A Letter to My Boyfriend about My Hurt Feelings: 7 Priceless Life Lessons

Inside: Discover 7 invaluable, empowering lessons from a letter to my boyfriend about my hurt feelings. Don’t forget to download your free checklist to neutralize your boyfriend’s hurtful words and actions.

Suddenly, shame presses down on me and my head feels too heavy for my neck. My chin hits my chest and my body shrinks back into the sofa. The flutter of my speeds up as they try to keep my tears from spilling over at his barrage of words. Each new round slices open my soul just a little more than the last.

“I don’t even know why I love you anymore,” he spits out at me.

His final, carefully aimed words leave me dumbstruck as they find their mark with cruel precision. Then he spins around and stalks away, disgust marring his features. And me—a silent, hemorrhaging mess on the sofa, watching him go, feeling even more worthless than usual.

After endless minutes, I summon just enough strength to stand, drag myself off to bed, and crawl under the covers. Lying on my side, staring sightlessly out the window, I seem calm…detached even. Not surprising since my brain feels foggy and sluggish.

My unspoken comebacks to his accusations are an incoherent mess in my mind. My words of defense, of disagreement, of pleading stay trapped inside me. Won’t I only make things worse if I say them now?

But the venom from his poison arrows is already seeping into my wounded soul and I have to flush it out somehow.

So I pull out my secret journal and write a letter to my boyfriend about my hurt feelings.

Bonus: As a bonus for joining my weekly newsletter, get this free printable download—The Blame Game Grand Slam Checklist. It gives you 6 unusual tips to win back your peace when it’s always your fault.

A Letter to My Boyfriend Who Hurt Me to the Core

Honey, I feel like this is all my fault and I should apologize.

Remember our first disagreement when you said, “What‘s wrong with this woman? No other woman I know would ever be like this.” From then, I should have known I wasn’t who you needed me to be. 

Every time you’ve said it since, I end up feeling unworthy, small, and ridiculous. It hurts when you compare me to other women, more so because I always come up short. But I don’t know how to call you out on it without causing more tension in our relationship.

Even when I manage to restore peace between us, I’m always on edge—trying not to upset our uneasy balance; praying against another storm; carefully choosing every word and action so I don’t say or do something wrong.

The tension is killing me. And your cutting words only make it worse, each one slicing away another piece of my soul.

Still, every time you find a new problem in me, I try to change. See, you’re the one person whose acceptance I’m desperate for and the one person who refuses to give it to me. Yet I keep trying to earn it because all I want is to be worthy of your love. Do you see why it destroys me to know you still don’t see me as good enough for you?

The truth is, I know you love the woman you’re trying to mold me into. But deep down, I also know I’ll never be her, no matter how hard I try.

Honey, I just don’t like who I’m becoming with you, living in constant fear of what you’ll say next. I’m bleeding out from the wounds you’ve inflicted. And I don’t know how much longer I’ll survive.

Why Write a Letter to Your Boyfriend Expressing Hurt Feelings?

This isn’t a hypothetical situation. It happened to me for years. If it’s happening to you too, please know how sorry I am. Having been in your shoes, I feel your pain down to the marrow of my bones.

I tried speaking up about my pain but I always failed because my boyfriend was a pro at turning everything around on me. And I swallowed all of his poisonous lies like they were the truth.

As you can imagine, I felt dismissed and victimized in what I now know was a toxic relationship. So I wrote that letter to my boyfriend expressing my hurt feelings only in the privacy of my secret journal.

I never delivered it because I didn’t have the confidence to confront his unacceptable treatment, or the courage to face the inevitable fallout.

But let’s you and I have a heart-to-heart talk about this letter to my boyfriend about feeling unloved, unworthy, and rejected. Because as it turns out, your situation is painful but you don’t have to suffer more than necessary.

Then I’ll show you how to write your own letter to your boyfriend about your hurt feelings. So you can leech out the poison and feel like your wonderful, amazing self again.

