Institute of Step-Family Dynamics

Tag: Couple

  • Beyond Repair?

    Beyond Repair?

    We have some dining chairs that have seen better days. I’ve spent months trying to justify replacing them with something new and fancy. Between my scrooge-like and greenie tendencies, buying new chairs when we have perfectly serviceable ones is a hard sell. Too hard, it seems.

    So I decided that I would repair the 17 year old chairs. They are plywood and some of the laminate had begun to lift. Between that and the varnish that was very patchy, some wood putty and a paint job seemed like the solution. They may well last another 17 years and the trials of 7 children and associated family and friends.

    Yesterday I broke out the wood putty I’d purchased the day before. I didn’t get the tiny tin because I knew there were quite a few of the 6 chairs needing repairs. I puttied up the first chair. Easy! I then went looking for the next one.

    Nope, not that one. Nope, nope, nope, nope. Wait what? I went round again inspecting more slowly.

    Oh my goodness! The falling apart dining chairs was in fact a single chair. I have spent the last couple of years solid in the belief my set of dining room chairs were on their last legs. This was absolutely a false belief.

    One single chair had 2 areas of peeling laminate. A quick run over with wood putty sorted it out. I have put this off for so long because it seemed like such a daunting job! The sanding and painting will take some time, for sure. But the repairing of the broken chair…quite literally took a couple of minutes.

    It set me to musing.

    How often do we feel something is very broken, or will take a huge amount to repair, or needs replacing, when it is actually a simple fix. I was sorting clothes with one of my daughters, her favourite top had a pull in the fabric, she was about to get rid of it. I said I could fix it. I pulled the threads back through. It was fiddly. I swore a bit, but in the end, she had her top back. A top that previously she had thought was lost to her.

    These simple repair jobs remind me of my work, especially relationship work. People usually wait to seek help when the wheels are falling off. Things are so bad they have come to the realisation they need help. Often the first session is filled with expressions of hopelessness and fear the relationship can’t be repaired. There seems to be so much wrong.

    As we work together and unpack what the issues are, the number of chairs that are damaged lessens. We begin to see the problem is often the same issue, it just wears lots of outfits and manifests itself in different ways. Fixing it is not the huge job it seems, because it is a single problem, not a whole dining suite.

    Focusing on what is broken or what is wrong can lead us to believe things are hopeless or broken beyond repair. Someone with the ability to see the larger picture than the everyday disconnects can see a pattern and identify the common thread. They can see it can be a relatively simple fix. A relationship that seems broken can be mended with the right skills, knowledge, and tools.

    Relationships can be hard work, they can feel unfixable. Just like the top and the chair, very often they can be repaired. If you are wondering how you can repair your relationship, contact me on [email protected] and we can discuss a repair or maintenance plan for you and your partner.

  • When Being Kind Ends Up Being Unkind

    When Being Kind Ends Up Being Unkind

    My darling and I are generally very easy-going people. Accommodating, understanding that sometimes life gets in the way and people make mistakes. Until we’re not. There is very little space between us being accommodating and then deciding the person we are dealing with is just taking the mickey.

    It’s been an on-going issue for years. When I look over my interactions with people, so often my response to them not following through or doing what they said they would is ‘No worries’. I mean it, I am not worried, I get life happens and things get challenging at times.

    I have also begun to realise this sets up a series of expectations around what I will accept. If I am not bothered by being let down once, I am then often relegated to the bottom of people’s priority list. When there are competing demands, my wants or needs will be pushed down the list for someone who is less kind, more vocal, and who makes disappointing them more unpleasant.

    My ‘no worries’ has a limited life span. This is something I fail to point out to people, when I generously throw around absolution for letting me down or not showing up. My ‘no worries’ sends a false message of accommodation that leads people to feel secure in my never-ending approbation and understanding.

    People are often shocked or hurt when I decide I have had enough and end the interaction, or stop being accommodating. They are surprised when I suddenly ‘am worried’ and hold them to account. They can often end up blaming me for this turn of events, and feel I am being unreasonable. Expecting them to follow through on what they have promised becomes something I have no right to expect, because I have taught them I will accept less than that.

    So, whose fault is that? Theirs for being flaky? Or mine for allowing them to believe I was going to accept flakiness forever?

    I have to believe it is mine. I set the tone, I lowered their expectations of what I would tolerate, my kindness was misinterpreted.

