“This is not what I signed up for” How talking about the sub-text can heal your relationship 1


One of the biggest relationship mistakes that people make is to express anger instead of fear or sadness.    That anger often arises from a sense of betrayal derived from the idea that an unwritten rule has been broken, the thought being ‘This is not what I signed up for’.    But more often than not, instead of sharing the thoughts and feelings underneath it all, we ignore the elephant in the room and fight about the symptoms instead of the causes.

For Brad and Julie it all started when they had twins, right around the time he got his big promotion.   All of a sudden their worlds were upside down.   Between recovering from the caesarian and taking care of two babies with colic, Julie was completely overwhelmed and couldn’t wait for Brad to get home from work to give her a break.

She had so looked forward to becoming a mother and now she felt utterly blind-sided by the reality.   Worse still, after everything they had been through to successfully become pregnant and have the twins, she felt guilty for feeling anything other than grateful and delighted.

She couldn’t talk about what she was going through because she was too ashamed to admit that she wasn’t feeling the anticipated joy.   Secretly, she was even jealous that Brad got to go to work each day.   The thought of getting paid to sit at a desk for 8 hours seemed like a picnic compared to her reality.

Brad was feeling pretty stressed out too, a lot was riding on the way he handled his new role.  It was not a challenge he had wanted to take on, but with college tuition for twins to think about, not to mention what they had spent on IVF, he hadn’t felt like he had much of a choice.

The additional responsibility made him feel like he was chained to a treadmill and he felt a secret resentment that he had given up so much for this dream that he wasn’t sure was even his anymore.   He began to dread going home, longing for a chance to unwind from the stress of the day before he entered the chaos that lay inside his front door that would consume him till the alarm told him it was ready to get up and go to work again.

Their relationship was suffering mightily.   Each of them became increasingly resentful that the other didn’t see how hard things were for them.  Stress and sleep deprivation turned the slightest thing into a down-and-dirty fight.  Sex?  You had to be kidding.     Even when they weren’t fighting, they barely made eye contact as they tag-teamed their shifts with the twins.

So Brad began to get home a little later, at first it was sporadic but then it turned into an almost daily pattern; accompanied by the fight on the phone as she called him at the end of the day and he told her he had to work late.     But he didn’t work late.   He left work right on time and went to the gym.   Reasoning that it wasn’t as if he was going to the bar or cheating on her and she would only bitch and moan if he told the truth.

Julie just kept trying harder and harder to get him to understand how much she needed his help but Brad just withdrew and shut down.  In fact, the more desperate her attempts to get through to him, the thicker the wall he put up.

Things built up until neither trusted the other that they could express their vulnerability safely.      It quickly escalated into a raging competition of resentment – each trying harder and harder to convince the other that they were the real victim who deserved the sympathy.  When the other partner didn’t give them the support they hadn’t asked for, the hurt and disappointment just kept on growing to epic proportions.  It seemed as if the marriage wouldn’t last long enough to see the kids into kindergarten.

The biggest problem here was that neither Brad nor Julie were really honest either with themselves or with each other.     To begin with, they each had a degree of self-judgment and shame about what they were experiencing, (by comparison to how they thought they ought to feel).   They were terrified of how they might be judged if they were to say how they were really feeling.   They were stuck and yet they couldn’t admit to each other that they were scared and didn’t know how to deal with the situation they found themselves in.

It was much easier to react from a place anger, fuelled by a sense of betrayal, that the other partner was breaking one of the clauses in the implicit contracts of their relationship.   Every relationship has one of these, it starts on the first date with an understanding about who will pick up the check.     As time goes on, this contract gets longer and longer.  Once you get to the point of living together and having a family, it covers a multitude of things from who takes out the trash to who gets the final say in a decision about how money is spent.

What Brad and Julie needed to do was to firstly to express the fears and sadness beneath their anger and secondly, to explain exactly what their expectations of the other had been and why having those needs unmet felt so bad to them.   Put it another way, the time that Brad was coming home was not the problem.  The problem was about the subtext – When you come home late I feel ….   (unsupported, overwhelmed – fill in the blank),  when you call me every day to ask me when I am coming home I feel…   (taken for granted,  that my needs don’t matter to you etc.)   For both of them, the underlying feeling was that the other person no longer cared about their happiness or well-being.  For both of them, that was the most important thing to fix.

Only when you actually bring out into the open the unspoken agreements that your relationship is based upon can you begin to renegotiate solutions together.  Whilst it may sound rather clinical and dispassionate, this kind of approach is a very pragmatic way that you can most efficiently cooperate instead of just duking it out in the problem.

Before you can begin to do that, you need to be honest with yourself.   What is that you are really feeling?  What is that you really want? What are you afraid of?  9 times out of 10, this is going to involve admitting to some kind of fear:  examples might be, that you are afraid of getting trapped, that you are afraid that you have made a mistake, that you are afraid that you are not going to get a critical need met etc.   Own your truth no matter how different you wish it could be and how much you fear exposing it to others.

Once you know it, you need to choose the right moment to share it.    Call  a truce.   Ask you partner if you guys can try something and agree to take turns speaking and listening.  Use a kitchen timer if necessary.   No being defensive or blaming allowed.   Be someone who invites honesty from others without fear of repercussions.   Try to put yourself in their shoes.  Even when you just can’t feel sympathetic because of an overwhelming preoccupation with your own unmet needs, you can always choose to listen without judgment.   You could even honestly express that you wish you were able to sympathize at this time.   (Resisting the urge to explain that the reason for that is because they haven’t been doing x, y, and z.)

Agree to take a look at your relationship contract.   Find out if you both even agree as to what you thought was in it.   Did the other person even know what you were expecting from them? Do these agreements still work or make sense?  Where is their room to compromise?   Are their new areas which need to be agreed upon?  List your needs for each other in order of priority.   Make sure that you actually know how to make the other person feel loved, cared for and/or appreciated.    Check it out.    Be kind.  Be authentic.  Be vulnerable.  Consider whether you might just prefer being happy to being right.

Finally, always remember to use honesty wisely as a scalpel to reveal the truth with love, not as a weapon to wound the other.      Try talking about the sub-text, you may just find that the truth will set you free.

 


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