How to Handle Relationship Conflicts with Confidence with Baya Voce | Mary's Cup of Tea Podcast

If your partner is 70% there on the repair, like they've done their work, they've attuned their present, they really are doing their work and you just cannot get over it. That 30% is yours to do. That's not actually the couple work. It's that empty well that your partner is probably never going to be able to fill.

Hi.

Hello.

Welcome to Mary's cup of Tea, the Self Love podcast for women. Though all self lovers are welcome here. I'm Mary. I write and speak about self love.

And I'm best known for my book.

The Gift of Self Love. And I also host retreats for women. And this is the podcast that will inspire you to love yourself. Fighting as a couple is normal. Some, like our guests today, be a voce, might even argue that it's necessary and healthy to have conflict so that then you can repair and make your relationship stronger. Bea Voce is a relationship repair expert, helping couples fight better and make up faster. She holds an MSW from Columbia University, is an ongoing supervision with Esther Perel, as well as trained and mentored by Terry Real. Bea collaborates with Columbia University Multidisciplinary association for Psychedelic Studies and Rick Doplin on pioneering research into MDMA assisted couples therapy. She regularly speaks at south by Southwest. And with over 5 million views, her TED talk on loneliness highlights the often overlooked impact of relational disconnection. And here we're talking about exactly the opposite. How do you connect more deeply in your relationship and fighting, having conflict and then being able to repair is what Bea is here to talk to us about. We dig into what healthy fighting looks like and how to navigate conflict with confidence and trust and maybe not ease, but at the very least not feeling like the sky is falling whenever there's a disagreement. She also talks about the different types of toxic tendencies many of us default to when triggered.

And I also open up about my.

Own, by the way, in conversations like this, it's pretty common for the more personal, vulnerable stuff to be kind of toward the end or at least the latter half of the episode. And that's because it takes a little bit to warm up, you know, to open up. And I hope you'll stick around to hear that because a lot of the insights Bea gives us about her marriage and what that looks like, it's just incredibly awe inspiring to me. Bea and I also discuss if or how men and women differ when it comes to those toxic default patterns. Bea digs into the four killers of relationships. Like if these four things show up in your conflicts, then chances are you'll probably gonna break up, separate or divorce. And what to do when you've asked your partner to change, but they won't. Toward the very, very end, Bea brings up one question to ask yourself if you're trying to decide whether to stay in or leave a relationship. And that's in the last, like two minutes of the episode. Needless to say, this conversation is for a particularly emotionally intelligent type of person. One who's not afraid to look inward, examine your own role in a dynamic, and really take personal responsibility. But with that being said, please know that none of this advice applies to a abusive relationship. That is a whole different beast that I'm certainly not qualified to talk about. And I hope that if you are in one, you can recognize those signs, get help, and seek a way out. One last housekeeping thing. I'm so sorry that my audio sounds blown out. Luckily, you don't hear too much of my voice in this conversation. It's mostly Bea, but nonetheless, something was.

Going on with my microphone and I.

Didn'T catch it in. So sorry it's overstimulating, but I appreciate your patience and understanding. So now, without further ado, please welcome Bea Voce on how to navigate relationship conflict with confidence.

Bea, welcome to Mary's cup of Tea.

Thank you so much for having me. However many years later reconnecting.

I can't believe that the first time I met you was on an interview similar to this I did. I'm just going to out myself from the beginning. I had this summit. Cause we were doing those back in the day and it was called Effortlessly Healthy Living. I. I just makes me feel so cringe right now. I don't know.

As soon as he said it was about 10 years ago, I was like, oh, I don't even wanna know.

I dug in the depths of cyberspace to relisten to our interview. And you were awesome. You're always awesome. Your TED Talk went viral. That's how I found you. Right. About the cure for loneliness. Couldn't believe I got to talk to you. I was so nervous that I just, I. I feel like I bombed the whole thing. But I have to have compassion for my 18 year.

Okay, well, I have to tell you, A, I have no memory of that bombing. And B, when I saw your name coming come up on my email, it was an immediate yes. So clearly it wasn't that bad. I mean, I don't remember what happened, but clearly it couldn't have been that bad.

Well, that is reassuring. Thank you. To start off, let's. I Want to hear about your proverbial cup of tea? Something small that you've been enjoying lately.

So this is going to be so random, but I live about 10 minutes away from some of my best friends, and they're all facilitators of different. In completely different worlds than I am. And one of them facilitates these cervical breathwork practices. So in the morning, they all live together. It's like four of them or something. In the morning, we go over to her house or their house, and she facilitates this cervical breath work where we're literally touching our cervixes. I mean, like our own cervix. It's like a whole thing. And doing this breathwork practice to bring more pleasure, it's like a. Honestly, it feels so random to me. She's such a good facilitator, though. We literally all stand around naked and do it, and it's like a whole breath work practice. That's so fun. I've been doing that lately and I've been like, God, is this what the hippies were doing in the 70s?

Like, is this.

Is that what we were doing? Are we rolling it back?

You know, how do I get invited to one of these?