7 Invaluable Lessons from a Letter to My Boyfriend about My Hurt Feelings

As it turns out, you can learn a few lessons from my undelivered letter to my boyfriend expressing my hurt feelings. These lessons are from 2 perspectives.

• Things outside of yourself—what you can’t control.
• Things inside yourself—your thoughts and feelings, which you can control.

Let’s start with the outside and work our way inward since your inner world is where you can make a real difference in your situation.

Related: My Man Hurt Me Emotionally: How to Feel Good Anyway

A word of warning though: I’m dropping truth bombs all over the place. Some of them may be hard to swallow. But just remember—the truth is what sets you free to heal your hurt and feel whole again.

1. He’s playing a game of emotional manipulation.

If you’re in a situation like I was, where your boyfriend compares you to other women, you should know one crucial fact: When someone starts comparing you to other people, it’s usually to manipulate you into doing something they want.

They may think their hurtful words are in your best interests. Heck, they may even believe it for real. But they’re usually lying—yep, even to themselves.

Every adult human on Earth knows: Comparison is a loser’s game that only makes you feel small. By comparing you to these mysterious other women who behave how he wants you to behave, he knows you’ll feel inferior. And he knows you’ll try changing yourself to please him—because you love him—and to feel better. And voilà, you’ve let yourself successfully be manipulated.

But here’s the thing: If he genuinely wanted what was best for you, he wouldn’t be comparing you to anyone.

Pay careful attention to your own work, for then you will get the satisfaction of a job well done, and you won’t need to compare yourself to anyone else. For we are each responsible for our own conduct.

Galatians 6:4-5 (NLT)

But maybe your boyfriend isn’t playing the comparison game. Maybe he uses more underhanded tactics, like the time my boyfriend said all I did was teach him patience because he didn’t know how he could have dealt with me otherwise. Can you see the subtle emotional abuse and manipulation? I mean, who says stuff like that to a partner they claim to love?

So here’s the deal. If he makes you—a grown woman who otherwise has her life together—feel like a naughty puppy who keeps pooping on the rug, you’re probably the victim of emotional manipulation.

Bonus: As a bonus for joining my weekly newsletter, get this free printable download—The Blame Game Grand Slam Checklist. It gives you 6 unusual tips to win back your peace when it’s always your fault.

2. He doesn’t love the real you.

How long have you been chipping away at this exhausting, impossible task? Changing bits, pieces, and whole parts of yourself to be good enough for him. Probably years.

And in all this time, what lasting changes have you made? Real changes in areas where you haven’t fake changed just to keep the peace. Probably very few. Because in your innermost heart, you never truly believed you needed to change, so you only pretended to.

Related: Why Am I Not Good Enough for Him? This Answer Will Make You Feel Better

When will you finally be the woman he wants you to be? The woman he can love fully?

I’m sorry to tell you, my darling, but the answer is never. You’re not perfect—no one is—and something about you will always be less than ideal for him.

I have seen everything that is done under the sun, and behold, all is vanity and a striving after wind. What is crooked cannot be made straight, and what is lacking cannot be counted.

Ecclesiastes 1:14-15 (ESV)

Your efforts to change who you are so he’ll finally love you as you are? Girl, you’re wasting your time.

Besides, your willpower won’t magically make you change into the woman he’s trying to force you to be. What’s more, nothing you do can make him love you. He has to decide on his feelings about you all on his own.

3. You’re trying to plug a hole he can’t fill.

As you can plainly see from my letter to my boyfriend about my hurt feelings, all I wanted was his unconditional love. I bet you’re after the same thing from your man.

Here’s the thing though. You’ll never get it from him the way you want, not in a way that fully satisfies you. This is mainly because you’re expecting him to fill a hole in your heart meant for God alone.

He has made everything beautiful in its time. He also has planted eternity in men’s hearts and minds [a divinely implanted sense of a purpose working through the ages which nothing under the sun but God alone can satisfy], yet so that men cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.

Ecclesiastes 3:11 (AMPC)

So even if the impossible happens and you manage to change enough for your boyfriend to finally love you as you are, you still won’t be satisfied. All because of the God-sized hole in your heart.

