Partnership
Speaker 0: Welcome to Takeout Therapy. I'm Rebecca Hunter, a therapist who knows therapy is actually very expensive and believes that mental health education should be free. Stick with me for the next few minutes, and you'll learn something that will help you think about life differently, or maybe manage things better for yourself. This podcast is authentic. It's unedited and without a bunch of ads.
All I ask is that you pass it along. Please forward an episode to a friend in need. And if you like my style and you wanna do some work with me, come join the club at takeout therapy dot com. Let's get to work. Hey, hey, before we start the episode, I quickly want to tell you a bit about Takeout Therapy Club.
It's my new project, and I'm really excited about it, and I think you will be too. For a ridiculously low price every month, I'm leading you through an in-depth workshop, meant to help you really dig into some deeper stuff as part of your personal growth work. It's the same length as a therapy session with about ten times the information you'd actually get in the office. With, of course, You know me, an action plan to follow. This takeout therapy club for me is about helping people change their lives through mental health education because there's just too much we don't know.
This month, we begin at the beginning. With the fundamental things that every person needs to know to have a baseline of decent mental health. Every month, you'll get tools to put into your life. These are the things we teach in the therapy office year after year. The human survival skills tools.
And as we go, we're gonna build a little community. Literally, the opposite of social media, this thing is not on Facebook. It's a insightful, accountable, and personally focused group of self helpers. Just like you, so come take out Checkout takeout therapy club at takeout therapy dot com. Hello hello, my friend.
Thank you so much for stopping in today to do a little bit of introspection. That's what I'm doing today. I'm doing a little bit of introspection as I just crossed over twenty five years of marriage Yeah. That is a thing. And I was, like, totally we went away for the week last week and You know, just talking a lot about marriage and partnership and, like, what it all means and like, kinda how proud we are of, like, sticking it through, you know, because, frankly, twenty five years with one person, is a really long time.
It's a lot of ups and downs. I was twenty four when I got married and I kind of laugh at that because I was so young. I was so young. My relationship skills were so terrible. And yet, we persevered and we grew we discover who we were together in partnership.
And today, as I'm kind of reflecting back on twenty five years of marriage, and partnership. I thought it might be helpful for you. For me to reflect out loud, to talk about some of the things that I see in the therapy office, in people's relationships, and some of the things that I see in my house, in my own relationship. Does that feel like it will be helpful? If so, stick with me?
Because we're gonna dig into what does healthy partnership really require what does it look like? And what are the things that we can kind of find there or hold on to there? While we're trying to navigate the kind of rough water sometimes of long term relationship. Here's the way I look at relationship as a therapist and as a married person. Is that I think of relationship like a jar.
And the people in the relationship are kinda like fireflies. Right? Did you ever collect fireflies when you were a kid or maybe as an adult? The relationship is a container. That two people make an agreement to kinda like be in together.
For as long as it feels good and as long as it works, we're in the container of relationship. I am not my relationship. My partner is not my relationship. The relationship is its own theme. And actually, I've talked about it a lot in the therapy office like a business because it's really interesting.
People don't sit down with each other and talk about how their relationships going. And I highly recommend that if you're one of the people that doesn't do this, that this becomes part of your regular repertoire. Because if your relationship were a business, and you never talked about it and how it was going, what was going well, what were the areas that were failing in the business. The business would tank, my friend. And so one of the things that I've learned from twenty five years of partnership is we have to talk about the relationship as its own thing.
Meaning, you come into relationship as an individual with your own history, your own personality, your own perspectives of things, and really your own sense of self idea ideally, and I'll say, like, coming into relationship with a very clear sense of who you are and what you want from relationship tends to be critical because It's hard when people come into relationships and their sense of self is not quite formed. Because then what happens is that they form their sense of self around this container. Right? And so we wanna kinda look at it a little bit differently. We wanna look at it as like I am me and you are you.
And we too fireflies are coming into an agreement where we're gonna hang out in this jar for a while and do this thing. Right? And it's so it's like It's not a battle. It's not a competition. There are no winners.
There are only two people trying to be in this predetermined container with this structure that you determine is best for you and trying to be like known right there. Relationships, partnerships, long term stuff when we really kind of settle in with somebody. Oh, it's one of the most vulnerable scary things that we can do. It's the closest that we get to another person. Right?
