It was Christmas Day when Deborah and her husband, Bob, woke up to discover it had snowed overnight.
Every year Deborah and Bob drove to her mom’s house on Christmas Day, but now they had a three-year-old, and Deborah was pregnant. The roads were awful, and not getting any better, and they decided against going.
Deborah called her mother to tell her that they wouldn’t make it to Christmas this year. Instead of responding with compassion and understanding, Deborah’s mother laid into her. “Deborah, you are ruining Christmas for me!” she insisted. “I can’t believe this! Your sister has four kids and she’s already on her way. Your brother was smart enough to come here last night and stay here with his family. This may be uncle Fred’s last Christmas, you know. I can’t believe you would do this to me. You can’t ruin this for everybody. Stop being so selfish and think about other people!”
“Okay, let me talk to Bob and see what I can do. I’ll call you back,” Deborah replied, rattled.
She went to Bob and repeated what her mother said. Bob still didn’t want to go, but after enough pushing from Deborah, he relented. “Fine. We’re going, I’m getting the car packed and we’re going,” he snapped.
As they drove to her mother’s house, things were so tense between Deborah and Bob that they couldn’t even speak to each other. Bob was fed up with all the times they decided something together, as a family, only for Deborah to prioritize her mother over him… again.
When they reached her mother’s house, their three-year-old, who’d had a meltdown on the drive over, needed a nap right away, and couldn’t do presents.
Meanwhile, Deborah’s mother spent the whole time ranting about how Deborah ruined Christmas (even though Deborah and her family showed up after all).
Everyone was mad, including Deborah. “You know what?” she thought. “I only did this to make everybody happy, and nobody’s happy. In fact, I don’t think anybody’s been happy at any of the last Christmases, either.”
Instead of hanging around to listen to her mother complain about how she ruined Christmas, Deborah packed up her family and took everybody home. Then she came to me and said, “Stacey, I don’t even know why I bother to try to make everybody happy, because nobody is happy!”
Some version of Deborah’s situation plays out with most couples all the time. You try to please everyone – often at the expense of what is authentically best for you – and end up pleasing nobody.
Does that sound familiar?
It’s a classic example of what my husband, Paul and I mean when we teach our students that relationship is a loop. What you put into the loop determines what you get back out of the loop.
In Deborah’s case, she put pleasing and compromising with her mother into the loop, and what she got back was resentment, because resentment is the boomerang back from pleasing and compromise.
Our relationships with our love partner, our kids, our family of origin – all of it – is a loop. We are always putting something in, and in so doing, choosing what we get back out (even when we don’t realize it).
Think of the relationship loop like a recipe. If you want to make a rich, delicious German chocolate cake, but you add sawdust instead of flour, and salt instead of sugar, you’re not going to get what you want. (In fact, you’ll probably get something you hate!)
What most people try to do in their relationship when they aren’t getting the response they want is the equivalent of yelling at the cake, complaining to their friends about the cake, not talking to the cake, and being disappointed in the cake, all while adding sawdust and salt instead of flour and sugar.
Yelling, complaining, and being disappointed won’t fix the cake. What will get you that rich, delicious German chocolate cake is using the right ingredients in the first place!
If you’re in a relationship, you can’t escape the loop effect. What you can do is change what you put into the loop, and in so doing, change what you get back from it.
It’s important to understand that everything you put into the loop is part of a predictable pattern with a predictable result. When you know the predictable pattern and its predictable result, you can put something different into the loop, and stop getting results you hate!
In Deborah’s case, if she stops putting pleasing and compromise into the loop, she’ll stop getting resentment back.
If you’re wondering why people keep repeating predictable patterns that get them results they hate instead of results they want, it’s for one simple reason: because we run to the end of our skill set.
We get tired of the same kerfuffles over the same topics, and start believing we can’t talk to our partner anymore, or that our problems are just unfixable. Maybe we try couple’s counseling, but that doesn’t help, either, because it becomes what Paul and I call a blame and side show about “who’s right and who’s wrong,” complete with a third party judge – the counselor – to decide which of you wins, and which of you loses.
The biggest problem with deciding who wins and who loses is that nobody wants to be the loser. Many of us were trained to make sure we win and never lose, but in a long-term relationship, no one wants to feel like they’re losing all the time.
Bringing the win or lose mindset to your relationship is like standing in a boat with your partner, shooting holes in the bottom of the boat, and thinking you’re winning. But you and your partner are in the same boat, and the boat is sinking. You’re both losing! It’s the same if your partner “wins,” and you feel like the loser. You’ve both still lost!
Love relationships are either win-win or lose-lose. There’s no such thing as a win-lose, and creating Unshakeable Love and Unleashed Passion starts with putting something different into the loop.
There are literally hundreds of predictable relationship patterns with predictable relationship results, and once you see the patterns, you can change what you put in, and in so doing, change what you get back.
That’s how one person can transform your relationship (even if your partner doesn’t want to change or do any relationship work).
To start changing what you get back in your relationship, by changing what you put in (and do it without pleasing, compromising, or losing), check out our 14-Day Boost program at https://14dayboost.com.
