00:00 

Hey there, welcome to Intentional Living with Tanya Hale. This is episode number 384, "Relational Living." 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. 

00:21 

Alright. Hello there, my friends. Welcome back to the podcast if you are a frequent listener and welcome for the first time if this is your first one. This is a great one to get started on. And so if this is your first time, I hope that you enjoy this. I hope you find some things that are going to enlighten your mind and help you see things in a fresh new way, because this is what this is about. 

00:43 

My life, as I look back on my last 10 years of my journey from my divorce, is unrecognizable from what it was. The tools that I have learned, the things that I share with you here that I've been able to implement into my life, not only in healing after my divorce and moving forward, and the tools that I used when I was dating, when I was single, and the tools that I now use in my marriage with Sione, We've been married three and a half years, has created an unbelievable life for me. I just could never even imagine a relationship that was so collaborative, a relationship where we are so compatible and where we just communicate and work through the things and we're both vulnerable and create this intimacy that I didn't even know existed in my previous marriage. And this is what I get to share with you as part of my journey and the tools that I have learned and the tools that Sione and I incorporate into our marriage to create something so different. 

01:44 

And even if you're not married, I think a huge part of these tools for me is starting to understand, oh, that's what creates a healthy relationship. That's what creates what I always ached for in all those years, but I had no idea how to get it and how to move in that direction. And so that's what I get to share with you. And I love it. 

02:06 

Before we jump in though, I want to remind you that I have my De-stress Your Holidays class starting on November 10th. If you have people in your life that stress you out over the holidays, or if you are stressed out about all the people coming to your house or adult children coming home and wanting to make sure everybody has a good time and everybody's happy and everybody gets all the stuff. This is the class for you. You will want to be here to go through these six weeks. It's one hour a week, plus time listening to podcasts, which you're probably listening to podcasts anyway. And then you come in Monday nights, we discuss the podcast, we talk about how all of this applies, and you are going to have your best holiday season ever if this is a place that you choose to be. The class is limited to eight people because I want it small so that everybody gets a chance to participate and ask questions and even get coached. And I've priced it super low at just $129 for the six-week class. And that's the cheapest class I've ever offered. You will want to be on this one if the people in your life give you a little bit of stress in the holidays. So check that out. 

03:19 

Also, next Talk with Tanya is November 11th. That is Tuesdays. It's at 2 o'clock Eastern and 12 o'clock Mountain. This is a free webinar where you can just show up. You can listen to other people get coached if you're a little bit nervous or uneasy about joining in the conversation, or you can jump in and just say, "hey, listen, I need some coaching. This is my situation." We coach in front of everybody, but it's really such a fascinating tool to help everybody see and understand how the tools work. So you will absolutely want to get signed up for those. 

03:53 

Both of those, you can go to tanyahale.com, go to the group coaching tab, and both of those are on there where you can get signed up and get the information that you need to move forward on those. So that being said, let's jump in. 

04:07 

We are talking today about relational living. So a few weeks ago, before I did those two greatest hit back-to-back weeks, we talked about psychological boundaries and about how they are important in order for us to feel connected and protected from other people in our lives. Being both protected and connected is really valuable to us. We need to feel safe emotionally, physically, and psychologically. And we also need to feel connected to other humans. And also, we need to feel connected to ourselves. So having healthy boundaries lands us in an important middle space where we can feel both protected and connected at the same time. 

04:48 

So if we're going to be in healthy relationships with others in our lives, it's important that we have these boundaries, which can sometimes be tricky because all people are so different. What one person finds comfortable and maybe even fun or exciting, another person may find super uncomfortable and either annoying or even frightening. And this can cause us to feel disconnected. And relationships are the place where we want to feel the most connected because as humans, we are wired for connection to other humans. 