I know. I'm telling you, they're awesome. I'm like, more women should gather this way. It's like, we should be. We should be naked together more often and, like, running around our yards and whatever, you know, I mean, I'm exploring our cervixes.

How deep do you have to go to, like, get it?

Deep. You, like. You, like, really get up there, and sometimes you can't feel it and it's kind of hard to find. But she has this whole. Her name's Jamie Thompson. She's actually amazing. She. I think she's has a bunch of courses on this. But anyway, she. She like, talks about how you can find it, why you might not be able to find it, how to kind of call her out, how to energetically feel it if you don't. If you can't actually find it. And then you go up the chakra system and again, this is not my world. This is like very much not my. I don't. Honestly, I don't even know if I believe in shock. I mean, do I believe. You know, it's like all of these things. I'm like, do I believe that this is. I don't.

I don't know.

But seems to be fun and relaxing. Apparently it's connected to your vagus nerve, so it helps you relax and regulate, which is great for the Repair work I do.

So, yeah, somehow this doesn't surprise me because you are equal parts a very embodied person and also incredibly open minded to things beyond. Well, that's just my perception of you after following you over the years. Oh, that's great. I love that.

That feels, that feels accurate.

I often tell my listeners, you deserve safe, healthy love. That's something that I've just kind of been chanting over the years. And I had a client recently, literally the other day, she messaged on one of my retreat group chats and she's like, I don't even know I'm sure what that means anymore. So how do you personally define romantic love? Healthy romantic love. And perhaps that can segue into how does that set the stage for handling any potential conflict?

It's a great question, and I could probably answer this in a lot of different ways. But first of all, I think about healthy love as not the absence of conflict, but repair exists. It's the presence of repair. I think when we, we've been raised in this culture, even if we don't consciously understand how much Disney has kind of steeped into our subconscious that programming, that kind of Hollywood rom com, Disney plus layer on social media and the kind of hashtag couple goals, most people don't understand how healthy it is to have conflict in their relationship. So when they're sitting there, you know, behind closed doors and fighting with their partner a few times a week, and then they go online and they see someone with six kids and smiling and put together and cooking from scratch every meal, you're like, how do they do? Like, what is wrong with me? I first want to say it's not the absence of conflict, it's the presence of repair. You asked us. Will you repeat that second question? Because I have again, I have a couple ways I could take this.

Yeah, it is such a broad question, but how do you define healthy romantic love, which you said is not the absence of conflict? Because I think a lot of people would say, like, oh, we never fight, and that's healthy. But I feel like you would beg to differ. It's kind of weird if a couple, like never fights, right?

Yeah, I wouldn't trust. I don't often trust a couple who never fights. I think that is generally a symptom of conflict avoidance. And two people who would prefer distancing over intimacy. I mean, the truth is. Or they don't understand that in their distancing, what they're doing is taking away intimacy. I think because we didn't have models growing up, like, very Few of us could look at our parental figures and our caregivers and think, oh, that's what I want. And even if people say that, oftentimes what they say saw was a perfect couple who didn't fight in front of them and fought behind closed doors or didn't have sex or so even, even with people who were like, well, my, my parents were actually pretty good. You know, they actually didn't fight. I didn't see them fight. Well, there's a reason you didn't see them fight, and that's not actually a good thing. You want to see as parents, you want to be able to fight and then repair in front of your kids. But we often didn't see that. So you're either not seeing conflict as kids, you're seeing a ton of conflict, and most of it is happening without, or you're seeing, you know, dynamic power, tons of weird power dynamics, or, you know, on the far spectrum, abuse or, you know, substance abuse or physical abuse or emotional and mental abuse.

Right.

And so, like, I mean, just think about it for yourself. Where in culture did you learn or have you learned how to do relationships? Where actually have you seen, what does it actually mean, truly mean, to be in a healthy dynamic? You don't see it. You see what the media sells us and what the media tells us. And unless you're doing self help programs and you're in the relationship space or you're reading relationship books, there's no reason why you would think that conflict is healthy. There's no reason why you would imagine to yourself that you could fight a few times a week. And there's no real ratio, by the way. There's no, like, well, you need to have X number of good days. And that means if you have X number of good days, you're allowed to have X number of bad days or hard days. That's not how it works. And for some people, their, their kind of constitution as a couple can handle more conflict. And for other people, their systems, their nervous systems, conflict's gonna feel way, way tougher. And so who you are as a couple, I know I work with couples who are more high conflict, but they can also tolerate more ups and downs. And then I work with people who are, who have less conflict, but the idea of those kinds of emotional swings would, you know, send them over the edge.

So it's almost about, like, expanding our threshold for how much conflict we allow without getting dysregulated or going into. You made a beautiful video about this, like, threatening to leave or sometimes it's not even a threat from a manipulation standpoint. Sometimes it's literally like a self preservation telling yourself that you can always leave.

