When Honesty Isn’t Enough: The Missing Piece of Emotional Safety in Open Relationships, EP. 141
We talk a lot about honesty in open relationships and non-monogamy.
Tell the truth. Name the jealousy. Share your feelings.
But what happens when you open up and your partner tries to fix it, explain it away, or tells you you shouldn’t feel that way?
In this episode, Ellecia Paine breaks down why honesty alone doesn’t create emotional safety, how emotional invalidation quietly shuts people down in non-monogamous relationships, and what real validation actually looks like. We explore jealousy, insecurity, nervous system safety, and why being corrected instead of received makes it harder to open up over time.
If you’ve ever felt shut down after sharing your feelings, or noticed yourself fixing instead of listening, this episode is for you.
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Music: Composer/Author (CA): Oscar Lindstein
STIM IPI: 572 393 237
TRANSCRIPT:
[00:00:00] Ellecia: We talk a lot in non-monogamy about being honest. Say the hard thing, name the jealousy. Don't bottle it up. But what we aren't prepared for is this moment when you finally open your mouth, you finally say, I'm feeling really insecure, or I feel scared, or, can you please just offer me some reassurance? And your partner responds with, I don't understand why you would feel that way.
Worse. You shouldn't feel that way because X, Y, Z, or that's not what's happening or that's not how I feel. So you're misreading this. Let's talk about that moment. Because that moment is where emotional safety either gets built or quietly destroyed. Welcome back to Nope, we're not monogamous. I'm E Ellecia Paine, your non monogamous relationship coach, and I am so happy you're here. Uh, [00:01:00] let's talk about this.
Yeah, so here's the thing. Most people are not trying to invalidate you or be dismissive. They're trying to fix discomfort. They're trying to explain their point of view. They're trying to defend themselves. They're trying to prove that they're not doing anything wrong. They're not the bad guy. They, they're trying to make it better, but their intent does not necessarily cancel the impact that it has, right?
So you share a vulnerable feeling and then your partner immediately corrects it or explains it away, or they debate you on it. Um, and your nervous system hears one very clear thing. Your experience is not real or your feelings don't make sense, or it's not safe to be emotional here or to be messy or not have it figured out.
And that actually hits really, really deep. And this is one of the sneakiest ways that emotional safety gets eroded in relationships and in non-monogamy, because like it doesn't [00:02:00] always sound mean, it doesn't always sound aggressive, right? Sometimes what they're saying is really calm and logical and even reasonable, and yet it still shuts you down, right?
And every time that happens, your nervous system learns that vulnerability leads to disconnection. Right. And then, and then people wonder why their partners stop opening up. And, you know, it's like, it's like your feelings get turned into this courtroom debate, and the message isn't, let me understand you and connect with you and love you.
The message that's received is convince me. Convince me that your feelings are valid. And most of us do that already. We already try to val, like we already try to convince our partners ourselves, everyone around us that, that our feelings are justified. Like even as a little kid, it's what are you crying for?[00:03:00]
What do you have to be sad about? You're not, you're not hurt. That doesn't hurt. You're fine. You're fine. And it's only okay to be upset if something bad enough has happened. If somebody, if you're actually injured, oh, are you bleeding? If you've actually been hurt or someone did something that was bad enough for it to be okay for you to be upset.
And then we carry that into adulthood. Now we're trying to justify our feelings of insecurity, our feelings of anger or betrayal or fear or insecure, like being insecure or jealous. Uh, only if something is bad enough do we feel like it's okay to speak up? And then the flip side of that, we speak up and then our partner is like, wait, but I didn't do anything wrong.
Or this is, this isn't against our agreements. What you're saying, I did nothing bad enough happened for you to be feeling this way, or it's not logical to feel this way. Right? And so here we are in [00:04:00] this battle for it being okay to have emotions. It's really frustrating and it's, um, extra dangerous and non-monogamy, extra hard, non-monogamy because non-monogamy already stretches our attachment system.
It pokes at our old wounds. It brings up insecurity and comparison and jealousy and fear of replacement just naturally. And that doesn't mean that you are bad at this. It means you're human with the full range of human emotions, right? And so when someone finally does the brave thing and says like, Hey, this is scary for me, and they're met with, well, logically you shouldn't feel that way.
