Why Weaponizing Your Pain Destroys Intimacy (and What to Do Instead)
Chapters:
1. When You Want Your Partner to Suffer
Naming the taboo urge to hurt someone you love when you’re in pain.
2. Weaponizing Pain in Relationships
How emotional punishment shows up unconsciously.
3. A Personal Story: Pain, Long Distance, and Control
How fear and missing a partner can turn into controlling behavior.
4. When Pain Feels Like a Threat to the Relationship
Why the nervous system interprets distance as danger.
5. The Unconscious Desire to Control Outcomes
How trying to reduce fear leads to manipulation instead of safety.
Why We Hurt the People We Love
6. Wanting Shared Pain as a Form of Connection
Why syncing through suffering feels tempting but backfires.
7. The War Paradigm in Intimate Relationships
How domination and control leak into love.
8. Why Weaponizing Pain Never Creates Safety
How it deepens disconnection and prolongs suffering.
9. Pain Is Inevitable — Suffering Is Optional
Learning to separate unavoidable pain from added harm.
Attunement vs. Emotional Violence
10. What Attunement Really Means
How emotional syncing creates connection without force.
11. Attunement vs. Forcing Your Partner to Feel What You Feel
Why domination kills intimacy.
12. The Baby and Caregiver Example of Attunement
Understanding responsiveness without overwhelm.
13. Self-Attunement: Turning Toward Your Inner World
Why awareness must start with you.
14. How War Energy Turns Partners Against Each Other
Why emotional attacks escalate rather than resolve pain.
How to Break the Pattern (Practically)
15. Step One: Learning to Hold Your Own Pain
Why emotional regulation is the foundation of repair.
16. Emotions as Energy in the Nervous System
Understanding pain as sensation, not truth.
17. Tracking Sensation Instead of Acting It Out
A somatic approach to emotional regulation.
18. Breathwork to Anchor Intense Emotions
Using slow exhales to calm reactivity.
Step Two: Inviting Attunement Instead of Forcing It
19. Why Invitation Creates Real Connection
Letting your partner choose to meet you emotionally.
20. The Risk — and Reward — of Not Forcing Attunement
Why choice reveals true intimacy.
21. What Inviting Attunement Sounds Like
Naming body sensations without blame.
22. Attunement Through Touch, Presence, and Listening
Simple ways to co-regulate without fixing.
23. Validating Feelings Without Taking Responsibility
Holding space without self-abandonment.
Re-Patterning Conflict Over Time
24. Noticing the Pattern After the Fact
Why awareness comes before change.
25. Shortening the Gap Between Reaction and Awareness
How practice builds emotional choice.
26. Creating Agreements Around Unconscious Patterns
Planning for rupture before it happens.
27. Turning Conscious Practice Into New Relationship Norms
How repetition rewires intimacy.
28. From Weaponized Pain to Secure Connection
Choosing harmony over domination.
29. Why This Practice Builds Trust and Ease
Reducing recovery time and emotional fallout.
30. Closing: Choosing Love Over War
Letting connection become the new default.
I love her, and yet I wanted to see her suffer. Have you ever wanted to see somebody suffer who you care about? Say, after they said something that hurt your feelings, or did something that caused you pain? Have you ever wanted your loved one to feel the pain that you were feeling? I definitely have. Today, I'm going to be sharing with you how weaponizing your pain kills your relationship over time, and what you can do instead. What if your sacred partnership could be a source of pleasure and stability amidst the chaos of these times? I'm your host, Forrest Williams, Certified Relationship Coach and Disciple of Love. And I help you learn the art of trust by waking up from unconscious patterns so you can enjoy the pleasure of relating.
So, I'm going to share a little story with you about a time where I wanted to see my girlfriend suffer.
