This Attitude Hurts Your Relationship
Sometimes relationships get too polite and generous.
“What do you want to eat?“
“Whatever you’d like honey.”
”What show do you want to watch?”
“I doesn’t matter to me. You choose.“
“Where do you want to go out?”
“Whatever you want, dear.”
At first, this is considerate, but notice what happens when you keep this up for too long. When one person is continually deferring to the other, it is now conflict avoidance. You’ll know that you’ve reached this point when your partner is no longer happy with your generous answers. Now your conflict avoidance has create a new conflict, and this conflict is one that waits to be resolved at your end.
At some point, if you continue to defer your desire (ie. what you want), your partner will experience your lack of desire and it will hurt. They will sense that something is missing (ie. your desire for them), but it may be difficult for them to see what is missing behind your polite gestures. A part of them, will remember something missing from the beginning of the relationship -a feeling of desirability. That when was when you knew what you wanted and you went after it. It was your favourite food, a fascinating show, an adventure to go on …it was them.
Watch the video below on deferring dynamics and see that “a happy wife” is NOT the recipe for a happy life.
Over-Functioning Guilt and Learning to be Self-ish
An over-functioning experience of guilt is often hidden. Guilt hides on the other side of people-pleasing, over-responsibility, over functioning in relationships, over giving… It can be so well hidden that a person doesn’t even recognize that guilt is involved in making many of their day-to-day decisions. Issues come up when exhaustion sets in. It is eventually physically and emotionally exhausting to continually put others first and to deny priority to your own personal needs. The unfairness of relationships leads to feelings of obligation, resentment, and eventually anger. Anger is the body’s protest to unmet needs. Have you ever been “hangry” (ie. hungry-angry) before?
Now, with an undertone of anger, it is unpleasant to be around the very responsible, super giving, high functioning, people-pleaser. And now this bitter expereince is more for the person with an over-functioning experience of guilt to feel guilty about.
It’s time to attend to unanswered personal needs and to learn how to be self-ish. Want to develop a healthy relationship with guilt?
You had me at “hell no”!
Transcript:
(Scene from Jerry Maguire)
Jerry:
“I love you. You complete me. And if I just had...”
Dorothy:
“Shut up. Just shut up.....You had me at hello. You had me at hello.”
I think this scene captures well our aspirations for romantic love. Someone to love us and complete us, someone to make us whole.
But is this picture of love reality?
The psychoanalyst Lacan challenges this notion of love offering. Love is giving what you don't have to someone who doesn't want it. At first this sounds horribly pessimistic and even cynical, but I think there's something for us romantics to aspire to here.
He's saying that we all show up to relationships with holes, with flaws, with pieces that are missing. He calls it a “lack”. We tend to not even know about these holes until someone else is allowed to get up close and personal.
Our unsuspecting lover.
They thought we were going to be the perfect partner and we were just as surprised as they were to find something repulsive.
What's possible now in this relationship when this flaw can't be hidden again, it can't be fixed, it can't be ignored, and the possibility of love suggested by Lacan, our partner, rather than despising us because of this flaw, might stick around and stay with us in our disappointment. They might comfort us in our distress over this newfound flaw and we might also comfort them in their distress. In an extraordinary irony our flaw becomes the very sight of endearment. The very sight of secure love, and over time comforting love gives way to a secure bond.
Love is giving what you don't have to someone who doesn't want it.
Your partner will eventually bring you face to face with what's missing and it will be upsetting for both of you. They won't complete you and you won't complete them, but instead you might bring each other a deeply securing comfort.
It's not a perfect relationship, but it might be much better than that.
“Shame on You!”
Why must you wear the shame?
What do I hope to accomplish with the shame on you?
Why must anyone wear the shame?
Where did the shame come from in the first place?
Who is wearing it now?
“Shame is a soul eating emotion.”
When I declare “shame on you”, I am trying to escape “shame on me”. Shame is a proverbial hot potato of intolerable soul eating emotion so unbearable that it is unwittingly passed on to anyone within immediate range.
In my reassignment of this dreadful burden, I cannot send it away. Nor can I change the “undesirable” quality in you, mirroring undesirability in myself, and rousing a smoldering internal anguish. This banishment will only deny your rescuing comfort and bury this dangerous grievance more inaccessibly within myself. The projected punishment of “shame on you” represents a more critical occupation of “shame on me” crying out to you for desperate relief.
But what if instead of sending you away with my burden of shame on you, I confided to you the shame on me.
“Shame cannot survive being spoken. It cannot survive empathy”