05:20 

But when we have such different ideas about what we want and what we like, it can be difficult to feel connected if we don't learn to live relationally with the people that we love. These differences can be really stark, even in a great relationship. Two people may have a super tight, strong relationship and still have some pretty great differences in how they approach different areas of their marriage and their lives. For example, a couple may have great compatibility in being able to parent well together or have similar financial goals, but they may have very different ideas about sexuality in marriage surrounding frequency, duration, intensity, or sense of adventure. Without learning to communicate about what we want and need and work through those together, and without the ability to learn and think and behave relationally, we can get really hung up on who is right and who is wrong and get very dug in to our detriment. 

06:26 

The biggest challenge of relationships is learning to stand up for yourself and also be able to make space for the other person to also stand up for themselves, to find a way to be collaborative in our relationships. Sometimes it can feel really difficult to create this together space. I noticed that many couples just back away from the difficult work of equal collaboration, and then the loudest and the most aggressive of the couples gets person in the couple gets their way and the other one just goes along, but not without slowly building walls of resentment on one side and feelings of entitlement on the other. 

07:06 

In general, most of us didn't have collaborative relationships modeled for us in our homes of origin or in other relationships that we observed, whether in real life or in movies or in television. And that's because our definition of what a healthy relationship is has completely changed in the last 50 years since we were children. Learning to step into relationship to live relationally is a whole new mindset that most of us have never learned how to do and are often at a loss of how to even start to get there. 

07:46 

The phrase "relational living" is one that Terence Real uses quite often in his work. It's the concept of living in relationship, which takes a very different skill set than living individually. Part of what creates difficult relationships is that we still try to live as individuals within the relationship. We think as individuals, we protect ourselves as individuals, and we forget or we never learned to think in the pronoun of we instead of staying in the me. And our primitive brain really wants the protection of thinking of only me because then we have control over how things work. We don't have to coordinate or collaborate or compromise. Our brains are always trying to figure out how can I get what I want right now. And the easy answer for that is rarely to think in terms of we and rather to keep thinking only of me. 

08:48 

This becomes especially obvious when we have differences of opinion in our relationships and our brain wants to push for being right, for getting our way, for getting what I want right now. So what does it mean to start thinking relationally with the people that we love? It means, for one, that we have to stop thinking in terms of who is right and who is wrong. The answer to the question of who is right and who is wrong, as Terrence Real so eloquently states, is, "who cares?" 

09:23 

First, there is rarely a right and a wrong. There are just differences of opinions based on our different life experiences and what we have made them mean. And second, even if there is a right and a wrong and you win, gosh darn it, then your spouse loses. And this means that you have effectively put your superiority of being right over understanding your space and making to working to make their life better. You have chosen to put yourself in a one-up position. Now, we're not saying that you just have to acquiesce to everything your spouse wants. What we're saying is that we have to start looking at couple struggles from the viewpoint of the relationship rather than the viewpoint of the individual. We have to stop thinking in terms of who is right and start thinking in terms of what is right for the relationship. 

10:26 

Often when we get in these tussles, it's because our egos are struggling so hard to find their footing. Our sense of self is weak and needing the perceived validation that comes from being right. And we push for that validation at the expense of the person that we proclaim to love the best. The real question needs to be, what works best for us for our relationship? Again, we're searching for what is right instead of who is right. What will be the best decision for where we want to go as a couple? 

11:04 

This is why I teach the concept of sense of self so much and why this last year I've taught so many sense of self classes. Because when we have a struggling sense of self, being wrong is devastating. Being wrong feels super scary. It feels as though our identity is uncertain and our primitive brain goes into panic protective mode. Remember, your primitive brain is always constantly scanning your environment asking, "am I safe? Am I safe? Am I safe? Am I safe?" And at the first hint that we may not be safe, our primitive brain pulls out all the stops and goes into fighting mode or flight mode, and it wants to be right. And we can feel threatened because there actually is some physical or emotional danger, or we can feel threatened just because our ego feels threatened. 

