
Two nervous systems can be hurting at the same time for completely different reasons. Two realities can be true at once. Your need for attunement matters. Their experience of being overwhelmed matters. Your wound was activated. Theirs was too.

This doesn’t mean your pain diminishes theirs, or that their pain overshadows yours. It means the relationship has two emotional spaces to hold at once. This is the foundation of secure attachment: the ability to stay connected without needing to erase someone else’s experience to validate your own.

Coexisting truths sound like:

“I’m still hurting, and I can see that you’re hurting too.”
“I needed you yesterday, and I understand that you felt overwhelmed.”
“This triggered an old wound for me, and I hear the impact it had on you.”

When both partners can honor each other’s emotional reality, the dynamic shifts from adversarial to collaborative. The conflict becomes something you face together instead of something that tears you apart.

Two truths.
Two hearts.

4. Own the Mirror Moment Without Shame

“I see that I shut down when you shared your feelings. I didn’t want to, but I was still overwhelmed.”

This is accountability without self-attack.

It’s the middle ground most people never learned growing up.
It’s not collapsing into “I’m the problem,” and it’s not defending yourself with “Well you made me shut down.”
It’s acknowledging your impact without abandoning your own experience.

This kind of accountability says:

• I recognize what happened
• I see how it affected you
• I understand why my body reacted that way
• I’m willing to own my part without shaming myself

When you speak this way, you stay connected to yourself and to your partner at the same time. Your nervous system stays open instead of bracing. Their nervous system softens instead of preparing for a fight.

This is how real repair begins. Not through blame, not through apologies drenched in guilt, but through clean honesty:

“I wasn’t trying to hurt you. I was overloaded, my nervous system was raw and I responded out of survival, and I can see the negative impact that had on you.”

This kind of truth builds trust.
It shows emotional maturity.
It teaches both partners how to repair without repeating the pattern.

It’s accountability rooted in awareness, not self-punishment.
And that’s what creates real change.

5. Practice Attunement as a Skill, Not a Trait

Attunement isn’t something you’re born with or doomed to live without. It’s a skill. It’s a practice. It grows with regulation, awareness, and repetition. The more each partner learns to slow down, tune into their own body, and stay present with the other person’s emotional state, the stronger attunement becomes.

It’s learning to notice the subtle shifts in tone, posture, breath, and energy. It’s listening for what your partner is trying to say underneath their defenses. It’s catching the moment you want to shut down or get reactive and choosing to stay curious instead.

And the more you practice it, the more natural it becomes. Attunement doesn’t require perfection. It requires willingness. Two people showing up again and again, trying a little differently each time. Over time, this builds safety, trust, and connection in a way that transforms the entire relationship.

A Healthier Relationship Doesn’t Require Perfection

It requires awareness.

Most people assume conflict means something is wrong with the relationship.

In reality, conflict reveals what is unhealed in each partner.
Your reactions tell the story your childhood never resolved.
Your triggers show you where your body needs safety.
Your patterns show you where the work is.

Relationships don’t break because we’re triggered.
They break because we don’t understand the triggers and we react from a place of fear. In this fear we reinforce the shame in our partner and ourselves.

The mirror effect isn’t a threat.
It’s a guide.

When you can see the pattern without shame or blame, the cycle shifts.
Attunement grows.
Connection deepens.
The relationship becomes a place where both people can be seen, even in the messy moments.

Because the truth is simple:

We’re not reacting to our partners. We’re reacting to the wounds they awaken in us. And they’re reacting to the wounds we awaken in them. That’s the mirror effect. Two nervous systems, each shaped by past hurt, reflecting the same unhealed patterns back and forth.

When you can recognize the moment you slip into the very behavior that hurts you, you see the mirror. When you notice your partner doing the same, you see that neither of you is the enemy. You’re both protecting old injuries the only way your bodies know how.

This is where everything begins to shift.
Not when one person changes.
Not when you win the argument.
But when both of you can say, “This isn’t you versus me. This is the past showing up in both of us.”

Awareness coupled with learned empathy breaks the cycle.
Compassion softens the nervous system.
And the relationship becomes a place where healing can finally happen.

Once you recognize the mirror in each other, everything can change and you can start healing together.

References

Bowlby, J. (1988). A secure base: Parent-child attachment and healthy human development. Basic Books.

Jung, C. G. (1959). Aion: Researches into the phenomenology of the self. Princeton University Press.

Jung, C. G. (1953). Two essays on analytical psychology. Princeton University Press.

Porges, S. W. (2011). The polyvagal theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and self-regulation. W. W. Norton.

Schore, A. N. (2012). The science of the art of psychotherapy. W. W. Norton.

Siegel, D. J. (2012). The developing mind: How relationships and the brain interact to shape who we are (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.

van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.

Linehan, M. M. (2015). DBT skills training manual (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.
(Useful for emotion regulation and relational repair)

Levine, P. A. (2010). In an unspoken voice: How the body releases trauma and restores goodness. North Atlantic Books.

Heller, D., & LaPierre, A. (2012). Healing developmental trauma: How early trauma affects self-regulation, self-image, and the capacity for relationship. North Atlantic Books.

Johnson, S. M. (2004). The practice of emotionally focused couple therapy: Creating connection. Brunner-Routledge.