Transcript: 

How to Clean Up What's Under the Rug in our Relationships

 

Hi, welcome to Us & Kids. I am your host Jan Talen. I'm a licensed marriage and family therapist, a wife, mom, and a grandma. This podcast is about how to be married forever while you parent together. It's not an easy task, so I encourage you to subscribe to Us & Kids in your favorite podcasting app. I'm glad you're here so that your marriage and home can be fulfilling and so very good.

 

Today. The question is, have you looked around your house, your garage, or your bedroom lately? Have you thought, Ooh, what a mess. I sure wish someone would straighten her. Clean this up. Well, I'm not here to help you right now with cleaning those things up in the physical sense, but I am interested in wondering with you about what do we do when we look around our relationships. Sometimes the holidays in December can bring to light the tensions of the past year. Things that have gotten stuffed under a rug or gotten moly in that sense in the back of the refrigerator can pop up when there's so much tension and stress during December. So let's be brave and take a look back, see what things there are to clean up or straightened up. We're going to look at it from five different angles in terms of giving your relationship a bit of a new year checkup.

 

So I'm going to talk about them from the marriage place and I'm going to remind you that these thoughts can also be applied to parenting your kiddos. So what's the first angle? How do we want to look under the rug? Let's start by thinking about memories that you and your partner have together. What are some good ones that happened over the last year? What are the ones that aren't so great? They're not so fun to remember, but often those are the ones that get pushed under the rug. We usually don't take pictures of the icky memories. So what memories good and not as good would be good or wise to reprocess, to laugh about or cry about. And for right now, for the sake of managing things, just think through the past year. What made the memory's good? Were the memories good for one of you but not for the other?

 

Listen, as you chat it through with each other, listen for deeper understanding and appreciation of the experience because it can be really valuable in terms of deciding, do we want to go there again emotionally, relationally, or no? Let's intentionally do this activity or this type of interaction or stress differently. As you take the time to think, to feel and then to talk with compassion, understanding, and an open mind, you will see that you'll be able to make a better plan. Write down that plan. It would look like this. I will do this. List your specific action differently when this happens, so I will hold my ground with quiet sentences. The next time you are being too mean to the kids, try it three times. There has to be an agreement between the two of you. If we're talking about meanness to the kids, who's your spouse has to agree.

 

Help me see it. I don't see where I think I'm being mean. Your spouse would then maybe have to say something like, I will agree to listen to your quiet sentences and try to calm down myself. Work that process three times and then revisit. How do you want to upgrade? No, a little aside here is that when we talk through an old memory, we have to talk them through with compassion, understanding and an open mind. I know I just listed those because I want you to remember them because so often we get sucked into the memory of reliving the event. It reawakens our emotions and then we just rerun the conversation and the fight. That's not the objective here is to talk it through with compassion. Working to understand your spouse as your spouse works to understand you and keeping an open mind about what about their perspective is actually helpful to the situation.

 

So I have a memory that my husband and I visit from time to time. It helps us talk about fears and about staying together. There have been three times when my husband was significantly injured, so results had they gone bad would have been life altering. We shared the event, each of us having a different experience, shared event, different emotional reaction, talking those events and our experiences through helped us both understand the impact of the us part of us and able to share the compassion and the commitment that we were glad we did it together and the compassion and the commitment that we never want to do that again.

 

Keeping track of those important events can help direct us where we want to go. So one of the events I just mentioned was a skiing accident. We could have decided that due to the accident skiing, playing in snow, going fast down a Hill was a totally bad idea and we would never do it again. Instead we decided that skiing was still fun. We're waiting for snow here in Michigan, like it's time. Our skis are like calling. We just never need to go back to the scene of that accident or that mountain again. There are lots of other mountains to pick. It has helped us stay courageous and confident about our skiing skills and about our love to play in the snow. If one of us had backed out our winter play time would be confused and we would have had to figure something else out.

 

So as you think back through memories and the past year, sometimes it can be wise to talk through what a bad, what bad happened has gotten into a regular space in your relationship. This is the second angle. It works within the angle of looking back at memories. But then as you look at those memories, is there a bad habit, maybe it's a habit of yours or a habit of what is happening between the two of you. Pause, breathe out, relax so that you have space to just own it and work with it. You know, sometimes we have a recipe that is going like, this doesn't taste good. What am I going to do? And you go look in the drawer of your spices or your quick hop online and you try to figure out what can I do to help this out? And that's what a bad habit is.

