158. The Hidden Cost of Becoming Healthier in Relationships

Speaker A: Hello. It's been a while. I'm so glad to be back with you and I'm way out of practice in this podcast. I just Talked for like 20 minutes and I looked at my recording software and realized I had never hit record. So here we are. I'm back. I'm hoping that everything I just said I can say at least as good as I said before as I come back into the podcast. Just get on here and talk a little bit about what's been going on for me in the last year, what I've been learning, and what you can expect from us moving forward. It was January of 2025, so over a year ago, that I decided to put the podcast on hold or pause the podcast. And everyone in podcasting says you need to be posting every single week in order to have a successful podcast. And I don't really know what the best metric of success is, but I, you know, as I was kind of, I don't know, maybe as, ah, the dust has been settling with everything that caused me to pause the podcast in the first place, as all of that was settling and I logged into my hosting platform and saw people are still listening to this, which is sort of a surprise, but. But also not really because I know that those of you who listen come because you're craving this kind of conversation that has kind of been missing in how we talk about relationships. The way we consume information now is in such short, small sound bites that we don't really get the depth and nuance that we're craving about what it takes to make a relationship work. And when I hear from my listeners, that's something that they appreciate about this podcast. So I logged into my hosting platform. I saw people are still listening. I've had a lot of things come up in my work in the last year that I really want to start talking about again. So we're back. And here we are back in January when I did decide to put the podcast on hold, I had a lot on my plate. As much as I loved the podcast and was very attached to it, I felt like at the time that was the thing that needed to go. I was working full time at a professional job. I had been doing my coaching practice on the side for, at that point, uh, several years. I don't know what you call several, but, you know, more than four years I had been working on growing my business on the side. I had gotten, you know, to a more intense part of my relational life therapy training. So I was doing more of the practicums and The Hampshire hands on training, working with my clients, working my full time job, and raising two small humans that needed me. And so over the holidays of that, you know, the 2024, 2025 season, it became very clear to my husband and I that it was time for me to, to start working on being able to quit my job so that I could do my business full time. And there were some personal reasons for that. We were very fortunate to be in the position where we could depend more on my husband's income for a period of time. My kids are at that age where you don't really want to leave them home, but daycare is not really a great spot for them either. So childcare got a little bit more difficult than it had been. And I had promised my son that I wouldn't send him to daycare this past summer because he's a little bit old, at least for the childcare arrangements that we had. So a lot of things were going on. I knew I was going to be having a big year. 2025 was a really big year in a lot of ways. I was going to, you know, quit my job, hopefully get certified in relational life therapy, spend more time home with my kids than I have in a really long time. I had a lot going on and a lot to think about and prepare for. So I put the podcast on hold. I knew it was the right thing, even though it was hard for me to let go of. I really have enjoyed this work a lot and sharing my thoughts with you, uh, on this platform. So I put the podcast on hold and I ended up, it really did end up being the right thing and the best thing for us. So I quit my job in May. When my kids got out of school for the summer. I was able to submit my case conceptualization, the final step of my certification program, right in the nick of time. As my training period came to a close, I was able to submit that I got. I heard back very quickly from the Relational Life Institute that I had passed. I was able to, you know, advertise myself as a certified Relational Life therapy coach. And then we had a summer where even though I'm just a very ambitious person and I love to be busy with work, I also felt really, um, I felt a strong impression that I should just relax with my work and spend some time with my kids. So we had a really great summer. We got season passes to our local amusement park. The kids had lots of time to play with their friends, um, which they couldn't do when they were in daycare because they were gone every day. And we just had an amazing summer. And then close to the end of summer, you know, late late July, my hut hiccup. My daughter ended up breaking her femur. My daughter ended up breaking her femur, which, for those of you who know or have experienced that, it's a pretty big deal. And so, um, I became pretty much a full time caregiver for the rest of the summer. And my daughter was still in a wheelchair when she started school in August. She. So I was really involved with helping her out with that. And I felt so grateful that I had listened to all of these impressions that I had throughout the past several months so that I could be in a position to do that and be there for her in that way without having to rearrange my whole life. It was a pretty intense period. I'm not gonna lie. There were days when I was just at my wit's end, because being, you know, 24 hour caregiver to someone who can't take themselves to the bathroom is just kind of a lot. Um, but we were able to get through that and get my daughter back up on her feet, literally. And as she started, you know, becoming more independent and that all kind of fell into place. My business started picking up in the last quarter of the year, and I'm here now just in a position, ready to get back into this. And I've had a lot of experiences, both personally and with my clients that I've really wanted to come and talk to you about on the podcast. So here we are. We're back. One of the things that I have felt really strongly in this last year is one of the principles in relational life therapy and RLT that we talk about. And it's grief, relational grief. And this is part of one of Terry Real's tools that he talks about. You know, if you're in a relationship and you're really struggling, at some point you're going to have to do what's called a relational reckoning, which is, am I getting enough from this relationship to make it worth it, to grieve the things I'm not going to get? And that although I've been through that in my own relationship, my