Letting go of the inability to change our partner frees us to grow autonomously
I recently wrote an article about a client who enjoys her marriage and who also struggles with her angry outbursts. couple. The article received some criticism.
To recap: After many years of explaining to her partner how and why her anger (and denial of that anger) was hurtful and not right, her behavior continued, hardly influenced by her rigorous and persistent efforts to change it. My client, as I reported, finally lost the will and interest to keep trying to change her partner. At the same time, she realized that it was not in her control to change her partner’s behavior.
It was at this point that my client decided to divert attention to her partner and direct it to herself, feeling curious about her own response, her own relationship to her husband’s misbehavior. As it was evident that changing partners was not possible and she wanted to stay married, she began to investigate her own situation, the story she told herself about her behavior, and what type of partner “should” have, how “should” treat her and what “should” your relationship include.
I received a strong response to this article. Several people became angry and believed that my client’s choice to divert her attention from her husband and her troublesome behavior to herself and her own process was to demean herself, blame herself. And furthermore, that I encouraged her to accept what she positively “should not” accept, to find guilt in herself. But in fact, it’s nothing like that.
Paying attention to her own process is not about trying to find out how and where she was at fault, nor denying or approving of her husband’s behavior. Rather, it is about finding a way to break free from the anger, helplessness, and frustration that her current reaction to her husband’s anger was triggering in her.
What she wanted was to hand her husband the misbehavior, not have to carry him as her problem, and not have to wait for him to change until he could be okay. In short, she wanted to be in charge of her own well-being.
It is abjectly false and dangerous, in fact, to suggest that focusing our attention on our own response to a difficulty, prioritizing self-awareness over fixing anyone else, is negative or self-destructive in any way. For my client, the decision to stop trying to change a behavior she couldn’t make her feel immediately empowering and liberating, as if she were taking charge of her life. With the change in focus, she was no longer waiting for her husband to change in order to be happy. With a better understanding of her own reality, her husband’s outbursts could be just that: her husband’s outbursts, her problem that he would or might not address at the time.
But most importantly, his outbursts couldn’t be about her or against her, it wasn’t something he had to take care of correcting. Turning the lens on her own response, and doing what she needed to do to keep her own peace, was about taking care of herself in the reality she was in, rather than struggling with reality and continuing to demand that she be different. One thing we know for sure, when we fight against reality, reality wins, always.
We hold firmly rooted beliefs and inner stories on the subject of relationships. They go from micro to macro, from subtle to obvious. The most “should” be a problem of all, however, may be this idea that we “should” change our partner, fix what we do not like. And consequently, we cannot be happy or content until we do.
Maintaining a relationship with a partner that we cannot change, accepting what we do not like, is seen as a surrender to failure, giving up on our partner and to a certain extent, on ourselves. When we stop trying to change the parts of our partner that we don’t like, we are judged (and we judge ourselves) as weak, dysfunctional and lacking in self-esteem.
The idea of focusing on ourselves when the problem is that our partner sends us to the fiercest “should” minefields. We get entangled in the idea that “we shouldn’t” have to live with this problem, “we shouldn’t” let the problem continue (as if we had a choice), “we shouldn’t” have to change who we are to accommodate our problem couple, “we shouldn’t” let our partner get away with bad behavior, and countless others “should”.
But these “shoulds”, while sensible and perhaps even true in some perfect universe, do nothing to change the problem, the partner or the relationship. And most importantly, they don’t bring us peace. These “shoulds” keep us struggling with reality, convinced of our righteousness but still suffering. But worst of all, they keep our well-being subject to someone else’s capacity or will to change, which is where we never want to be.
These “shoulds” contribute to the idea that the relationship is good or bad. If the relationship contains difficulties that we cannot fix, then the relationship must be bad and we “should” go. If we don’t, we agree to stay in a bad relationship.
The truth is that we abhor contradiction in this society; we are not trained to hold coexistent and contradictory truths. The contradiction, which paradoxically is the essence of a relationship, terrifies us. We cannot wrap contradictory truths and put them neatly on a shelf. Nor can we categorize A relationship as good or bad, worthwhile or not.
And yet all relationships are both bad and good (except perhaps the most recent ones). Accepting that the good must coexist with the bad, and being loving in the midst of contradiction, is the basis of a healthy relationship. Keep in mind that those bad aspects of a relationship are not abuse. Your partner may have defects that are difficult to bear without being intentionally harmful to you.
A relationship requires a “and” attitude, not a “but” attitude. “But” is a word that erases; erase everything that comes before it.
It’s a healthy urge to want to fix what we don’t like in a relationship, to change what doesn’t work. And the period of discovering and struggling with the problem and our partner, in other words, the period of suffering, can last a long time, sometimes the entire relationship. For some people, the lucky ones, there comes a time when they realize that they have done everything they know how to do to try to change the couple, and even then the problem persists and the couple remains unchanged. So we have the option to take a new course and examine whether there is a way to find peace even with the problem. Our partner can continue doing what he has always done, but we can do things differently.
At any point in a relationship, we can choose to be curious about ourselves, our history, our triggers, our experiences, and our response to a problem we are experiencing with our partner.
We can unpack our stories and consider if there is anything we can let go of that alleviates our suffering and brings us peace.
We do not do it to blame or punish ourselves, but to free ourselves from the fight. We do it not to get more entangled and to be the victims of the problem any longer, but to use it as an opportunity for self-awareness and expansion.
The action of turning the lens towards ourselves is a victory, a liberation and delivering the problem to whoever has it.
We unhook our own well-being from the other person’s car.
Once disengaged, we discover that we can live with that same problem, but without living it as a problem, our problem, or even a problem. This is freedom. This is autonomy.
Nancy Colier is a psychotherapist, interfaith minister, public speaker, workshop leader, and author of “The Power to Shut Down: The Conscious Way to Stay Sane in a Virtual World.” For more information, visit NancyColier.com
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