S3 | Session 7: What Will Life Look Like if This Relationship Ends?
Think about a time you brought a really important concern to your partner, only to feel completely dismissed. When that happens over and over, you eventually stop bringing things up—not because the problem is solved, but because the pain of being unheard is just too heavy to keep risking.
That is exactly where we find Rachel today. Recently, Rachel's daughter came to her feeling like some recent situations involving their step-parent dynamic just hadn't been fair. Hearing her daughter's frustration sparked something in Rachel. It made her realize that she had been noticing those exact same unfair dynamics, but she had been keeping quiet because the last time she tried to voice her concerns, she felt completely dismissed.
In Emotionally Focused Therapy, we don't stay in the logistics of the fight. The specific details of the story don't actually matter, because conflict is always going to circle back to someone's attachment need going unmet. For Rachel, this private incident triggered a massive, ancient wound: the agonizing pain of feeling dismissed. And for Mike? Watching Rachel slip into that pain didn't just make him uncomfortable; it activated a terrifying catastrophization in his brain. His nervous system convinced him that he was going to fail her, the marriage would end, and he would be thrust back into the profound loneliness he experienced during his years as a single man. Today, you are going to hear what happens when we slow down the nervous system's automatic defenses and finally give these hidden fears a voice.
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S3 | Session 6: When the Fixer Finally Puts Down His Tools
Julie: [00:00:00] Hi everybody. Welcome back to the Secure Love Podcast. I'm your host, Julie Menanno, licensed marriage and family therapist and author of the book, secure Love Create a Relationship That Lasts a Lifetime, which is now out on paperback. Alright, so imagine sitting on a couch across from the person that you love most in the world and listening to them describe a lifetime of deep, unresolved pain.
You see the tears, you hear the exhaustion in their voice as they recount feeling abandoned and unprotected. What happens inside your body in that exact moment? So today we're picking right back up in the middle of our session with Rachel and Mike. In our last episode, Rachel bared, her soul, connecting her current urge to just emotionally shut down to the profound rejection that she experienced as a child.
And the energy in the room is incredibly heavy, incredibly tender. [00:01:00] And so now we're gonna turn our focus to Mike. So when you look at an avoidant partner in moments of high emotional stress, the assumption is that often they come across as cold or detached or, or simply don't care. But the reality is entirely different.
So today you're going to feel the suffocating wave of failure that crashes over Mike. We're going to take a magnifying glass, um, to his internal world and zoom in on it and see how his tendency to justify reason and overexplain isn't him just trying to randomly be dismissive or argumentative. It's actually his desperate, you know, panicked attempt to regulate his own immense shame.
So this is the episode where the fixer finally puts down his tools and the entire landscape of their marriage begins to shift. All right, so let's get back to this session. Hi. Okay. Sorry that was a bit longer than usual, but nice to have a [00:02:00] break. How are you doing rachel?
Rachel: I dunno, like I feel exhausted.
Julie: Yeah, I know. This is, it is exhausting. Um, I hope you can think of it and I'm sure you do as an emotional workout that has a greater purpose, like a physical workout would have a greater purpose, but it can be really hard. Um, so I do want to, you know, go into your helping you see the wisdom in your mistrust and accepting your mistrust and validating it.
But I think I'm gonna pause that for now and go do some work over here.
Rachel: Okay.
Julie: But I do just wanna let you know that. I see the wisdom in your mistrust, and I can accept your mistrust, and I can recognize that your mistrust is not going to be the thing that causes the relationship to not work.
Rachel: Okay
Julie: what [00:03:00] causes the relationship to not work is when the things we need to have happening aren't happening.
That leads us to the very understandable place of mistrust. So the mistrust is, in and of itself isn't, isn't the problem unless that mistrust is coming from, you know, old places that aren't necessarily appropriate to the relationship. But anything anyone's gonna mistrust. And Mike too, you know, when we haven't been able to meet each other emotionally and we have these experiences that feel really good, um, it's only natural that our body comes in and says, well, I want more of that, and I'm scared that I'm not gonna get more of that.
What would it mean if you didn't have that happen? It would mean, like I said earlier, it would mean that you didn't care. So as I move over to him, can we just kind of hold onto that little bit of, um, validation of your mistrust?
