Ep. 139: The Real Reason Your Spouse Isn't Validating You In The Way You Need

For today's episode, I wanna start with a scenario.

So you have one spouse who has been out of town for work.

They've been gone for a few days, so everything has been falling on the other spouse's shoulders.

And even if they don't have working mental load systems, it still has just felt like a lot to the one that's been home, and more than usual, right? Maybe the kids, you know, woke up more often in the middle of the night, or after school activities were in full swing, and the spouse at home was battling with figuring out how to be at multiple places at the same time.

You get me, right? They're tired.

And the spouse at home looks forward to the check-in calls from their spouse like oxygen on the moon, because maybe it's the only time all day long that someone is asking about them or really caring about them in any meaningful way.

So that call comes in, but the partner who's out of town is distracted.

They say, you know, kind of a little about the day, like, "I went to this meeting or that meeting." You know, asks maybe a small question about the kids and then says, "Hey, I gotta go." And the spouse who's at home feels bad, right? Just feels kind of neglected, feels like, "Oh, my gosh.

I've been waiting all day for this call, and I didn't even get what I needed to out of it." And when they bring up this to their spouse, and they say something along the lines of, "Hey, I was really feeling like I needed to talk to you.

I was disappointed in what I got," that kind of thing.

And they get a response back in the form of, "Well, I was busy," you know, "I had back-to-back meetings, connection was bad." You know, you get the drift.

Something along those lines.

Honestly, I hear various examples of this every single day with my clients.

One client is feeling bad, is trying to express those bad feelings to their spouse, and they're met with some, I'll say, defensive response around it.

I can think of an example with my own spouse when I had said a version of, "That response I got from you hurt my feelings." And he said, "Well, I didn't mean to hurt your feelings." And this is when we would struggle because I would say, "Yeah, I know you didn't mean to, but my feelings are hurt." And he genuinely believed that if he told me that he didn't mean to, then, then my feelings would go away.

If I knew that piece of information, my feelings would change.

And when they didn't, he was shocked.

[chuckles] And, "Now I don't know what to do," right? Like, that was my only thought.

So we could obviously go down multiple rabbit holes here, and multiple examples, and multiple...

You get it.

But for the sake of this episode, I want to present why this happens, why this doesn't work, and why it creates such issues within relationships.

And then I'm gonna talk about what to do about it.