It makes sense and is kind of predictable that the next step is they stop sharing or they minimize, or they self-edit or wait until this feeling is so unbearable that they have to explode or quietly detach, [00:05:00] and then their partners say, I don't understand why they don't open up anymore. Well, what's going on?
This is why.
And I wanna make something really clear here that validation does not mean agreement. Okay? Validation doesn't mean you're taking the blame or that you're saying you are. Right? And I'm wrong. Validation just. Simply acknowledging someone else's inner experience and saying like, I see that this is real for you.
That's it. Or saying like, I don't experience this the same way. I'm not having the same experience as you and I care that it's hurting you. Right? You. You can validate a feeling. You can validate your partner's emotional state without agreeing to [00:06:00] the inter interpretation. Right. You can say, I hear that you're scared, and that doesn't mean, yep, I fucked up. I did something wrong. Right? They aren't the same thing. Two things can exist at the same time. So let's talk about what real validation. Let's talk about what real validation actually sounds like. Okay. It sounds like that makes sense given what you've been through, or I can see how that's landing for you, or I don't feel the same way and I care that you're scared. Thank you for telling me I'm here.
I'm here with you. When you give answers like, you shouldn't feel that way, or that's not what happened, or you're overthinking, or you're projecting, that is when, uh, the sense of safety in the relationship actually starts to shut down, even if those things are true, even if that's really what's [00:07:00] happening. There is still this.
A message being sent that it's not safe to share how you're feeling, right? So even if it's factually accurate that this isn't true, it misses the point emotionally. And so most people don't stop sharing because they're closed off. They stop sharing because they have learned that it's not safe to share. If every time you shared what's on your heart, it turned into a correction or a lecture, or a debate, or a defense of someone else's intentions, how eager would you be to do it again? So if you're listening to this and you're realizing that you're the one who fixes, explains, or corrects, I say this gently like, you're not wrong or broken or bad. You probably are someone who learned that logic equals safety. You probably learned that being calm and reasonable is how you survive this life, right?
[00:08:00] And if you're listening to this and you've realized that you're the one who shuts down, you're not too sensitive. Your body and your nervous system are protecting you in the way that it knows how.
so I wanna give you one simple tool to use when you are sharing your emotional state with your partner or with your partner comes to you to share what's going on for them. Before you respond, take three deep breaths.
And then say, thank you for sharing that. Thank you for telling me.
That's it. Really simple, really easy. Thank you for sharing what's going on for you. Thank you for sharing how you're feeling. Thank you for telling me what you're experiencing. [00:09:00] Just start there. Practice that all the freaking time, just practice it, okay? It's going to change so much. It's gonna slow you down so you don't just instantly jump into defending yourself.
Uh, and if you're the one sharing, take three deep breaths. It's gonna help center your nervous system,
it's going to help you stay calm and grounded so that you can share what's happening for you emotionally and not, um, take your partner's reaction to, to, to mean that you were wrong or you shouldn't have shared. So I wanna leave you, uh, with just this like, really simple truth, that honesty is really freaking brave. Okay? But honesty without safety is like exposing a raw nerve. So we have to build that in, we have to build that into our relationships, and it takes intention. It's a skillset, it's a practice. And real intimacy, [00:10:00] especially in non-monogamy, isn't built by, built by having the perfect explanation or having a perfect reason.
You feel the way you feel or the right level of justification for your feelings. It's built when, when feelings are met with presence instead of correction. Okay? You're not doing non-monogamy or your relationship wrong because feelings come up. Okay? That's normal. You're doing it wrong when those feelings aren't allowed to exist, and the good news is that this is learnable.
It's repairable. It's a skillset that you can practice and learn and support actually changes a lot of this. So if you're listening and you're like, Ooh, this is what's happening, I want you to know. You don't have to figure it out alone. Okay? I offer clarity chats for people navigating non-monogamy who want support perspective, a place where your feelings don't have to get debated.
There's no pressure, there's no convincing. It's just a real conversation to see what would actually help you feel safer and [00:11:00] more grounded in this journey. And you can find the link in the show notes. If that feels like the next step for you, it's or go to Elleciapaine.com/clarity. Nope, Elleciapaine.com/call and check it out.
I appreciate you so much. Thank you for being here. Hit like, subscribe, hit, do all the button things that every other, uh, content creator, creator out there is telling you to do, but please do it for me. Thanks. Bye.