Those first 3 lessons cover the perspective from outside yourself, which boils down to this: Even if you can magically change yourself enough to suit your man, you still won’t be happy because he’ll never fill God’s space in your heart.

Moving from the Disheartening outside View to the Empowering Inside One

What a dismal view! Mainly because it’s completely dependent on someone else’s decisions and actions. Which, to be honest, you’re trying to control.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa there, sister!” you say. “I’m not trying to control anybody!”

I mean…aren’t you?

Your boyfriend is trying to control you—manipulating you to change—by using his elusive love as a weapon. Meanwhile, you’re trying to control his feelings—getting him to love you—by changing yourself to suit him.

This all sucks and is a complete waste of your time because you can’t control another human being. You can try but you’ll fail since no one wants to be controlled and manipulated. Not even master manipulators.

Don’t despair though. The view from the outside isn’t rainbows and unicorns but the view from the inside is bursting with hope.

You see, I didn’t know this back when I was writing my infamous letter to my boyfriend who hurt me but there’s one thing in this world you can control—you.

You have 100% control over what you think, feel, and do. Even if you think you don’t, you absolutely do. If it wasn’t true, the Bible wouldn’t say this:

Yes, each of us will give a personal account to God.

Romans 14:12 (NLT)

How can you give a personal account of something over which you have no control? You can’t.

Plus, if it wasn’t true, someone else would be responsible for your thoughts, feelings, and actions. How disempowering!

Good thing it’s true and you get to choose how you think, feel, and act every single day. Let’s see this play out in the case of your boyfriend hurting your feelings.

4. You decide what you think.

Like most people, you probably believe your thoughts are involuntary but they aren’t. You train yourself to think in certain ways then your thoughts become a habit. It’s how your brain works.

This means you can train yourself to think new thoughts. It’s called the renewing of your mind.

Don’t copy the behavior and customs of this world, but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think. Then you will learn to know God’s will for you, which is good and pleasing and perfect.

Romans 12:2 (NLT)

The whole “changing the way you think” part doesn’t happen by magic though. It happens when you become aware of your current thoughts. Then you decide and practice what you want to spend your precious mental energy thinking about instead.

So what are your thoughts about your current situation?

Don’t just let them run amok, bouncing off the walls of your mind and creating more confusion for you. You’ll only get to the heart of what you’re thinking if you get proactive.

Do this by using journaling prompts or doing a brain dump. Get your thoughts out on paper, into your phone’s note app, or in a document on your tablet or computer.

Write out all of your confusion, pain, and grief. Remember, this is private, between you and God, and no one has to see it if you don’t want to share. So don’t hold back.

Nothing useful will come of censoring or judging your thoughts, so just let them come. Then re-read your writing and journal your thoughts about that too:

• How do you feel about what you’re thinking? Are you surprised? Sad? Angry?
• Why do you feel this way about what you’re thinking?
• Are you judging yourself for your thoughts? If yes, why?
• Are your thoughts useful or helpful in your current situation? Why or why not?
• What do you want to think instead? Why?

5. You decide how you feel.

You don’t just “feel however you feel” or “can’t help how you feel.” Your thoughts cause your feelings.

Just think: Why can two people take the exact same actions but one makes you feel offended while the other doesn’t? It’s because of your thoughts.

So how do you feel about your current situation? Now, this is important so pay attention: A feeling is one word, not a sentence.

This means, “I feel like he’ll never love me,” isn’t a feeling; it’s a thought. But “rejected” is a feeling.

Write a brain dump of all your one-word feelings about your current situation. If you’re struggling to identify your feelings, you can Google, “feelings list” and draw from that.

Also, if any of your feelings spur additional thoughts, add those and any other associated thoughts to your brain dump from the previous step.

Then review your feelings dump and journal about them too:

• Did any of your feelings surprise you? Why?
• How have these feelings been serving you in your situation?
• Do you want to keep feeling this way? Why or why not?
• How do you want to feel instead?
• What thoughts can help you feel the way you want to feel?

6. You decide what you want.

Next up for your journal: Barring your man magically behaving differently, what do you want from this situation?

