Why Do I Need Her to Say It's Okay?

I mean stop making your partner responsible for regulating you.

I see this constantly.

A man betrays his partner, she's devastated, he enters recovery, and without realizing it, he starts to look for the person he injured to make him feel okay, right? So Corey, I gotta tell you personally, when I'm s- when I was realizing this, when I, you know, when I was doing it and I broke through a number of years ago to, to this stuff, I had this, you know...

I don't know if it was shame or what it was, but it was like, I just said, "Oh my God, I cannot believe how selfish I've been," right? And it was kinda like I didn't even know I was being selfish, right? That was the weird part.

It was like this realization of, "Oh my God, I've made everything about me," right? "Is she angry today? Did she hug me? Does she notice how hard I'm working?" You see how we're scanning to see if I'm okay.

If you know you're okay, you're not gonna do that, so that's the, the spoiler alert.

But anyway, um, we ask ourself, "Is she gonna stay?" We're, we're, we're terrified, right? Why weren't we terrified when we were acting out? Well, that's another thing, right? But we're terrified.

"Why won't she tell me we're gonna be okay?" Who does that sound like, right? Does that sound like a little kid asking for something? Do you hear what's happening? Your emotional stability is still dependent upon something outside of you, and I got to tell you this, and if you've been in my connection, Reconnection Intensive, you've learned this deeply.

Nothing [chuckles] outside of you ever is gonna give you emotional stability.

That's an inside job.

And now you're asking a woman who's dealing with the consequences of what we've done to regulate what's happening inside of us.

Do you see when I w- how I...

when I saw I was doing that, I was like, "Oh my God."

So some men might hear that and say, "Isn't my partner supposed to support me?"

Of course partners can support each other.

That's part of intimacy.

But mutual support and making another person responsible for your emotional stability are completely different things.

Your partner can care about you without making you feel okay, and that's what we're looking for.

We've always looked for people to make us feel okay, 'cause we couldn't make ourselves feel okay.

Well, we made ourselves feel okay by acting out, but that wasn't really solving the problem, was it? So she can love you and still be furious.

She can care about recovery and still not trust you.

She can hope and heal and have no idea whether she wants to stay married to you.

This isn't about you.

We're giving her her agency back, the one we stole when we never told her who we were to begin with.

She can see that you're working hard and not wanna congratulate you.