How to Get What You Want from Your Relationship

Hi there, I’m Maggie O’Connor at Breakthrough MFT helping you reach your breakthrough moment.

Today I want to talk to those of you out there who are dating and wondering if this is the right person for you…

So the other day I went into a donut shop and I asked for a quinoa salad… I really insisted, although the lady behind the counter was saying to me, “We don’t have it, I’m so sorry… is there something else you want?”, and I just really didn’t want to leave without my quinoa salad!

This sounds ridiculous to anybody who’s listening, but…

Sometimes in dating, we find ourselves looking for what we need from someone who just doesn’t have it!

We’ll spend all kinds of time and energy trying to help them to understand how good it could be… how great this thing is if they would just try it. We even make excuses why they just don’t check that box. We don’t spend enough time wondering what’s important to us about it, and checking that out with our partner!

So what do we do about this? How can I be helpful?

I want to suggest to you that a little curiosity goes a long way. How are we gonna do that?

Number one, you’re going to identify your need and what’s important about this to you.

Number two, you’re going to check the evidence – is this person, is your partner handing out quinoa salads to everybody and not giving any to you?! That’s informative!

Number three, you’re going to ask them about it. This is really hard, this is the moment of truth.

You’re going to do it like this – identify your feeling first (i.e., “this didn’t feel so great to me when you… (fill in the blank).

What’s that about?”)

Number four, you’re going to be quiet you’re gonna really listen to the answer. Know that they’re always going to tell you what you need to know but it might not be what you want to hear so from something like, ‘I love you babe, but family time skiing it’s not my thing’, you could hear “I love you babe” and leave it at that, and you’re going to be disappointed. But if you really listen to the truth of, it’s not their thing you can…

Number five use this to make a decision about whether you accept it.

Accepting means ‘no harm no foul’; this means no resentment and this means I’m not gonna get it from you, so I’m okay getting it from somebody else. And if one of us feels lonely later we can have another conversation…

You can acknowledge that this is gonna be a source of conflict in the relationship but we don’t want to change it yet…

Or, we’re gonna change the nature of the relationship, and that doesn’t mean we have to end it but the nature of the relationship needs to change, if you’re not going to be able to get your quinoa salad from the donut shop.

I‘m Maggie O’Connor, hoping this helps you to ‘break on through’.

Is This What Holds You Back?

Well hi there, I’m Maggie O’Connor a breakthrough MFT helping you reach your breakthrough moment. I’m here today because I need your help with something. Now what happened to you when I said that? Did you pull back a little bit? Did you lean in with curiosity? Most of us do pull back a little bit when we’re asked for help because we’re just wondering what’s it going to take from me; And even more of us hesitate before we ask for help ourselves. We say things like, oh I should be able to handle it on my own or it’s not that hard.

Well you make complete sense, Homo sapiens lived in caves for hundreds of thousands of years where the main goal was survival- who you trusted or showed vulnerability to could mean the difference between life and death. The instinct to protect, kept us alive for hundreds of thousands of years but, these days we don’t just want to survive we want to thrive. We want to be happy; We don’t just want to be breathing. But what happens when our survival systems sidetrack our happiness? What happens when that instinct to protect distances us from the people we want to be most close too.

In relationships today we want to grow with our partner, we want them to understand us for decades upon decades. Which is a far cry from living in caves and just needing your partner to make fire, hunt, gather, and not get eaten before dying at about thirty-five years old. In order to be truly known and understood we need to show that underbelly. We need to talk about what hurts us, scares us, and even inspires us; That’s vulnerable too. Most of us need help learning what activates our specific defense systems. What brings them online and makes it hard for us to do the thing we most want to do? We need to bring down our defenses to feel truly known and be happy. So I wonder where you would have learned to do that. Most of us need help- why wouldn’t you need help?

So most of us don’t go to the doctor at the first sign of a cold- most of us don’t go to the mechanic at the first grumble of the engine- I mean that’s when I hope it just goes away but, I hear most consistently from couples that they wish that they had come in sooner because it didn’t have to hurt so bad for so long. So don’t wait till it’s completely unworkable. Take the bravest step of asking for help with your relationship. You’ll be so relieved when you make that first call! I’m Maggie O’Connor, hoping this helps you to break on through.