Remember, he’s an adult so—just like you—he’s free to make his own decisions. This means you can’t control his thoughts, feelings, or actions; you can only control yours.

If you’re having trouble answering this question independent of him miraculously becoming a different person, try one of these questions to jump-start your journaling:

• What’s your wish list for your relationship?
• What did you think your relationship would be like at this age or stage?
• If you had a chance at a clean slate, what would your relationship look like?
• If you could re-make the decisions that brought you here, would you make the same ones? Why or why not?

Answering these questions helps you to see the gap between your reality and what you truly want. This is the gap causing your unhappiness.

7. You can decide to be your own best friend.

It’s time to be your own best friend, my darling. Not the girlfriend you call up when things get awful. But you—looking out for yourself 100% of the time, wanting what’s best for yourself, giving yourself the unconditional love you want from your boyfriend.

What would you tell yourself to do if you truly were your very best friend and loved yourself just as you are? What would you want for yourself?

Write in your journal every single piece of advice you’d give yourself if you wanted the best for yourself.

If you’re struggling to start, imagine yourself feeling happy and whole—completely loved, accepted, and worthy. What advice would that version of you give to current you about what you’re going through? Write it all out.

Then go deeper with your journaling:

• How do you feel about Best Friend You’s advice? Remember, a feeling is one word, like scared, apprehensive, or hopeful. Write all the feelings you have about the advice from Best Friend You.
• Do you want to take her advice? Why or why not?
• What’s the worst that could happen if you took her advice?
• What’s the best that could happen if you took her advice?
• How do you feel about these possible outcomes?

So…Should I Tell Him He Hurt My Feelings?

Assuming you’re not in a Sleeping with the Enemy situation, the answer to this question depends on who you want to be in your relationship. Do you want to be a woman of integrity who values open, honest communication, and who tells the truth in love to yourself and your boyfriend?

Or would you rather be like me back when I secretly wrote a letter to my boyfriend about my hurt feelings and never delivered it—a stressed-out mess of a woman, suppressing her feelings for fear of losing the relationship she poured her heart, body, and resources into for nearly 10 years. A woman who didn’t believe in herself enough to have her own back, be her own best friend, and know she could handle whatever fallout came from being honest and truthful.

The choice is yours.

If I had it to do again, I would either write a letter to my boyfriend expressing my hurt feelings, then give it to him, or I’d sit him down and talk it out. Either of those options would create one of 2 best-case results: it would make our relationship better or mercifully hasten the end of it.

What I wouldn’t do again is keep my feelings to myself.

Don’t Forget God’s Love Letter to You

One more critical thing to consider as you think about writing a letter to your boyfriend about your hurt feelings: What does God want for you?

I can’t answer this question for you. Neither can your pastor, friend, or counselor. You need to hear directly from God on this. So search His word for His feelings towards you (including why you need to know who you are in Christ!).

Related: Why Is God Silent in My Life? 5 Simple but Surprising Reasons

Once you have a handle on how much God loves you, you need to go directly to Him, submit yourself, and ask Him what He wants you to do about this situation with your boyfriend.

Pour your heart out to Him in prayer then stop talking and listen so you can hear God’s voice. Quiet your internal chatter and give Him a chance to answer you.

Call to me and I will answer you, and will tell you great and hidden things that you have not known.

Jeremiah 33:3 (ESV)

Then do what God tells you, which is always the best path, no matter how scary it seems.

How Do I Express My Hurt Feelings to My Boyfriend?

Whether you’re writing a letter to your boyfriend who hurt you or you’ve decided to sit and talk with him about your hurt feelings, you can use these tips. As you do, remember to keep your power by doing the inner work:

1. You decide what you think—your thoughts aren’t at his mercy so don’t abdicate your mental health to him.
2. You decide how you feel—your emotions aren’t at his mercy either. Don’t abdicate your emotional power to him or anyone else.
3. You decide what you want—you’re a grown woman and you get to choose every step you take. So don’t give away your power of choice.
4. You decide if you’ll be your own best friend—you don’t have to wait for anyone to rescue you. You can be your own best friend and rescue yourself.