And it sounds like, why in the hell would you want to see your girlfriend suffer? But it was totally unconscious. And now that I've, like, grown from that experience, I've reflected on it, and I've integrated what I've learned. I'm happy to share it with you. I'm sure it's relatable to some degree. So, at the time, we were long distance. We were long distance for seven months. And in this moment, I was in a lot of pain because I was just really missing her. And it was painful. It hurt to miss her so much. We had just been three weeks together in California where she was living. And I took two planes to go up and visit her and then took two planes to go back to Arizona where I was living. And, man, it's really hard to acclimate to that transition after three weeks of living together and then going to, like, talking on a screen or just talking on the phone. It was really hard, especially because, for me, two of my biggest love languages are physical touch and quality time. And it's really just not the same, spending quality time remotely versus in person. So, I was having a hard time, a really hard time. And
subconsciously, I was detecting the long distance as a threat to our relationship. Because in my body, it was feeling so intense that I thought, I actually don't know if I could do this. And when I was communicating this on the phone, I wasn't saying, I don't know if I can do this. But I was just communicating how much I missed her and how it was so hard for me. She missed me, too. But in that particular moment, she wasn't suffering like I was suffering. Like, she was being with the missing, but it wasn't, like, tearing her apart. And, you know, this is ebbed and flowed. There's been moments where it was tearing her apart, and for me, it wasn't. That's just the nature of a long-distance relationship over time. But in this moment, I was low. She was a bit higher than me. And I wanted to see her suffer. And so, I was kind of pouty and just really emotionally unavailable, honestly. And I wasn't really directly communicating what was coming up for me because it was so unconscious in the moment. So, ultimately, I was like, you know, I want to get off the phone because I feel like I am just, like, you know, so pouty. I just need a moment to myself because I guess a part of me could sense that I wanted her to suffer because that was the way I was behaving. It's almost like wanting to, like, punish her or something with my behavior. I wasn't, like, name-calling or something like that. But there was this energy behind it that was so heavy and sticky and unforgiving. And so, I was like, you know, I don't want to get off the phone, but I'm going to because this doesn't feel good. And what I realized with some time, it wasn't immediate, I realized that subconsciously, I was detecting the long distance as a threat. Because the pain was so intense in my body in that moment that I was doubting if I could actually hold it. I'm like, can I actually do this?
And so, I thought, well, if she's suffering just as much as me, then she'll take quicker action to get close to me, like, to move to where I am. And so, subconsciously, I thought, if she's suffering, that's going to help our relationship stay secure because that's going to eliminate the threat. It's going to give her that impetus to take action to close the gap between us.
And, you know, in reality, we were both doing everything we could. And there were some things that were just simply out of our control, timing-wise. And so the real threat to our relationship in that moment was not the distance, but my urge to control the situation. My urge to weaponize my fears and my pain against my lover. I'm gonna break this down a little bit more. But I wonder, like, can you see yourself in this? Have you ever had one of these unconscious moments where if somebody asked you consciously, do you want to see your lover suffer? You'd be like, no. But maybe there's been an unconscious moment where you do want to see your lover suffer. Maybe you lash out or you name call and then you regret it later. But in that moment, it was because you wanted them to suffer, basically. You wanted to punish them.
And the truth is, this is such a common phenomenon, you know, because we're living in a world that's really in the transition between paradigms. There's this old paradigm of domination and control. And then there's the new paradigm that's rooted in abundance. It's humans returning to our nature, which is one of harmony and collaboration and love.
And as we're transitioning from that war paradigm into that peace paradigm, it's just so common to have the residue of that war paradigm showing up in our relationships where we feel pain and then our instinct or our urge is to weaponize it. So in the context we're living in, it makes sense. You know, unconsciously, we internalize this war culture and it seeps into our relationships and we end up turning against each other. But psychologically, if it's a disconnecting thing that we do, then why are we doing it? Like what's going on psychologically? And this is something I've come to understand just by reflecting on my experiences. And what I see from my lived experience is that this desire to weaponize pain actually comes from a desire to feel connected. So obviously it's not giving you connection, but the intention is actually to reach for connection. It's just in this unskilled, unconscious way because, you know, we don't learn those skills growing up in an empire. Right. So So the pain itself is a result of feeling disconnected, especially when your partner is not feeling pain while you are feeling pain. So subconsciously, you're having these different experiences and you actually want to sync up and you want to be having the same experience or at least a similar experience. Um, and so that desire to cause pain to your lover is a desire for you both to be in pain at the same time. And through that, both feeling connected, you know, pain is heavy. It's really heavy. It's a lot to hold. And most of us don't grow up with those skills of just holding emotions, especially the uncomfortable ones. So it's, it just makes sense. It's common. You might not want to hold that on your own. But the problem is you, all you're doing is spreading pain. You're not actually connecting. The pain itself is disconnecting.