And so within the partnership, each individual really wants to be seen as themselves and loved for themselves and to be validated, which I've talked about on the podcast before, but Like, no one's right and no one's wrong about what they think. We can agree. We can disagree and all that. But everybody gets to kind of hold their own perspective. Now, sometimes in my own relationship, I have looked at my person's perspective and thought you are whack, man.
That is not a correct perspective. And that is really damaging to relationship because I can guarantee you the reverse has happened. You know, we say things in relationships that we don't mean? Oh, my gosh. In the course of twenty five years, the the number of absolutely awful things I've said to my very best friend on earth is embarrassing.
And yet, when we decide to share a jar, it gets a little cramped in here sometimes. Doesn't it? And so what we really want in relationship at the very bottom of everything. I just wanna be myself right here. Right?
Like, if you're gonna come here and be in my life and live with me and, you know, kinda like be a part of my reality, I just want to be able to be myself right here. I can't fake it. And when I got into this long term relationship, I was really a child who had come from a lot of trauma. And I wanted and felt that it was my role to please my person, to be pleasing, whether it was to be agreeable or flexible or quote unquote easy going. In the early days, I found that they didn't have many opinions about much of anything.
And thank goodness. I married somebody with a positive spirit and a sense of adventure. And the ability to actually make decisions and execute them because I didn't understand that that was my job too. And so through the years as I've obviously grown up, I've realized, like, I don't actually like not getting to choose. And have helped us both to understand that we're both individuals and everybody gets a vote and nobody's right and nobody's wrong.
So I don't know. Like, when I when I think about a long term relationship, I guess I try to think like, okay, well, what are the big takeaways that I've learned in these years? And what do I see in the office that is really detrimental to relationships. And I guess the the thing that I would say, and it's funny because I was sitting eating breakfast this morning with my partner and I said, hey, what just off the top of your head, what are your takeaways from twenty five years of marriage? And the first word that came out was empathy.
And I agree wholeheartedly. Empathy. The ability to not have to agree with somebody, but to totally understand them. That's empathy to just hold space for somebody else's experience. Because in partnership, we can both go through the same exact experience and experience it completely differently.
And so if we look at each other and we're like, why aren't you thinking about this the way I'm thinking about this? Why are you not behaving the way I think you should be behaving? Why are you not doing the things that I would do if I were in this situation? That's not empathy. Empathy is allowing your person to be themselves and to try to hold space for that even if they annoy the shit out of these sometimes.
Frankly, truly, honestly. To allow somebody else to just make their own mistakes, Right? Rune their own relationships or foul up their own jobs or parents in a way that doesn't feel a connection to you. That's okay because relationships aren't about trying to get each other to be the same. They're about sharing the jar with somebody totally different and having that be okay.
And so a lot of times people ask me Rebecca, how much of of my partner's behavior or like how much of my partner's need of me is my responsibility. Like, I'm being asked to change the way that I am. So that this person can be not triggered, more comfortable, feel more empowered, feel more comfortable. But right? And that's a really hard question because we do have to grow and change in relationship.
Like, we're sharing the jar. We said we'd share the jar. Right? We agreed to living in this container of partnership and relationship and maybe marriage for however long, as ourselves with another. It takes so much patience with ourselves because it's hard to be in relationship, but also with our partners.
And I think it's totally reasonable to say, and we've talked about boundaries on the podcast before, but it's really reasonable to say to somebody, this is how your behavior impacts me, and this is what I'm going to do. When this behavior comes up. It's relationships aren't about saying, this is what your behavior does to me, and I need you not to do that anymore. Right? And and really, it's kind of the same thing because typically when we set a boundary, it's like, hey, so I don't know.
If you're going to blare your music late into the night when I'm trying to get to bed, I'm gonna sleep in the other bedroom. Right? It's like there are ways to navigate relationship issues in which we can use empathy. And we can display patience. But there's also this thing about curiosity that keeps coming up in the therapy office actually when we're talking about relationships because people get this idea that, like, they know what their person might think about x y and z.
And I'm just gonna call b s on that right now. This is something that I had the good fortune of learning very early on in my own relationship. One time, we went over to Seattle for a long weekend with John and Julie Gutman. You know those guys? They run a weekend seminar for couples, and it was fantastic.
