When something is wrong and you can’t name it
When something is wrong and you can’t name it
For years, many of us sense that something in our marriage is not right — but we can’t say what it is, or why, or whether we’re even allowed to feel it. This post is for those years.
Val & Bruce
The Pit — anguish
There is a particular kind of pain that comes before the pain you can name. It lives in the stomach, low and hollow. It shows up in the quiet moments — when the house is finally still, when you are driving alone, when you lie awake at three in the morning unable to explain to yourself why you feel the way you do.
You tell yourself it is nothing. You tell yourself you are being too sensitive. You tell yourself that other people have real problems, and this — whatever this is — is not a real problem. You make bargains with yourself. You find reasons to explain the feeling away. And for a while, the bargains hold.
But the feeling doesn’t go away.
If you are reading this and you recognize that feeling — the one without a name yet — we want you to know something before we go any further: you are not crazy. You are not emotionally unstable. You are not failing at your marriage. You are a person who is sensing something real, and your body and your spirit are trying to tell you something that your mind does not yet have words for.
This post is an attempt to give you some of those words.
Val
For most of my marriage I carried a feeling I couldn’t explain. A hollow pit in my stomach that appeared whenever I let myself get quiet enough to feel it. I told myself I had no right to it — we had a good life, a comfortable home, children I adored. I buried myself in raising them and tried not to think too hard about the feeling.
I thought the feeling would lift if circumstances changed. Each time something in our lives shifted — a new home, a new season, a new hope — I would feel a surge of relief. This is it. Now things will be different. And for a while they would seem different. But the feeling always came back.
I blamed myself. I wondered what was wrong with me — why I couldn’t simply be grateful for what I had. I visited doctors for physical symptoms that had no clear physical cause. I was eventually prescribed medication that helped me function but never touched the underlying thing. I was in survival mode for years without fully knowing it.
The day I sat in a group therapy session and heard a counselor describe “crazy-making” — I went very still. He was describing something that had been happening in my life for years. For the first time, I had a name for it. And the name changed everything.
The experience of not knowing
When something is genuinely wrong in a marriage — when one partner is hiding something, struggling with something, or causing harm in ways that are subtle and hard to see — the other partner often feels the effects long before they understand the cause. The confusion, the self-doubt, the physical symptoms, the persistent low-grade sadness — these are not signs of weakness or instability. They are signs of a person responding, quite reasonably, to an environment that does not make sense.
The cruel irony is that this response — the anxiety, the tearfulness, the questioning of one’s own perceptions — can itself become evidence of the problem. You seem unstable, so clearly you are the unstable one. You are too sensitive. You are imagining things. You remember it wrong.
Over time, the person on the receiving end of this begins to internalize it. They stop trusting their own instincts. They stop bringing up what they notice. They learn to manage their reactions carefully, to keep the peace, to avoid the conversations that seem to go nowhere except to leave them feeling worse. They become, in a very real sense, a stranger to themselves.
Crazy-making and gaslighting — when confusion becomes the pattern
“Crazy-making” is a term used in therapy to describe the experience of being made to feel irrational, oversensitive, or unstable by someone whose behavior is actually causing the distress. It is not a clinical diagnosis — it is a description of an experience. And for many people who hear it for the first time, it lands like a key turning in a lock.
Gaslighting goes further. The term comes from a 1944 film in which a husband systematically manipulates his wife into believing she is losing her mind — dimming the gaslights in their home and then denying that anything has changed. In relationships, gaslighting involves a persistent pattern of denying reality, rewriting history, and causing a partner to doubt their own perceptions. It is a form of emotional and psychological abuse.
When the pattern is persistent — when you consistently leave interactions feeling confused, ashamed, or as though your own reality cannot be trusted — that is worth taking seriously. That is worth bringing to a counselor. That is worth naming out loud.
A common experience
When her husband’s hidden behavior finally came to light, Lisa was less shocked by what he had done than by what she recognized in herself — a constant low-level anxiety she had carried for years, a sense that things were not what they seemed, a feeling of walking on ground that might shift without warning. She had visited her doctor repeatedly for physical symptoms. She had wondered if she was depressed. She had prayed earnestly to know what was wrong with her.