11:58 

When we have a strong sense of self, we have the ability to recognize that a difference of opinion doesn't invalidate our worth as a person. Even choosing to do something other than what was our original idea doesn't invalidate our worth. Remember, nothing can even touch our worth. Nothing we can say or do or think or believe makes us less valuable as a person. Our value is set and it never changes. But it's so fascinating how often our primitive brain wants to put our worth in question. And relationships are a prime breeding ground for exacerbating our struggling sense of self. 

12:40 

In relationships, it's not so much figuring out which person is right, what idea is right, but rather learning to step into curiosity and understand your partner's point of view so you can negotiate each person's subjective reality to come to a collaborative finality. So this can sometimes be referred to as being factually correct versus being relationally correct. So let me give you an example from one of Terrence Real's books, and I love this example. 

13:13 

So a couple is going on a road trip and they need to take two vehicles for some reason. And the woman doesn't feel comfortable driving at night, which they will be doing. And so she asks her husband to stay close, to drive close by her, so that she can feel safe in case something goes wrong or she takes a wrong turn or something. So while driving, the husband gets in front and he starts weaving through traffic and he gets about two cars ahead of her and she's upset because she can't track him, she can't follow him and she's feeling all nervous and she feels as though he's left her without caring that she's freaking out and she's uncomfortable. So they bring that to his office and the man is just arguing that he's like, "listen, I could see you the whole time." 

13:58 

And in his brain, he thinks that he was doing exactly what she had asked by keeping her headlights in view. He knew which headlights were hers, but she had lost him and she didn't know which car was his. And she calls him on the phone and she's panicked and she's upset that he left her. And he's arguing. He's like, "listen, I can see you. This is the car that's in front of you. I can see what's going on. So don't get so freaked out." Right? Now, was he factually correct? Yes. Did he leave her? No. Could he see her and was he tracking her? Yes. Okay, he was factually correct. But did this comfort his wife? Did he consider her point of view and what she was experiencing? Did his explanation make her feel safe and as though he was helping her in the way that she had asked and requested? No. 

14:59 

What the couple is fighting over here is who is right. She feels left and as though he wasn't there, and he argues that he always had her in his rearview mirror. So here's how Terrence Real described it in his books. He says, "in intimate relationships, it's never a matter of two people landing on the one true reality, but rather negotiating differing subjective realities. Stan is factually correct, but relationally incorrect. Did Stan, as promised, look after Lucy to make sure she was all right? Yes, absolutely. And if he had been the one to make the request, he would have been fine. But Stan isn't married to Stan. Lucy wanted the comfort of Stan by her side, in sight of her. It wasn't his age she was after, but the reassurance of his company. He missed the point because he wasn't thinking relationally. 

16:00 

"Stan was being instrumental. His focus was on the task at hand, not the subjective feelings of his partner. He was looking after her. He was not attending to her emotional needs. Objectively, Stan was 100% right. At the same time, however, he was 100% tin-eared when it came to his wife's subjective experience. Worse, every time Lucy tried to tell him what bothered her, every time she tried to bridge the gap between them, Stan only retreated more staunchly into his precious rightness." 

16:39 

Okay, so in this instance, Lucy wants and needs to be seen and understood, and Stan cannot see past his need to be right. He is holding tight to being factually correct and not considering that his wife could be having a different viewpoint and reality. Thinking relationally means that we stop thinking in terms of me, as Stan was doing in this example, and we start thinking in terms of we, working to see things from the other person's experience, seeking to understand their perspective, thinking about how our actions or our inactions are impacting our spouse. 

17:23 

And this can be super easy to do when we have different opinions. Our arguments will be laced with "you always..." and "you never..." and "why do I always have to....?" We focus only on our perspective and our struggle and even refuse to try and see things from the other person's perspective. It would have served Stan very well to get curious, to ask Lucy what about his behavior didn't seem as though he was showing up for her in the way that she asked, and seek to understand that her idea of being there for her was different than his idea of being there for her. 

