BSB 105
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Speaker: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Bite-Sized Brilliance podcast. I'm your host, Dr. April Darley, and I wanna talk about partner dynamics today. Back when I was a doctor, and if you are a doctor or a therapist listening to this, maybe even a coach, have you seen this pattern where all day long or even all week long, you have the same patients that come in a nd they had the same sort of disorder or complaint or concern? This is one of those weeks for me as a coach because I'm noticing that some of my clients are coming in and they're having issues with their romantic partner.
So when I said I wanted to talk about partnership dynamics, you could expand this to include a friendship, a coworker, a business partner, because partner dynamics, you're gonna see some of the same things popping up. Now, this week, my clients had anger towards their partners, and I use anger as an umbrella, and that [00:01:00] can encompass the smaller emotions of anger, like frustration, irritation, annoyance, or even disappointment.
Their partner was doing some kind of behavior, which triggered them to have this anger type response. Each individual had a slightly different scenario, but it had that commonality of my partner displayed this kind of behavior. I'm upset. I want to really unwind this a little bit. Their partner is usually not my client, so I can only work with the client's viewpoint and the client's information as they tell it. There is that old saying, there's his story, her story and the truth is somewhere in the middle. Because every individual will have their own perception of events because we have our own lived experience. We have our own filter, moral code, [00:02:00] value system, and we have what I call a mental playbook.
Based on our life experiences, our values, our moral or ethical code, that is the playbook that we end up living by. We have this subconscious expectation that other people should live by our playbook and when they don't, we end up feeling some kind of way.
Anger, frustration, annoyance, sadness. What I see when it comes to couples is one person is almost like telepathically, assuming that the other person knows what their playbook is, all the details, because they've been together for however many years. And that's not actually true. No one is a mind reader.
No one lived your experience right there next to you, even twins with the same parents and the same genetics do not end up having the same experiences based on perception. So you are truly out there [00:03:00] wandering the world in a very unique way. And let me tell you, nobody else understands your playbook as good as you do.
And if you haven't done a lot of personal development work or inner work, you may not even be aware of what your playbook is, and that can create problems as well. When we have these expectations for our partner, because they're not behaving like we expected them to, we're going to get some kind of emotional response.
If you've listened to this podcast before, and I hope you have, please share it with your friends if you love it, is that we have something called self-agency. Self-agency is our ability to do things and our brain likes to trick us and tell us that we can't do things.
If you think thoughts over and over that says, I can't. Thoughts you continue to think, become beliefs and those thoughts and beliefs can elicit emotion, so [00:04:00] _I can't_ can make you eventually feel anger, helplessness, disappointment, sadness. We just have to trace that back to the beginning and look at your self-agency and go, you know what?
Actually you can, that's not really the issue. If you have healthy self-agency, you can do anything. But what is a limiting factor from there on out is do you want to and are you willing to? When someone comes in to work with me and they have written relationship issues on their intake forms.
I will straight up ask them the question in the very first session, do you want my help to stay or do you want my help to go? Based on their answer, my approach is going to be very different. Sometimes the client will tell me, I want your help to stay, but halfway during my program, they decide, you know what?
I need to leave. Then we switch gears and we work on an exit strategy. [00:05:00] Sometimes they tell me I want to go right from the beginning and we work on things like confidence, self-esteem. The exit strategy. Sometimes they tell me I want to stay, and then we work on their ability to handle stress, to handle pressure, to look at their partner as not an ideal, but an actual human.
Those relationships often end up getting better because when my client works through their own issues, they have better energy to bring to the partnership, and the other partner is less reactive. So I've seen every single scenario in that. I wanna mention self-agency. You can do anything. What do you want to do?
What are you willing to do? Because it ties into the next concept of free will. You can make any choice that you want. You have free will to do that. What you are not free from is the consequences of that choice. So if you come in and say, _I want help _[00:06:00] _staying with my partner, I want to work on our issues, _then you have made that free will choice with your self agency that says I can stay.