Rachel: Yes. That's helpful. Thank you.
Julie: Okay. You're welcome. All right, Mike, let's go over to [00:04:00] your side and we've done a lot of heavy work on her side.
What is coming up for you? Um. I'll kind of figure out where we need to go.
Mike: Yeah, so I think it's, you know, it, it's very, it, it's sad and heavy to, you know, just kind hear. All those raw emotions from Rachel. Um, there's a lot there. And, you know, it's, it's, I think what what's kind of interesting, and, and I actually just mentioned it, um, was, uh, to Rachel is, is there's so many similarities between her and I, but we process our emotions differently.
Um, you know, there's, there's a lot of parallels there.
How her experiences have made her go in one direction. And then my experiences, you know, kind of fundamentally very similar, made me go in a different direction to try and [00:05:00] process and hold those emotions in different ways. So I think that that's kind of almost funny in a sense. Um, or just
very interesting, let's put it that way, is, you know, there's a lot of, so many similarities, but.
Such a different way of processing the emotions or in my case sometimes not processing it, processing them at all. Um, but yeah. And it's interesting to even hear kind of, you know, Rachel kind of say that, you know, it's at a certain point, you know, in her processing, she kind of goes to intellectual.
In a different way. So I think, I guess I just, that was just one of the, the, the things that I just kind of recognized, you know, through that. Everything that Rachel had just said was kind of like, just kind of sitting there like, wow, there's, there's a lot of parallels and similarities here that are, it's just really [00:06:00] interesting.
So I guess that's, that's, yeah. But yeah, and, you know, and then on the, you know, the emotional side is it's, um, yeah. You know, it's just, it's. It's hard in a sense to hear that, you know, how much she has been hurting and, and, you know, not feeling supported. Um, and it's, you know, it's, it's, it's heavy I guess, on me just, you know, knowing that that's been the case and that, you know, she's in a, in a sense, been hurting alone.
Right. I mean, that's not your partner to do so, but yeah, that's.
Julie: Yeah, so I, I think, you know, I'm, I'm glad that you are able to see this parallel. I think it's very helpful that we are both over here struggling emotionally and you know, in some, I think, I think what I would say is on the surface it looks different.
That if you really just take that step below the surface, both [00:07:00] of you aren't really processing your emotions, right?
Mike: Mm-hmm. Right.
Julie: You just have different ways of, you know, showing that her solutions to painful emotions look like action, whereas your solutions to painful emotions look like non-action, I think.
Mike: Mm-hmm.
Julie: Maybe a good way to say it.
Mike: Yeah, I think exactly. I think that's kind of the, I guess it's what I see. Yeah. So from my, my understanding today,
Rachel: mm-hmm.
Julie: So let's then figure out, um. You know, by using a trigger, I wanna know what painful emotion and you might not be getting processed that we can try to do some processing with in a new way.
So you said, you know, seeing her in distress and hearing that she's been alone with this her whole life, even before, you know, in this relationship and before that, [00:08:00] you know, I, there's a part of you that's really empathizing and leaning into that. I feel that. Right? And so. I wanna just honor and hold that
part, but then I wanna talk about this part that might, you know, be having some negative experience around it.
Negative in the sense of painful, I guess, is a better way. Like maybe, I don't know, shame or, um, any, anything there.
Mike: Yeah, I mean, if I had to put a point on it, I think it would be, you know, just being, it's a sense of failure, right? As a spouse. I think that's kind of the, knowing that that's a, an area that I haven't known how to, to get in touch with myself.
And then in this relationship, it's hard to, it's hard to just kind of see the, um, the, you know, the, the trail of, of damage. You know, that that's, that's caused, um. I [00:09:00] think that's kind of the, and you know, in that there's a sense of failure because it's, you know, it's like, it, it is, and it isn't like, I, it's not one that I hold heavy, too heavy on myself because I, as we get deeper into this work, it's, it truly is something that I've never experienced.
So you, you know, I can't be too hard on myself, but I also, it's always that what if, right? Or, or should have done that better or, you know, those, those just. Thoughts naturally swirl, but um, in the same sense, it's like you, you don't know what you dunno. Um, so it's, uh, I guess yeah. To, to, to answer the question.
