00:00

Hey there, welcome to Intentional Living with Tanya Hale. This is episode number 244, "The Relationship Circle." 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

Well, hey there, my friends. Welcome to the podcast today. I just want to start today by saying that it is such an honor to be part of your journey. And as you work to figure out how to show up better in your life, how to be more the kind of person you want to be, how to have the kind of relationships that you want with the people that you love, I'm just honored to be part of it. And thanks for including me.

00:43

And we're going to jump in today. We're talking about a concept called The Relationship Circle. So several years before I found The Life Coach School, I found a concept that I call The Relationship Circle. And I love this idea because it reminds me to stay in my lane, meaning to work to control myself, and allow others the same agency to work to control their selves. As I have received coaching and as I coach others, I've come to realize how often we are in other people's business, trying to control things for them. But it's super tricky because it is often couched in thoughts like, "I just want to help them. I love them and I want to make this easier for them. I've been through this before," or "it makes sense to me," or "I don't want them to hurt or struggle," right? Those all just sound so lovely, don't they? But they're actually destructive thoughts in our relationships. Because in general, as people, we don't like to be told what to do. We don't want people coming into our lane and making decisions for us. We don't want people treating us as though we're incompetent and need their help. Underneath all of the angst we sometimes feel, we still know we're capable of figuring out and we really want to, even if we're letting our fear run the show for a bit.

01:59

So with that preface, let's jump into what The Relationship Circle is. I want you to imagine in your head three circles, all the same size, sitting side by side in a row, touching at the edges, but not overlapping. So do you remember in school when we used to do the Venn diagrams, where two circles would overlap, and we would discover what things two different items had in common and what they had in different? Okay, yeah, we're not doing that. We're not doing a Venn diagram. Okay, I'm gonna talk to you a little bit more about that at the end, and why that's not a helpful concept here. What we're talking about is three circles in a row. The middle one is touched on two sides, and the end ones are just touched on one side.

02:39

Now, one of the end circles is you. Notice that you are a complete circle. You are completely responsible for you, for your thoughts, your feelings, your ideas, your beliefs, your actions, your growth. You are a complete circle. Entity entirely selfsufficient, entirely worthy, entirely working your way through life. Now your spouse is the circle at the other end of the relationship for this. Well, I guess for this episode we're gonna we're gonna say that it's your spouse. So the circle on the other end is your spouse, for purposes here, just because I need to narrow it down somewhere, but it could be any relationship we're talking about here. So notice, though, that he is also a complete circle, also completely responsible for his thoughts and feelings, his ideas and beliefs, his actions his growth. Okay, now the middle circle between you that both of you are touching...that's The Relationship Circle. Again, notice that it is a complete entity, all its own. We don't overlap into the circle, but we do touch it which allows us access to the circle So both of you voluntarily choose to enter into this relationship circle and this circle is an amazing place Because it's made up of both of you choosing to be there However, you are still a complete and whole you and your husband is a complete and whole him We don't come into the circle to be completed.

04:13

We're not two halves that make a hole We're not deficient as a person and need somebody to fill in in the missing spots We are two holes that come together to create something entirely different, which is our Relationship so when we approach our relationship from this mindset We are able to create a healthier relationship space So this circle this relationship circle is the place where we come together to create our own unique Relationship it's a place where we come to share our hopes and our dreams a place where we seek friendship and partnership It's a place where we can come to support and love one another a place to learn to accept each other. This is a place where we can show up and be vulnerable and really be known intimately. It's a place where it's safe to share our strengths and our weaknesses, our failures, our successes, our dreams, our desires.

05:09

I also like to imagine that within this circle is a table, big table, needs to be big. This is the place where we can come and put all of our crap out onto it. So this table is where we place all of our stuff: our thoughts, our struggles, our frustrations, our wins, our losses, our hopes, our dreams, our desires, and we put it out there so we can see it more clearly. We can stand back and go, "huh, look at that." And so can our spouse. They can see it more clearly and understand us more deeply when they see all the things that we're working through. They get to see it all and they get to put all of their stuff out onto the table as well. And if we have a fairly healthy relationship with someone who is also fairly healthy, this will generally be a pretty safe place. So hopefully we are working to have more unconditional love for our spouse. A place where we can see their struggles and weaknesses and create an amazing space of acceptance for who they are and what they're going through. And also the other way around, they will have more unconditional love and acceptance for who we are.

06:24

Okay, so let's say that you and your spouse are really good at what we've talked about so far. Here's where sometimes it can get tricky. Your spouse may put a current struggle out onto the table. He may tell you about why it's hard and even say that he doesn't know what to do with it. And we hear that, don't know what to do with it. And often our go-to response is to pick that theme up off the table and try to work it out like it's a Rubik's Cube or something, right? Or we may even want to take it back into our circle to figure it out. We hug it. We hold it close to us. We say, "this is mine. I'm going to take care of this." But what we have to realize is that just because it's on the table doesn't mean it's ours to figure out. They don't put it out onto the table for us to fix or figure out or take control over. Now, they may say something that makes it sound like they want you to fix it for them, but don't fall for it. Okay, don't go there. We all have to stay in our own lane and take care of our own stuff. What we do get to do at this table is offer empathy, listen to understand, help them sort through the information they have, if they want help, but never ever pick it up. Don't even touch it. It's not there for you to touch and fix. It's there so you can understand your spouse better, so you can learn how to accept them for who they are and where they are in their process of figuring it out.

