Latest / The Divorce Decision Podcast / Ep. 41: Want To Stop Feeling Resentful In Your Marriage? (Use the 3% Rule)

Transcript

Ep. 41: Want To Stop Feeling Resentful In Your Marriage? (Use the 3% Rule) · The Divorce Decision Podcast

• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: You're listening to Lucky in Love, the podcast where we tell the messy truth about relationships and share tools that can help yours.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: So whether you're questioning it, fighting for it, or trying to protect it, don't worry, I've got you.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: I'm your host, Carrie Hoskins.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: Now let's get talking.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: Hey there everyone.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome back to the podcast.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: If you are new here, I am so delighted that you found me.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: And I would really appreciate it if you could hit that subscribe button.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_00: And also, of course, share this with everybody that you know so that we can continue to help more people in their relationships.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: So today, my friends, we're going to be talking about how to use the 3% rule to help you have more emotional peace and freedom and agency in your relationship or your marriage.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I first came across this concept of the 3% about, I don't know, I'd say a year after my first marriage of 17 years ended.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: I was walking around with so much resentfulness and blame and regret.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: And frankly, it felt really, really crappy.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: And so I was just kind of trying to figure out what do I do with all of this?
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: How do I let this stuff go?
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: And that's when I came across the 3%, which was explained by Catherine Woodward Thomas, who happens to be the creator of Conscious Uncoupling.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: And when I did this work, I'm so serious.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: It helped me let go of all of the resentment and the blame and the regret that I was carrying around.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: And it made me a better co-parent.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: And to be honest with you, my first husband and I, like we like each other.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: We um I still consider as friends.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: I think he's probably still considered as friends.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: And I wanted to feel good about the way that I was showing up in this new um dynamic that we had.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_00: And sure enough, it helped.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: Like it literally let me go of all the stuff that felt so crappy inside of me.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: And so what I want to do is I want to share with you what this 3% rule is.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: Now, Catherine does not refer to it as a rule, I refer to it as a rule and I teach it to my clients as a rule.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm gonna share with you what that is, I'm gonna share with you how to use it, how to figure it out, and then also how it can help you in your relationship or your marriage.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: So the concept of 3% is this.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: If your significant other or ex-significant other is responsible for 97% of the problems, for 97% of the unhappiness that your relationship dynamic is causing you, what is your 3%?
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: Um what is your 3% of the problem?
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_00: What is your 3% of the conflict?
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: What is your 3% of the way that your dynamic is unfolding in your life?
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: When you can own your 3%, what you do is you take so much of your power back.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: Because I want you guys to think about this.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: If your partner is 100% responsible for every single thing in your relationship, that means they're the only ones that have the power to change and fix it.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: Because we can't make them change.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: The only person that we have control over is ourself.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: And so what you do when you take, when you can like call out and acknowledge your 3% to yourself and then hopefully to your partner, what you do is you flip the script.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: It goes from they're doing this to me to hey, this is what I can do to influence what happens next.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: And when you're able to do that, you have so much more agency, you have so much more power.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: And what that does is that reduces feelings of resentfulness, blame, defensiveness, disappointment, general unhappiness.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: So the mantra today is going to be, or the question I should say today is going to be, what's your 3%?
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: So, how do we figure that out?
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_00: Because a lot of people they get really defensive when I suggest that they have some ownership in the way that their relationship feels and the things that are happening in their relationship.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: And so this is how I help people figure this out.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_00: You want to look at what are the most common recurring thoughts and feelings that you have about your relationship, about your dynamic, about your conflict, or about maybe one singular problem.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: You want to figure that out.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: That's where you ask yourself, now, what role am I playing?
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_00: How am I contributing to those uh to those feelings?
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: And the second part of that is, now what can I do about it?
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: So let me give you, you know, an example because hold on, let me back up.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: When you answer, what can I do about it?
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_00: Now what you've done is you have like taken control of it and you've given yourself more agency in the relationship.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_00: You have created a situation where you're not victim to your partner's behavior.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_00: You have control over your.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_00: So let me give you some examples.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_00: Um, if you feel like your partner or your spouse is controlling or overbearing, what's your 3%?
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe you need to speak up for yourself more.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe you need to speak up for yourself more and feel okay and comfortable when they get upset about it.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe you need, or you definitely need, if this is your case, stronger boundaries and you need to hold to your boundary, right?