18:05 

So here's another example. Rather than using the phrase, "I won't live without sex for the rest of my life," switching that to, listen to the difference here, "we both deserve a good sex life. I miss you. What do we need to do as a team to figure this out?" Notice the shift here from the, I won't live without sex, okay, to the we phrase, we both deserve this. What do we need to do as a team? And it's not just switching out those words. It's also thinking in terms of the two of them, of them as a relationship, as a partnership, and how it impacts both of them, and not just how it impacts each of them individually. 

18:49 

When one person in the relationship is having a struggle with sex, it's not their problem alone. The sex life of the couple is a combined situation that belongs to both of them. It is a problem of the relationship. It is theirs as a couple to figure out, not his or hers to figure out. If one partner is struggling with achieving connectivity or climax in the sexual relationship, it is theirs to figure out, not just hers or his. Both partners are needed to work together to figure out the next course of action. 

19:30 

This, my friends, is relational thinking. When either of them have a struggle within the context of the relationship, it takes both of them to work through it. It is their problem, not his or her problem. Learning to think in terms of relationship rather than in terms of the individual takes some awareness and practice, and it is a skill that is developed over time. 

19:57 

One thing that can really get us hung up on being able to think relationally is when we think of relationships in transactional terms. Or another way of saying that is we think in terms of what's fair and what's not fair. We keep score to make sure we're not doing more than the other person deserves. We see all of the hard work we're doing. We don't see the work our partner is doing. We worry so much about our rights and what we deserve that we can't see our partner's rights and what they deserve. In fact, we don't even consider them. We get so darn myopic that all we can see is our own pain, our own struggle, our own point of view. And when we're in this space, we start behaving in ways that only benefit us individually and that leave the relationship gasping for air. I believe that as soon as we start thinking in terms of fair and deserve, we have moved out of relationship and into individuality. 

21:03 

 Adam Miller, an LDS psychologist, talks about not asking what someone deserves, but asking instead, what do they need? This shift in our thinking takes us out of the individual living and into relational living. As I look back on my previous marriage, it is so clear to me that neither of us had the ability or the awareness to think relationally. We were so ruled by our primitive brains always asking, am I safe? Am I safe? That we were living in panic protective mode most of the time. We did not have the ability to consciously answer that question, am I safe? We could not scan our environment to see if we were safe. We just believed our primitive brain when it screamed that we weren't safe and freaked out to send us into fight or flight. 

21:58 

Had we had that awareness, if I had had that awareness, I would have been able to see that I wasn't in danger. Was it uncomfortable at times? For sure, but I was safe. I didn't need to lash out to try and protect myself because there was nothing to protect myself from. It was all perceived danger. My primitive brain doing what it's really good at, freaking out over things that don't need freaking out over and telling me things that are not true. 

22:29 

To be able to live relationally, it's imperative that I learn to question my primitive brain, the thoughts and the fears that ooze out of it. I have to learn to care more for my relationship than I do about my precious ego that wants to be right and serviced and thought of as the most important thing in the room. The thing is, if we want exactly what we want in life, we need to choose to be alone. We have no business being in a relationship if we do not want to consider another person and make adjustments to make that person's life better. 

23:09 

Living relationally requires that we take care of ourselves in our own sense of self-circle and that we bring that best, strong self into the relationship to care for the other person and for the relationship. It requires that we seek for the other person's happiness and peace and fulfillment as much as our own. It requires that we choose to set our ego aside, the part of us that is only concerned with us, and that we consistently seek for the well-being of our partner, not in place of our own well-being, but that it matters as much to us as our own. 

23:52 

For women, because of how culture has shaped us, this requires that we often get out of the one-down place, the space of putting ourselves last and thinking only about everybody else's happiness and comfort and wants and needs. It requires that we learn to step into equality and claim our full authority as a human, as a partner. For men, because of how culture has shaped them, this requires that they often get out of the one-up place, the space of putting themselves first and thinking about their own happiness and wants and needs before all else. It requires that they learn to reconnect with their feelings and figure out how to connect emotionally with the people that they love. 

