Intentional Living with Tanya Hale

Episode 368

Staying Out of Other Relationships

 

 

 

 

00:00 

Welcome to Intentional Living with Tanya Hale. This is episode 368, "Stay Out of Other People's Relationships." Welcome to your place for finding greater happiness through intentional growth, because we don't just fall into the life of our dreams...we choose to create it. This is Tanya Hale and I'm your host for Intentional Living. 

00:22 

Alright. Hello there, my friends. Welcome to the podcast. As always, super happy to be here and to be able to share with you some information that I've been working on and processing and working on with my clients as well. Before we jump in, I want to remind you that our next Talk with Tanya will be August 11th. It's always the second Tuesday of the month at two o'clock Eastern. And I would love to have you join us. We just get together and have great discussions, do some great coaching. You can ask me questions. You can ask to be coached. Anything you want to do. 

00:52 

It's pretty much just an open invitation to come and and connect with me and to connect with other people who are also engaged in doing this work, engaged in creating relationships that are healthier and happier and more functional and that just fill our souls. A healthy relationship just fills our souls like nothing else. And so if you'd like to come to that, go to my website tanyahale.com. You can click on the "group coaching" tab. And there is a place there where you can sign up for the Talk with Tanya and you will be sent an email and it will send you the link for the call that is coming in August. 

00:52 

So let's go ahead and jump in today. We are talking about how to stay out of other people's relationships. So I have another topic in the queue for today, but as sometimes happens, this concept has come up so many times this last week while coaching my clients. And so I thought that I would take some time and dig a little bit deeper into this today. So it can be easy to feel sometimes like we get caught in the middle of other people's relationships. So maybe it's between your spouse and one of your children. It might even be between your ex-spouse and your children, or maybe it's between two of your friends who are struggling with each other, or maybe it's between two people that you work with. 

00:52 

If you are a confidant for someone, it is likely that when they are struggling with a relationship, they will come to you to talk to about it, to hash things out, to whine and complain and just share with you all the struggles they're going through. They will want to tell you all the things about what this other person is doing wrong. They will want to tell you all the things about how they are being hurt and why this is such a struggle for them. And they will want to tell you all the things about how this other person should change to make the situation better with you. And we have to realize that this is just the human condition. This struggle with humanity, this bumping up of humans against humans. This is what we do. Humans bump into other humans. Humans say and do things that don't land well with other humans. It happens to all of us and we all get to figure it out. We all see and experience the world differently. So of course there will be some bumping going on. And when you have people who trust you, people who know that you will listen to them, sometimes you will get to be the happy recipient of hearing all about the struggles going on in someone else's life. 

03:26 

Now, I know that most of us haven't been trained in how to respond to other people complaining to us about others. We often think that we need to agree with their assessment of how they've been wrongly treated, even if we don't necessarily see it from the same perspective. And if the struggle is between two people that we know and love, we might be hearing the same story from both of their perspectives and feel the pressure to choose a side. 

03:52 

So let's say that the struggle is between your husband and one of your children. Your child comes to you complaining about their dad, telling you how he's really putting on the pressure to find a job now that they're graduated from university. They tell you all about what he's saying and how he's saying it and how they feel attacked. And that even though they're applying for two to three jobs a day, they're just not having any success. They're struggling and feeling worthless and full of shame. And their dad is making it worse. He's putting the pressure on. It's making them feel angry and resentful. And it's really causing problems for them. 

04:29 

On the other hand, your spouse may be complaining to you about your adult child and how they're just hanging out in their room all day and they're not stepping into being an adult and it's about high time they got their act together and got a job and moved out, and if they really wanted a job they would be (fill in the blank,) right? So this can be a tough situation because you love both of them and you can also see things from both of their viewpoints and you may feel as though you have to choose a side. 

04:56 

The problem is if you side with your child and jump in the pool with them, agreeing about how difficult their dad is being, then you're not being a loyal marriage partner, and that's not okay. And if you come to their dad's defense and become his apologist by giving excuses for his behavior, then that doesn't feel good either because guess what? That is not your job. When your husband talks to you you might feel equally torn. You do get his viewpoint that it's time for your adult child to start taking responsibility for their life, and you also see your child's point of view that they are doing what they know how to do and not finding success and they can use the additional support of living at home while they get their feet on solid ground. 

05:38 

So you see this struggle in their relationship and it's tough for a couple of reasons. One, you feel as though you are expected to step in and solve this problem for them. And maybe you are. Maybe this has been the role that you have played for many years. The go-between liaison in the relationships of your spouse and your children and maybe you've always been the one they turn to to fix their relationship and so they have never had to confront each other and learn how to resolve problems together. So instead of talking to each other they talk to you because they know you will talk to the other person and smooth things over. And maybe you've spent years being the go-between, talking to your kids about their dad then talking to your husband about your kids relaying messages back and forth making excuses for both of them working to help each of them create a space for the other. That sounds lovely, and it's so unhealthy and dangerous. 