Yeah, I talk about how the number one biggest trust Eroder is threatening to leave when you don't mean it because it's just not then it's then not taken as seriously when you actually do mean it. And it, it also for the person on the other side creates a lack of safety in their ability to feel like they can come to you with challenging topics without that being thrown out. So of course for many of us it's kind of an innocent enough self preserv tactic, but we've got to learn how. I mean so much of repair, so much of repair is looking at our impulses and expanding our capacity. That's the skill we haven't been taught, the skill of repair. And so it can feel like this kind of amorphous. Well what is it? It's a feeling and it is a feeling that's kind of how you know, repair has worked because there's a softening, there's a way that you can you start to feel closer to your partner. So it is an embodied experience. But there are skills that get you there to go a little bit deeper here on what is, you know, healthy love. When we think about conflict, there are ways that we can do conflict that is going to be less harmful for your dynamic. I think one of the simpler frames to use is the Gottmans. They're relationship researchers and I like them. I'm not, I'm not like one of their die hard followers but I think they have some good stuff. And one of the, one of the things that they talk about, it's. A lot of people have heard about the four horsemen of the Apocalypse. And the four horsemen are basically what they found in their research around the four qualities that in conflict, if these show up more easily, predict divorce or separation.

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If these show up more easily, predict divorce or separation, those are contempt, defensiveness, stonewalling, and criticism. So contempt is the one that they talk about that if contempt is there. If we're gonna rate these as, you know, worst to least worst, it doesn't really make sense. But this is the one that's really bad. It's like, oh, if contempt is there, this is like, watch. Contempt is like eye rolling. It's using sarcasm when your partner brings up something sensitive, right? So saying your partner brings something up and you're like, you're so sensitive. Like, I can't believe how sensitive you are. Right? It's this kind of sneering or it signals a kind of disgust and emotional invalidation. Here we go again. Sensitive Sally, right? Like that kind of writing somebody off, writing someone's experience off. Defensiveness is really just shifting the blame. I come to you and I say, hey, I feel like you were really rude to my friend tonight, you know, at dinner or something. And you say, what are you talking about? I was just, I was literally talking to them the whole night. Like, I was. What do you. All of a sudden, now it's on. It's on me, the person who brings it. The focus of attention has completely shifted. So that's defensiveness. It's basically where you take whatever your part says and you spin it and now you're deflecting the thing that's actually been brought. A lot of times you feel like you're doing this because you're like, wait a second, I need to defend my honor here. Like, I actually don't feel like I did anything wrong. And that's where defensiveness can come up. But there's a great Line that one of my teachers and mentors, Terry Real, says. He says there's no space in relationship for objective reality. They're just two subjective experiences. And what you think is yelling, I think is speaking at a high volume. What you think is speeding in a car, I think is five, five over. That's not speeding. So the more that we're fighting the quote unquote truth, the more we're gonna just spin and spin and spin and not get anywhere. Defensiveness is one of those things where if somebody comes to us and says something that makes us feel like, wait a second, that didn't happen, we're going to be more likely to bring out our defenses. Now, if we know there's no objective reality in relationship, there's just literally no space for it because your lens and my lens are completely different, then it sets us up to be able to actually stay with our partner's experience and not need to combat what they say. Now, as the partner bringing the issue, there's a big difference between saying, you've been a really big jerk lately and saying, hey, I feel like the last few conversations we've had after you've come home from work that I've felt you be a little bit snippy, and I just want to understand more about that. Or do you have that same experience? Is something going on? It's a completely different way to bring it. So there's two parts to this. This is a dance between both people. One is do your job as the partner, bringing it to own your language and move from blame and shame and putting it on your partner to statements like I feel or my experience or the story I make up about. This is right. So you kind of soften how you bring it. And then there's the work of the partner who maybe your partner didn't. Maybe your partner brought it like crap and did blame you. Then there's the work of the partner to in hopefully the most lucid moments, which on our best days, hopefully we can be, and on our worst days, we're not going to be. And that's okay to be able to sort of translate what your partner has just said into softening language. One of my dear, dear friends and colleagues, Annie Lala, she's a love coach. I love the way she talks about this. She basically says, your partner just has pretty bad bedside manner. But they actually do want to be close with you. They want to give you the best. It's just that they're going to come to you and say, hey, why didn't you, you know, turn out the lights when I. Or, why didn't you get off the phone when I asked you to? And what they're really saying is, hey, baby, I really want to be close with you, and it's your job to translate that. So we each have a role. It's like, as the speaker, you want to bring it as cleanly as possible as kindly as possible, as with language that owns as much as you can as possible. And as the receiver, if your partner can't do it, can you translate the bedside manner into actually what they're saying? And can you get curious enough to elicit more openness from your partner versus you being defensive? Okay, so that's the second one.

Wait, can I say something about Terry Real?

Oh, yeah, totally.

