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Choosing to Stay in Your Relationship

by | Jan 11, 2021 | Communication, Conflict, Connection, General, Love, Relationships

Should you stay in your relationship?

For better or for worse. 

These sacred words, uttered by so many couples, symbolizes the shared commitment that they expect each other to hold up no matter what happens in life. 

A blog reader recently wrote to me expressing shame and guilt for choosing to stay with her partner, who she said was a “porn addict”. 

Betrayed partners of infidelity express shame when they choose to stay with their partner who cheated on them. “Why don’t I just leave?”

Like these folks, you might choose to maintain your commitment as opposed to leaving the relationship. Like our recent blog reader, you may also feel riddled with guilt, shame, and embarrassment for your choice to stay. 

Let’s explore why you choose to stay committed and how you can stay without beating yourself up.

Why You Choose to Stay in Your Relationship

It’s difficult to feel conflicted about whether or not to leave your relationship. Love is both simple and complicated. 

As a relationship counselor, marriage counselor, and sex therapist, I help many partners work through the ambivalence of staying or going. When I’m doing this with both partners, it’s called discernment counseling.

When you love someone, whether the problem is a sexless marriage, relationship dissatisfaction, infidelity or anything else, the answer to stay or go may not always feel crystal clear. 

In the most ideal situation, you might choose to stay because your partner actively participates to make your relationship better. Perhaps, you’re working through the hurt and pain their actions have caused you. As you do this, you may also see  their genuine effort to work on it with you. 

This can provide you with hope and a vision for a future together. 

If you choose to stay and your partner doesn’t actively work with you to resolve your relationship struggles, consider working with a professional relationship therapist. Working with a seasoned professional can either help you find ways to make that relationship better or work toward dissolution. 

If you want to stay but develop hard feelings about your choice to stay, like guilt, shame, and/or embarrassment, rather than turning away from those emotions, can you tune into them?

Invite Your Emotions In

Our emotional responses can provide a wealth of information for us if we allow ourselves to tune in, pay attention and feel. 

Rather than beating yourself up through shame, guilt or embarrassment, ask yourself:

  • Who makes me feel shame? Guilty? Embarrassed? (think about family/friends)

If family and friends put pressure on you to leave, you may want to draw stricter boundaries with them. Friends and family often mean well but it’s not their place to influence the direction of any adult’s intimate relationship.

On the flip side, the concern of your family and/or friends may be informative. If you repeatedly turn to friends and family to de-escalate a situation or to cry on their shoulder, this may be a sign to seriously examine your choice to stay. 

  • Am I expressing these feelings to my partner?

If you’ve been hurt by your partner’s actions, we always recommend that you share your feelings with them, including your ambivalence, shame, guilt and/or humiliation. It may be hard for them to hear but partners need to know what you feel. 

Expressing your feelings can often help release them, especially if you have an attentive partner who wants to support your healing.

  • How is my partner supporting me through these feelings?

In marriage counseling and couples therapy, I often help partners that have violated the relationship contract learn how to become healers of their relationship. Sometimes, both partners need to become healers.  

They can do this by being an attentive listener, apologizing and demonstrating trust-worthy, dependable behaviors.

This process usually works best when both partners actively participate in the healing process and when guided by a couples therapist. 

  • Are these feelings familiar? Have I felt them before in previous relationships?

As relationship counselor, I often see repeated patterns in my client’s relationship history. Often these patterns can go all the way back to childhood. 

If you feel riddled with guilt, shame or embarrassment, chances are you’ve felt these feelings deeply before. You may have felt them in previous relationships or in the house that you grew up in. 

Sometimes, these emotional states feel so familiar that we can feel lost without them. We like to call this our “comfortable chaos”. Shame, guilt and/or humiliation can become part of our identities. It’s not conscious but it takes consciousness to break the pattern. 

  • Are these feelings telling me something that I need to face?

It’s easy to compartmentalize, ignore or deny difficult feelings or problems in a relationship. Especially if you’re considering separation but also view separation as a failure.

But if you want clarity around ambivalence or if you want to live without shame, guilt or embarrassment, you must tune in instead of tuning out. 

In therapy, I break these processes down for you even more. Often, these difficult feelings are embedded in a deeper story that requires unpacking.

How to Move Forward

You may be able to use the questions above to help you dig deeper into your experiences and emotional life with your partner. 

Journaling your responses can be a way to explore the topic further. Of course, I always recommend communicating with your partner and working through the issues together. 

If you choose to stay, make that a choice free of shame, guilt or humiliation. If you hold onto those feelings, become curious about the purpose they serve.