So how do you actually connect? Right. There's this old world, unconscious habit of I'm feeling disconnected. I'm feeling pain. I don't want to feel alone in my pain. I want you to be here with me in my experience. And so I'm going to attack you. So we're both bleeding. But what is the actual way through? Well, the real way to connect is through attunement. What is attunement? I like to think of attunement as like syncing up with somebody's inner world, their emotions. I get this image of like a guitar string. If you've ever seen a guitar string vibrating, you just pluck it once and then you could see it vibrating super duper quickly. Imagine if you're both vibrating on that very same frequency. Like you're both just synced up. You're tuned in, right? Thinking of like a chorus or a choir who's like on the same note. You're on that same tune. You're in that same vibration. You're vibing together. So attunement doesn't necessarily mean that you need to feel what your partner is feeling. But it just means that you're holding space for their experience. You're acknowledging what's coming up for them. You're not denying what's coming up for them. And you're showing compassion. It means you can hold space and be soft. You can maintain your heart while you're holding that space. So one example of attunement, this is probably the most common example, is a mom responding to a baby. The baby cries. The mom responds. Just because the baby's crying doesn't mean the mom starts crying, right? But the mom can take care of the baby. It's like, okay, baby's maybe like hungry. And so let me try this. So it's being responsive. That's part of attunement. And then, of course, there's also self-attunement, you know, it really starts with yourself. So being attuned to yourself is being aware of your inner world and also being attentive to your inner world. So for me, in this moment, I was not the most self-attuned because I was feeling a lot of feelings coming up. And instead of kind of tuning inwards and saying, what is going on here? What do I need right now? I just started wanting to see my partner suffer. And so that was the cue where I was like, wait a minute, I actually need to take a break and actually just come into myself because I don't even know what's going on, but I know it doesn't feel good.
So, you know, the thing with the intention of hurting somebody for connection is that it does not make them actually attuned to you. It's quite the opposite. It turns them against you and it puts you at war with each other. So maybe you're both synced up on a war vibration, but the vibration of war is the opposite of connecting. It's like beyond disconnecting. It's like, I want to eliminate you. It's really intense. And so the pain stings even more deeply in this attempt to alleviate the pain by attuning to each other. You end up just misattuning even further, which puts you even further back from where you started. So you can see how the pain here is inevitable. You know, that's natural and it's nobody's fault. I mean, unless they're trying to hurt you, but like in this case, I was in pain, but it wasn't my girlfriend's fault. It wasn't my fault either. I just had pain and that part's inevitable, but the suffering really is optional. It's like, okay, you're in pain. And what do you want to do with that pain? Do you want to weaponize it? Probably not, but you might unconsciously do that. And you can observe if that does happen unconsciously, which likely it will, because it's so common right now. You can just observe how much suffering that actually creates, how it leads to further separation and further disconnection than what you really want.
And the thing is, when you're weaponizing your pain against your lover, not only does it intensify the pain, which stems from feeling disconnected, but it makes the recovery period longer. And that's where the suffering comes in. You're just elongating and deepening the pain when it really doesn't have to be that way. And that's part of the new world paradigm.
So how do you move forward? How do you step into the vibration of consciousness and the vibration of connection, which is a very delicious place to be? Like I'm saying, if the pain is unavoidable, at the very least, if you can ride the wave and move forward gracefully, you're going to be in the pain for less time. And that is going to be a more pleasant experience, not only for you internally, but also for relating. Your relationship is just going to feel more easeful and more pleasant.
How do you step out of this unconscious pattern? How do you step into a conscious way of relating where you're relating at the vibration of connection and harmony? Because that's really what feels good. It's pretty simple, actually. I didn't say it was easy, but it is simple. So there's two steps. The first step is really just to hold the pain on your own. And this will require learning how to be with your emotions. You know, like I said earlier, it's just not a skill set that is normalized within a society that is very war hungry. That is domination oriented. There's not the time or the space or the care for kids to actually have their emotional experience without getting punished for it or told to shut up or sent to a timeout or something. So it is our task now as we are transitioning into a new paradigm, which in some ways is actually an ancient paradigm before war was the norm.
It is our task to learn how to be with our emotions. And of course, it takes some time to learn how to be with your emotions. It takes some consistent practice. But really, all you have to do here is observe your emotions. You don't change them. You don't control them. You're just letting the waves of energy ripple through you.
