Why you can’t stop nitpicking your partner
How do you stop nitpicking when it feels like an uncontrollable force that keeps haunting your relationship?
How do you stop that impulse to pick out all the little things that frustrate you about your partner?
Even when they finally change or improve something, do you impulsively jump to the next new thing to focus on?
Maybe you know in your mind that your partner is a wonderful and normally-flawed human, and it feels irrational to obsess over their imperfections.
You might even suspect that your nitpicking is a self-sabotaging pattern due to old trauma and pushing away the healthiest relationship you’ve ever had.
Despite knowing this in your mind, you can’t seem to stop the behavior no matter how much you tell yourself to quit it.
This is not your fault!
Nitpicking is a defense mechanism that prevents you from resolving past trauma.
Unresolved trauma is like a pile of medical bills that stack up on the corner of your desk. You may tell yourself, “I’ll look at it later,” relieving yourself of the anxiety and burden at the moment; yet the financial damage adds up exponentially over time.
Nitpicking your partner is a common way to avoid the unresolved trauma that’s been trapped in your body for a long time. When you constantly pick on what they need to improve, you avoid looking at your own issues. Being so focused on them takes the focus away from you.
Your partner is an easy target to project your issues on, because they’re literally the closest person to you (you might nitpick with your mom too if you see her often). A body and nervous system that’s holding onto trauma will do whatever it takes to avoid looking deeper inside if it doesn’t feel safe to do so.
Even though you desperately want to stop nitpicking, and you’re stressed by the habit, it feels safer than looking more deeply at your own trauma.
To your nervous system, it’s safer to become irritated about all the little things that your partner’s doing or not doing. These obsessive judgments and criticisms about them is usually not really about them. You may’ve had plenty of moments feeling like, “Why am I making SUCH a big deal out of such a silly little thing?”
Your irritation and frustration isn’t REALLY about the silly little thing. It’s about you.
The charge that you’re feeling every time you’re bothered by your partner is your body trying to send you a deeper message. It’s your body saying, “Hey, we’re getting triggered here. There’s something in here that needs to be healed.”
Listen to your body. These messages give you an opening and opportunity to heal the trauma that’s pushing away your loving partner.
When you can’t stop nitpicking, your relationship suffers because you’re always trying to change your partner.
I used to do this ALL the time. I was always in the habit of trying to change my partner. He deeply resented the fact that I was unhappy with who he was, even though it was his #1 priority to make me happy.
The reality is, I wasn’t happy with MYSELF.
Before I healed my trauma, I constantly picked on him and I wasn’t able to make it stop. This was one of the biggest reasons why he broke up with me early in our relationship.
My client Cameron struggled with the same exact pattern. Every day, when she woke up, she looked over at her husband and rolled her eyes. She huffed & puffed as she got out of bed. She woke up with such irritable energy and immediately started picking on all of his flaws.
“He’s so lazy.”
“He needs to get his shit together.”
“Why doesn’t he ever get up earlier than me?”
Sometimes these judgments are valid and useful. If your partner never works or contributes to your family, that’s a valid reason to feel frustrated with them.
For Cameron, these thoughts were a projection of her own frustrations with herself.
How did we know? Her body revealed this truth through movement.
“What would it look like if you moved your pattern of nitpicking?” I asked Cameron.
“Oh wow, I have no idea.” She responded.
I said, “Let’s try it. I’ll take the role of being nitpicked while you gesture or move your body in a way that’s nitpicky.”
She agreed.
Cameron started moving close to me and made faces at me. She pointed her fingers at me. She rolled her eyes and made sounds of disgust. I allowed my body to move in response to her movements, to show her an example of how it impacted my body.
She suddenly stopped and said, “Oh my god. This has nothing to do with you.” (No, it had nothing to do with me. What she meant was, it had nothing to do with who I represented for her in that moment: her husband).
She’d been avoiding her bigger career dreams for over 20 years. She had made plenty of excuses why she needed to stay stuck in the same unfulfilling job.