07:54

So here's an example. Let's say that your spouse is struggling with their relationship with one of your children. They put it out on the table and they tell you they're struggling to connect, that it seems whatever they do just isn't working, that they're super frustrated, they don't know how to fix it. So what do you do? Many of us want to go into giving ideas about what they're doing wrong because obviously we see it pretty clearly from the outside and we know exactly what's going on, right? Or we maybe really tempted to pick it up and go and talk to the child about it. We may want to make their relationship our responsibility. Often, we do this because their struggling relationship can bring us a lot of discomfort. So we tend to think that if they get along better, that we will feel better. Okay, there's problems with that, thinking that we need to work through. But neither of those options is our job. Our job is to express some empathy, some compassion, and then our job is to ask them questions, to support them in figuring it out, but not to think we have to figure it out for them. We might ask questions such as, "oh, that sounds difficult. Tell me why that's so hard for you. What do you want your relationship to look like? How can I help you?" So our job here, if we offer help, is to help and not to enable. The difference being, we can tell the difference between helping and enabling by who holds the bulk of the responsibility. If they have the bulk of the responsibility and we're just adding a bit to support, that's helping. If we take on the bulk of the responsibility and they're just tagging along, that's enabling.

09:42

So going back to the example with their relationship with a child, that has nothing to do with you. It's their relationship. It's theirs to figure out. And regardless of how they choose to end up in their relationship, it is none of your business. It has nothing to do with you. Stay out of the middle of it. Their relationship is for you to figure out. You have a separate relationship with your spouse and you have a separate relationship with that same child. But there's no place for you in the middle of their relationship. And this is where you get to experience your own space of growth. How do you show up supportive and not pick that struggle up and try and fix it? This can be tough stuff, especially if you're used to being the fixer and that's how you generally responded in the past. We have to increase our awareness of our tendency to overstep our boundaries and back off.

10:38

Okay, so here's a tougher example I want to offer you. Let's say that your spouse brings pornography and puts it out on the table. So this is something that's been part of his life and he's struggling with not wanting it to be, but he's struggling that it's still there. Okay, in the LDS culture, pornography has been made to be such a huge moral issue, akin to having an affair. Alright, and many women really struggle with the idea that their husband engages with pornography. As I've spoken with a lot of people outside of the LDS culture, they're like, "pornography is pornography." And I'm not going to talk much more about that, but I just want us to realize that pornography being a moral issue is in many ways kind of unique to the LDS culture. But here's the thing, your gut reaction to your husband putting pornography on the table may be to step in and pick that pornography up and try and fix it. We may start checking our husband's phone or computer. We may start trying to control how they're using their free time. We may start to manipulate them by withholding emotional or physical intimacy. Alright, all of this in an effort to control their relationship with pornography.

11:59

But let's put it, so let's put it in the same context as their relationship with their child, okay? It is not yours to fix. You can put all sorts of rules and regulations in place and they will still have a relationship with pornography and it is theirs to figure out. You putting rules and regulations in place is you picking it up off the table. What we get to do is the same as the previous example. We get to show up loving and kind, supportive, empathetic, compassionate. This is our job here. They put it on the table and we don't get to touch it. We don't get to pick it up and take it back to our circle and make it our problem. What we do get to do is decide how we want to show up when our spouse is struggling with something they may or may not want to overcome. What kind of person do you want to be? Their space of growth is figuring it out. Our space of growth is deciding how we want to show up for them figuring it out. Now, we may decide that we don't want to be married to someone who does that or that that's a dealbreaker for us. I mean, that's all personal choices and personal decisions, but your job is not to take control of that relationship. Your job is to figure out your stuff.

13:22

Okay, so let's shift to another example. This one might be a little bit more personal. Let's say you have realized that you have an unhealthy relationship with food. You eat when you're emotionally distraught or stressed and now your clothing doesn't fit. You feel sluggish and tired a lot of the time and you are pretty hard on yourself for your perceived lack of self control and you've gotten into beating yourself up over it. Okay. You bring this to the relationship table. You want your husband's support and gentle kindness, not his berating. You also don't want him to pick it up and start telling you what to do, what foods to eat and when, and what you should be doing for exercise and when. If he were to pick up this struggle and take it back to his circle to try and figure it out, you probably wouldn't be very happy about it because that's not his job. You're bringing it to the circle to allow him to see your struggle, to receive some moral support and compassion while you figure out what you want to do about it. You didn't bring it for him to take over and fix it, because he can't. When we start to see this Relationship Circle as a place of acceptance, a place of love and compassion, a place to support one another, then this circle can also be a space of greater personal awareness, a place to help us develop our own self-compassion better. And ultimately a place where we love to be, where we want to be, a place where we can laugh and a place where we can cry. And just enjoy each other's company. And even, dare I say, have a bit of fun while doing it.