And this is what's going to help you reduce your recovery time. So you're avoiding all that unnecessary suffering. You let the pain ride out. Maybe you feel it in your tummy. Maybe it feels like a little electric lightning bolts, little pulses. I mean, it is electricity moving through your body if you think about it. Um, emotions really are energy in motion and the nervous system is an electrical system. So it makes sense why the pain can feel really intense. It's because there's like little electricity bolts moving through your body. Um, so it's about being with this sensation, observing it, taking deep breaths to anchor you through it. So the most simple breathing technique that I could offer you would be to breathe in through your nose for four seconds, to breathe out through your mouth for eight seconds. This really can just anchor you as you're letting the, the waves ripple through your body. And what you're doing here is you're observing your reaction and this initial reaction, it is very unconscious and because it's unconscious, it's, it's not actually your truth. There is some wisdom in the reaction, right? There's wisdom in the pain. The pain points to a need, but when we're living in a context of war, like where war is the norm, whatever the unconscious reaction is, we'll be stemming from that environmental influence. And so it is not your ultimate truth. War is not your truth. It's just not how human nature is designed. It's very outside of human nature.
So what you want to do is observe your reaction, take deep breaths to anchor you. If you want, you can even hold your breath in between the inhale and the exhale. That's totally optional, but it can just help reduce your heart rate. So it can help you just anchor a little bit more deeply if it feels really intense and you really need some, some grounding. There's the option of holding your breath for four seconds in between the inhale and the exhale. And what you can do here is something called tracking the charge. This is a somatic exercise, tracking the charge. And really what you're doing is just noticing in your body, where is that electricity moving? Where is that energy, that emotion moving throughout your body? This is unique to everyone. And so you just want to notice where am I feeling sensation in my body? What does that sensation feel like? And how is it shifting over time as I'm taking deep breaths? So this can really anchor you as you're having a reaction and you feel that impulse to weaponize your pain. The practice here is just to observe, observe the pain, notice where it's going in your body. That will keep your awareness inwards and not so you're getting hooked in that unconscious pattern where you're projecting your pain outwards. And then you can take deep breaths to anchor you.
And so the next step here is to actually attune. And I'll tell you a little bit about what that looks like. Like how can you attune here? But before I get into that, I want to say you don't have to be perfectly grounded. You don't have to be 100% zen as fuck in order to like invite your lover to attune to you. So the key word here is invite, right? So this is how it's a conscious paradigm because part of that war paradigm, that unconscious paradigm is weaponizing the pain. Because like I said, the intention is to sync up together for your lover to feel that pain. But when you're actually attacking someone or weaponizing it, you're not giving them the option to attune to you. You are forcing them to feel what you're feeling. It's a form of domination. And that's why it's disconnecting, right? So if the intention is to feel connected, there's a very conscious and gentle way to do that. And it's to invite your lover to attune to you. And if there's a fear of like, well, what if my lover chooses basically not to attune to me when I'm inviting them and I'm not forcing them? I would ask you, is that somebody who you really want to keep investing in? So if this is a fear that you have where you're like, well, I don't know if my lover is going to attune to me unless I hurt them and force them to. You're never going to know the truth about does your lover want to meet you where you're at? Like, does your lover want to meet you emotionally? Does your lover want to relate to you from their heart unless you give them the opportunity to choose to? If you're forcing them, you're never going to know the truth.
So how do you attune? Well, like I'm saying, it's just vibing together. So this could look a lot of different ways. It could be as simple as eye contact. It could be touch. So maybe you're holding hands. Maybe you're even just touching legs. You're sitting next to each other. Maybe your lover puts a hand on your back and it's just saying, like, "Oh, I see you're in pain." So part of it is just validating what you're feeling and what you're needing. And so let's say your lover is in some pain and they're asking you for attunement, they're like, "Hey, I'm in pain, can you be in this pain with me? I don't need you to take responsibility for it, don't need you to fix it, but can you just be present with me in this pain?" You don't have to agree with their pain, but you can just validate what is coming up for them. How are they feeling and what do they need in that? Oftentimes the need is just reassurance or it's just being present, it's just that comfort. So, you know, you're like kind of anchoring them from the outside as they're anchoring themselves and riding the wave. It's just holding the space, like being a loving presence. If you can imagine, you know, let's say you need to go to the hospital for some kind of surgery or procedure or something, which can feel kind of scary, could bring up some fears. It might be really comforting to have somebody that you love and trust just alongside you. They're obviously not going into the surgery with you, they're not being cut open or something. But it can be so comforting to be moving through your own pain and just have the loving presence of somebody that you have right there. And they're not checked out on their phone or something, right? They're just being there and they're being present with you. So that's part of attunement. You don't have to fix your lover's feelings. You don't have to agree with what they're feeling. You know, if your lover's feeling pain, but you're not, that's okay. You can still validate what's coming up for them.
Another part of attunement is acknowledging nonverbal communication. So, you know, back to like the mom and the baby example, babies really are not communicating verbally.