Having said all that, here are the steps to take when you want to let your boyfriend know about your hurt feelings.

1. Get clear about your feelings.

Writing a letter to your boyfriend about your hurt feelings, or talking to him about it, will go downhill real fast if you don’t know exactly how you feel and why.

“Hurt” is a good start but what else? Are you feeling rejected? Betrayed? Resentful? Furious? Disappointed? Worthless? Unsure?

If you’re struggling to find the right feelings words, use this simple list of emotions to help expand your emotional vocabulary.

Getting crystal clear on all your feelings will help you know yourself better and avoid being taken off guard by your boyfriend. Believe me, if he’s an emotional manipulator like my ex was, he’ll come out swinging, ready to turn things around on you. So you need to be ready.

Once you’ve pinpointed your feelings of hurt and beyond, dig into why you’re feeling each emotion. This will help you know yourself even better by helping you surface the hidden thoughts causing your emotional reaction to your boyfriend.

2. Take responsibility for your hurt feelings.

Remember, your man isn’t making you feel anything. Your thoughts about what your boyfriend said or did are what’s making you feel hurt. And when you acknowledge this truth, you take back all of your power.

Now, this isn’t to say you shouldn’t feel hurt. If your boyfriend’s been a jerk, of course you want to feel hurt by his jerkiness!

All I’m asking is for you to be honest with yourself about what’s causing your hurt feelings—your own thoughts, not his actions.

Keep this in mind too: As you take your power back by taking responsibility for your emotional life, you also get to decide on your standards—the treatment you’ll accept and what’s not OK with you. You get to draw boundary lines around your life and no one gets to cross them unless you allow it.

3. Share your hurt feelings with your boyfriend.

Once you’re clear on your feelings and you’ve taken responsibility for them (don’t you feel better already?), then you’re ready to tell your boyfriend about your hurt feelings.

Whether you write a letter to your boyfriend about your hurt feelings and give it to him, or you have a sit-down, heart-to-heart talk with him, go into this part of the process knowing he may not react the way you want. You’re on a journey of emotional growth but he may not be, which is OK because we’re all on different journeys.

The key to sharing your hurt feelings with your boyfriend is remembering this: His response is none of your business. He gets to choose what to do with what you’ve shared.

4. Forgive your boyfriend for hurting your feelings, not for him but for you.

Once you’ve shared your feelings—from a place of love for yourself and him—then you can move on to forgiving him for the hurt he caused.

You don’t need him to ask your forgiveness in order to give it. Heck, you don’t even have to tell him you forgive him. But you need to do it for yourself so you don’t let bitterness take root and poison you, alongside whatever he said or did to land you in this situation in the first place.

You may have to forgive him a million times before the hurt releases its grip on you. But no matter how hard it is, give yourself this gift. You’ll be a better woman for it.

A Letter to My Boyfriend about My Hurt Feelings Can Change Your Life

Back when my boyfriend’s favorite sport was ripping me to shreds with his words, I would stay curled up in bed for hours, hidden under the covers, hoping they would protect my wounded heart. All the while, the words I was afraid to say trembled on the tip of my tongue but remained unsaid except in the privacy of my secret journal.

But you, my darling, don’t have to cower in fear like I did. You can write a letter to your boyfriend about your hurt feelings then do whatever you want with it: keep it secret forever, give it to him, or use it as a practice run for the conversation you’re going to have with him.

Whatever you do, don’t be like I was. Don’t keep walking on eggshells, waiting for the next time he lashes out and hurts your feelings, or you accidentally upset the delicate balance of your relationship through some imagined misstep.

Instead, let my letter to my boyfriend about my hurt feelings inspire you to become the best friend you’ll ever have—a woman who makes new decisions that lead to joy, peace, and healing.

Remember, whatever you decide, the choice is yours.

So the Lord must wait for you to come to him so he can show you his love and compassion. For the Lord is a faithful God. Blessed are those who wait for his help.

Isaiah 30:18 (NLT)

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