My girlfriend always criticizes me.

My girlfriend always criticizes me.

Is it her or is it you? How to empower yourself to stop being criticized.

When your girlfriend criticizes you, do you react with anger or defensiveness? 

Or do you shut down? 

These are the most common reactions that men have when they feel rejected. 

I’ve lost count of how many times clients have said “my girlfriend always criticizes me”. They get upset or angry and want me to help them to make it stop. 

In order to do this, we first need to uncover the root causes.

When someone criticizes us, it’s normal to feel the pain of rejection. But a lot of my clients don’t realize that this is why they are upset. It can be hard to accept a feeling of rejection.

The reality is, struggling with rejection shows there is a lot more right with you than wrong with you. 

Rejection causes intense pain. In fact, neuroscience studies show us that rejection lights up the same parts of the brain as physical pain. So it makes total sense that you would want to avoid it.

To make things even more challenging, all of us experience rejection throughout our lives. As a result, we build up reactive defense mechanisms to avoid the pain.

These reactions are normal. But, over time, they can harm relationships.

They can create arguments and emotional distance. Which in the long run increases the pain.

You must find new ways to handle these reactions. Ways to shield you from criticism’s pain without hurting your relationship.

Follow this step-by-step guide to manage critisism and rejection and discover how to overcome it. 

1.Understand your reactions to your girlfriend always critisizing you.

Have a think about how criticism might have shown up for you.

Did it come from your teachers?

Were you ever rejected by a group at school?

Were you ever made fun of by other kids?

Did it seem like people praised your siblings more than they praised you?

Were you not picked for the sports team?

Did you get yelled at by your parents?

Criticism can be big or small. At one extreme, someone could have bullied or even abused you. But even if you haven’t experienced anything that difficult, any harsh word can affect us as children.

Well-known psychologist and author Steve Hayes tells a story. It’s about an incident with his eight-year-old son. The boy was messing around with his knife and fork at the dinner table. His dad becomes impatient and tells him to pick up his knife and fork correctly.

The boy gets so upset that he runs crying into his room. His dad, wanting to see what’s wrong, goes in to kindly ask him what’s up. The boy simply says, “You said I was bad.”

As kids, we can overreact to criticism. We take it as a painful rejection when it is simply a request to do something differently. 

So, big or small, we all have experience with criticism. Because it hurts, we build protective mechanisms against the pain. 

These defenses blind us to the nuances of situations. They make it hard to tell a request to change from a painful rejection.

2: Identify your protective mechanisms when your girlfriend criticizes you.

See if you can relate to any of these common protective mechanisms:

• Defensiveness and justification.

You shift the blame onto the other person or make excuses. Often, your tone can be harsh or aggressive.

Example: ‘Well I wouldn’t have done that if you hadn’t…’

Method of protection: When the other becomes the guilty partner, you don’t feel so bad about yourself.

• Avoidance and Withdrawal

You either shut down and stop talking. Sometimes you use this as a counterattack knowing that it’s making your partner suffer.

Or you change the subject or evade the issue.

Example: Going into another room and refusing to engage in conversation.

Method of protection: You don’t have to listen to painful remarks.

• Minimizing and dismissing

Playing down the criticism as not important or dismissing or belittling the criticism.

Example: Using sarcasm or humor to deflect from the topic.

Method of protection: Avoid the pain or criticism by downplaying their importance.

3: Assess the ‘workability’ of your methods to stop your girlfriend criticizing you.

Protective methods can often work in the short term. In that moment, they can ease our pain and prevent us from getting hurt further. 

The problem is that, over time, they stop providing what we truly desire.

Especially when the communication in the relationship gets worse or breaks down completely.

What most of us want is the relief that comes from respect and acceptance by the person whom we care about. 

How often have your protective mechanisms worked to get you there? How often have they brought you further away from what you want?

When we get defensive, the other person often gets defensive in return. We can end up in a defensive loop where both people end up feeling angry and hurt.

When we shut down, there is no chance to say how we feel and get some acknowledgment and care. 

When we minimize and dismiss, we are so focused on protecting ourselves that we fail to make an effort to understand what is upsetting our partner.

All these protective methods shut down any chance of a resolution.  

So if these methods don’t work, what does?

4: Get into a calmer state.

Communication is only effective if it gets you where you want to be. It’s hard to communicate when you’re upset and reactive. 

Writer and teacher Eckhart Tolle talks about a concept called the ‘Pain Body’. When we are upset, this whole system activates within us. When we are in Pain Body, we can no longer be rational. We become centered in our own pain and we cannot be objective. 

Tolle says it’s impossible to communicate effectively when we are in Pain Body. We can’t resolve conflicts when we only focus on our own feelings. Or when we communicate from a reactive state.

The first thing we need to do to communicate effectively is to get ourselves out of Pain Body.

There are many ways to calm yourself in a short amount of time. You can try breathing exercises, taking a ‘time out,’ counting up in multiples of seven, to name a few. It’s very important that you find your own calming strategies.

In a calmer, less reactive state, we can be more objective. We can then see the whole picture with greater clarity. We can talk in a way that is more likely to foster understanding and connection.

5: Collaborative communication

Criticism in relationships always has a reason. We must find it. If not, it will be hard to move on. These are some of the common reasons:

• Your partner is upset about something else and is directing that frustration toward you. This might seem unfair, and you are within your rights to calmly say so. But trying to find out what this might be can bring you closer to your partner instead of getting into a fight.

• You have done something that you had no idea would bother your partner. This does not make you wrong or a bad person. It means you perceive things in a different way or that you lack awareness. Finding out what you could try to change to help, if that’s possible, can be a great way to get closer.

• Your actions have been completely misunderstood. 

Instead of jumping to your defense, try to understand why this might be. In relationships, we often see things differently. We both think our view is the truth. Curiosity in seeking the other person’s ‘truth’ can build a deep connection. This is better than just defending our own position.

If you want to feel calmer and more connected in your relationship, then we should talk.  

No need for therapy or endless coaching sessions. I combine psychology and neuroscience to help rewire your brain.   

 Get the relationship you want. Book your free call here.