Well, he really shifted my perspective on this and personally helped me. My defensiveness comes from you say, defend your honor. For me, I have this overwhelming fear of being misunderstood, and I have been on the receiving end of, like, hey, I think you were rude to my friend. Like, oh, my God, I was literally just trying to crack a joke. I'm so unfunny now. I hate myself for it. So I'm defensive. Trying to explain to you how it was not meant maliciously. But Terry Real really changed my perspective, because he even takes it one step further. He says, objectiveness has no place in a relationship, and our only job is to make things as subjective as possible. And I think that, like, shifted something for me, because we think about fighting falsely through media or whatever, conflict resolution, as we just need to prove the facts. We need to, like, lay out an argument, right? Become, like, our own attorney and. And prove to you that this actually. The tonality of what I said and how I said it was more jokey sarcastic than, like, bitchy sarcastic. You know what I mean? And he said. He said, even if you have a sonographer, an audio recorder, a whole film crew recording that scene for you, so then you can watch it back, there will still be perspectives and people that take it in as many different directions as there are, you know, brains and minds and perceptions. And I think that, like, visual of a sonographer sitting there, I think his example was, like, something happening at a restaurant. So I'm just picturing, like, a couple at Outback Steakhouse, and then they have their little, like, audio recorder there. And I think about that because it's true. Like, even if you had all the perfect facts, people would still take it through their own lens of interpretation.

I love that you're talking about this. And just for people Listening so that you're not thinking. I'm going to drop it. I promise I'll get back to the last two for the Four Horsemen. But I do want to pause here because I think what you're saying is really important. So there's a former CIA agent agent, his name is Andrew Bustamante. And he talks about the difference between perception and perspective. Perception is where we all live. Perception is. We're doing this interview, I'm thinking, how is my mic looking? How do I. How am I sounding? It's the way I walk through my life and the way you walk through your life. It's your lens where much more practiced in our perception, because that's just how we live. It's. It's the lens through. Through which we look at the world. Perspective is looking at the other point of view, looking at the world through someone else's eyes. So my ability to come over to your world and think, okay, so what's this like for Mary right now? What is she thinking about? How is she thinking about? How I'm answering the questions, what she's going to say next, Right? So all of a sudden, I'm taking my lens and I'm shifting my seat over to yours. Now, we are much less skilled at this. This is really, really hard work because we're not practiced at it. And there's nowhere in our culture that makes us practice. In fact, now more than ever, we're in echo chambers of our own belief systems. There's nothing that, you know, you could have an entire feed of everything that agrees with you, all opinions that agree with you. I mean, politics are a great example of this. Right now. There's nothing that's making you watch, listen to, or see another person's perspective. In fact, people are cutting off family members now more than ever. That wasn't a thing, you know, 20, 30, 40 years ago. So we are more and more being fed content that's comfortable for us to digest. It's easy for us to digest. It generally looks like us, sounds like us, holds the same opinions as usual. Where in our lives are we necessarily put into the position of being in a room with someone who really disagrees with us? Basically nowhere else except for our relationships, our family systems, sometimes friendships, but not even that oftentimes. And for sure, our romantic partners, our intimate partners. So there is this. This atrophy of the muscle that needs to be able to hold complexity. But it was a muscle that was never very strong to begin with. You know, this isn't. We weren't Taught culturally how to hold a lot of nuance and how to hold two truths at one time that are actually just opposing. Right. We weren't. This isn't like the critical thinking lens unless you went to school and really, really worked that muscle or worked that muscle on your own. It's not an adaptation that has that, that our culture has ingrained in us. And so here we are, we have somebody across from us who we love deeply, but for the time being feels like our mortal enemy. Another Terry, you know how Terri talks about this is. So what's going to happen when we're sitting across from somebody who, who we completely disagree with in this moment is we're either going to go one up. He calls it grandiosity, or one down. We'll go into shame. People who go one up tend to blame outwards. It's like the people who are driving in the car and someone cuts them off and they're like, oh my God, he's an asshole, right? Or go one down into shame. Those are the people who are driving in the car. Someone cuts them off and they're like, oh my goodness, what did I do? You know, like, so you're either going to. When someone disagrees with you and you're triggered, your triggered state is more naturally going to be be blaming someone else or blaming yourself. Like in the example that you used when your friend comes to you and says you're being kind of rude and you're like, oh my God, I just made that joke. I can't believe I made that joke. Like, that's blaming inwards, right? That's a shame. That's a one down perspective. Then there's a horizontal axis of the grid. So for some of us we're going to be what he calls boundaryless. And for some of us we're going to be more walled off, more boundaryless. Folks are. That's like the yelling or the graspy needy wants more connection, more, more, more and will basically do anything to get it. The walled off are the people who are going to close down. They're going to shut off. They might leave the room, they might go quiet. And we more often than not now you can live in multiple places, but more often than not we inhabit one part of the grid. So you're either one up and boundaryless. That's where a lot of violence lives. That's blaming outward and screaming and yelling or right, like, that's like a. So one up and boundaryless is where really abuse lives. But that's on the far end of the spectrum, you don't need to have that corner and also be abusive. Then there is on the bottom corner of that, the grid is one down and boundary list. This is where I live. This is like I go into self blame but I do it in kind of a manipulative way. So what I'll do is I'll be like, well we just need to go to more therapy. Like that's what we need. Or I'll be like, oh baby, I think something's off. And your nervousness like this is what I used to do a lot. I used to be like, I feel like you're shutting down right now, right? And she's like, what? Like my wife is like, so anyway, I would, I would sort of like grasp as much as I could. It's like this neediness that is not coming from a regulated place. It's coming from please don't leave me. Then on that same line of the grid you have walled off, right? So walled off and one down. This is the shame based place. But you go one down instead of, instead of, or excuse me, you go walled off instead of boundaryless. And down here is where like a lot of kind of depressive symptoms live. So this is like kind of an Eeyore archetype. Nothing works for me. I've tried everything. Nothing, you know, nothing's and nothing ever works out. And then on the top of the. And by the way, these are just kind of dramatic examples. You can live in these parts of the grid and doesn't have to be so, so dramatic. And then on the top corner you have walled off and boundaryless. This is where you're going to get people who are completely shut down. But instead of going inward like the, the kind of Eeyore, there's a righteousness, there's a way where it's like you don't even deserve my time, you don't deserve my energy, you don't deserve like there's like a. You're kind of beneath me, but I'm not even going to give you the time of day. Anyhow, I think it's good to be able to find yourself on one of these quadrants because we all live there. And how he talks about it is like what we're trying to do is we're all trying to make our way towards the center of health. So for he says for the mighty to melt and for the weak to rise depending on where we fall, in one of these quadrants we find kind of our work. And so we're trying to make it into the center we're trying to make it into. How can we take care of ourselves while also taking care of the other? One of many frameworks to think about conflict. But it can be easier to kind of place yourself there.