 

It's a recipe that has gone bad. It used to be fine, but it's gone a little bad. And you're going to go say, what can I add or take away that would make it, okay, explore the habit for a minute and then look like you do at a recipe. What is a better habit to replace it with? Remember like making a recipe a bit different is that we usually do it in small steps or small doses and the transitions of habits also has to be in small steps. For example, if when you were first married you ate dinner together, but now you have two small little kids and they are hungry way earlier than the two of you are, so someone makes dinner for the littles but then snacks and eats their leftovers and so by the time it's time for the adults of the family to eat, the person who fed the little ones is not quite so hungry but the other person is hungry, heats up some food and sits down by the TV, pulls out their phone and that adult connection time has sort of petered out, gone away.

 

If you want to reset that pattern, the changes for one person might be not snacking as much with the kids and committing to being ready to have dinner with their spouse when they come home. You might talk about that habit and you might say, well, we would have a little more fun if we made dinner together a couple of nights. The commitment from the person coming home later might be that, yeah, I'll snack a little something and help you get the kids to bed and then we'll make food and we won't turn on the TV. We'll leave our phones in the living room. For some couples, they might remind themselves that it's a couple dinner night by lighting a candle or lowering the lights and adding a little atmosphere. It keeps the energy going and the atmosphere and the tone in the house blends a little bit more romance so that you're more set up for conversation and being together.

 

Now I know, some of you are laughing because bedtime takes two and a half hours and by then you're both so hangry. Yeah, can hardly even speak much less be nice to each other. So look at the patterns and look for ways to make better memories, practice, humor, cooperation with each other and grace because putting little ones to bed dinner time is an ongoing challenge for many households. Don't make it so that he gets swept under the rug and you get bitter between each other. Instead, keep trying to clean it up and keep rolling with it. Your littles will continue to change. They will learn how to eat, they will learn how to go to sleep, stay together together. So another angle to look at your relationship and make sure it's not having too much stuffed under the rug is to look at what your priorities are.

 

So pause for a few minutes sometime or think about it while you're driving around. What are your personal priorities? What do you want yourself to be like over the next year? What do you want the relationships to look like with your littles, with your marriage? There are oodles of other places to look at priorities right now. I would just focus on those. Then in one of those quieter, we're not too tired, we're not too hungry moments. Turn off the TV, closed down Netflix, turn off your phone and talk with each other about what those priorities are. Come with the attitude and the emotional energy to listen to what the other person is saying. Listen to what they need or what they're hoping for. Remember, you're married, you're together in some of that work of being married is to help each other, not judge, but help to encourage to add good information.

 

Not too much criticism, but support and optimism. Well, one person's priority might be to upgrade their career status in one way or another. Maybe the company they're with or maybe by switching jobs, the other person's priority might be to have more time together as a couple and as a family. And those two priorities could feel like they are clashing. It's probably true that both people see their priority as a way to help marriage and family life. One is through financial security and the other is through quality time. So where can you make a transition from thinking that the other person is just rejecting you and go to a place where you can see that you are both working towards the good of the relationship?

 

Maybe there's a conversation about how to spend less money so your savings account actually grows. Even if the job doesn't change. Maybe there's a conversation about being present and available, not quite so entirely exhausted when you're together. Maybe there's an agreement to change the priority of finding a time available in the week. Well, you're willing to be emotionally connected with each other intentionally. It's in the thinking about priorities and writing them down. That actually helps us focus on where we are going and what we want the year to look like. Checking in with those priorities every two or three months. Put it on your Google calendar so that you can remember and get bumped about. It can help keep those ambitions on track. Your parenting in your marriage, working in other things. They're busy. I'm not advocating going for an a plus on achievement of priorities. I'm inviting you to stay realistic and look for that. B or B plus meaning there are times when it's an a plus, but times when it's a D plus because real life happens in real life is realistic, keep it realistic and there will be less concern or energy to just shove that priority under the rock.

 

Okay. It certainly is possible that when looking at memories and looking at habits and priorities, they could all use some adjustments and then looking at those things, it can open up old wounds, things that are ugly, things that have been turning into grudges. My definition for a grudge is a space or an event where you have felt used, diminished or disrespected because of some action or interaction that space or event has not been tenderly cared for and so it sort of swelters in the heat of quiet anger until it begins to affect the beauty and the peace of other areas of your relationship. Often I think about it when the times when I have had milk spilled in my car and I think I've cleaned it up except for when the next summer comes around. Smells like rotten milk again and I've got to clean it up again. It's not real fun or pretty, but I don't like the smell of rotten milk much like you may not like the smell of that grudge. It can take a couple of seasons to clean up grudges that are sort of dug in or ingrained.