I think that's what it's, it's it's like a kind of a sense of, you know, yeah. Just failure.
Julie: Yeah. So both of you are heavily focused on, and neither of you're doing anything wrong here. It's what I'm here to do. Both of you are heavily focused
on. The, the impact of the [00:10:00] cycle on Rachel's feelings, but when do you focus on the impact of the cycle on your feelings?
All right, Julie, jumping in. So this dynamic is so common in the anxious avoidant relationship. The anxious partner's, pain is usually so loud and visible that it can just eclipse the avoidant partner's pain. Mike is sitting here quietly drowning in the belief that he's just a failure as a husband.
Because he doesn't externalize that pain because he just gets quiet, intense. Rachel just assumes he doesn't care. So by deliberately shifting the spotlight to Mike's internal agony, we're leveling the emotional playing field here so they can finally see each other. Alright, well let's jump back in because you're saying something really big to me.
You're saying over and over and over in this cycle. I, I experience, I say to myself, I failed her. I failed her. I failed her. Even right here and now when she's talking about her pain [00:11:00] for you, it goes so quickly to, I've failed her, right? But in that I failed her is an enormous amount of pain within you that doesn't get seen, sat with, talked about.
And so if you are not seeing, sitting with talking about that pain in you, what are you doing?
Mike: Avoiding it. Yeah. I mean it's, yeah, there's a lot there. That's, you know, um,
Julie: so let's talk about that. Um, so just in a moment where you. Get a message from her that takes you to, here I am again. I failed again. What happens in your body?
Just as I put words to that and, and maybe let me, let me back up [00:12:00] here. When was the last time this happened that you really got that message and your mind goes to failed again?
Mike: I think, I mean it. It's, it's kind of, you know, every time that we start a negative cycle, you know, whether it's something that happened, you know, at work or with the family or you know, just a general disagreement, whatever it
is. I mean, I think anytime I get there's this, this, this sense of, um, disagreement or misalignment and something we're trying to work through that.
And, and it's kind of, yeah, I, I guess that's where it always starts in terms of knowing that one, one way or another, you know, I'm going to, in this sense,
you know, fail Rachel in terms of, [00:13:00] you know, she's, whether it's something that, you know. You know, she, she is wanting to do, or whatever the case is. And then there's a differing, you know, opinion on my side.
And I think that's where, you know, all the, all those heavy emotions come in and that's where it's like that stressful tension.
Julie: Let's, um, let's slow this down. Notice how, when I try to take you into the feeling right, you. We're gonna end up really quickly up in your head, trying to talk about the feeling.
Just notice that you're not, please don't let me, um, send you messages. You're failing because you're not failing. You're actually being enormously successful and resilient and strong by being here, learning to do something new, right? So just to put that out there, but just notice how fast it comes at you.
Mike: It's
Julie: your brain. That's the power of your [00:14:00] brain. It helps you so much in life. I mean, and, but it comes in so fast. When we start going into, let's feel some of this, it comes in and says, let's make sense of it.
Mike: Right, right,
Julie: right. But before we make sense of it, because we do need to do that, let's see if we can dive into it and slow it down a little bit, because that's what's gonna help you do new things with it outside of here.
I'm just helping you do new things inside of here. So. So tell me the last like, really specific moment when you get a message from Rachel. You're failing. You failed me again.
Mike: I mean, I think the most recent one, and I know we've, you know, beat it up a good bit was, was that, you know, family dinner deal with knowing that. Kind of my, my desires and, you know, wanting to do this family birthday and then knowing that, you know, it was not the [00:15:00] desire of Rachel, you know, there was reasons that she had for that.
Um,
Julie: so the desire, we talk, we did talk about this, we spent more time talking about. In the context of failing your parents. Right. But now we're gonna switch
over and talk about a different piece of it, which is, um, failing her. And so when you say she had a different way of wanting to do it, how does that lead to I'm failing her.
Is it, she has a different way and I don't know if I can accommodate that way, and so I'm going to fail her again.