I love a matrix. I love when things intersect. But I am finding myself a little lost and called out here because I am. I'm all four and I'll just oscillate in a matter of minutes. So I got lots of work to do.

I. I imagine you're not actually. I imagine you're one down, more than one up. Shame can. The tricky part about shame is it can look like it's not shame. I don't know what your flavor is of this, but it can look like I'm actually not going to look at myself. I can't look at myself. The more I learn about. About grandiosity, the more I think grandiosity is just a dressed up version of shame. Shame doesn't always have to look like that. Oh, poor me, I'm so bad it can point fingers. So if I had to guess, I mean, you could give me an example here if you wanted, about a fight and I could probably give you a little diagnostic, but we don't, we don't have to go there.

Well, we are currently mid fight, so the timing of this is immaculate. And our couple's therapist, we call the grandiosity that I do, I call it getting hot. And it's this, like, I'm up here and I'm very regulated and I'm very steady. And I'm like, okay, you want to go to couples therapy, you get to book the session. I'll respond with my availability. Like, I'm very calculated, I suppose, at this particular point in time. But in the heat of the moment, I am in all of the boxes and all of the quadrants literally within, like I said, five, five minutes is probably and an exaggeration, but within an hour I can go into all of those quadrants, though I don't have a specific example because can I tell you.

What this fight started with?

Absolutely not. But am I still committed to being angry?

Yeah.

Oh, I so know that. I so know that. There's a. I think that I, I have that too. And I think there is something we get from the righteousness of staying angry. I call it the 70% rule, which is, is if your partner is 70% there on the repair front, like, they've done their work, they've attuned their present, they really are doing their work. And you just Cannot get over it. That 30% is yours to do. That's not actually the couple work. It's that empty well that your partner is probably never going to be able to fill. Anything less than 70%, I think is the work of the couple. That's the couple's work. Like they didn't attune as well. There's more responsibility and ownership that needs to be taken. There's more understanding that needs to be heard. Right. So again, I don't know this exact situation, but there is something we get. There's a payoff, there's a reward that we get for not forgiving and for staying in anger or righteousness. Especially if we're people and I fall into this category who go into more shame based thinking and experiences. It's a way that we can actually hold a little power where we feel powerless. So when we go one up, when we go one up from one down, oftentimes that's it's a way to just like grasp onto control just for a little bit. Because it feels, it's like a break from feeling how terrible the shame feels.

Absolutely. That definitely resonates. One thing that I really wanted to talk about is how the person listening to this is probably, I mean in a heterodynamic is probably the gal. And I feel like the person buying Terry Real and John and Julie Gottman's books and signing up to work with you. Like, have you looked at your stats on Instagram? How many of those are women? Women, mostly women. And the part that like tears me apart and I know that 30 is me and I have a lot of work to do. But I think the reason why I'm being so stubborn about not doing it now is because for many years, and I'm sure a lot of people will resonate with this, I'm the difficult conversation starter. I'm the hey, let's not sweep this under the rug. I'm the, you know, it kind of gets like twisted into making me seem like I'm the one that's perpetually dissatisfied or trying to start something, but really it's because if I don't do it, if I don't unpack this, if I don't read and gather the tools and then soften my voice and try to perfectly present it for conflict resolution, then it's probably not going to happen. And I think that's a really good, exhausting place to be for a lot of women. I'm very curious in your perspective because I know you've been in both a Hetero relationship. And now you're married to sweet Emmy, and I am. So I. By the way, I watched your wedding video three times this morning. Yes, three times. At this point, it's probably just gonna be like my morning music video. Get ready. Because it is just so feel good. So I am curious, like, both personally and in the context of this conversation. Like, what is your, I don't know, dynamic look like? Is it different? Is it a man thing? Like, not to go there, but is it a dude thing? And how do you kind of like, bring your person on board? Because as much as, like, Stan is so open, he'll listen to this conversation, he'll, you know, download the audiobook, but then he'll listen to like maybe 20, 25% of it. Do you know what I mean? And then it kind of like tapers off. It's like, in theory, I'm very into this and I'm. I'm open to having the conversations and reading the books and going to couples therapy. Actually, he is. Loves couples therapy because he's very, like, hands on kinesthetic kind of person. But, yeah, when it comes to the, like, intellectual unpacking, couldn't be him. And sometimes I feel really alone in it. I'm just gonna say it like it is.