  • Do they exist to make sure your partner stays punished? Or to control your partner’s actions by making them feel bad about themselves? 
  • Do they reflect a deeper story about you? Your history? Your relationship patterns?
  • Do they exist because it’s truly time to leave the relationship? Does your gut tell you to leave when your heart tells you to stay? In those situations, gut wisdom is often correct. 

If you have difficulty figuring this out, turning to a relationship counselor, marriage counselor, couples counselor or sex therapist can feel like a lifeline. 

10 Communication Mistakes to Avoid {Tips from a Marriage Counselor}

by | Oct 6, 2020 | Communication, Conflict, Connection, General, Marriage Survival, Relationships, Sex Therapy

Are You Making These Communication Misktakes in Your Relationship?

Do you think to yourself, “We don’t know how to communicate“? Feel like you argue in circles, never resolving your differences? Sick of feeling unseen and unheard?

Good, healthy communication is a skill. It’s like a muscle that has to be toned through exercise. It requires intentional effort and practice and guess what? It’s something couples can learn how to do.

How often do you cut each other off, talk over each other, name call, or smirk at your partner’s comments? How many times do you create circular conversations that go nowhere?

In your intimate relationship, you will have differences of opinion. In fact, I hope that you do. That means that two unique personalities are visible. That’s a good thing.

But, how you navigate your differences matters.

Skills You Can Learn Through Marriage Counseling

In couples therapy, marriage counseling, or relationship counseling, we help couples see their own intimate communication dance. This includes learning about who tends to lead, follow, control, be aggressive or passive, pursue or distance, shut down, withdraw and so much more.

In fact, below is a chart that highlights skills we help couples avoid along with teaching them what they can do instead to help make their intimacy dance more fluid, connected, and loving.

 10 Communication Skills for Couples – Mistakes and Solutions

Avoid This… Instead Do This…
Talking over your partner Be quiet while they speak
Blocking your partner’s ideas and feelings Ask them what they think and feel, then listen
Name calling Manage your anger, take a deep breath
Blame and Shame Practice personal accountability
Bringing up old wounds and random issues Stay focused and stick with one topic
Belligerency (“You’re the problem, not me”) Remember it takes two to tango
Sarcasm or hostile humor Say, “I feel really angry right now”
Eye rolling, sighing Take a break, then come back to talk more
Personal criticisms Focus on the problem, not on character
Using words like “always” and “never” Say “sometimes” or “this happens a lot”

Center for Intimate Relationships ©2020 All rights reserved.

You can see that these communication skills are not complicated. Anyone can learn to strengthen and improve them. Over the years, we’ve seen thousands of couples in therapy. Every couple comes in with their own unique story that needs some form of guidance and healing.

As couple’s therapists, we use charts just like the one above to provide concrete tools for you to draw from, homework to practice and new skills to learn.  Your therapy sessions help you practice these skills so that you can bridge the divide between you.

Let’s consider the story of Harriet and Kirby.

Relationship Counseling with Harriet and Kirby

Harriet and Kirby came into therapy because they were at odds in most subject matters – sex, money, parenting and work. They felt deep marital dissatisfaction but weren’t ready to call it quits. They knew that they loved each other but didn’t know how to manage their differences.

We met weekly. Harriet expressed feeling overwhelmed by their work and parenting schedule, changes in her body after having kids, overall exhaustion on most days and missing the “little things” Kirby used to do for her to make her feel special.

Kirby talked about his stress around being a father due to how he was raised, numbing out each night with social media, feeling like he was always “in trouble” with Harriet and that he didn’t do anything right by her standards. He also said their sexless marriage had him feeling like less than a man.

Both partners came from high conflict families. As kids, they were the “parent pleasers”, in an attempt to keep their parents from fighting even more.

They carried this into adulthood. They tried to please too many people – bosses, external family, the kids, friends, neighbors, the school community, church members – leaving nothing left for their own relationship. They worked to please everyone but each other.

Each felt weary, bitter and resentful towards the other.

Those hard feelings showed up in their poor communication style.

They exercised behaviors from the “avoid” column above. With the guidance of therapy, they learned how those behaviors kept them stuck in a negative cycle.

After about 12 sessions, they started to connect the dots. They saw how their upbringing influenced their interactions with each other.

In fact, they got so good at seeing their own negative pattern that when caught up in it, they would name it themselves! “We’re in it again”, they’d say.

Except this time, they had communication tools to get out of that awful cycle.

With enough practice, that cycle showed up less and less as behaviors from the “Do this Instead” column showed up more and more.

Rather than get heated quickly, like their parents did, they practiced slowing down, conscious breathing, responding (Do Instead) not reacting (Avoid).

They focused on connecting instead of winning.

They lived for 10 years in a dissatisfying marriage. Through marriage counseling and commitment to the homework, they improved their marriage in just six months.