But it's like, it's just that you're syncing up to each other. So it's being attentive, being responsive, but not taking responsibility for someone's emotions, but just being a loving presence. Being present, acknowledging what's coming up for them and empathizing with them. A big thing here, if your lover is having some feelings that you are not having, is, you know, just listening fully, what is coming up for them, and repeating back what you hear them say. So this is a way to validate someone if you don't agree with them, or even if you do agree with them.
So these are just a few practical ways to attune. But really here, the practice, too, is consciously communicating what is coming up for you. So it could be, if you're 100% conscious aware, which does not happen for me often, to be honest with you. Like I said, it's a practice. The more you do it, the better it gets. But it could be like, you're like, ooh, I'm feeling a lot of pain right now. I just need a second to like breathe and feel my feelings. Could you just hold some space for me while I'm in this? And could you hold my hand while I do this? And then maybe your lover is, you know, just asking you what's coming up. Do you want to talk right now? And oh, wow, that sounds hard. Oh, I see what's coming up for you. Don't have to agree, but just repeating back. Oh, yeah, I understand what you're saying. So that's if you're 100% conscious. That's one example of what can happen. More commonly, you know, you don't start off from a place of being 100% conscious. There's a level of unconsciousness. And so the practice here is to observe your unconscious behaviors. Just by noticing them does not change them right away. But it's through the repeated noticing the unconscious That's going to help you start to notice more in present time what's coming up. So the flow is something happens. It was unconscious. And then after it happens, you reflect. You're like, oh, I was totally in this unconscious pattern. But the more frequently that you're in this practice of observing yourself and reflecting, the quicker you can shorten the gap between when the unconscious pattern is happening and when you're observing the unconscious pattern. So ideally, you can get to a place with some time and some repetition where you can start to notice that the unconscious pattern is happening in the moment. And then boom, that's your opportunity to try a different action. So you're not just stuck on that hook to weaponize your pain, but you're communicating like, hey, I'm in pain. So more realistically, if you're not 100% consciously aware, but you are feeling pain, what you can do is you don't even have to articulate, I'm feeling pain. You don't have to know what you're feeling. You don't have to know everything to invite your lover to attune to you. So... What you do here is you just say, "Oh, something is off in my body. I'm not really sure what's going on right now." And depending on your level of awareness, you could tune in and say, "Oh yeah, there's like a little tingling in my chest." Or, "Oh, my stomach feels like it's in knots," or, um, "I have tension in my, in my shoulders and I notice my breathing is getting shallow." So, really what you're doing here is you're not labeling your emotions perfectly, but you're just observing, something is off in my body and I want you to know that. And so that is the invitation for connection. If your partner doesn't have space to be in that with you, they can name like, "Oh man, that sounds really difficult. I'm so sorry. I actually don't have the capacity to be with that right now. Are you going to be okay?" Or, you know, is there somebody that you can lean on that can support you? Or if they do have the capacity, then can act on that and they could say, "Oh my God, that sounds really hard. What do you need right now?" And maybe you don't know what you need and that's fine too. And so, if you don't know what you need, maybe it's just them holding some space while you're just taking some deep breaths. That can feel way more connecting than weaponizing your pain.
So again, if you want to wake up from this unconscious pattern of weaponizing your pain against your lover, it's a simple two step process. First, you learn how to hold the pain on your own. And second, you invite your lover to attune to you instead of forcing them through turning against them. And this will reduce the amount of time it takes to recover from the pain. So, this is a way to avoid further disconnection, further intensifying the pain, and drawing out the pain. So, you're not eliminating the pain, but it's going to make things a little more smooth and easeful and connecting. And after all, connection is the intention. So, if weaponizing your pain is an unconscious pattern that you find yourself in or that your partner finds themselves in, I would highly recommend, together, sitting down and discussing this unconscious pattern in a moment where it's not active. So, it's a moment of neutrality where you can both create a container and have a little conversation. Hey, there's this unconscious pattern that I'm noticing. Can we talk about a plan of how we both want to show up when this happens? And that can really help you follow through with re-patterning. So, the intention is really the first part, and the awareness is the first part. But what's really going to help you with the re-patterning is taking action. And if you're both synced up, if you're both aware of what's going on, and you both have an idea of what to do when this pops up, then you're that much more prepared to start practicing something different. And the more frequently you can practice this over and over again, eventually, you won't even have to think about it. It will just become a habit. It will become a new pattern that is your new normal. A norm of ease, abundance, and connection. May it be so.
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