    Or does it go deeper than that? Are there some issues around entitlement that I need to unpack? Do I feel I deserve less than others?

    I think for a long time this was the case. I tolerated less, because I felt deserving of less. My sense of entitlement has shifted, but my go to responses to people who let me down have not. I am telling people it is ok to not perform, when actually I have an expectation they will, and it damages my regard of them when they don’t.

    My seeming kindness is actually unkind, to myself and to those around me. I short-change myself and set others up to damage their relationships with me, sometimes to the point of no return. I am unwittingly setting people up to fail. When I tell a client it’s fine they forgot to pay me, or tell the landlord it’s ok they haven’t done the repairs they said they would, I am telling people they can walk all over me. I am telling them, I don’t value me or my time, the implicit message in that is they shouldn’t value me or my time either.

    This can happen in our couple relationships. We let things go and let things go and then suddenly explode over a seemingly trivial matter. Keeping ourselves in balance sometimes means speaking up before we lose our shit! Being able to set a boundary when we are calm and centred is far more effective than losing it. The repair job takes up precious energy we could be spending on enjoying each other.

    What messages are you sending with your kindness and generosity?

    Is your kindness really kind? Or is it a fear of setting a much needed boundary?

  • When You’re All Out of Love

    When You’re All Out of Love

    This was a rough week in relationship world. I had a falling out with my husband. Notice the wording there – I had a falling out with my husband. As far as he was concerned, life was and should be fine. Something quite innocently thoughtless on his behalf ripped open a deep wound in me. It was a wound I thought I had healed reasonably well, but with the right triggers it became a gaping, festering wound in the space of a few hours. I wasn’t expecting to be wounded so easily,or for the pain to strike so deeply.

    My response was to retreat into being a bitch. I was grumpy, sullen, and obnoxious. My husband became my ‘bitch eating crackers’. It was amazing how the little things I usually gloss over as unimportant became huge faults and wrongdoings. Him leaving his wet towel on the bed resulted in me telling him to go and put it in the wash, the way he did the most simple things became a source of annoyance and disappointment. I was all out of love. The wound had sucked it out and its place was filling with disdain and disappointment.

    It shocked me how quickly I could go from being so in love with this man, to being so out of love. It reminded me of conversations I have with girlfriends when they have lost the loving feeling and their marriages have become chores and a source of stress. My hunny and I usually manage to avoid this cesspit of disappointment. Now I found that even with all of the work we have done, the safeguards we have in place; opening up a source of pain can quickly lead down paths that make you question your entire marriage and your regard for your formerly loved one.

    After 3 days of hating myself and my husband, I finally came clean with what the problem was. I asked him to listen to me and not to respond right away. I was too raw to deal with an argument or justifications and the topic was too painful for us to have a rational conversation immediately. He was able to hear me and just listen. He was unhappy, I could tell he felt parts of what I was saying were unfair, and possibly they were, but they were the festering sores I carry in the wound.

    It took courage to expose my deep fears, I worried about him rejecting what I had to say outright, or denying it, or trying to blame it on me. These were all things I had experienced in previous relationships, the gaslighting of making their failings mine. His response is why I love him and rarely am ‘all out of love’. As the day progressed, there was a thawing, when he came and hugged me and held me tight, I felt the love slowly seeping back.

    My innate response to these kinds of bumps in the road is to catastrophise, to want to run away, to shut off my feelings and leave. It’s easier to walk away than to deal with the painful feelings. I am a master at cutting people out of my life and walking away. It is my first response and one I battle each time my husband and I disconnect.

    We have spent the last couple of days being gentler and kinder to each other. We still have a way to go before we can address the wound and add another layer of salve to a wound that will probably be with me for life. This morning my husband responded in a negative way to a request for help. It brought up all the feelings of fear and rejection I had been experiencing throughout the week. One moment of him expressing annoyance at asking him for help with something he felt was trivial hurt me to the point of tears. It was then I realised that after having been ‘all out of love’ the reservoir of good will, security, and safety I felt in our relationship was low. Usually I would know this was just his way of dealing with what he felt was a demand when he was feeling stressed, not an indication he didn’t want to be married or no longer loved me. Being ‘out of love’ doesn’t just mean being out of love with our partner, it also means being unable to feel love from them.

    How many of you are ‘all out of love’ at the moment? How many are running on the fumes of goodwill and love?