06:34 

If you take on this role, even though both of them might be inviting you to do it, you are so getting in their lanes. People can invite us into their lanes and it's important that we learn to say "no" because that is not a place for us. Something important to understand is that their relationship is their responsibility. You do not sit in a triangle relationship with them. They need to have a direct line to each other and you need to stay out of that line. Can you be a confidant? Absolutely. Can you listen and be empathetic with their struggle? Of course. But moving into the role of mediator is not your job. Boundaries are not just about protecting our own space to be safe but they are also about choosing not to cross boundaries for others even if they haven't been set yet. Just because they haven't set them doesn't mean they aren't important. 

07:36 

So we also get to recognize when it would be a basic boundary violation and stay away even if we've been invited in. You may even get a direct invitation such as "will you just talk to dad about this" and you get to say "no." You get to stay out of their lane even when they invite you in because you know it's their lane and it's not your place to be there. You just muddy the waters and make the relationships complicated and dysfunctional if you go there. If you continue to cross into your child's lane when they are old enough and capable enough to manage the relationship themselves then you are the one at fault. And if you've always done it in the past of course they're going to keep inviting you. Of course they are going to want you to do the difficult and dirty work to manage the difficult parts of their relationship with their dad and you get to say "no." You don't even have to offer an excuse. You can just say "no." 

08:43 

And the other side of the equation works as well. If your spouse wants you to smooth things over and ask you to tell the child something again you get to say "no." All the same stuff applies. The hard part is that you might see their strained relationship and it might make you so incredibly uncomfortable that they're not getting along that even if they don't ask you. you will want to step in and clean things up for them. This is where we really have to start paying attention to our brains. What are we thinking? Is our discomfort so acute that we can't stand it and we feel this incredibly strong urge to step in and resolve things? This is what we get to start creating awareness around. What is yours and what is not? And if it's not  yours, we have to learn how to keep out of it. 

09:38 

Now you might be thinking, so what do I do when they invite me in? How do I respond when they start telling me all the things? And that's a great question. It might be hard at first if you've been a follower of the patterns that I've already described of getting in other people's lanes of being in their relationships. But I know you can do it because it's so much of what we already talked about. What you get to do is focus on the relationship that you have with the person who's telling you the things. So if it's your daughter complaining about her dad, you can listen attentively. You can be empathetic to her struggle. You can validate her emotions. And that might sound like, "wow, that just sounds really tough." Or maybe "it sounds like you were pretty upset when your dad said that." 

10:27 

But here's the point that can be tough to wrap our brains around sometimes: you don't have to agree with what they are saying in order to validate them. You're not going to validate that their dad is a jerk. You're not going to say, "you're right, your dad's a jerk." But rather, you're going to validate that they are upset or that they're angry at him. When you are caring for the relationship with your daughter, you are invested in and you validate her experience and her struggle. You can just leave your husband, her dad, out of the validation. It sounds like you've really been struggling with this. You hear how you can focus on her experience without even agreeing with her experience. And this is an important part of validation. You don't have to agree. And if your husband wants to talk to you about the same situation, again, you focus on your relationship with him. You focus on validating his experience and struggle as well. In neither situation do you need to take a side. You don't have to throw either of these people under the bus. You just get to show love and compassion and understanding towards this person that you want to have a relationship and stay out of their relationship, which is them fixing their own struggle and challenge. 

11:58 

So if you remember podcast number 357 called "How to be More Understanding," it is these tools that we're talking about. You are validating them and then you are restating what they're saying and you're getting curious. That's all this is. That's what you need to do to stay out of other people's relationships. So don't allow yourself to get drawn into the middle of a relationship that is not your responsibility. Stay out of it. It is their drama. It's their relationship. It's not yours. You have a relationship with each of these people and they have a relationship with each other and you don't belong in the middle of it. Learn how to be loving and kind. Learn how to have your own strong relationship with each of those people and learn to stay out of their relationship. 

12:54 

Let them grow into the people who can manage their own relationship. If you keep stepping in, you are keeping them from the growth of discovering how to communicate better with each other of how to create their own relationship. You are actually creating a more dysfunctional relationship for them. If you continue to take over that element of their relationship, they have to figure it out on their own and you get to figure out how to stay out of it. And this can be a tough part of growing up, tough part of having kids grow up, or this could be any other relationship as well. I know I focused a lot today on like a parent-child relationship, but this could be two friends, same thing. We just have to learn to let other people have their relationships and we just stay out of it. It's none of our business. 

13:57 

Okay, I love growing up, don't you? Amazing, amazing stuff. This is a super short one this week, but I think it's some good content. So I just wanted to remind you as well that if you go to the show notes, if you want to learn more about this, going in the show notes, I will always have several other podcasts that you can find that build on these concepts that will expound it for you and give you more. So check that out. Have a really, really awesome week, my friends, and I will see you next time. Bye. 

14:31 

Thank you so much for joining me today. If you would love to receive some weekend motivation, be sure to sign up for my free "weekend win" Friday email: a short and quick message to help you have a better weekend and position yourself for a more productive week. Go to tanyahale.com to sign up and learn more about life coaching and how it can help you get to your best self ever. See ya.