Thank you for the suggestion of this topic!! You know who you are!If you’ve been in this group or reading my blog somewhere else for a while, you know to expect the unexpected. So I’m going to do just that.
And it will be hard.
Very hard.
And I cannot guarantee if it will work, either.
But –
What I want to do with this post is first of all put in some background. I’ve never met the people involved, the person who suggested the topic or their spouse. But I do have some ideas as to how someone got to be the way the spouse seems to be. So I’ll come up with some possibilities first.If I’m right, then this could be very helpful.
If I’m not right, then maybe we need to talk so I won’t be in the dark as to why this spouse won’t accept and cherish their partner as they are.
But let’s proceed with Possibility #1:Your spouse grew up in a very rigid home where things were always a certain way and they have no idea how to be flexible.
What this means is that thinking differently is like talking to someone from Mars. They can’t stretch their mind around it.
There is a part of this that means the spouse who is rigid must also be very insecure. They act the opposite: Big know-it-alls. But underneath that, they’re totally out of their league.I lived in Florida for 3 decades and there is a good analogy here. The palm trees are kind of soft; they sway in the wind. The other trees break in hurricanes. A spouse who can’t see another way of doing things or thinking may be like the other trees, the ones that break when life gets tough.
So they’re nervous to make changes and see things the way they do but at the same time they’d be very nervous if Life throws them a curveball for which they’re not prepared. Possibility #2:It could be that this person grew up in the opposite kind of home, one that was chaotic, with a parent that was not around much or on drugs. Nothing steady and dependable.
It could be that the poor little kid in the middle of that latched onto very rigid ways of looking at the world and handling things because they felt so scared and unsure in the middle of that chaos.
So What Do You Do About It?
Here’s where my opposite, unexpected approach – that is very hard – comes in:Empathize.
Yes, with this annoying, frustrating, pain-in-the-a– spouse.
Yes, empathize with that person.
How? You say.
Well, I do not mean “agree” with them. You should not sell yourself down the river by agreeing when you don’t.(Of course, if you do agree, that’s fine.)
Empathizing means understanding how hard it is for them to see your point.
Instead of trying to explain and explain – and get nowhere – tell them “I understand how hard this is. It means you have to step outside of your own comfort zone and you can’t even see a way. I get that.” The reason it’s hard is because not only is your spouse not seeing you, but you’re not even focusing on you! You have to focus on them.But here’s the thing:
By doing this, they are not getting a message of your
*frustration
*unhappiness
*loneliness
Etc
You’re not disconnecting from them. Sure, they’ve disconnected from you, but you’re staying in the ring.Instead, they are getting a message of your caring.
And, at the same time, they are also hearing that you think they are struggling rather than that you think they’re know-it-alls who didn’t make room for you.
Now, in truth, they may not be conscious of struggling. But I think they must be actually struggling. It takes a lot of mental energy to see only one way instead of being flexible.Like those trees that break apart in a storm.
Not only that, they can plainly see that your relationship is in tatters because of it – and they’re totally helpless to do anything about it!
That’s why the empathy is an unexpected but powerful start.
But, see, behind the empathy is the message that they have to do the work to see things your way. And you’re there to be understanding of that struggle.This process will not only be hard, but take looooong.
You’ve got to be empathetic for many months for your spouse to genuinely feel the support to start venturing out of the box they’ve put themselves in to start being open to your view of the world.So that’s another reason it’s hard.
But totally worth it when the end result is true communication.