Now it really comes down to do you want to and are you willing to. Changes will have to be made. Now we're gonna expand that a little bit. When you are thinking about making change or wanting your partner to change, you have to be ready, willing and able to change.
Sometimes the conflict or anger or frustration that my clients feel is they have a partner who is either not ready, willing, or able to change. I will say almost all of these partners have the ability to change. They have resources. They can, there is literally nothing preventing them from change except for readiness, willingness.
They don't want to, and you can say they're not ready or they're not willing because of something like [00:07:00] fear, but they're also not ready or willing to move through that fear. You have to look at the behavior and the choice. If your partner is not changing and you have communicated how that makes you feel and they have even said,_ I'll work on that. Thanks for letting me know_. But nothing happens. They don't want to, they're not willing to or they're not ready. That puts you in a position where if you choose to stay in, then it will require a perception shift from you. This is the third thing I wanna talk about.
When we are doing a perception shift and you have decided you want to stay in this relationship or partnership, then I want you to look at the behavior that triggered you to feel anger in the first place. This is where I'm going to tweak your perspective slightly.
When you look at behavior, I want you to really [00:08:00] think about this. Is it the behavior itself that made you angry, I.e. what they did, or is it actually what they did not do? Some of you may be going April, isn't that the same thing?
I'm mad at what they did because they didn't do this, but it's actually not. Your job will be fine tuning and digging into that and going, _am I mad at the behavior itself? _And that could be yes, but am I more angry at the fact that they weren't living up to their potential? That they aren't living up to my expectation.
They don't match my internal playbook of values, ethics, and behavior. In other words, they don't match my ideal. And if they don't match your ideal or their potential, and I see this often with people that have high emotional intelligence and high empathy, whether they call themselves an empath or not, but empaths tend [00:09:00] to see a person's highest potential and then get angry when the person is not taking steps to reach that potential.
So ask yourself if you are feeling some kind of way about your partner right now, romantic business coworker, friendship. Are you more angry at what they are doing versus what they're not doing but could? The answer to that question is going to give you deeper insight about yourself, and it's actually going to let me know if you're at the front door or if you're at the back door, so that I can find what's hiding in your subconscious in a blind spot to really help you find the answer about what triggered you in the first place.
Is it being with a partner who's not living up to your standards, your potential, your ideals, or they're not moving fast enough to reach that place? Or is it because you're with a partner that feels like dead weight because they just are stuck and refuse to [00:10:00] change at all, even if it's hurting them too?
Very different places that feel originally, like it could have been the same answer. Are you angry at what they're doing or what they're not doing? Partnership dynamics are very interesting and it's complicated because if you think about the true definition of a partnership, it is two individuals who are trying to come together and create something new that hopefully is fair and harmonious to both parties.
And if you are expecting your partner to match up to your internal playbook that they have no idea about and you don't communicate what you need with your partner, or even worse, if you do and your partner outright dismisses that, then you have to decisions to make. You have free will and self agency. You can do anything.
You [00:11:00] can stay, you can go. Do you want to stay? Do you want to go? Are you willing to stay? Are you willing to go? Because very different strategies are involved in that. Are you ready, willing, or able to stay or ready, willing and able to go? I see people staying in unhealthy partnerships because of
money. they don't wanna be alone. Somebody is better than nobody, even though in the long run these things can make you miserable. I also want you to be really honest. If you're choosing to stay in, why you are choosing to stay in. Is it because you believe that this person is worth fighting for, that they are a great match for you in most areas?
Or are you staying with the partner out of fear? You don't wanna be alone. You don't think financially you can make it yourself, or it would be hard if you were [00:12:00] alone, and are you staying out of comfort? These tend to play out eventually. So if that is your current strategy, it's better to have somebody than nobody and I need their financial support 'cause I don't believe in my ability to make it on my own.