 

This will scratch the surface on how to take care of a grudge, but we want to do at least get started. Part one. Remember if there is an old memory that still pesters you for clarity and for emotional balance, write down what that memory is, why it still bothers you. Look especially at your emotions and what your memory of the facts are. We are going to be gentle with the memory of facts because we know through lots of studies that memories will be very different even around the same event and both sets of memories, yours and your partners can well be accurate. So arguing about the facts of something long ago is often counter productive to resolving a grudge. Talking about this as my perception of the facts and based on my perception, this is what my emotional memory is. This helps you and your partner not become defensive but help you be able to just listen and enter into the world of your spouse.

 

The release of the grudge usually happens as a person. The listening person accepts the perception and the emotions as being real to their spouse. As genuine and deep acceptance is experienced all long with compassion and care. The grudge often heals. The words like, I'm sorry, genuinely said, feel it within your own being as well as theirs. I'm sorry. I see your pain. I didn't get it before. I don't want you to hurt. If I had understood this earlier, I would have behaved differently. I can see where I played a role in this and I can see that your fear or worry about this happening again is pretty big for you. I want to remind you that we haven't been in that place since then. I did like those interactions between us. Either I made decisions to walk away and calm down more often. Listen to the pronoun of the person who's processing the hurt of their partner.

 

The pronoun there is "I". Okay, I see I played a role. I'm reminding you I didn't like. I hear your pain. It's that compassion of not saying yes, but that's not true. That won't help a grudge. Just accepting the person where they are and accepting their pain as being real for them is often the healing part. I know this is a brief outline about how to release a grudge. The most important part in doing this is to listen carefully and gently without defensiveness and with compassion. As you do be sure that you make plans about how you would do a situation like this differently. Should there be a next time and keep your promises. So one final angle to look at what's under the rug is to look at the things we can't change. There are things that happen in real life that are right now real life for us for many years.

 

Bedtime took a long time. We wanted it to take 20 minutes. It usually did not and so instead of creating blame or shame and pushing someone to do something that went against their values, we accepted what was for the most part and often tolerate it the hour plus that it took to get all the littles asleep. Sometimes we would trade off. One of us would work on cleaning up the downstairs. One of us would stay upstairs with the kids when one of us got exasperated with a kiddo, the other one would step in, one after another. We knew this was reality for the age of our kiddos. There may be other things you can't change like job situations or limited income or having a parent live in the house with you. Understanding things that can't be changed. Doesn't mean you have to put up with things that are injuring your relationship?

 

What it does mean is that the things you can't change is that you talk it through. Can you talk about what it is, how your feeling about it and about how we're going to manage it. We are going to manage it. Stay together. Look at each other. Hold hands, remind each other your for each other. Talk about what's the impact on our relationship. How long can you do this? How long can I do this? How long can we do this? What are we going to do when we're too weary or we're falling apart? Is there a plan B or a respite space? Accepting some things you can't change is important. It is also important to realize accepting some of these things does create stress and realizing the stress. Having a coping mechanism or two or three around that stress that keeps you connected can lower that stress enough to not make it a mess under your rug and then next year at this time you won't have to peek under the rug and go, Oh, that thing we couldn't change is still underneath there.

 

Well, those angles with which we look around the corners is your relationship and see what has been slipping under the rug or growing moldy in your relationship. Work to clean up those memories, undo the bad habits and make them better. Check out your priorities. Be sure they're on track for what you want. This year to bring. Don't let those grudges trip you up and pull you back into the past. Instead, clean them up. Use understanding and forgiveness. And as you look at those things that are what they are that probably are not going to change right now, look at them as ways to build connection and strength with each other because those connections and strengths will help you move forward into other tougher places that could well be ahead of you. Well, you know me, I'm also gonna remind you, hold hands, hug, smile, kiss, hello, goodbye.

 

Don't forget bedtime and bedrooms snuggles, smiles and giggles. See the good share, the good with your partner and with your kiddos. There's a great printable waiting for you so that these things you can put out on your bedroom dresser or the kitchen table or the fridge to just keep your brain active and engaged and not too overwhelmed. I'm always glad to spend this time with you and watch remind you to join us on the Facebook page. Why to the website at Us & Kids because the new program called DNA for fun is going to be released in early March. It's a good communications course and it's going to help you stay connected in those places where those memories are attentions that we've just talked about. Can't seem to unwind, married forever and parenting together isn't easy. Be sure to join us for the webinar and look with me towards a really good year. You are worth it. Bye bye.