Mike: Yeah. Um, yeah, it, it's just knowing that, you know, I, it's back to that disappointment thing. It, it's, I've, it's you letting somebody down, in this case, letting Rachel down.
Julie: Mm-hmm. And for you, it doesn't end at, I'm letting her down. It actually goes to, [00:16:00] I'm failing her.
Mike: Right.
Julie: And what are you. What are you failing in that moment Mike: to, in simple terms, it feels like I'm failing to stand by her. Okay. And,
and support it. It feels like I'm failing in a sense of, you know, of the marriage of presenting in a united front.
Julie: Mm-hmm.
Mike: Uh, which is really big to both Rachel and I, I mean, we always wanna be united on. You know, the things that we do and, um, just how we operate.
But I think in those, and obviously we, at this point, we, we, well know that there's not always a, um, and there's things work through to get there. Um, but that's, I think that's where it feels like it's, you know,
Julie: you wanna be. You wanna be this united front, but sometimes your fears bump up against each other [00:17:00] because you also want to, you know, have your parents approve of you and think that you're being a good son.
Mike: Right.
Exactly.
Julie: And you also want your parents to probably not be mad at Rachel for interfering with the family things. So you're probably protecting her too, right? When you are wanting your parents to see both of you in a good life
Mike: trying to, yeah.
Julie: Yeah. So you, you get these messages coming through that says she has, she has a different way of wanting to do it.
It doesn't end there. It goes into, and I now have all these things to try to protect, and if I protect a, then I'm letting B down. And so part of you says, well, I'm scared of failing my parents, and we talked about that, but let's just talk about that part that says, I'm failing her. I'm failing my wife, or I will have to fail her.
Right,
Mike: right, right.
Julie: If I go with them,
I'm gonna have to fail her. And so what comes up in your body, just as I say, bam, I [00:18:00] failed her again.
Mike: Mm-hmm. Again, yeah, that's, that's, I mean, I think it's, it's just a lot of tension and I know exactly when those moments happen. It's always, you know, it's just like tension in my chest.
Julie: Okay. So let's hope. Let's hold there before we move past. Remember, we're slowing this down, so I just want you to close your eyes and sit. Can you feel some of that tension right now?
Mike: I, I know the feeling of, of just talking about it. And I will say too, like in, in instances where it's a drug on,
Julie: before we, before we talk about it, I wanna stay with it. If you talk, if I let you talk about it, I'm letting you abandon it.
Mike: Okay.
Julie: Which is what you're used to doing.
Mike: Yeah. I think just, just for a second, if I could expand on it just a little bit. [00:19:00]
Say is, is in those times there's like. Heaviness in my chest, and then when it's sometimes drug on, I will get like a faint headache and it's just like pound in my head. That's like when it's intense. There's when I cannot find a solution to make everybody happy, that's that's, mm-hmm. Physical things that happen.
Julie: Okay. Well, I appreciate you telling me that because it's not, you're saying, look, it's not just in my chest. I always also notice this other somatic thing in my head.
Mike: Right.
Julie: It's even worse. So I want you to just maybe close your eyes and see if we can. If you can sit in some of that, let, let me do a little exercise with you that might help as I want you to imagine a time when you do feel like you are
showing up and you do feel like Rachel's happy with you, or your kids are happy with you, or your parents are happy with you.
What happens in your body when you go to that successful place that you like so much?[00:20:00]
We might not be able to get there since we've been talking about negative stuff. Mike: Go one extreme to the other.
Julie: Yeah. Yeah.
Mike: It, it's, I mean,
yeah, I, I don't know how to explain it besides, it's just like a lighthearted happy, you know, feeling.
Julie: That's great. It's, it's what you're describing probably is an absence of the tension in bad place.
Mike: Exactly. Yeah. There's no, there is no physical. Alright.
Julie: So
Mike: yeah,
Julie: I want you to close your eyes and I just want you to kind of sit in that, sit in that absence of tension, that success place that's lighthearted and happy, and you just tell me when you've accessed some of that.
You get the message from someone, you did it, you got it right. Do you feel any of that?
Mike: Yeah, there's,
Julie: okay. All right. Now, I appreciate you doing that. I, I'm, [00:21:00] I'm guessing that's not the hardest place for you to find. Um, now I wanna, with your permission, take you to the opposite of that. Do you mind if I. Try to your body in the opposite experience.