 

Healthy Communication With Your Spouse or Partner

Healthy communication skills are available to you too. As you can see, the skills are not mysterious or complicated. They are not vague or abstract.

They are concrete, tangible, do-able behaviors that you can start to practice right away.

Far too many couples fail to get the right help that can transform their relationship. With simple behavior changes, you can stop suffering year after year in an unhappy marriage and start to feel alive and happy again.

If you find yourself stuck in a negative cycle and can’t get yourselves out of it, consider working with a marriage counselor or couples counselor who has experience and can offer you research-based tools to support your relationship health.

 

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Power Struggles in Your Relationship?

by | Sep 22, 2020 | Conflict, Forgiveness, General, Relationships, Sex Therapy

Do You Have Power Struggles in Your Relationship?

Couples are often told to learn the art of compromise. Find the middle ground. Make your decision a win-win for everyone involved. Satisfy both needs.

Those are wise words and yes, you have to find ways to factor in what you and your partner want when making decisions. In many situations, that advice works. 

But, what if you can’t do that?

What if your situation is a bit more black and white? What if, whatever decision is made, somebody loses out?

There are some conflicts with no easy compromise.

Examples Include:

  • You want another child and your partner doesn’t
  • You’ve dreamed of moving to another state but your partner doesn’t want to leave family
  • Your partner wants to adopt a pet and you don’t want to
  • You both want your child to have a stay-at-home parent – each wants the other to put their career on hold
  • You want an open marriage and your partner wants monogamy

You can see that, in the situations above, neither partner is “right” or “wrong” for wanting their desired outcome. There’s no malice here. Just two good people with two very different desires.

For many of these examples, it’s not easy to find middle ground. Most couples go around in circles, debating their points, trying to sway their partner in their direction, ending nowhere but frustrated and back at square one.

Or someone feels repeatedly, “unheard”.

 

Here’s how it plays out once a decision is made:

  • One partner gets what they want, the other partner feels angry, bitter, powerless, shocked and dismissed
  • Their relationship divide grows
  • No one acknowledges an important word in the experience: GRIEF

It would be nice if each partner could always get what they want, equally. But some decisions can’t be divided up that way.

It’s not even the final outcome that tears couples apart. Instead, what trips most couples up is the process of how they got there.

In marriage therapy or couples counseling, couples usually call me after one partner went ahead with a decision; either out of assuming their partner was on board, confusion and misunderstanding or lack of clarity around their partner’s wishes. 

When you find yourselves in that situation, know that the person who didn’t get their way gave something up (even if they weren’t involved in the decision). 

So, even if you weren’t trying to “win”, your partner will inevitably feel like they lost. 

Maybe they’ve given up their dream to have a second child, or build their dream home, or make partner at the firm. 

Maybe they’ve lost their freedom and independence and now have to take care of another life (child, in-law, furbaby).

It’s not your job to try to convince your partner that the outcome is “for the best”, or that they somehow “gained too” from the experience. 

It’s not your job to help them see “the bright side” of things or in any way convince them to feel anything other than their grief.

In fact, when you acknowledge their pain and loss around these black and white decisions, you see and hear them. You validate their experience. This helps them feel like they matter, even when things don’t go their way. 

Knowing what to say and how to say it is key to repairing this type of relationship rupture. Below, I offer you language to help you hold healing conversations together.

In the examples below, we’re assuming that one partner went ahead with a decision that the other partner did not fully agree to. 

 

Here’s how to speak to your partner when they didn’t get their way on an issue:

  • I know I didn’t go about this quite the right way. My decision has clearly caused you pain. I’m sorry that I didn’t factor in what you wanted. 
  • I know there were no easy answers here. I can see that you feel like you lost out on this. I’m sorry for that. 
  • I know you weren’t really on board with my decision. And now that this is done, I can see how hurt you feel. What can I do to help you manage your grief around this? 
  • I understand how this outcome bothers/hurts you. What can I do to make it right?
  • I know that you didn’t get what you wanted out of this. I want to talk about what this loss means for you and for us. 

While it’s nice to idealize power as a shared experience in relationships, there will be times when one partner exercises more power than the other; when one partner feels more powerless than the other. These moments are inevitable.

In relationship counseling, I help couples work through those power struggles, whether it’s around intimacy, parenting, domestic life, finances, sex, career; and even in all of the small decisions partners make throughout the day that influence power in the relationship.

 

What You Want to Strive For

In healthy relationships, you want to strive for as much balance as possible when it comes to shared decision making. Maximize that to its fullest.

But also know that, at times, shared or not, it may not always feel equal. 

If one partner doesn’t get their ideal outcome, make sure that you acknowledge and validate the grief that accompanies the loss. Hold space for them and find ways to move forward together.

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