When a counselor told her that her body had been responding to a real threat — that her instincts had been correct all along — she felt two things at once: a profound relief, and a grief she hadn’t expected. She had spent years doubting herself. Those years could not be returned to her. But she could, at last, stop doubting herself now.
Compassion — and its limits
Most people reading this are not looking for permission to be angry or to give up. They are looking for understanding. They want to know how to love their spouse well while also making sense of what is happening to them. That impulse — toward compassion, toward patience, toward giving the benefit of the doubt — is a beautiful one. It is Christlike. We don’t want to talk you out of it.
But compassion has to be honest to be real. And honest compassion includes the recognition that some things cannot be fixed by loving harder. Some things require professional help. Some things require honesty from the person who is struggling. And some things — this is the hardest part — are not happening accidentally.
There is a meaningful difference between a spouse who is causing harm because they are struggling with something they don’t fully understand — and a spouse who understands exactly what they are doing and chooses to continue. Both deserve compassion. But they require very different responses from you.
Val
For most of my marriage I defaulted to compassion. I believed in giving the benefit of the doubt. I believed that love could cover a great deal, and that patience and faithfulness would eventually be enough. I still believe those things are right and good — as a starting place.
But I have also come to understand something I didn’t know then: compassion and self-protection are not opposites. You can have genuine compassion for someone — wish them healing, carry no bitterness, pray for their well-being — and still recognize that remaining in a harmful situation is not required of you. These two things can be true at the same time.
If you are in a place right now where you constantly ask yourself what is wrong with you — please hear this: seek help. Not because something is wrong with you. But because you deserve to understand what you are actually experiencing. The language, when it finally arrives, is one of the most clarifying and freeing things you will ever receive. I know because I lived without it for a very long time, and then one day I didn’t. Everything looked different after that.
What to do when you can’t name it yet
Seek counseling. Not because you are broken, but because you deserve a safe place to understand what you are experiencing. A good therapist can help you find language for things that feel unnameable, and help you distinguish between your own patterns and what is being done to you.
Trust your body. Chronic pain, anxiety, sleeplessness, persistent sadness without clear cause — these are not signs that you are falling apart. They are your body’s honest response to something real. They are worth paying attention to.
Be gentle with yourself. The self-blame that comes with this experience is almost universal — and almost always wrong. You have been doing the best you could with what you had.
Don’t carry it alone. A trusted friend, an ecclesiastical leader, a counselor — someone safe who can hear what you are carrying without judgment. The moment you say it out loud to someone who truly listens, something begins to loosen.
Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.
Matthew 11:28In the posts that follow we’ll go deeper — into mental illness, personality disorders, and the specific dynamics they create in marriage. But we wanted to begin here. With the feeling that has no name yet. With the hollow pit and the bargains and the hope that this time things will be different.
A word of caution
Not every experience of this hollow feeling points to something your spouse is doing. The pit in the stomach, the low-grade unease, the sense that something is not right — these can also arise from unresolved trauma carried from long before your marriage, from a strained relationship with a parent or sibling or close friend, from grief, from your own untended wounds.
This matters. Misidentifying the source of your pain — or applying words like “gaslighting” to a spouse who is simply different from you, or struggling, or failing without intent — can cause real harm to a relationship and to a person who does not deserve it. Not every miscommunication is manipulation. Not every difference in memory is deception. Not every painful pattern is abuse.
This is one of the most important reasons to seek professional guidance rather than navigate this alone. A good counselor can help you find the source — wherever it actually is — with honesty and care. That is a gift worth seeking.
Whatever you are carrying right now — the feeling without a name, the questions without answers, the confusion that has been your companion longer than you can say — we see it. Understanding is possible. Language is possible. Peace is possible. Not on a timeline you can control. But it is possible. We have lived it.
— Val & Bruce
When you’re ready, the next post continues the journey.
Mental illness in marriage — what we’re actually dealing with →About this site
Peace After Pain is written by Val and Bruce — two people who have been through divorce and found healing on the other side. The content here is for informational and educational purposes and is not a substitute for professional advice. If you are in a difficult or dangerous situation, please seek help from a licensed counselor, your ecclesiastical leader, or appropriate authorities.
About Val & Bruce →