Mike: We can try.
Julie: Alright, well now I want you to imagine, bam, you get this text from your mom and it takes you right to that spot where somebody is going to be failed. Somebody I care about is going to be disappointed in me. There's no escape right now. There's no escape. Well, what happens in your body?
Mike: Yeah, it's physically, it's always, it always starts with tension in my chest, just the heaviness.
Julie: Okay. So I just want you to, again, just, we're not going to abandon that place right now. We're just going to lean into it, [00:22:00] and so I just want you to stay there and come back to me when you're ready. Just notice, you know, if your mind wants to slip out of it and go into your head, um, just notice, see if you can go back to it.
Mike: Yeah, I mean, I think I, quickly wanna go to my head
Julie: okay. Well, good observation. That's how strong this protection is. That wants to pull you into your head to make sense of it because if you can make sense of it, what? What's gonna happen, what's the advantage to being able to make sense of it?
Mike: Solve it and make it go away.
Julie: Exactly. That's how you've learned to regulate it, is to just put out fires [00:23:00]
Mike: and I think. That's one of the thing that Rachel's often said about me is I, when I am in those places, I will justify everything like over in my own mind. Right. It's, it's justification comes out super heavy and over explaining and you, you're probably noticing it, Julie, but you know, it's, and, and I know our, our previous, um, work we have is it, it's always justification over explanation.
Trying to find comfort in it. That's, that's where I go,
Julie: you know, half the work is, is being able to recognize that and understand what it's trying to do, the justification, the putting out fires, all of that is your way of regulating pain. The pain around failure, the pain around failing people that you [00:24:00] love. The pain around them being in pain. Part of it is empathy.
Mike: Yeah.
Julie: Yeah.
And I, I think, you know, forgive me if I'm being repetitive here, but have you put words to it, this clearly to Rachel, which is the problem solving plays, the justification place, the words place. That's my way of regulating the heaviness in me. I haven't known any other thing to do with in my whole life.
Mike: I've, yeah, I've, I've never said it to Rachel, but she's, she's said it to me.
Julie: Okay, well, why don't we do that Then the new thing here is maybe not so much the information for her, but it's you sharing it with her, you showing her your heart instead of just your head.
Mike: Yeah. I think my entire life just trying to deal with the uncomfortable things, I always.[00:25:00]
Reason my way out, all the discomfort.
Julie: Okay, Julie here. So don't miss the magnitude of what Mike just did. He just completely demystified his behavior. For years, Rachel has experienced his. As minimizing her feelings or making excuses. But right here, Mike owns it. He admits that going into his head and intellectualizing the problem is literally the only way he knows how to soothe his own anxiety.
He isn't abandoning her. He's just frantically trying to manage himself. Notice how immediately Rachel softens when she hears this. So vulnerability truly is the antidote to the negative cycle. Alright, let's jump back in and see how it all plays out. So, how does it feel for you to get out of focusing on [00:26:00] how
you've impacted her and focus on how you are doing your own feelings, which is by the way, helping your feelings, being able to.
I understand. Understand how you've been trying to regulate them. Your whole life is helping yourself. So how does it feel like for you to do that and then share it with her?
Mike: Yeah, I mean, it feels good to it. It feels good to let you know, I guess, in a sense. Kind of affirm what you've noticed and, and see it within myself and see the patterns that, thinking back to those so many different instances and just seeing that consistent pattern, it's, it's good to.
Julie: When you do this and you go there and you start [00:27:00] to tap in and do some new things here, which is putting words to it, shining light on it, instead of just escaping it with your head.
Does your body relax?
Mike: I think it does, but there's, I guess there's, so there's like a it, it's like a, I can tell it's like a first step. You know, kind of look, finding those emotions. We, I know my head obviously run, wants to run in the, fix it, solve it direction. I guess I would, I have a hard time trying to, how do we marry those two?
Or how do we Sure. How do, yeah, how do, how do you, yeah.