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: So people get this messed up all of the time.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_00: They're like, well, I have a boundary and they crossed it.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so when you tell somebody what you want or what you need as your boundary, um, your responsibility is to follow through.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: It is not their responsibility to respect your boundary, it is your responsibility to follow through if they cross your boundary.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so maybe you need stronger boundaries.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_00: Um, this is one that happens a lot.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_00: It's around lying, believe it or not.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_00: So maybe you're in a relationship with your partner repeatedly or consistently, just gives you small white lies about things.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_00: And this actually comes up way more often than you would think.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_00: What's your 3% in that?
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_00: And people get super defensive when I ask them what the 3% is.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_00: Here's the deal.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_00: If you are, and this is what I would suggest doing, I would suggest looking at the way that you're communicating.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_00: If your partner consistently doesn't tell you information or consistently lies to you, it's probably because you are creating a dynamic where they don't feel safe telling you things.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: They don't feel safe telling you something that might upset you because of how you're going to respond.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: So I would really look inward and ask yourself, how am I communicating?
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: Am I am I staying open?
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: Am I managing my emotions when I hear something that I don't like, or am I completely flying off the handle?
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: We avoid things that cause us distress.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_00: We avoid things that create tension.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_00: And so for a lot of people, they'll just lie or not tell you at all if they feel like it's going to be the path of least resistance.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so that would be an example of your 3%.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: Let's pretend that you are often let down or disappointed by your spouse.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_00: I would suggest looking at your expectations.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_00: Um, have you told them what your expectations are?
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_00: Have you made it very plain and simple and clear?
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_00: Um, are your requests specific or are they vague?
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_00: I can't tell you how many times I have heard somebody say, Oh, I told him I needed him to help me around the house more.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, but what does that mean?
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_00: What do you specifically want more help with?
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_00: Be specific.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_00: Come up with the plan.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_00: That's part of your responsibility if you want something to change.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_00: And I have to say, for a lot of you listening, you have expectations that are unspoken.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: So you're thinking like, well, they should just know.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_00: We talked about this once five years ago, don't they remember?
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_00: So those unspoken expectations are not helping you.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_00: What you need are agreements where you openly talk about what it is you want and you come to an agreement that you can both follow through on, right?
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_00: You make a decision about how you want to handle it.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_00: Um, another example of a 3% in this situation of being let down is if your partner has like a track record of being late, of forgetting things, of avoiding certain topics, then your 3% is you need to create boundaries and hold to them, just like my last example.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_00: Like you have to follow through with the boundary when they cross it.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_00: Um, what tends to happen in that situation is people will express their displeasure, expect it, uh, express their disappointment, then you'll fight about it, but then you stop with the fight.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_00: You don't actually close that loop.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_00: You don't come up with the next time this happens, this is what we're gonna do plan.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_00: You just kind of leave it with the fight.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_00: So what you really need to do to get more agency and to give you some freedom from this is to close that loop.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_00: What are you gonna do next time this happens?
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_00: If one of your big things in your relationship is that your partner avoids topics or does isn't opening up with you and isn't being emotionally vulnerable with you, um, I would really suggest that you take a step back because maybe your responsibility is in how you talk to them.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_00: Do you come across as belittling or dismissive?
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_00: Do you criticize?
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_00: Um, can they trust that you're not going to use what they say against them?
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_00: Those are some of the more common things that I see when people's partners shut down and avoid conversations.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_00: So those are like some general relationship things that tend to come up.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_00: I thought I'd share with you just like real life examples so you can see what to do with this.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_00: Like you can see how this works.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: Wife put 100% of blame on her husband's anger, his temper.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_00: She said he was he got angry a lot, he lost his temper a lot, and he got mean.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_00: He 100% blamed his wife because he said that she never opened up, they had no more emotional connection, and then of course, you know, they weren't having any physical intimacy.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_00: And he put the blame squarely on her shoulders.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_00: So for both of them, I'm like, let's take a step back.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_00: What are each of you 3% responsible for?
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, because what was happening in that situation was he would get angry, she would retreat inside of herself, um, stop the conversation because I mean, to her credit, she had a really good boundary.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_00: A boundary was I don't want to be talking too disrespectfully.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_00: So she would stop talking, but her 3% in that scenario was that she'd stop talking and exit the conversation, but they never come back and revisit it.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_00: So that conflict was never resolved.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_00: So he'd get angry, she'd retreat, which would make him more angry, right?
