Episode 112: We’re Fine!

Welcome to the Loving Truth podcast, where it's all about finding clarity, confidence, and peace in the face of marriage challenges. And now, your host, relationship expert and certified master life coach, Sharon Pope. Hello, loves. This is Sharon Pope, and this is the Loving Truth. Today we're going to be talking about how two things can be true at once. So the reason I want to talk about this is because in general, our thinking these days, as I see it, tends to be very binary.

Like something is all good or all bad. Someone's choices are right or their choice is wrong, or my spouse is meeting my needs or they're not, or I trust my spouse, or I don't when there are nuances to that right. I might trust my spouse as a parent, but I don't trust my spouse with finances. So there's nuances in there. And when we think in binary terms, we don't allow for any of those nuances.

So I always just look to human behavior and why people do what they do, knowing that everyone is just trying to get their needs met. So I understand why we do this, because binary thinking is easy to understand, right? It's simple. It's either good or bad. It's right or it's wrong. I don't have to think too much, and I don't have to go too deeply. I don't have to think too deeply about my own motivations or someone else's motivations.

I mean, if you really want to be honest, it's because we just are kind of lazy in our thinking, and so this is the lazy way to think about things. Here's the problem. None of that binary thinking allows for the complexity of being human, nor does it allow for the deeply complicated nature of our intimate relationships. And so we want to fix our marriage, but we think our spouse is all wrong, right?

And so you can't. You can't start here and get to that place. You can't fix your marriage if you're starting from a place of my spouse is all wrong or my spouse is all bad, or this marriage is so broken, right? You. You can't get there because you don't allow for the nuances. It doesn't mean the nuances don't exist. It just means sometimes we get a little bit lazy in our willingness to be able to see those things.

So I want to share with you a story. This isn't about my marriage, but it's about an important relationship in my life, and it's the relationship that I have with my dad. So we have had a difficult Relationship for as long as I can remember, like for sure, most of my adult life, we've had a difficult relationship. And there's many, many reasons for that that aren't important to this story.

Here's what is important. There are many times that I have felt that my father is all bad. There are no redeeming qualities about him. And I will tell you, there have been pivotal moments in my life, like at my mother's funeral, that I genuinely felt that way about my dad. I'll tell you, like even today in my phone, he's not listed as dad. He's listed by his first name and last name.

So we've had a difficult relationship. And as often happens when you have some distance from a difficult relationship, your heart starts to soften a little bit and you start to be a little bit more open to seeing that it's not just one way. Now maybe I'm the only one that does that. I just can't believe that I'm the only one. Some people get really stuck to their opinion of the situation and of the person to the point where they don't.

Years later, they don't even remember why they have that opinion of this person, that they're just a horrible human. But they do. And they've thought that thought for so long over so many years that it just becomes a deeply held belief. But they forgot how they got here. So I can only speak from my experience in this situation and that's that the further I get, the more distance I have from my dad.

I start to be able to see different perspectives of the situation. I think my heart softens a little bit towards him and I start to allow for those nuances and that it's not just he's all bad. I can see how he's a deeply complicated person like most of us are. I start to see a deeper truth of what's really going on and who my dad is. So I think my dad is a complex human like most of us are.

Right. I think that my dad has a lot of deep fears and so the choices that he make that he makes in his life all come from a place of wanting to avoid those fears, not wanting to deal with those fears. And frankly, isn't that what most human beings do is we want to stay in our comfort zone. We don't want to look at ourselves too much. We want to blame a little bit more than we take self responsibility.

Like I feel like that's a lot of human beings right now. And he definitely wants to be right like Being right and righteous is very important to him. But what that means is that it doesn't allow for someone else's experience that might be very, very different than his own. And so there's not that openness of communication. There's not that ability to be your full self or express your experience with him because he really views his experience and his perspective is the right perspective.

And if we're really honest, isn't that what most of us are doing right now? Right. All you have to do is look at politics and go, yeah, we all think that our perspective is the right perspective. So it happens in relationships, it happens in politics, it happens at our jobs, in our careers, it happens in what we eat, what we choose to eat, how we choose to work out all of our choices.

So many of us are damaging our relationships because we won't allow for an alternative perspective to our own. So my dad is not unusual in that way. And the last thing I'll say is that I think he carries a lot of shame and a lot of insecurity, and none of that will ever be discussed. We will never speak of it because he was raised in a generation and a family that did not talk about things, certainly not directly, certainly not lovingly, certainly not with compassion.