I'm so glad you're bringing this up because I imagine a lot of people are gonna. Are just like, nodding their heads to this right now.

I feel like I overshared.

No, no, no. I think it's great. I mean, from one overshare to another. So Dr. Alexandra Solomon has a frame that I think is really helpful here. At least it helped me because I am also the one in my relationship who is. Let's go to couples therapy. Let's read the book. Let's. You know, and if it were up to Emmy, like, we wouldn't. My wife, we just. That's not. Not like maybe we'd go to therapy, but outside of that, that, yeah, we're.

Here to have a good time. That's how like, Stan puts it. Let's just have a good time.

Yeah, that's exactly, exactly. So this frame that I love that Dr. Alexandra Solomon uses is basically that it's what she calls an effort mismatch. And I actually have a full workbook on effort mismatch and questions to ask and how to kind of navigate it with your partner that you can download. Basically, there's one partner that she calls the change partner and another partner that she calls the acceptance partner. The change partner is probably the. It's you. It's me. It's the ones probably listening to this podcast who are just like, okay, here's the next podcast episode, here's the next workshop, here's the next book, here's the next therapy, blah, whatever. It's. This is. This is the one who is to going. Going to continuously be oriented towards growth. Now, those are the partners that for most of us who are in the self development space or who are interested in this topic, it's really easy to look at those partners and be like, we're clearly the right ones here.

Wait, are you about to tell us that we're not? Because that's.

Well, listen, I'm talking to myself too. Like, I hate that I'm like, I don't want to say this. This is not like, this is. This is not. Not work for me.

This is the echo chamber I wasn't ready to step out of.

Yeah, yeah, totally. And this is why we have algorithms.

Well, because it's true. In the algorithm, you will come across a video that's going to be very inflammatory and it's going to say, if your partner isn't willing to talk and grow and unpack and get deep and do the workshop and the retreat and the cervical embodiment, you know, tantric stuff, then they're not in it with you.