Julie: All right. Lemme, lemme pause you. We're gonna do some of it right now, but you said it really well. You said it feels like a first step, which it, it is. Because what I'm trying to do is that first step, which is the what, what I would call in my, you know, clinical nerdy way is function of the protection.[00:28:00]
The protection is going into your head and. We're talking about the function of that, which is not random. She just sees you, I don't know, ignoring her or trying to talk her out of her feelings or, and you know, that is what that thing is trying to do, but the function of it is regulating your own pain.
And that's what we haven't been abundantly clear about. You're starting to get some clarity in your work, you know, with with your therapist, but we're just getting more clarity around that. And then, then you shared it and you said to
me, look, yeah, I can see some value in this, but still there's some fear that comes up, is what I'm guessing.
Um, and that fear says the same mistrust that Rachel's mistrust says, but which is, this is great, but is this gonna get us anywhere?
Mike: Right.
Julie: Yeah, like what's the formula here? Which is, you know, I didn't take you into your feelings [00:29:00] purposefully deeper into them just now. 'cause I wanted to do something different.
But just notice how you pop out into the same place of mistrust that Rachel pops into because your nervous system, understandably mistrust.
Mike: Mm-hmm.
Julie: So I appreciate you sharing that with me. Let me flip over here. Rachel, how is it for you and your body to hear him doing this new thing, which, you know, the other thing that we did earlier in the session wasn't so new.
You've heard him say. You make sense to me, but this is new. You're hearing him put clearer words to why his body feels so safe in this problem solving place, and what does it do to your body to get this new information from his mouth? Not so much the knowledge of it.
Rachel: It's so calming. It opens my heart up.
Julie: So, so I want you to tell him that your [00:30:00] body is co-regulate just by him sharing with you more of himself.
Rachel: My body is definitely calmer and more cod with you opening up and sharing more about yourself and what's going on for you.
Mike: Okay. And that's the value. And that makes sense.
Julie: That's it. You just did it. You just didn't know you did it until you got the co-regulating feedback from her.
Mike: Okay. Yep.
Julie: And so what you did here is you helped both of you instead of just leaning in and just trying to help her and help her and make her feel better.
You helped you and then you helped her.
And what's been missing from this equation the whole time has been you helping you and you not asking her for help and inviting her in.[00:31:00]
And so when you're not, when we're not helping ourselves, we're having to behave in all these ways to regulate the feelings and ways that a lot of times don't work. Sometimes they do, right, but they don't really ever heal the core problem. We're gonna get to. Um, so yeah, it's so good work there. Um, you know what I did here, just to put this in the context of the cycle, is I kind of said, Hey, what happens for you when she's over there really struggling emotionally, um, and doing grieving and being in this, being with her own painful place?
Part of you was fully present with her and validating and empathizing with that. And we don't need to work on that because that's already there. Right? But then this fear comes in that says, and I'm failing her and it's all my fault. And that's the scary part, right? That's the part we need to work on. [00:32:00] And so.
What you do with that. There's so much pain around that. We're still, we're still going there. We did some of that yesterday and we're gonna do some more of it as we work. But that there's so much pain around on failing her, and that's the place that you don't wanna go. You've never learned to go, you've never had help there.
You've had to learn to disconnect from it. And so, even right here and now, what you wanna do is go into your head and talk about it from the outside instead of going leaning into it. That's, and then, and then you try to help her in the same way that you try to help you, which is talk her into something else or make sense of it or justify it.
There's no intention to leave her alone, but that's what it does, because you're leaving you alone. You're abandoning both of you. So the first thing I did is help you not abandon you. Let's put some more words to it. Let's go a little bit deeper in and get out of your head, um, or go into your head in a new way, maybe I should [00:33:00] say.
And then you were able to share and that helped her. And now you're not abandoning either of you. And it worked because we know it worked because
her nervous system told us at work. When you know it's working and you get to experience success in this, what happens to your nervous system? Because now we're not in failure.
Now we're in success. So what happens to your nervous system there? Mike: It, I mean, it's, it's calming and Yeah, it, it's good to know that.
It opened her heart. I mean, that's, you know, that's great to hear. That's great feedback. And that's awesome. I mean, that's, that's the goal for sure. Um, at least that I'm, you know, striving for. And, uh,
Julie: well, you're doing an, a fantastic job. And just to kind of redirect you just for a minute here, do you notice a calming in your system?