24:40 

Culturally, we have not learned to live relationally, to live as equals, to consider that everyone else's wants and needs matter and that they are all important and need to be considered our own as well. This type of thinking is what creates the emotional intimacy that we, all, women and men both, crave at our core, because this is what creates the connectedness that we innately desire. I love how Terrence Real describes this type of intimacy. He says, "think of intimacy as comprised of two intersecting lines across. The vertical line represents that nose-to-nose energy. It is the capacity to be fully present in the moment. The capacity to face one another, really looking at one another in relationship is intense. It is sexy, nourishing, stimulating, romantic. The horizontal line represents shoulder-to-shoulder energy. It is the capacity to sustain connection over time, to be thoughtful, responsible, to build trust. Living a good life together, sharing values, goals, remembering birthdays, paying the bills, these small acts of care are also nourishing in a different way and no less essential. There is a cozy comfortableness that comes from a strongly established horizontal line, a sense of domesticity." 

26:15 

So, learning to embrace the nose-to-nose, the ability to see inside each other's souls and really seek to see them and understand them, and also the shoulder-to-shoulder, the ability to partner up and work and live together in harmony. These both are the essence of relational living. We have to understand, however, that intimacy isn't something we have. Intimacy is something we do. And what we do stems from our feelings, which are created by our thoughts. The capacity to live relationally starts with how we choose to think about ourselves, about our spouse, and about our relationship. Those are three separate entities. 

27:07 

So, how do you think about yourself? This is where doing the sense of self-work is so vital. Being in a place where we can see our strengths and our weaknesses, where we can embrace our successes and our failures is so important. We need to know that we are human and offer ourselves grace for this humanity. We need to know we are flawed and still a good person at our core. When we bring insecurity into the relationship, it demands too much and it smothers it. We have to strengthen our sense of self. 

27:46 

So, then how do we think about our partner? Well, we get to choose to assume best intent, to consider that they are doing the best they know how with where they are in life. We decide to offer them grace when they do something that is so human, and we seek to understand their point of view rather than go into judgment for where and how they are. We consider that their wants and needs matter just as much as ours, and that we are equals in every way. And then third, how do we think about our relationship? We choose to believe that it matters. We see it as a separate entity that requires nourishment and attention. We understand that to be in partnership means just that, that we choose to work together to make the relationship beautiful and intimate rather than thinking we can neglect it and ignore it and even dismiss it and it will be okay. 

28:41 

We choose to think in terms of "we," making decisions based on what is best for the relationship, considering how our actions or inactions will impact our partner, and thinking about how we can make their lives significantly better. Relational living really requires that we have a strong sense of self and don't feel threatened by the needs of the relationship. When our sense of self is weak, it will feel threatened by the we of the relationship and feel that the relationship absolves them, that it depletes them, that it makes them insignificant, that it requires too much of them. 

29:20 

And yet when both partners have a strong sense of self and when they choose to think relationally, the opposite actually happens. The relationship gives them the freedom to explore themselves more. It gives them the capacity in a safe place to look at their flaws and their failings, and it provides them with support to work through those flaws and failings. A strong relationship actually makes us feel more significant because we have a person in our corner who is supporting us, who is witnessing our beautiful life play out, and with whom we take priority. 

29:59 

When our sense of self is struggling, we will tend to be caught in the me thinking that has our ego scrambling for footing to feel important enough, to feel worthy enough or capable enough. And this is when we start feeling all sorts of defensiveness and the push to be in a one-up position in the relationship, to be acknowledged as right and better than our partner. 

30:23 

I love that Terrence Real says, "you can either be right or you can be married. You can't be both." Brilliant. The capacity to set aside our self-interested desires for the sake of the relationship is emotional maturity at its best. This doesn't mean that we neglect ourselves and not consider our own wants and needs. Rather, it means that we honestly believe the other person's wants and needs matter just as much as our own. We have the capacity to consider their wants and needs as much as our own. We seek after the other person's well-being and happiness as desperately as we seek after our own. This is relational living. This is us prioritizing the other person and the relationship just as much as we prioritize our own life and wants and needs. 