You totally. And at some point there's a question of, is what I'm getting in this relationship worth grieving what I'm not? Which is a. Another great Terry ism. Is what I'm getting in this relationship worth grieving what I'm not? If yes, then grieve. Grieve what you're not getting so that you don't hold on to resentment. And if no, then you reckon, what. What needs to happen? Are you leaving? Is that really on the table? If it is on the table, what does that look like? What. What would you need to see? What questions are you not asking? What haven't you said that you might be nervous to say? I mean, that's kind of a side tangent, but. So the change partner is always going to orient towards change as the right path. The acceptance partner is the partner exactly like you're talking about with Stan, who's just like, let's just have a good time. Things are good as they are. They are. There are people who I honestly, I posted this video about this and it is my most viral video. It's some, I don't know, over 10 million views and the comments are scathing. I mean, I cannot tell you how many change Partners are like, the acceptance partner is the worst person in the world, basically. They're the ones who avoid the fight, the ones who make me work so hard. I'm always doing the heavy lifting. And that's fair. That's actually really fair to feel that way. But there is wisdom in that perspective. And what happens when they're. When we're in a dyad and there are two people is the polarity that we would hold within ourselves the part of ourselves that wants to grow and the part of ourselves that just wants to have a good time. Time. Now get separated into two people, and now you each hold one of the polls. One of the people holds the pole of, we gotta do better. We can. We need to go further. And the other person holds the pole of, what about the present moment? What about what's working now? The ability to be influenced by your partner. The ability to see your partner's perspective. Perspective. Both partners, not just the change partner, and not just the acceptance partner. Both partners to see the wisdom in their partner's perspective. To see the wisdom in. Okay, if I. And. And I, by the way, I tested this. At one point, Emmy came to me and she was like, baby, I have no more capacity for processing now. I have a lot of capacity for processing. I have, by the way, in different moments, under my breath, muttered, like, you're just being avoidant. You're just. This is always gonna be on me. Like, I've said that stuff. In this particular moment, I actually heard the genius of her request. I don't know how. I don't know what came over me, but there was something in me. Not that there were things to process. There were things that were wrong, but something in me. It was almost like I heard her and I literally watched. I watched the truth of her not having capacity. Like, I watched the genuine truth as she told me. And I was like, okay, what do you feel like you need? Like, what do we feel like we. And she was like, I need a break. Like, I really need a break from processing. So for, I don't know, three, maybe four months, we stopped going to therapy. And we were in therapy consistently before then we stopped going to therapy. I began learning the hard skill for me to let things roll off my back a little more easily. Like, I hang on to things I like, and then they pile up, and it's. This is just, like, having a good time is really freaking hard for me. But I can. I can see the genius in it. Over those few months, it was maybe one of the best few months Period of our relationship. But it took me being like, okay, how can I see what she's like? Our relationship probably is starved for fun a little bit. Like, we probably do need to focus on that a little more than processing, processing, processing. So. So it's not to say that the person who is always bringing things up needs to consistently be that person. But what are the conversations that aren't being had with you and your partner about what that dynamic actually looks like? Women are more trained for? I mean, but I'm with a woman, so I say that. And in the same breath I'm like, culture has trained us one way, way. And also, this isn't gender specific. I know plenty of women who are in the accept role, but it's oftentimes that women are the ones who over and over again feel like they're exhausting themselves to be in a dynamic that works for them. So then the next question becomes, what boundaries need to be set so that you can take care of yourself? And we really misunderstand what boundaries boundaries are. We think boundaries mean someone else has to change. But if you're the one exhausted from bringing things up over and over again, then the question becomes, what do I need to do to take care of myself? What limit do I need to set to take care of myself? If it's, I feel like I have been bringing things up over and over again and that is, it's like making me really depleted, Then bring that to your partner and understand what you need to take care of yourself. That requires nothing from your partner to change. You can always make a request, but the truth is we can't control our partners. So if they can't change, if they never bring something up, if you're always the one, if you're consistently the person who is bringing things to the surface over and over again, are you getting enough out of this relationship relationship to make grieving worth it? And that I think is a really, really important question to ask because also we as some of us over functioning partners, also me, we get something out of over functioning too. There are two questions in 12 step programs that I think are really interesting to use here. One is, what's my role in this? Where can I actually take responsibility? What's my role here? How am I in collaboration to create this dynamic? And then what do I need to take care of myself? What do I need? I think those are really valuable questions because often we put our needs as a requirement. Our needs are conditional on our partner changing, and that's just never going to happen. I mean, listen, you can make a request and they might change, they might show up differently, but that's not a surefire thing. There's a stage in relationship called disillusionment. And disillusionment is the phase. We all go through it. Every relationship will go through it. If you're in a relationship long enough where that hope that you have for your partner ever being different goes away, and that is really freaking hard. Hard. That place where you're saying it could be as small as, like, my partner's never going to clean up after themselves. That's just never going to be a thing that they do. It could be as big as, one of you is more introverted and one of you is more extroverted. And your dream is to go home from the party at the same time every night that you go out. And the extrovert is just always going to want to stay out later or the extrovert is going to want to go on more trips. And so you stop going on as many with them so you don't wear yourself out. Right? There are dynamics that are never, ever going to change. Sometimes where we get stuck in disillusionment is that we're hanging on for dear life, that something can change in them and that hurts. Hurts us so deeply, that is a. It's a recipe for so much resentment for you to feel, not them. When you enter into disillusionment and you really enter into, whoa, my partner is never going to change or may never change. And if they change, it's going to be on their own accord. It's not going to be because I beg, borrow and steal to get them to change.

Change.

It hasn't worked so far. It's not going to work. Then you move into grieving, which moves you into acceptance. And once you're in acceptance, then you can actually look at the relationship as is and say, do I choose this? That doesn't mean new standards of the way that you handle yourself aren't now implemented. Maybe that means they come home, they've been coming home for dinner, like late most nights, and that has happened, that's continued to happen. Or they haven't been appreciative of you cooking. Maybe that means you start to cook for yourself and you leave dinner in the fridge. I'm not saying that's what we want to do. I'm not saying that's ideal, but that's relationship. Relationships are not ideal. Relationships are not getting everything that we want. They're just not. So how do you then in the areas that you are never, ever, or you may never, ever get the thing that you so desperately want from your partner. How do you reconcile that? And that's the work. That's grief work. Can I share a quick story?

Do we have time, please?

Yes.

Okay. So when Emmy and I got married, about two weeks before we got married, we got into the biggest fight we had ever gotten into. And it was over something so dumb. Like, one of those fights that you're talking about where you're like, I don't even know how this started. It was like one of those. But it just devolves so quickly. So we ended up taking two nights apart. And on that first night, I sobbed myself to sleep. I mean, I'm just crying and crying, crying. And all of a sudden, I hear this voice in my head, and it's like me, but way smarter. It's like that. And I hear her, and she's like, keep going. You're not too much. You've got this. I've got you. Keep crying. You don't need to change for me. I'm here for you. I've got you. I'll hold you. And I'm crying, and I'm crying. I'm crying. I've got you. I've got you. You're not too much. Until I sort of rocked myself to sleep, or this part of me could have rocked myself to sleep. And I woke up the next day and I changed my vows because it really. It really hit something in me. My vows then became, two weeks later, the most vulnerable thing I can do is give you my heart. And you have it. And what I want to say is, here's my heart. Please keep it safe. Please don't break it. But what I know I'm saying is, here's my heart. I know you'll break it. I know you'll drop it. And in the moments where you can't pick it up because you're triggered or you're in your wound or for all those reasons that you just can't be there to pick that part up from me, I will do the work of picking it up for myself. That's healing. That's the dojo of relationship, is when we choose a partner who we can be in it with in a major way. That doesn't mean it's always good. We, Emmy and I have a bunch to work on still. Of course, we probably always will. But I trust her to be doing her own work, and she trusts me to be doing mine. And from that place, we can come together.