When you know that [00:34:00] this has gotten you somewhere that that other strategy has never been really able to do?
Mike: I do. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's definitely, yeah, it's calming and just, just, just to know that there, it's like a first look at a path of mm-hmm. What, what direction, you know, to go and when for so long.
I didn't know. Right. It's like seeing that first step is it's encouraging and it, there's a, there's a calmness around it. And just to know that there's, it's like knowing how to, it's like a little recipe to deescalate the situation.
Julie: Okay. Well, beautiful. I'm so happy that your nervous system is also responding to the work that tells me we're on the right track.
You know, I know this is hard. Um. Because you know, we kind of have to dysregulate you to get you guy with the feelings to get you guys into how to regulate and how to do these feelings. If [00:35:00] we don't do that in here, they're gonna come blindside you and find you outside of here. So you're being incredibly brave by being here, showing up, doing this, and then on top of that.
In the context of this podcast, which is hard, but you guys are doing it and I deeply appreciate that because you really are helping, you know, um, almost a million people at this point.
Mike: Whoa.
Julie: No pressure. Scary. I know I was, as that was coming out of my mouth, I was like, why? We're supposed to be forgetting that we're doing this.
What am I saying? Like, why am I doing this?
Rachel: But we, we have been helped by the previous seasons and that's why. Julie: Okay,
great.
Rachel: I mean, honestly, like as scary as it is to put ourselves out here. We know how much we were helped and impacted by somebody else being vulnerable in their own life and their cycles and sharing it.
And so we want to be able to [00:36:00] help other people.
Julie: That's beautiful. I'm so happy that that helped you. I'm so glad. To hear that, um, hear and we'll go ahead and, and stop for now. Alright, well that brings us to the close of the session. You know, it's so easy to vilify the fixer in a relationship. The partner who meets tears with logic and meets emotional please with logic solutions.
What an incredible paradigm shifting truth we, we were able to witness today. You know, Mike has spent his entire life caught between a rock and a hard place. When he sees Rachel hurting, his body doesn't just feel empathy. It's flooded with the paralyzing physical tension of failure. And his lifelong survival strategy was just to jump into his head, justify the situation, and try to put out the fires so he could escape that awful feeling of letting someone down.
And of course the downside is in that it ends up leaving Rachel [00:37:00] alone and emotionally abandoned. So she is asking and not getting help, and he's not asking and not getting help. But today he did something entirely new. Instead of explaining the situation, he explained himself. He showed Rachel his heart.
He let her see that his problem solving isn't a lack of love, but a desperate attempt to manage his own overwhelming discomfort. And the moment he did that, something magical happened. Rachel didn't feel abandoned anymore. She felt cod. She felt safe. And that is really, guys, the true power of this work.
When we stop trying to fix the problem and instead simply share our fear, the walls will come tumbling down. So I want you to think about the word failure.
When you feel like you're letting your partner down, or when they come to you with a complaint, what is your immediate reflex? Do you go on the defensive?
Do you overexplain your intentions to prove you're a good partner? Do you withdraw completely? So this week, try to catch [00:38:00] yourself in that protective reflex instead of just justifying your action. See if you can take a breath, drop the shield, and simply say, I'm feeling really scared that I'm failing
you right now.
Notice how that vulnerability can change the energy in the room. All right. As always, we wanna hear from you, send your questions, your breakthroughs, or a voice note to support@thesecurerelationship.com. And lastly, please go on and leave a five star rating on Spotify or Apple Leave a review. It really helps us get feedback and get the word out to couples in need.
Thank you for holding space for this work today. Thank you to Rachel and Mike for your incredible work. Until next time, take care of yourself and your relationships.
If you feel sensitive in relationships, scan for signs of disconnection, or spiral into protest and panic when you don’t feel close, this course is your starting point for healing. In this self-paced course, Julie Menanno guides you through the deeper emotional work required to stop self-abandoning and start showing up for your own needs, so connection can feel safe again. You’ll learn how anxious attachment develops, how it shows up in adult relationships, and how to build secure self-support,