It was very much a suck it up, buttercup sort of mentality. So we're not ever going to talk about those things. And what that means is that he never really fully is able to share who he is with people that he loves. And people will probably never fully know the complexity of who he really is. And it means we're not going to be terribly connected in our relationship with him.

Right. And I mean, we, the collective, we, the family, the friendships, things like that. So I got off the phone with him the other night and we talked about a number of things. We talk maybe once a month. It's about all we can do right now. And that seems to be fine. We spoke the other night and I could tell that my heart had softened towards him because I felt sorry for him.

You know, he's older now and my mom has passed, and so he's lonely. And so I could feel that and I could allow myself to feel that. But what was interesting to me as I got off the phone with my dad and I went to Derek and I said, you know, it's so interesting because on one hand I see him and I feel bad for him about how lonely he is.

And then on the other hand, I can see he created this situation. Like it's not a surprise that he doesn't have close connected relationships with family and friends. Like, he comes from a family who never talked about anything, who always needed to be right, who, you know, like, doesn't allow for other people's experiences and, and is deeply insecure and fearful. So, yeah, he doesn't have close relationships and he's lonely.

So I can hold those two things, I can hold those two truths at the same time, right? Is that I feel bad that my dad feels kind of alone in his life. And I can see how this is just the natural outcome of a million different choices he made throughout his life. It's not like, you deserve this, you're bad, or oh my gosh, he's such a good human and we should all be better and make sure that he doesn't feel lonely in his life.

Like, it's not, it's not so binary, it's not so easy. And so this is what gets lost, the nuance gets lost in the midst of our binary thinking that everything just absolutely sucks or it's amazing, right? So it really reminded me of this idea that no one is all good and no one is all bad. And we are pretty complex in our humanness and there's no circumstance, particularly in our intimate relationships, that's all positive or all negative, right?

Sometimes there's some positive that's trying to come through, but it gets expressed as negative. Right? It's like we try to communicate about the tough stuff, but because we're not very practiced at it and we don't have a lot of tools, it ends up turning into a negative experience, like maybe a big blow up or some kind of bad outcome between the two of us. And now we've got to do some repair work to find our way back to one another, to better understand one another.

And I just think there are many more places in, inside of the continuum of the health of a relationship at any given moment besides just am I madly in love or am I pissed off and ready to quit? Right? It's not always so easy. There's that middle ground. There's the I love you but sometimes I don't actually like you sort of thing. So if you've been struggling in your marriage, which, if you're listening to my podcast or engaging with my work, buying my books, reading my blogs, whatever, I know that at least at some point you were struggling with your marriage and you might still be struggling today, and there probably was a time that you've been feeling like I should just give up, that there's no point.

And so What I want to offer today is that you can hold two truths equally at the same time that seem like they don't go together at all. So I wrote a bunch of these down, although I'm sure there's probably a hundred more. But this will get. This will get you started along this thinking. So we can love each other and still sometimes not really like our partners.

I think we need to normalize the fact that you are not always going to feel madly in love with your partner. There's going to be times that they're going to do something or say something or not do something or not say something. They're going to hurt you in some way. It's the nature of intimate relationships. And sometimes you're not going to like them. But that doesn't mean you have to lose the love.

You can be hurt and you can still be kind. You can be busy and you can still make time for one another. Boy, if we just followed that early on in our marriage, we maybe wouldn't have so many downstream impacts. We can see someone's pain and still see their strength, right? We can see someone who in the moment is weak. Like, as I think about my relationship with my dad, I can see the weakness.

I can see the pain. But I choose to also see his strength because I know as human beings, we are the strongest, most dominant force in our own lives. Not anything outside of us, but us. So I choose to see his strength even if he doesn't. We can enjoy things together and we can have interests that we want to pursue as individuals. We don't have to do everything all together or do everything separately.

Right? That binary approach, it's not working very well, right? Because one feels like you're way too. Like there's no space for you as an individual when you have to do everything together. Like one of my clients right now, she talks about how she can't even leave the house. Her husband is very sick and he's very scared. And he gets very scared if she even wants to go to the grocery store or go have dinner with a friend for him to be alone for two hours.

Right? Like, nobody actually wants that. That's not healthy. I think we can all agree, but we also don't want to live as roommates, just living under the same roof, passing each other in the hallway as we're living our separate lives. So health always resides in the middle. We can have arguments and we can still feel safe with one another. We can have difficult conversations and not jump to the conclusion that the marriage is Broken or irreparable.