And one of the things that we learned is you don't know much about me at all. Really? Yeah. We're married. Yeah.
We have kids together, but I change every single day of my life. And that was such a profound experience to learn how to be curious with each other. It's lacking in relationships. We don't ask each other questions anymore. We just get complacent and we're like, I know, you know, people say all the time, I know what my wife's gonna say, or I know what my husband's gonna say about this.
Or I know what she's thinking. Right? And that's not true. You don't know anything unless you actually ask the question. And so one of the biggest takeaways from my own relationship deficits and one of the areas that I continue to try to develop is never ever ever assume that I know anything.
I always just ask What do you think? What do you want? How is this impacting you? Right? What are your feelings about this situation?
Right? What are your feelings about when this happens? What are your ideas about how we can improve our relationship? Curiosity. Curiosity is not how are you.
It's not how was your day. That's not curiosity. It's like how are you feeling about the work that you're doing in your life right now. Does it feel fulfilling? It's like, what are you learning from your role as a parent?
How is it changing you as a person? What are you working on in your personal development right now? And how can I sort of come along on that journey with you? It's curiosity that's really really needed. And that, I guess, brings me to probably my last takeaway for you today on this little relationship discussion, which is like If we wanna be in long term partnership of any kind, we have to be willing And what we have to be willing to do is to just love somebody else as they are.
And we have to be willing to be loved by them. For me, that's been the hardest part. My trauma has made it hard for me to receive love. Isn't that interesting? You'd think it would be so much easier to receive than to give.
But for me, it's harder to receive. I'm a really good giver of love. I'm a really I'm a connector kind of person. I love people. I will dig in with them any day of the week.
But will I let them dig in with me as the question? I'm working on it. We're all working on things in relation chip. And I think, like, what's the most helpful thing to work on in relationship is just this piece about willingness willingness to show up as ourselves, like our real selves, not the self that we want everybody to be happy with, but like to say, I don't really love that. I don't like that.
I don't want that. Right? Or to say, No. I actually really do want Thai food for dinner tonight. Instead of, I don't care.
I'm easy. The numbers of dinners that I eaten, that I was like, this isn't really what I felt like that I never spoke up. I can't even tell you. I've changed a lot in this relationship over twenty five years. And so I guess another thing is like we change in relationship.
And frankly, I meet with a lot of people all the time who are in relationships with people who literally refuse to change. And that makes things unsustainable. Because through the course of human life, it's a journey and I believe that the journey is about healing. And yeah, so maybe you ended up with somebody who's just like somebody in your family. Right?
Maybe one of your parents. Yeah. Relationships are container in which we can heal the wounds of the past. Meaning, it doesn't matter if you ended up with somebody who's like your dad or somebody who's just like your mom. If that person is willing to heal the places in them, that don't work for the relationship.
And if you're willing to heal the places in you that you want to improve in, It might be sustainable. So hopefully, I've passed on some of my old age wisdom to you about what does it take to be in a healthy partnership? I can certainly do a whole another episode on what an unhealthy partnership looks like. But between you and me, usually when somebody is in an unhealthy partnership, they know it. They know it down deep.
They know I deserve to be treated much much better than this. This is and I am not on equal playing field. And this is not sustainable. So if that's you, just know that you are sovereign being, you're just you, you're an individual, and not all successful relationships. Are ones in which we stay with the person.
Most of our relationships don't last. Right? And they were successful because you grew there and you got to know yourself there. And you figured out what you wanted right there. And then you moved on to go and get it.
Because that's what you deserve. Somebody that can hold space for you with empathy and patience and somebody who has the willingness to get to know you with curiosity and lots and lots of love. I wish that for you. Okay. Thanks for listening today.
I hope it was helpful. I'll see you again soon. Thanks for listening. The goal of this project is really to provide mental health education to everyone who needs it. So if you wanna help me with that, forward an episode to a friend or write a kind review, pleats.
And if you like my style and you're ready to dig in, do some work with me. Come join the club at takeout therapy dot com, where I'm now hosting a monthly mental health maintenance club. I also do classes groups and one on one coaching and therapy. It's time for change. Are you ready?