15:03

When we use a different model, okay, we're going to go back to this Venn diagram. Remember the two circles that overlap. And I've seen that one used before with relationships, but I don't love that one so much because this is where my circle and his circle overlap and that overlap place they show is our relationship. Then I just feel like that creates an unhealthy entanglement in each other's business. So entangled relationships. This is where we move into a space where they come home super frustrated from work and that frustration bleeds into our circle and then we're frustrated. So do you remember the stories growing up in the 70s or the 80s about the man who comes home hangry from work and he yells at his wife, then the wife gets angry and yells at the child and the child gets angry and yells at the dog, right? I remember hearing that when I was like 14 or 15 in young women's, right? But this is what happens in enmeshed relationships. K? Where people take on the other person's emotions and then everyone is emotionally escalated.

16:08

A healthier model is one in which we are not enmeshed, where someone can come home angry, put their crap on the table and we can look at it and say, "wow, that looks tough. What are you thinking about it? Any idea what you're going to do? Any way I can help you?" But we don't pick it up and take it back to our own circle. We don't even touch it. But we do acknowledge it. We make it a safe place to talk about it and offer compassion and kindness, support and help when  appropriate. But we don't take it on. It's not ours. Relationships aren't for us to become the same person...they're for us to each become better and stronger versions of our own person with the support and love of the other person in the relationship. And that is the work we get to do in relationships. We get to learn to honor The Relationship Circle and honor the other person's circle as well. Their circle is theirs. Another way to say this is that their path is their path to walk. This is their journey in life. And when we choose to engage in a relationship, it's not so that their will becomes our will or vice versa. We learn to stay in our own lanes with a healthy dose of respect for the other person's lane. It's not so that we have someone to fix all of our things or to make us whole or to make us feel like we're of worth. That's our responsibility in our circle. We choose to engage in a relationship so that we can learn how to love better, more unconditionally and more cleanly. We choose to engage in a relationship so we can learn to be more accepting of someone else's differences, so that we can learn to embrace those differences as amazing and actually engaging and desirable. We want those differences.

18:06

So here's a more personal experience. And you got a huge personal experience last week. I'm going to give you another one. Okay. When Sione and I first got married last year, a situation came up between me and one of his children. And he and I talked about it and, well, he was still in "fix it" boat and he spoke to his child about it. And it provided us with an opportunity to discuss that it was a situation between me and the child. It was our relationship to figure out and actually had nothing to do with him. And he wasn't expected to do anything with that circumstance. His only job was to hold space for me to have the struggle and not to pick it up off the table and fix it. So nowadays, I'll tell you, he is amazing at leaving my stuff on the table, but also being really supportive. When a tough situation resurfaces, um, afterwards, he'll just pull me aside and he'll give me a big hug and he'll let me know how proud he is of how I showed up and of how I'm working through the situation. No more fixing for him, at least with me. Maybe he still does in other relationships, but he's figured that out with me. Right? He's learned to allow me the struggle of figuring out, hearing it out, but also showing up supportive and kind and compassionate and empathetic. And in this space, I am growing more into the person I want to be. And so is he by learning to not step in and try and fix things. He's always been a fixer and he's doing some great work there is evidenced by the work that he's does with me, right?

19:48

But here's the thing, my friends. We are not our relationships, but The Relationship Circle is there to help us become our better selves. The relationship circle is there to provide us support and kindness and understanding and even fun and learning to be responsible for our own complete whole self who can then engage in a relationship in healthy ways is one of the most spectacular parts of middle age, I believe. I'm in a second marriage at this point in my life and learning to incorporate all of this that I didn't have the capacity for the first time around. But even I have a lot of friends who are going on 30+ years of marriage and they are finally moving into this same space of figuring out this part of their relationship, The Relationship Circle. So I think a lot of times it's an age thing. We very often just don't have the tools and the understanding and the experience when we're younger to create this healthy of a relationship circle. But by midlife, we're starting to get it. And it's all part of growing up, I believe. Growing up into middle age is amazing. I love it so much. And I'm so grateful you joined me here on this journey. Take a look at your Relationship Circle. Take a look at how you are showing up in support of your spouse and try and discover like, "what am I doing?" Create your greater awareness. "How am I showing up? Am I showing up the way that I want to?" Okay, The Relationship Circle is not a place to make demands. More so, it's a place to show up and become more the kind of person that we want to be.

21:37

Okay, I love you, my friends. Honestly, thank you for being here. Means the world to me. And I pray that this information is helping you bit by bit to step into more of the kind of life that you really want to create, the kind of relationships that you want. Okay, that's going to do it for me this week. Have a really, really amazing week and I will see you next time. Bye.

21:59

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.