I Think it's so interesting that the grow grower, the growth minded person through going through disillusionment. It's kind of like the gap where you reluctantly end up at acceptance on the other side.

But the hope is it's actually not reluctance that you end up. It's actually because if you accept and you choose to stay, the hope is that you find the wisdom in what's happening. You find the wisdom in the wound that you have done. The kind of excavation process that brings you to. I mean, I will tell you, I wished for so long Emmy were more interested in self development and processing for hours like I want to process. Like that was the idea that she wasn't that person was very, very hard for me to, to get, to wrap my head around. But coming to a place of acceptance through, I'm just going to say it, a lot of grief, like a lot of grief which looked like resentment and anger and all of that. First, what I recognize is that her capacity, or lack of capacity from my perspective of processing, really brings us into efficiency and, and it has brought me into a level of skill of how I bring things to her that I never would have developed otherwise. So the way I bring things to her now and again, this is still a work in progress, is so different than I used to bring things when I would word vomit all over her. Because I know I only have her for a little while now because I have learned to contain myself, work with my nervous system before I bring her anything. Because if I come to her dysregulated, not going anywhere good, my dream would have been that I can just come and bear my soul and that she would get it and I could just. But she doesn't. She like completely shuts down when I do that. Now that's. That's been a very hard thing for me to reconcile. But the wiser part of myself knows that's also going to set me up to be a better mom. That if I could, my kids are not going to be able to understand me. That's not, that's not their job to understand that oh, mom can't get her shit together, so she's just coming to me all messy. That's not their job. It's. So I feel like through learning this in this relationship, which is not a skill I ever wanted to learn because I really just wanted to be able to come and cry and have somebody hold me. I've learned so much about containment, resilience, how I can bring it and actually get met. And also I imagine about you know, we don't have kids yet. But how I will be a better mom.

I mean, you're going to be an amazing mom. Mom. And it's funny that, you know, relationships are always bringing up, like, the deepest, darkest part of you. That's, like, their purpose. The mirror. And though the grass may seem greener on the other side, like, I wish they would just, like, unpack with me. I was. I call it unpacking. You call it processing. But I love a good unpacking. I also know that that unpacking would put me deeper into my hole. And it's funny that you brought up polarity, because when Stan gets really mad at me, he's like, you are not like that. You are so chill with your girlfriends. You are so different with your mom. And it's because, like you said, it's that, like, polarity that it amplifies. It's like, relationships are this great amplifier. So why am I saying this? I don't know. Because there's some value. This is a much more emotionally intelligent conversation. I can't even, like, tie a bow to it because it is so much, much deeper than just being like, you deserve somebody who's gonna process with you, dump their ass. You know what I mean?

I mean, that's the. That's the. The. Also the culture we live in.

That is the culture that we live in. Yeah. You deserve somebody who agrees with you, who holds space, who. Whatever.

And yes, you do.

And there's a lot more there in between.

Total.

Totally.

And just to. Speaking of bows, wrap this up. The two other things that are going to be detrimental, the two last Horsemen that will be detrimental to the ability to hold space, the ability to stay connected, the ability to stay in healthy conflict, are stonewalling, which is walling off and just distancing yourself without being able to say, hey, I need five minutes or I need an hour and I'll come back. Right? So you just literally disappear. So your partner's just grasping for trying to get you and criticism. So when we're attacking somebody's character versus criticizing the behavior. So there's something very different around saying, you're so lazy. You don't care about me. You're a slob. And saying, I really want to feel restful in my home. And when I come, come home and there's a pile of laundry on the couch, I feel like now I have tension in my system, and I'd really love not to. I will say that while repair is hard, the ability to stay is sometimes harder. But it's where the juiciest stuff comes in. I think we often leave relationships because we don't understand what relationships take. And so we think that somehow the relationship we're in is harder than, quote, unquote, healthy relationships. Sometimes that's the case. And by the way, I'm not talking about relationships that have high levels of manipulation or abuse. None of this will work with people who are manipulative. And where there's abuse, this doesn't count. But for many of us, what looks on the. What looks to us like, is this too hard? Is just relationship. That's just what relationship takes. But because we haven't learned that, nowhere in our culture have that has that been taught. We sit in our own siloed experience like something is wrong with us. And if we leave this relationship, then the next one will just be better, next, easier. Sometimes that's the case. I'm not saying never leave your relationship. A really good question you can ask yourself is, am I growing into more of the person I want to become? Even if there's a bunch of conflict and if the answer is yes, that's a good thing. That's a. That's great, right? You're building. You find yourself building more resilience. You find yourself learning, learning how to attune in a way you didn't before. You find yourself healing parts of your right, all of those things. Now if you're finding yourself disappearing amidst the conflict, you're getting smaller, you're getting more triggered, you're finding your version of yourself that you're not actually proud of. Then that's a good signal.

Yeah, that's a really important note and a great litmus test to leave off on. Thank you so much, Bea. I want to respect your time, though. I could be here forever, so we will definitely need to do a part two. Totally.

This is great.

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