The nature of intimate relationships is that we're going to have to have a difficult conversation time and time and time again. And if we don't get good at it, then that's going to be the thing that tears us apart. We can love someone and still have healthy boundaries with them. You know, I told you that I only talked to my dad about once a month, you know, and some people might look at that and go, oh, that's horrible.

And other people who have challenging relationships with their parents, they might go home. That's more than I can speak to my family. Like, you need to find where's the boundary that helps you feel healthy and safe, still loving. Right. And so you don't. It doesn't have to be like, I'm all in with you and I share everything with you or I cut you off. There's this middle ground of I care about you, I want to know what's happening with you, but I'm not necessarily going to share every element of my life with you.

Right. That's the middle ground. That's where the health is. We can be together and realize that our partner has a say. So in that. Right. The nature of relationships is that we're in the ship together. So if the ship has a hole in it and the ship is sinking, no one gets to stay on the ship. So the minute the relationship stops working for one of you, the relationship stops working for both of you.

So I get that one of you might really want to keep this relationship together, but you have another person who also has an opinion. We can feel like our perspective is important and we can allow our partner to have a different perspective about the exact same thing. Like your child came home with a c. Exact same circumstance. You can have a completely different perspective than your spouse, and you don't have to make your spouse wrong in that same sense.

In that same vein, you can validate your partner's experience and not agree with it. Right. Isn't that a radical idea? Is that you can say like, I understand why you would feel that way. Right. Given their upbringing, given their thinking, given their values, given the way they see the world, given their role in this situation, like as a mother or as a father, I can see how you would see it differently than me, but it doesn't mean that that now invalidates my experience.

Right. It's that idea that we have to agree that makes us want to invalidate our partner's experience and convince them that our way of thinking is the right way of Thinking which only then makes them feel more disconnected from you. It doesn't do anything helpful. We can appreciate our partners for what they do and we can still desire change. Right? We can give our partners the benefit of the doubt and we can still hold them accountable to their choices that they're making as an adult.

We can feel the emotion of anger and we can choose to not act on it. My friends, you don't have to act from a place of anger. A couple weeks ago, I was feeling deep anger about a variety of things in my life. And I purposely said to myself, I'm not making any decisions right now, none. Because I knew where my emotional state was. So I knew that I wasn't going to be in my best decision making.

So you can feel anger. It's fine. There's nothing wrong with a little bit of anger. But you don't have to act every single time you feel anger. We can go through a really difficult period together and still choose to not throw in the towel just because it's a difficult period. And likewise, the marriage can be perfectly fine. Like, oh, it's fine. It doesn't feel great, but it's fine.

It's fine. And you can reach for more. You can reach for creating and evolving the relationship to a place that feels really good for you. I can be mad as hell at you and I can still choose you. I can think of several occasions where I've done that in my life where I'm just mad as hell and I still choose to be in relationship with you. We can have our experience and our partner can have an entirely different experience of the exact same thing.

We can make the difficult decision to end the marriage and still choose to love and be loving towards one another. Right? Just because you choose to end the relationship doesn't mean now he I have to hate you. Now you have to be the villain in this story. No. We can choose to say we want very different things, or we loved each other as best we could until we couldn't, until it became very unloving or very unhealthy.

Or we just wanted different things at this new stage in our lives. Like, you can end a relationship and not hate the other person. Those two things you can hold simultaneously. And the last one, that we can be scared and we can still take steps forward in our lives no matter what direction that is. Right? Scared often equals paralysis because we don't know what to do and we're afraid to make the wrong move.

So we just stay stuck in this place of indecision. But my friends, the only way through the indecision is to start facing those fears and to start doing something different so that you can gain some new information. So most of the world will stick to their binary thinking because it's sort of the lazy man's way through life, right? It's easy. I don't have to think too much. I can just write people off as like, good, bad, right, wrong.

However, human beings are complex creatures. We just are. We all are, whether we want to own it or not. And if we're going to be our full selves and be in relationship with other human beings, I'm going to offer that it really is helpful to allow for the complexity, to allow for the nuances, to expect the complicated nature of intimate relationships and be willing to see that not everything is so black and white, not everything is so right and wrong or good and bad, and that no one is all bad or all good.

I hope that's helpful for you. Until next time, please take really good care. If you're listening to this podcast because you're struggling to decide whether to stay or go in your marriage and you're serious about finding that answer, it's time to book a Truth and Clarity session with a member of my team on the call. We'll discuss where you are in your marriage and explore if there's a fit for you and I to work together so you can make and execute the right decision for you and your marriage.

Go to clarityformymarriage.com to fill out an application. Now that's clarityformymarriage.com.