31:19 

Getting to this place requires a lot of conscious work because relationships are not easy. They don't always make us happy. Rather, they require that we work on our selfish tendencies, that we learn to honor our own value and worth, that we stretch and grow and feel a lot of discomfort when we see our flaws reflected back to us. And every good relationship shows us our flaws. It shows us our weaknesses and our deficiencies. And, you know, that is hard to see. And learning to live relationally means that we address those things and that we are willing to clean up our dysfunctional patterns of behavior in order to love the other person better. 

32:07 

If we want to have the kind of relationship that is deeply connected, then we have to start taking the kinds of risks that deeply connected partners take. Intimacy isn't something we have. It's something we do, and it's risky. It doesn't just  happen because we get married. It's a conscious choice of intimate thinking, feeling, and behaving toward this person in our life. Relational living requires that we step into vulnerability, that we engage tools of repair and communication that equalize our relationship, and that we treat the other person as one whom we love and respect. It requires that we have the capacity to see beyond our own needs in order to consider the needs of the relationship and this person that we have chosen. 

33:02 

Relational living requires that we truly learn to listen to understand, that we actually want to see things from our partner's perspective, because then we know them better. And we don't have to even agree with their perspective, but because we understand, we can respect it and honor it as needed. So again, we can be right. We can be seeking a one-up position of being better than our partner to assuage our own insecurities and harm our marriage. Or we can choose to be married and do the work necessary to show up as an equal, to 100% see them as our equal, to prioritize their well-being and happiness and do what we can to add to that, to learn to communicate in loving and kind ways that don't attack, criticize, accuse, or blame. 

33:54 

And when you're in a tough relationship, getting to this point takes some capital W Work. It takes creating awareness of where you don't have a strong sense of self. It takes some real come to Jesus moments where we address our dysfunctional patterns of behavior, where we take a huge piece of humble pie and choose instead to show up in ways that will prioritize the relationship rather than our own ego. The stronger your sense of self, the greater your capacity will be to yield to your partner because you don't need to die on a particular mountain to feel important. 

34:37 

We live in a very anti-relational world. So many of us were taught thought processes and behaviors that kept us in a struggling sense of self. We saw destructive relational patterns modeled by our parents and our grandparents, by other adults in our life, and we see them all over in TV and movies and whatever else we see in life. Learning to live relationally demands that we figure out how to behave in ways that don't come naturally, but that create the relationship intimacy that we crave. And that's what we're doing here on this podcast. 

35:18 

And this is what I coach my clients on in one-on-one coaching and in my classes. We have the capacity to create beautiful partnerships. We just have to see what we're doing that is creating the opposite, clean up that crap, and learn how to live better. If you want to dig deeper into relational living, check out the show notes on your podcast app where you can find several more podcasts that will help you understand more clearly the concepts that we talked today, talked about today. There is so much good stuff here. And I promise you, it will make your life better. 

36:02 

Living relationally is one of the most beautiful experiences I've ever had in my life. Was it a risk to get to this place? Absolutely. Is it still sometimes scary because it requires vulnerability of me in so many different areas? 100%. And is it worth couraging up and facing my fears? Absolutely. 110% on that one. It is so worth it. My friends, we can figure out how to live relationally. This is all part of growing up. And this middle-aged life, this is when it all comes together for us. This is when we start to see things we've never seen. Our experience and our knowledge and our wisdom all start to come together in this perfect storm if we have the courage to address it. That's what it takes. It takes some courage to take a risk. I love this work. I love that you are here with me. Thank you so much. 

37:14 

Okay, check out my De-Stress Your Holidays class. Get signed up for Talk with Tanya if the timing works for you. And let's do some work. Let's figure out how we are not showing up relationally. And let's figure out how to do it and how to do it well. Okay, I love you. Really, I do. Thank you for being here. Have an awesome week, my friends, and I'll see you next time. Bye. 

37:43 

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.