Connor Beaton, in this short YouTube talk, coaches men on taking ownership of relationship dysfunction by leading themselves first: staying grounded, receiving partner feedback without defensiveness, setting healthy boundaries, and listening when they've let their partner down. He argues that when men can remain centered and receive their partner's anger or hurt, communication, intimacy, and connection improve.
Chapters
In order to feel like a whole and complete and self led man, part of what we need to do is step into the space of taking ownership over where dysfunction is showing up in our relationship.
And how we can start to take action to create space for our partner to be more heard, more understood, more seen, et cetera. And then those things will start to come back to us. So often we're playing this like stalemate game where both partners are waiting for the other person to change or waiting for the other person to soften so that real communication can happen. And it's challenging because for a lot of men out there, it's like, well, if I go first, then I'm weak or I'm broken or, you know, fill in the blank. And the challenge is that it takes a lot of courage. So I would just say to like all you guys, like lean into that space, lead yourself first and foremost and make sure that you're grounded and you're present and that you have the space to be able to call your partner forward. Right. I think Dr. Glover put it best. He said, if you can't stand up to your partner, she'll never trust you to stand up for her. Right. And so we need to learn the art of being able to set boundaries with them and say, hey, it's okay, I got you. I see what's happening right now. I see that, like, you're frustrated with me. Okay, tell me what's going on. I can receive your frustration, I can receive your anger. I'm going to set boundaries with it to make sure that it's healthy and it's not attacking and you're not, you know, you're not calling me a worthless piece of crap in the middle of this. I'm going to make sure that it's a healthy form of communication, but I can receive it and I can stay centered and grounded. And that is the biggest gift that we can give our partners in conflict. Being able to stay grounded, centered, and to be able to see them and what they're experiencing in those moments. And if we can practice that, then the communication in our relationship will radically, radically change and the intimacy will change and the connection will change and everything will start to shift. Because what she'll see is, oh, he can actually handle my chaos. He can handle when I'm hurt, he can handle. He can handle when I feel rejected or embarrassed, or he can handle when he's let me down. One of the biggest challenges. I know I'm going off a little bit of rant here, but one of the biggest challenges in relationships is when the man has let down the woman, right? When he has let her down in some way. It's oftentimes where the most amount of conflict comes up because, like, no one wants to hurt their partner. But for a lot of guys, it's like, oh, if I failed, then I'm failing on my purpose in this relationship. Because a lot of men feel like their purpose is to protect their partner and provide for them in some way, shape or form, Right? And so if we fail at that, it's very challenging for a lot of guys to say, hey, okay, let me hear how you've been hurt. Let me understand how you're suffering right now, or how you feel like you're in pain, or how I let you down. How did that impact you? So creating the space for that to happen, without defensiveness, without justifying, without trying to explain ourselves, without trying to rationalize it, just sitting and shutting our mouths and listening for a little bit can be one of the most powerful things, because it can create an opening for the conversation for us to be heard later on.