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_00: And it was just this whole vicious cycle.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_00: And by the time they came to see me, there was so much unresolved conflict and problems that created so much tension and disconnection in their relationship.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_00: And it wasn't until they both took ownership of their part that we were able to start re-establishing trust and really turning that relationship around.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_00: So that's what you do with the 3%.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_00: You take ownership of it, you identify it, you figure out what you can do instead, right?
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_00: How you can fix your part of it, and then you acknowledge it to your partner and you come up with the plan.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_00: So that's one of the things that we do in those coaching sessions is we come up with the plan of how we're going to move forward, right?
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I get a lot of pushback from people when there's been a betrayal, when there's been um infidelity, either an emotional affair or a physical affair.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_00: The same 3% rule applies.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_00: One of the unfortunate things that happens when there's been an affair is the affair is what creates the biggest, most hurtful rupture.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_00: And that overshadows all of the other problems that are happening in the relationship.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_00: So all those other problems are kind of like brushed to the wayside because everyone's focus is on the actual affair.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm not saying that um, I'm not saying that there's like a justification or a rationalization or an excuse.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_00: What I'm saying is both people have to take responsibility.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_00: So I thought I'd give you just a couple of real life examples of that.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_00: I had a couple where um the husband admitted that there was distance and he recognized the distance, but he was so caught up in work and so caught up in all the other stuff going on in his part of his world that he just kind of neglected his wife and didn't address the drift, and neither did she.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_00: And then pretty soon they drifted so far apart that she looked outside of the marriage to get her emotional needs met.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_00: I had another situation where it was the wife, or I'm sorry, the husband that had the affair.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_00: And the wife's 3% was he came and told her that he was unhappy several years before the affair actually happened.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_00: But again, she's busy with the kids.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_00: She didn't, they didn't really talk about it.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_00: Nothing happened, they didn't get help.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_00: She just kind of assumed that it would either resolve itself or, you know, some some way it was just going to be fine.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_00: So nothing happened.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_00: But his unhappiness got bigger and bigger and bigger until it created the situation where he went outside the marriage to get his needs met.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and so as even though you're in a situation where that is super, super extreme and very, very painful, there is still some responsibility there.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_00: These are things that need to be talked about.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_00: So I want to take this one step further for you in how to really identify your 3%.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_00: I really suggest looking at your pattern.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_00: Um, almost all of us have a way of behaving that was started when you were young.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_00: So you want to look at past relationships, friendships, family relationships, past romantic relationships, and look to see where your 3%, like any problems that happen in those relationships, what was your responsibility?
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_00: What was your role?
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_00: How did you contribute to those?
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_00: Write those down.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_00: That's going to help you.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_00: Um, because like I said, a lot of us repeat these things again if we don't identify them and make changes.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_00: So there was a statistic that did not surprise me at all.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_00: It's that 40% of first marriages end in divorce, 60% of second marriages end in divorce, and 70% of third marriages end in divorce.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_00: And my hypothesis here is that that is a direct result of people not looking to their past relationships, identifying their role and making changes and acting accordingly, right?
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_00: So um something that my husband and I started doing when we were dating is we got super honest with ourselves and with each other.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_00: I literally asked him on one of our dates, babe, what is your 3%?
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_00: And we had this whole conversation about it.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_00: Now we didn't just talk about it once.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_00: We um have talked about it several times and we have revisited this topic several times because we want to acknowledge um our natural tendencies.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_00: Like I tend to be a people pleaser, I over-accommodate, I'm an over-functioner.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, I over-function regularly in relationships.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_00: And that is my work to do.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't want to repeat that in my current marriage, right?
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_00: And he took ownership of his stuff, how he contributed to the dynamic, the very toxic dynamic that he and um his first wife had, right?
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_00: So we did this um very openly and honestly because we didn't want to repeat that in our marriage.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_00: And so what I would really like to challenge you to do is think about those areas in your relationship where you are not super happy, you're not super satisfied, and where your tendency is to place all the blame squarely on your partner's shoulders.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_00: I want you to think about that and come up with a couple of ways that you are contributing to that specific problem or that specific dynamic, right?
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_00: Answer the question: what is my 3% and what can I do differently?
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, my friends, that is what I have for you today.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_00: If this brought up any questions, if you want any help, please feel free to follow me on social media.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_00: I'm at Carrie Hoskins Coaching.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_00: That's K-A-R-I-H-O-S-K-I-N-S coaching.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I also have the links to all my social media and to my website in the show notes.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_00: So if you want any help or have any questions, just click those links and I'd be happy to help you and answer your questions.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_00: I hope you guys take this seriously.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_00: Go find out what your 3% is, and I'll talk to you next week.