Institute of Step-Family Dynamics

Tag: relationship advice

  • Giving Space – Relationship Tip

    Giving Space – Relationship Tip

    So often I hear from clients – s/he was not happy when I expressed my boundary, or s/he gets so mad when I say what I need. My answer is consistently – well of course!

    Who likes being told no or that something that works for them needs to change, or that they have disappointed their partner. Absolutely no-one – that’s who!

    One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned is I have learned to give space to my hunny when he is not feeling the love. He hates upsetting or disappointing me and when he hears something that indicates that, he will often shut down and seem really grumpy.

    Today is a case in point. I bought a caravan/trailer to be converted into my office 6 months ago. The plan was for it to be done in a month. My husband got really sick, we moved house. Six months later I’m close to the end of month 3 of working out of our bedroom.

    My darling had grand plans for how he would build everything from scratch for me. He has completely gutted the interior, insulated it, relined it etc. We are now down to the wire and I have a goal of being in by the end of next weekend. His goal is to paint this week and be making shelving and a desk next weekend.

    I have been reading articles on home offices and scrolling pinterest for months. Today I saw an article that was a game changer. Track shelving!! Why didn’t I think of this before? Mainly because I associated it with dodgy commercial building outfits and thought it looked cheap and nasty. My eyes were opened to the possibility. My brain went – this doesn’t require much building and zero painting. I could be moving my stuff in next weekend!!

    The response from my darling was muted at best. I had, quite frankly, pissed on his parade. His vision of what he was creating for me just got shoved sideways in a big way. I asked, far too many times, if he was ok. He said he was fine in the ‘I am not fine but please just leave me alone’ way I know too well.

    So I did just that. I gave him space. I researched and found the best place to go and look. I went to go call him about desk leg options and saw I had missed a call. It was a call asking about where I wanted to go to buy shelving.

    He had taken the time and given himself space to process the change in plan and was ready to show up and support me. Giving him space to do that gave him time to get there without us experiencing a disconnect.

    When we change plans suddenly or switch up what we expect, it’s important we give our partners space to process and adjust. If we make a request that isn’t their favourite, we need to give them time to feel angry or upset or hurt. Expecting someone to jump for joy and be immediately on board is not only unrealistic, it’s also unreasonable.

    PS – this approach also works well for boundary setting! Just rinse and repeat.

  • Getting Lost In The Other

    Getting Lost In The Other

    For a long time, I felt I needed to launch this website with others. I needed the support and the validation. What I was really telling myself was that I was not enough alone to stand in this place. In placing myself at the whim and will of others, I felt powerless. I was in a place of constant lack, I needed this or that from someone else. Whether it was help from my husband, or more qualifications, or a business partner, or someone to provide a service…those barriers kept cropping up. They ‘cropped up’ for more than 10 years. In hindsight, it took me 10 years to come to place where I was enough. It took me 10 years to come to place where I felt I was worth spending $100, $1200 or $2,000 on, to launch my website and business.

    Getting lost in the other has been a long time ‘friend’. It was a pattern in my first marriage. I constantly talked about ‘we’ needed to do things, if ‘we’ are doing something there is no responsibility to take ownership. The thing gets lost in the ‘we’ and I get to sit there helplessly playing the victim, blaming the other for the lack of progress and letting myself off the hook completely. It takes time and some uncomfortable reflecting to shift that thinking, to find the strength and confidence to make the ‘we’ into me.

    We all need help and support, don’t get me wrong. I am not able to do everything I need to do to pull this project off alone. It’s finding the line between giving away our power and reaching out when we need to. I agonised over what the call the site, I asked different groups of people over and over. Nothing I got back felt right. It several incarnations till I settled on Step-Family Dynamics. This was something I had to do myself. It was not a group effort gig. There are other parts of this journey that are something that can be a group effort gig. I am incredibly blessed with those I have around me; writers to contribute their stories, a very supportive husband, who has vast knowledge I can tap into. The difference between tapping into his knowledge and expecting him to do this for me is the difference between accomplishing my goal and not. It’s not because he is unwilling to help, it’s because it’s not his dream. It’s not his priority and while he is more than willing to make time to help me, quite understandably, he is not willing to make my dream his.

    When we get lost in the ‘we’, often what we are asking of those we make part of the ‘we’ is to take on our dream, to live by our values, to share our priorities. We get disappointed when they don’t, we feel let down, unsupported, and abandoned. How about we let them, and ourselves, off the hook? What would that look like? How about instead of passively expecting others to come on board with our plans, we specifically asked for their help in areas they feel comfortable helping? Instead of looking for co-pilots, we take control of our own vehicle, steer our own course.

    When we take charge of our journey, we disentangle ourselves from the murky depths of the ‘we’. We stop getting lost in the other and return home to ourselves. We send ourselves the very clear message ‘you are enough, you have enough’. Independence is not about cutting ourselves off from others and becoming like the little red hen who does it all herself. It’s about taking responsibility for our journey, for the route, the provisioning, and the help we need to access along the way.

    What are you currently getting lost in the other with? Where is your ‘we’ crying out to become ‘me’?

    Recently I have come to a place where I am now able to bring others in to work with, not because I need them, but because I am solid enough in my own doing. I’m not looking for them to fill gaps or do things that scare, I have learned the value of trusting my own capabilities and utilising the skills of others.

    We need to get solid in our own sense of being enough. If we gift ourselves that, we are no longer willing to give away our potency to ‘the other’.

  • 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?