A client stuck in a painful marriage realized external changes wouldn't help. She shifted her focus inward, questioning why she loved her husband and changing her narrative about him. That mindset shift softened her posture toward him, and he softened back.
I think one got her email recently from a woman who had been for many, many years struggling with her marriage and really having significant head butting situations with her husband. And she started, she actually sent me an email and she had an insight that there's only three things that can really change in your life. One is that your circumstances can change, and one is that other people can change. And one is that you can change. And she'd realized that she'd been building her whole frustration with her marriage on the idea that her husband needed to be a better provider and that he needed to have a different personality. And then, oh my gosh, I think.
Half the women listening just agree with you.
It was all on him.
Yep.
And we worked together a little bit and she. And she finally came to this realization that it didn't really matter how much money they made or where they lived or what her husband did or said because the target would keep changing. Like if he would change one thing, she'd be a little happier for a week or two and then he would do something else and leave his sock on the floor again or whatever. And it would stay set her right back into the same attitude. So she realized that she was spending a lot of her emotional and mental energy thinking of all the ways that her husband was a big jerk. And then she finally had this insight that if the real change that needs to happen is inside of me, then what do I need to start changing? And what I'm thinking about that might change the way that I interact with him. And that's when it really started to break down for her. Because she then realized that if she spent all of her imagination time planning what she was going to say the next time he mouthed off to her, or planning what she was going to do the next time he didn't do the thing he was supposed to do, then what she was really doing is projecting all this negative emotional energy onto her husband. And then he was reacting to that with the same old defense mechanisms. So she decided she was going to change her behavior. First her thoughts about him. And she started thinking, why did I fall in love with him? What things about him do I appreciate? Instead of all the things I don't appreciate, what are some of the things I do appreciate? And then before long, she started softening in her posture to him. And then he started softening in his posture towards her. And she wrote that her marriage was better than it had been in many years because it all started inside of her.
That's so powerful. And that's really what we're called to do.
