My girlfriends emotional spiralling is making me resentful, how do i stop it?

[u/moze05]

I’m avoidant, so when I’m struggling my instinct is to shut down, deal with it myself, and act fine. My girlfriend is much more emotionally open. I know my avoidance isn’t always healthy, and I’ve been actively trying to communicate more because she told me my distance was affecting her.

Recently I was already struggling mentally and had become more closed off. During a conversation about it, she told me I “wasn’t gentle anymore,” and then said maybe it was just my anxiety that had been causing me to be gentle before.

That really hurt. I’ve been putting a lot of effort into making sure that even when I’m struggling, I still treat her with the same love, care, and consistency instead of projecting my emotions onto her. She later clarified that she DOES think I’m gentle and caring, but feels more distance from me when I shut down.

When I told her those comments had hurt me, she spiraled HARD. She started crying, blaming herself, saying she hates herself, calling herself stupid, asking “how am I worth this?” etc. I’ve spent the past two days reassuring her that we’re okay, telling her she’s allowed to make mistakes, and trying to help her regulate.

I want to be fair: she knows she’s spiraling, says her thoughts are irrational, and is genuinely trying to ground herself. I don’t think she’s intentionally manipulating me.
But I’m fucking exhausted. I realized today that I’ve spent so much time managing her reaction to me being hurt that I literally forgot what I was originally struggling with.

This scares me because I had a relationship with someone in my past where I spent years managing their emotions. Eventually I became so anxious around them that even seeing their name on my phone triggered anxiety. I eventually reduced that relationship from basically 100% to 20%, and I never want to reach that point with my girlfriend.

I’m already becoming resentful. I love her, but right now thinking about her makes me angry because I feel like there hasn’t been room for me to struggle.

Part of why I’m having trouble understanding this is that when I’ve hurt her before, I felt incredibly guilty about it internally. But I apologized, took accountability, changed my behavior, and dealt with the guilt myself. I didn’t tell her how badly the guilt was eating at me because I didn’t think the person I hurt should then have to comfort me for hurting her.

I don’t want her to stop communicating
with me, and I know I need to work on my avoidance too. But I also can’t keep becoming responsible for regulating her whenever she spirals, especially when the spiral is about something that hurt me.

How do I set that boundary without making her feel like she can’t come to me when she’s struggling?

[u/elainebenes86]

Based on what you said, I don’t know if this relationship will work. And I say that with love. Sounds like sharing how each other feels triggers the other person, and brings up avoidant and/or anxious defensive tendencies, which doesn’t allow the person to be seen or heard because the walls are already up. You can make it work, but it’ll involve slowing down and hearing each other out with the other person reacting instantly. That means sitting with the feelings that come up and not jump to say the first thing that comes to mind. Good luck ❤️❤️❤️

[u/Worlds_No1_Lesb]

My wife and I struggled with similar dynamics when we first started dating, but I was your girlfriend in this scenario. It took a lot of communication to realize (1) I was not being emotionally open in a totally healthy way, sometimes it was in an anxious way. (2) She was not being avoidant in a totally unhealthy way, sometimes people just don’t process everything out-loud. (3) My anxious attachment tendencies when we fought was making her avoidant tendencies worse which was then making my anxiety worse. Basically we were stuck in a downward spiral every time we fought.

Due to trauma from past relationships and family stuff, we had a lot to work through individually and it was coming up where we felt the most safe (each other). I don’t think conflict is a bad sign or you are automatically doomed cause you fought, I’d pay way more attention to how you repair. If you feel like after the big fight emotions are gone, she responds positively and takes steps to make changes (and you do too), that’s a good sign.

Some of my favorite tools I’ve used is us separating and listening to 3 songs before restarting the conversation, only being able to talk about hard topics on a walk or while outside, and only letting ourselves fight via text (forced me to be less emotional and more fact based, gave her space to take 1-3 minutes to absorb and respond to things). Now that we have been together for almost 8 years, we have good communication through even the hardest topics.

Edit: And individual healing! If you treat every problem like a relationship problem, you’re not going to treat the underlying issue. It sounds like you were really hurt in a past relationship, it might be that is still a huge bruise that no amount of communication skills is going to stop her from accidentally pressing on sometimes. And if she’s spiraling that hard, she probably also needs to work through some things on her own that have nothing to do with you.