Her irritation about her husband’s laziness was about HER. He was satisfied with the work that he did. He didn’t have the same aspirations as her. He was happy to provide in the way he had been doing for so long.
Once she had this epiphany, we accessed and healed her old trauma that fueled her resistance to achieving her bigger dreams. She started dancing every morning and took baby steps towards her goals. Meanwhile, the irritation and nitpicking started melting away. It no longer served its original purpose.
Stop nitpicking and admit your own flaws first.
One of the hardest things about stopping the habit of nitpicking is admitting our own flaws. When you’ve focused so long on someone else’s imperfections, it can be very challenging to turn the microscope back on you.
What’s even harder? Communicating these flaws to your partner.
For example, let’s say your partner stays out late with friends every week. This bothers you because you take it personally. You may nitpick and instinctually think, “Why do they need to go out every week with friends? Are they really THAT bored at home?”
Your usual habit is to send an angry text about why you need them to come home. You easily come up with reasons to come home early. They need to spend more time with the kids, do chores around the house, spend more quality time with you, etc. These are all valid things to want in a relationship.
But instead of sending the angry text, you can own up to what’s really causing you to feel upset. You might admit that you feel lonely when your partner is out every week, even though you spend lots of time together otherwise. You might own up to feeling jealous that they have a close group of friends when you don’t.
You might even realize that any time spent away from you makes you feel insecure about the relationship. You could own up to this and say, “I know it sounds silly but I have this feeling I can’t shake, that you’ll have so much fun with your friends and realize how boring life is with me.” (P.S. it’s not silly, it’s that old fear of abandonment and not being good enough).
It takes SO much vulnerability to say something like that and admit to our own irrational fears. It’s scary as heck. Trust me, I know.
If you can understand and own up to the real reasons why you’re nitpicking, then you can communicate it in a way that brings you and your partner closer together instead of driving a wall between the relationship.
Angry texts stop. Nitpicking disappears. It’s no longer what your partner is doing wrong. It becomes “this is what I need to work on.” And it’s really not about them.
Is trauma the reason behind your nitpicking behaviors?
If you can begin to be more vulnerable and own up to the real issues that’s causing you to nitpick, then it should be relatively easy to stop the habit.
However, for most people with deeply stored trauma in the body, they cannot change the pattern through words or mind’s will alone. You might know exactly what you want to say differently instead of nitpicking, but in the heat of the moment you end up blaming your partner again.
If that’s happening for you, then it’s a strong indication that you need to release the trauma stored in your body that’s driving these impulsive, unhealthy behaviors and causing your nervous system to react before you can control what you say next.
There’s no amount of talking, affirmations, or mental awareness that can change this pattern alone when the root of the behavior is trauma trapped in the body. You have to do the deeper work through your body and movement to release the trauma and rewire your nervous system so you can stop pushing away your partner.
You deserve to find peace in your body & let love in without fear.
The latest trauma research shows that cognitive-based therapies cannot fully access trauma stored in the non-verbal brain and body. Even alternative approaches, such as EMDR and Brain-Mapping, are often not enough to fully heal trauma from the physical body or nervous system.
This makes trauma healing a very frustrating journey for many people. They end up feeling stuck, even after spending decades of therapy and gaining so much self-awareness.
If you relate, you might’ve considered giving up on your healing. You might wonder if a fully integrated healing is not possible for you.
Every human being is 100% neurophysiologically capable of healing deeply & wholly, because we all have neural pathways that can be rewired from fear and overprotection to love, joy, and openness.
But even with an effective neuroscience-backed Somatic approach, going to weekly sessions could still require many more months or years until you feel that “click” in your body that finally makes you feel WHOLE.
That’s why I run Somatic Trauma Healing Retreats where many people experience accelerated, integrated, and lasting healing in just a few days.
(Disclaimer: each attendee must go through an application process that ensures this accelerated healing is possible for them).
If this sounds like something you might be interested in, I’d love to invite you to check out my retreats! There are several options from women’s healing, plant-assisted, 1:1, and more.
