Apr 11
24
I was reading through a newsletter by Rori Raye of Have the Relationship you want the other day, and was very moved by what she said in it. I want to share this piece of relationship advice with my audience, because distance in a relationship (the emotional kind, not the physical kind) is a problem that we ALL encounter at one time or another. And like Rori Raye shows us in her story, most of us do the wrong thing – we over-do and over-reach, and it never works to bridge that gap. So let’s get to it.
Here is Rori’s story about her own relationship and how she healed her relationship by doing exactly the opposite of what she had been doing for a very long time.
Have you ever felt like your relationship is just drifting away from you? And your heart feels like it’s taken a direct hit? Where you feel absolutely wounded?
I remember feeling so NEGLECTED by my husband. There was so much frustration and sadness in the space between him and me, on top of all the sleepless, miserable nights I spent alone – curled up on the rug, crying, or just walking the house while he slept. What I wanted, what I NEEDED, was HEALING. I needed someone to wave a magic wand over me and heal my relationship, and then heal my heart.
I tried therapists and healers of all kinds, and the hole in my heart just got deeper and deeper, and the distance between my husband and I just got bigger and bigger. What I didn’t know then was that not only could I heal myself, and fast, but that I could heal my relationship, too.
I spent so much time trying to figure my husband out, and figure out why things were going wrong, and figuring out how to GET HIM TO DO what I wanted him to do and ACT how I wanted him to ACT. But every time I opened my mouth, it was like he was telling me with the look on his face and the coldness of his body language that I’d once again “put my foot in it.”
Every time I tried to “talk” about what was going on with us, it backfired. Things just got worse and worse, to where I was afraid to even speak. And remember, I was a fairly successful person in every other part of my life – I was outgoing, smart, a working actress. I’d even learned how to put a business together on my own. But here I was – afraid to SPEAK to my husband.
So there I was, walking on eggshells during the day and staying up all night trying to figure things out. And everything I was doing was more damaging than if I’d done nothing. Walking on eggshells was destroying trust in my marriage. He stopped trying to communicate with me. And I, so frustrated by not being able to have things the way I wanted, started doing even MORE of it MYSELF.
I was carrying my household, my life, and my marriage all in my own arms – all by myself. If this sounds familiar, know that you can turn this around like I did, using the Tools I created for myself. I was doing so much “figuring out,” it was taking up all my time and energy.
Until I finally “figured out” how to undo all the damage my “figuring out” had done, how to truly CONNECT with my husband again, and how to HEAL my relationship – all in ONE MOMENT! And that was the moment I STOPPED trying to Figure Things Out.
I’d been so tense and overworked and anxious, I’d just kept going, no matter what. I’d been jumping over obstacles I’d created for myself, I’d worked hard to fix things, and I’d worked hard at being cheerful and positive. I could have exploded. I could have blown a fuse or gotten really sick.
Instead, in a moment of utter frustration, I just STOPPED. I sat down on the floor and didn’t have dinner ready. I stayed on the floor, watching my daughter play with a toy, and I didn’t get up to welcome my husband home. I could hear the coldness in his voice and even though I felt the fear in my body screaming at me that I would lose everything if I didn’t jump up and make everything “better,” I stayed put.
I didn’t try to make everything “better.” Instead, I watched our daughter play on the floor right in front of me. I watched my husband go straight to her, hug and cuddle and kiss her and practically IGNORE ME, and then cuddle and kiss our cat and IGNORE ME, and I sat there, feeling like I was dying without his attention, affection and love.
And then, in two completely surprising minutes, it all changed. As he walked away from our daughter and our cat and went to take his work clothes off, I could feel my mind running, spinning, going a mile a minute trying to figure out HIS mind. I thought and tried to “figure things out” through every second of those two very long minutes.
I MADE myself stay on the floor and not run after him to ask how his day went and be a “good” wife even though I worked, too. And then the Magic Wand appeared. It was like a moment of light and quiet in my dark and busy mind. Just as I’d simply NOT gotten off the floor, I stopped thinking.
I focused on my daughter, looked at her face, looked at the paintings on the walls, looked at my own clothes and started thinking about how fun it would be to go shopping for MYSELF instead of the HOUSEHOLD, and before I knew it an amazing thing happened.
He walked over to me. He sat down next to me. I thought he was there for our daughter, but he was there for ME. He looked at me. I smiled at him. And in that one moment, we CONNECTED.
If you had told me then that just NOT doing what I always did (and it might be different things for you that you always do and can stop doing) would make so much difference in my relationship, I would have rolled my eyes. I never would have believed you.
From there, I started feeling stronger. I stopped doing more and more, and to my never- ending surprise, the less I did, the more space I allowed between us, the CLOSER he wanted to come to me!
And then, even more amazingly, as I started practicing this early version of my LeanBack Tool, I started to feel different inside. I got my confidence back. I started to FEEL more powerful. I saw that my husband craved closeness as much as I did, he just didn’t know how to do it. He couldn’t put his finger on what was pushing him away from me.
He wanted to cuddle. He wanted to initiate sex. Actually, he wanted to Make Love to me. He started looking FORWARD to bedtime and cuddling up and kissing. He could never have given me the advice I needed to inspire him like this, because he didn’t understand it himself. (I still don’t talk about any of this to him, not because I want to keep secrets, but because it’s not about HIM!) And this is where the HEALING happens. By staying put on the floor, I was paying attention to ME. By not jumping up and all of a sudden making him the focus of my life, I was focusing on MYSELF and what felt good to ME at the moment, which was sitting and watching my daughter.
(And by the way, you may have done these kinds of things before – pulling away, not doing what you may have done for him before, but out of ANGER and RESENTMENT. And the key to the whole thing working is that as soon as my man DID come over and sit beside me – I SMILED. I was warm, I welcomed him. If I had been angry or resentful, he likely would have felt it and not come over and sat down at all, or he would have gotten up quickly, or turned his full attention to our daughter instead of to me.
If I’d been UNWELCOMING, I might have gotten totally involved in playing with our daughter and hardly even LOOKED at him. I might have deliberately, or unconsciously SHUT HIM OUT. I would have been cold. And that made all the difference.
And that’s how I healed my relationship. Practically overnight. And now you can do it, too.
Catch Him and Keep Him by Christian Carter