Yesterday I began posting about the challenges my husband and I have faced throughout our marriage. You can read that post here. I wrote about some negative feelings I was having but didn’t know how to turn those feelings into positive feelings without my husband’s help. For me, the first step in solving that problem was him using words and a tone of voice that showed me he cared I was hurting. On the flip side, I had to be able to let his love in. I had to allow him to love me.
After years of hurt, it was pretty hard to do. I wanted to keep my guard up and not trust his efforts were going to stick. I wanted to protect my heart from future hurt. But I knew that line of thinking would not help my marriage. In fact, that line of thinking was more likely to set my husband up for failure. I wanted him to succeed in his efforts.
It was my job to set him up for success. As long as he was willing to put forth an effort, his success was partially dependent on whether or not I was going to allow allow him to succeed. The only thing that would make my marriage grow was to allow his efforts to heal my pain. All while knowing in my heart that things he had been saying to cause the hurt, was most likely going to happen again.
It wasn’t easy at first. But the more I allowed him to heal my pain, the easier it became. Not only that, but the more I allowed him to to heal my pain, the easier it was for him to put forth the effort.
Did those things that caused the hurt happen again. Yes, they did. But things were beginning to change.
Accusations turned into ownership. Instead of saying, “You are out of control!” We said, “I am reaching my boiling point so I’m going to step away from this situation until I am in a better place to have this conversation.”
As weeks turned into months, the things that happened to cause the hurt were still happening, but not as often as they had happened before. When they did happen, we’d spend time reflecting together afterwards. He’d ask me at what point in the conversation did I think things got out of control and why I felt it was out of control. He would share with me when he felt things were out of control. It helped us learn about each other’s boiling points. Knowing each other’s boiling points has helped us both keep difficult conversations under control.
Turns out I view stress differently than he does. What does that mean in conflict resolution? This next part might be confusing if you haven’t experienced it. For us, it meant I thought he had reached his boiling point before he was really there. Once I believed he had reached that point, it caused me to react. I thought I was reacting to his stress. It wasn’t his stress I was reacting to. I was reacting to my own fears from past hurt. Of course, that caused my husband to also react to my fears. And that made things escalate at a quick pace.
Confusing as mud?
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