A Relationship Doctor’s Confession About Speaking Hurt Over the People We Love
There is a strange and holy tension that lives inside every relationship:
the place where love meets our unhealed wounds.
It is the intersection where the things we never wanted to say slip out of our mouths,
where the person we treasure becomes the landing place for the pain someone else created,
and where God gently—sometimes painfully—reveals that the tongue speaks from the overflow of the heart (Luke 6:45).
As a relationship doctor, I help people navigate those moments every day.
But I am also a woman who has loved deeply, lost deeply, and said words I wish I could take back.
I know the anatomy of a wound because I’ve bled from one.
I know what it is to love someone who hurt me—not because they didn’t care about me,
but because they were drowning in their own hurt.
And I know what it is to take my hurt and accidentally hand it to the person whose arms I wanted to rest in.
This is a confession, a prayer, and a theology of repair—written from the messy, honest heart of someone who understands both the science of relationships and the spiritual ache of loving an imperfect person while being an imperfect person.
When Hurt Echoes Through Our Words
When we speak out of fear, shame, or old trauma, our words stop being the present truth—they become a replay of our past.
A raised voice becomes an echo of abandonment.
A sharp sentence becomes a shield.
A defensive tone becomes a survival strategy we learned long before this love arrived.
Scripture tells us, “Death and life are in the power of the tongue” (Proverbs 18:21).
Most couples think that means “don’t say mean things,” but it goes deeper.
It means:
- You can speak life into someone’s identity…
or you can remind them of every voice that ever tried to break them. - You can speak hope into the relationship…
or you can speak your worst fear and call it truth. - You can speak healing…
or you can speak from your unhealed places and mistake the two.
Sometimes the most damaging words are the ones spoken not in anger, but in fear.
Fear that we are not enough.
Fear that we are too much.
Fear that the person we love will leave, or choose someone else, or discover the parts of our story we’re still ashamed of.
Fear is a terrible prophet—yet we quote it like scripture.
Loving Someone Who Was Hurting
I have loved someone who was hurting.
Deeply.
A man whose soul carried wounds he never deserved and didn’t know how to soothe.
A man whose compassion ran deep, but whose pain ran deeper.
He didn’t hurt me because he was cruel.
He hurt me because hurt people eventually spill.
And sometimes—they spill on the one who stands closest.
We were two souls trying to love each other with hands still shaking from old storms.
He carried trauma that made him pull away when I needed closeness.
I carried trauma that made me cling tighter when he needed air.
We loved each other with the best parts of ourselves.
And we also loved each other with the broken parts.
That is the unbearable truth no one wants to speak:
even beautiful love can wound when it is afraid.
I spoke things onto him that belonged to my past, not to him.
He spoke things onto me that belonged to his past, not to me.
Neither of us meant harm—yet harm happened.
Because love is not a shield against unhealed wounds.
It is the mirror that reveals them.
The Theology of Misplaced Pain
There is a sacred but painful moment in the spiritual life when God reveals that our harshest words were never about the other person—they were prayers disguised as accusations.
When Adam and Eve hid in the garden, their first reaction was blame.
Their second reaction was fear.
Their third reaction was silence.
Humans have been doing the same ever since.
We speak blame because vulnerability feels dangerous.
We speak fear because intimacy feels risky.
We speak silence because honesty feels too heavy.
When I loved a hurting man—and when he loved me with the weight of his wounds—God began showing me something I had never wanted to see:
Sometimes the person you love is not your enemy.
Your fear is.
Sometimes the person you love is not your problem.
Your past is.
Sometimes the person you love is not the threat.
Your trauma responses are.
And sometimes the person you love is hurting too,
and the two of you are accidentally fighting the wrong battle—
each other, instead of the pain that shaped you both.
Paul wrote in Ephesians 4:29:
“Let no corrupting talk come out of your mouths,
but only such as is good for building up…”
Corrupting talk isn’t just cruelty.
It’s any word spoken from a wound instead of from wisdom.
It’s any sentence shaped by old fear instead of present love.
And God—gentle, patient, persistent—keeps teaching me that healing begins when we speak life into each other again.
The Doctor and the Patient Inside Me
I spend my life teaching:
- emotional regulation
- attachment repair
- Gottman’s antidotes to contempt
- EMDR resourcing
- how trauma scripts rewrite relational behavior
But in my own relationship, I discovered the truth every therapist eventually faces:
Knowledge does not heal what we refuse to feel.
Tools do not save what we refuse to admit.
And love cannot grow where fear is still in control.
There is a patient inside me who needs compassion as much as any client I serve.
There is a doctor inside me who knows better,
and a woman inside me who is still learning.
Both are worthy.
Both are loved.
Both are healing.
When We Hurt the Person Who Loves Us Most
The person we love most often receives the most unfiltered version of us—not because they are the safest target, but because they are the safest place.
But safety is not permission to harm.
Love is not the right to unload unprocessed pain.
And grace is not the expectation that the other person should carry our wounds for us.
When I look back, I see all the ways I tried to love through unhealed fear
and all the ways he tried to love through his.
We both deserved better…
and we both deserved healing.
There is redemption for that, too.
Because God does not waste a painful love.
He transforms it.
What I Wish I Could Say to Him Now
If he were standing in front of me, I would say:
I know you were hurting.
I know I was hurting too.
I know neither of us meant to wound the other.
I see your humanity now.
I see mine too.
And I forgive you for the moments your pain leaked onto me.
I hope you forgive me for the moments mine leaked onto you.
You were not my enemy.
We were just two people trying to love without the tools we needed.
Both of us did the best we could with the hearts we had.
A Prayer for All of Us Who Speak From Wounds
God,
teach us to speak life where we once spoke fear.
Teach us to pause when the old wounds tremble.
Teach us to recognize when our past is speaking louder than our present.
Teach us to love with healed hands and tender voices.
Teach us to honor the hearts we treasure with words that bring life and not loss.
And when we fail—which we will—
teach us to repair,
to apologize,
to grow,
and to return to love again.
Amen.
Closing Thought
If you have taken your hurt out on someone you love, you are human.
If someone you loved took their hurt out on you, they are human too.
But humanity does not excuse harm—
it simply explains it.
And love—real, spiritual, God-shaped love—
invites us into something deeper:
Not perfection.
Not punishment.
But redemption.
The same redemption that turns Saul into Paul,
fear into faith,
wounds into wisdom,
and painful relationships into testimonies
about the God who heals even what we break.
Science and Spirituality 
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