Or I would rather have the material comforts and be in emotional distress. I've made that trade off. If that's the case for you. Great. Own it and own the consequences of that because you are free to choose anything you want, but you are not free from the consequences of those choices. When you have this true accountability, you may move different, you may strategize differently, but if you're not honest with yourself in the beginning, then it's very difficult to make any partnership work.
Really sit down. I am a big advocate of being real and honest with yourself and real and honest with your partner. There are many times I've had clients refer their [00:13:00] partner in to me as well, and the best ones have this open communication policy where they're like, you know what? Help us share how we're looking at things differently.
And when they have that perception change, when they have that true open conversation and communication, things get better. But when one partner won't communicate, isn't willing to do the work, then you have a choice. You can deal with that and try to look at that with grace and compassion and patience.
Or you can decide I need something better and I love you, but I'm not in love with you anymore, or I respect you. This is just not a resonant match anymore. We're just not resonating. We are not trying to go to the same places anymore, and that's okay. But the best thing for us is to separate so that we can pursue paths that are in alignment with us.
Look, [00:14:00] relationships are hard. Partnerships can be challenging. We're human. That's part of the deal, and we learn so much by being in relationships. Some people have a self-protective mode that tells them the opposite. They're avoidant. It's better to be alone than in a partnership or relationship, and that has its own set of troubles, concerns and issues.
Everything in life is on a spectrum, my friends. You can have helpful and harmful ways of thinking or being, feeling in every area of your life. I just want you to realize that you have a lot of power. You have agency, you have choices, you have options. Now, you may not like some of those choices, options or consequences, but that is life.
We don't always like what we get, and we do have the ability to change it a lot of the time. Many things are outside of our control, but when something [00:15:00] is in your control where you can do something about it, but you're not, that is telling and you really wanna examine that. A lot of times we stay stuck and we do it to ourselves because we're afraid of discomfort, we're afraid of making change.
We're afraid of what will people think and we're letting all of these _what ifs_ get in the way of living the best life that we can right now, even if it might have some challenges, even if some things aren't our preference. The real key is discernment and awareness, and you still have the power. There's great power in patience and compassion, but that can keep you stuck too.
There's great power in staying. There's great power in going. Ultimately, you do have power. I f you feel that you don't, that is a mindset issue, that is a thought pattern and a habit pattern that can be broken. And these habits and thoughts [00:16:00] and beliefs and emotions have created an identity that makes you feel powerless and without self-agency.
If you're listening to this and that's resonating, you wanna jump on that because it requires you to do something different, to be different. Otherwise, you still get this internal frustration of being stuck. Now you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make 'em drink it. So ultimately, in a partnership, you have to decide, is this where I want to be?
Knowing I may not get some of my needs fulfilled, and that is fair. To say that your partner has to fulfill all of your needs is probably in your personal playbook, but not reality. Get the help. Ask for help and help yourself. These are really big things that you can do. I am here if you need a guide to help you find these hidden [00:17:00] subconscious patterns that you may have developed that you don't even realize are affecting your life right now.
That's my specialty, and right now I've created two different offers that are private coaching. One is called *Decode*, and the other is called *Amplify*. In the *Decode* program, we're going to take any issue that you have found challenging. We're gonna look at it from an illogical way. Yes, I said illogical, not logical.
Because if the problem were logical, you would've solved it already. So the answer to the problem lies much deeper than you expect in your subconscious or your unconscious. For those places, you often need a guide to find that information, bring it up to the surface, and show you the thoughts, the beliefs, the emotions, the habits, the systems, identities and patterns you've created that you may be ready to let go of, and that you've absolutely outgrown.
In [00:18:00] *Amplify*, it's for people who want to move fast. They are ready, willing, and able to go all in to create an identity that is about growth, expansion, and impact. And they are willing to move quickly to reach that next level of impact. It is high touch support when you are playing at high stakes. If you would like more information on either one of those, go to aprildarley.com.
You can book a complimentary consultation and we'll get into which program might be best for you and how you can get started on decoding and amplifying your life or your partnership today. Until next week, my friends. Goodbye.
