Control or self-care? How to tell the difference.
Somehow, I managed to pack my old stories on vacation.
It’s been a rough few months of high stakes and intense schedules. We’ve been like two ships passing in the night.
When Walter—who never needs a break, btw —looked at me and said, ‘I need a break,’ I knew we were both running on empty. He booked five days away, and his boss told him, “Do not get on the daily calls!”
This is great, I thought. We’re really going to have a real vacation here.
The first three days were dreamy.
Then Monday happened.
His meetings began at 8 am and continued off and on throughout the day. The final one began at 5 pm, which was supposed to be a half hour but ended up being an hour and a half.
And after spending a lot of the day on my own, I started to get pissed.
In a setting like this, when a table for two becomes a table for one (just me), I’ve earned the right to be annoyed.
It seemed to me that the work really ramped up while we were sitting on our balcony, chilling. He was unhappy with his staff's output, so he began making calls to check where everything was. And I began to wonder, is this really necessary? Does he really need to micromanage these people? Why can’t he just sit here and be?
Which is when the conversations in my head began…
Ok, I’m very unhappy right now. What can I do to not be so unhappy? What do I need to do to feel okay with this current circumstance? Because I cannot control him.
Also, his job pays for this amazing vacation and basically our whole lifestyle (who am I kidding, it pays for all of our lifestyle, as I’ll remind you that I’m still writing this content and giving it to you for free!!)
I literally have a select handful of paid subscribers, and I appreciate each of you!!
My conversations begin erring on the side of self-preservation, not on what I need to do to take care of myself.
I decided I’d just have to do my thing and start getting ready for dinner on my own. Perhaps even go to dinner by myself if I needed to. I called this self-care.
The melodrama continued. If this moves on through tomorrow and I end up being alone the entire day, I might book a half-day excursion—maybe I’ll get a boat or do an eco-tour. Yes, that’s definitely what I’ll do.
So, what is that? Is it self-care? Or is it control?
Honestly, I’m not sure.
The truth about my past.
I’ve had relationships with addicts. And addicts have irregular, unpredictable, and unreliable behavior. I could never count on these people to show up for me when they said they would.
So, when I expect my husband to show up in a certain way and he doesn’t, it triggers this. It’s in these moments of confusion that I’ve learned to employ my best recovery trick.
I ask, “What would love look like in this situation?” Because love always looks like something. And a lot of the time, it’s not what you think it’s going to look like.
So, what does love look like?
Love for him, love for myself…
Loving him looks like support, and it also looks like holding him accountable. He committed to being present on this trip, but he wasn’t present. And he didn’t fully communicate about his need to change direction.
Also, love might not look like flat-out abandoning him at dinner. It feels a little punitive and doesn’t feel like much fun for either of us.
The truth about what was happening.
My ‘I’m not important’ button got hit, and then my ‘I can’t count on him’ lever got pulled, and there I was, 7 years old and 30 years old and all the years old where other people have shown me just how important I was to them and how little I mattered.
It’s an old story.
I believed those stories back when I still thought that how much I mattered depended on how much other people showed me I did.
Fortunately, I don’t live in the old story anymore.
But sometimes I bring my old stories with me into my current life.
This allows me to become aware of when they’re showing up so I can step out of them and try on some new behavior instead.
Walter finished his call, and I was still icy as he showered, but I knew I was ready to craft a new script. I began to thaw myself a little.
Then, I employed the tools of creative destruction:
How do I feel?
What do I need?
Who do I want to be in this moment?
How do I feel? I felt hurt, disappointed, and vulnerable.
I began to recognize that I didn’t want to feel hurt and vulnerable —I wanted to feel important, so I was going to demand it through control. I wanted to control him, the situation, his meetings, my pain. All of it.
What do I need?
This took some iteration. I wanted him to stop working, but I knew that wasn’t really it. Plus, it wasn’t realistic. But eventually I got down to it. What I needed was to feel important, and the way that was going to happen was through communication. Namely, I needed to communicate with him what I needed and how I was feeling. Then, my hope is that it would open the door to how he was feeling, and we could come up with a solution.
I still had a lingering question as to whether he was manufacturing problems so he could solve them. I decided that if he was doing that, it had nothing to do with me—that was on him. He would have to deal with the natural consequences of those actions. The rest was really none of my business.
Who do I want to be in this moment?
I knew I wanted to handle this differently for both our sakes and in order to handle something differently, guess what? You have to actually do something differently.
I needed to break the ice a bit, which is difficult for me. My ego tends to get in the way, especially when I’m hurt. The only thing I could think to do was iron his shorts while I was also prepping my outfit for the night. I was choosing connection over being right and practicing what I teach.
Doing something nice for him reminded me of why I love him, why I was even in this relationship in the first place. Then we talked a little.
I think we both tend to gauge the other person by mannerisms and tone of voice. The underlying question is, “Is it safe here?” After a few minutes, things began to feel safe, and the more they did, the more I loosened up, and by dinner we were able to have an evening that felt normal and loving.
Though we typically have epic conversations about our feelings and process our emotions together, this time, we didn’t even need to discuss the event, really. He gets it. He knew I was upset and he became completely present for the rest of the evening and as much as he could for the rest of our time together.
We both know that changed behavior, not words, is what mends fences and builds trust.
The thing that surprised me was that simply asking the question, Who do I want to be in this moment?, shifted the energy between the two of us and helped me keep the focus on me. This gave me agency over my part in the dynamic. At the end of the day, it’s not his job to make me ‘okay.’
Maybe happiness can be as simple as sand between our toes?
Our vacation in the Florida keys ended beautifully. Though he still did plenty more work, it didn’t ruin our happiness. He told me he understood how I was feeling through his words and actions and he was doing his best to acknowledge this and honor me.
By the end of our trip, it was less me vs him and more we’re in this together, and when the phone rang, I found myself saying to him, ‘Here we go again,’ and laughing about it, instead of being mad.
LYLAS,
Sara
What areas of your relationship need a new script? Where can you employ the methods of creative destruction to help get you closer to the life you want to live? Leave a comment below…