marriage has been through that. I've experienced that in my marriage. It was not in my marriage that I was exploring that in the past year. It really was with some of my other close personal relationships that I started to really see, you know, and I think part of it is you cannot escape your own work if you're trained in relational life. Therapy, you just cannot do it. The work that we do with our clients is deep and, and it's nuanced and it's challenging. And you just cannot guide someone through that without doing it yourself. And so, you know, throughout this training, we're not just learning how to help clients, but we're learning how to be relational beings ourselves. And that has made me more aware of some of the dynamics in some of my relationships than I ever have but before. And I was starting to see how, you know, another term that we use in the, in the relational life therapy model. As the adoptive child, I was starting to see how some of these behaviors I learned from my childhood about, you know, being very accommodating, smoothing things over to keep the peace, kind of accepting abusive behavior as normal. Um, one of my therapists that I've been working with this last year called it betrayal blindness. You know, waking up to the ways that I was being mistreated in some of my personal relationships and, um, realizing that I had to protect myself from that by distancing myself from certain relationships brought up a lot of grief. And I see it in my clients too. You know, when we start to realize that our relationships that we thought were working okay, and we thought we're really close are not actually what we thought they were. Um, there's a grief in that. You know, there's a grief for someone like me who's learned how to be an over functioner. There's a grief for. There's a certain amount of grief when you, you know, for someone like me who's learned how to be an over functioner, realizes that over functioning is not actually helping my relationships. And when you stop doing that, you stop taking responsibility for everyone else and making sure everything goes well, even if it's not your job to make it sure it goes well. And when you stop doing that, some people become very angry. Um, you start to see more of the reality of how your relationships are working. And it can be really sad. So I want all of you who are listening, who are struggling in some sort of a relationship to know that as a quote unquote relationship expert, I am not immune to any of that. I am walking beside you and learning it and doing it and living it. And the thing that helps me the most, and I think it works the best for my clients as well, is the thing that helps me the most, is embracing the spirituality of relational work. And one of the ways I, that I think of spirituality in this way, it's not a religious construct at all, but it's this idea that I'm part of something bigger than myself and that we're cycle breakers. You know, every single person who walks in my door and asks for help with their relationships is working on breaking cycles. And one of the things I love about Terry Real and when he talks about the spirituality of this work is when you're a cycle breaker, you're not just providing healing for the future generations. That is what motivates most of us to break cycles, is we don't want to pass this on to our kids. You know, of course we want to experience more joy and connection and satisfaction in our, you know, relationship, in our primary intimate relationship. But what gets a lot of us through the hard work of doing that is knowing that when we do it, we don't pass the difficulties onto our kids. So that is a big part of relational grief and relational work and getting past the extreme soul wrenching difficulty of working through some of these things. But also one of the things that I have felt, and I don't know if you hear the tear in my voice, but, um, one of my grandmothers passed away just a couple of years ago. And as I've been doing this relational work and thinking about her, how difficult her life was, how much she struggled, and how graciously and beautifully she worked through all of that. And she lived an amazing life. And, excuse me, I got to sit with her when we knew she was dying and to hear her talk about the wonderful kids that she raised and how proud she was of that. And I know that about her. I see that in her and I know it. And also there were some of the things that she experienced in the generation that she lived in where she had to deal with abuse and oppression and, you know, just the inequity of the world. And she dealt with that very stoically. And. And when I come up against this and I look at, you know, how we are working so hard to dismantle patriarchy and remove hierarchy from our relationships, and I realized at that moment I had a connection with this, that when I do that, I'm healing those former generations. I'm passing that back to, to my grandma. And I'm saying, look, grandma, we've healed this. We don't have to do it this way anymore. And I had. I've had some just, you know, experiences with that where I've seen just and felt that healing, that healing to the previous generations and then also to my children. And I will tell you, I am not perfect by any means. I make relational missteps every single day. And I'm sure that my kids are going to have to go to therapy and work through some of that when they become adults and they start to hit some of these roadblocks in their own relationships. But I also know that I'm working and I'm growing and I'm repairing as I go, and I'm so grateful that I've been able to do that work. I'm so grateful for the gift of rlt, of relational life Therapy and how it's provided me with some really good tools and really good principles for doing this work in a deeper, more meaningful, more mature way. So I'm back, and I'd like to think that I have even more to offer you now than I did a year ago when I stopped. Not because I'm, uh, an amazing person, but because I've been involved in this work, and I'm really committed to this work. So I've got a lot to share with you about, you know, some of the ways that I think about relationships in my own personal life and how I work with clients in my relationship and their. And how I work with clients and their relationships. And I just. What? What? And so I hope, if that's something that you're looking for right now, that you'll get value from listening and that you'll stick around, because we've got a lot more, um, coming with the podcast this year. So thanks again for being here. I so appreciate you. I feel a sense of community with you that I know are listening, that we're all kind of on this ride together. We're all committed to the more equitable, satisfying, collaborative relationships. I am so glad you're here, and I am looking forward to the year to come.