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One Honest Conversation: Why Silence Costs Us More Than Speaking Up · No Shrinking Violets Podcast for Women

• 0:00
  Marcelle: We never stop and turn around and look at the vista, how far we've come, all of the mountains that we've we've already climbed, and acknowledge those things, write those things down, look at them, then you'll start to see patterns of what makes you happy.
• 0:21
  Mary: For centuries, the phrase shrinking violet was used to diminish women, to suggest we were meant to be small and meek.
• 0:28
  Mary: But in nature, violets are anything but weak.
• 0:31
  Mary: They're resilient, beautiful, and essential to the ecosystem.
• 0:35
  Mary: Hi, I'm Mary Rothwell, licensed therapist, and each week I sit down with women who remind us that being compared to a violet isn't an insult.
• 0:43
  Mary: It's a testament to strength, endurance, and the power of taking up space and living by your true nature.
• 0:49
  Mary: If you're ready to stop shrinking and start thriving, you're in the right place.
• 0:54
  Mary: Hey violets, welcome to the show.
• 0:58
  Mary: When I think back across my dating history and my first marriage, I can say with 100% certainty that I stayed in many relationships way longer than I should have.
• 1:09
  Mary: I knew deep down that they were not serving me, that I was really alone, just, well, with a partner.
• 1:16
  Mary: It took me a long time to learn to trust my inner knowing and accept that I wasn't confused about whether to end the relationship.
• 1:23
  Mary: I was just avoiding doing it.
• 1:25
  Mary: In one relationship in particular, when I was way past the age that I should have fallen into this trap, I kept convincing myself that I was being too judgy, that I expected too much.
• 1:37
  Mary: It was agony.
• 1:38
  Mary: And when I finally started the process to end it, he refused to move out of the house for months.
• 1:44
  Mary: It felt surreal that I ended up in that situation.
• 1:48
  Mary: I was bruised and ashamed.
• 1:50
  Mary: But I also had to just accept that I'd done what I'd done, that I ignored the red flags.
• 1:55
  Mary: I just convinced myself for a long time that it was a carnival.
• 1:59
  Mary: And my friends, bless them, never raised an eyebrow or gave me the side eye.
• 2:03
  Mary: They just helped me pick up the pieces and move on.
• 2:06
  Mary: That, thankfully, was the last time I kept my mouth shut about anything that felt wrong in my relationships.
• 2:12
  Mary: My now husband knew from our first date who I really was and what I really wanted.
• 2:18
  Mary: My guest today had her own wake-up call too, after keeping her head in the sand of her marriage for way too long.
• 2:24
  Mary: Her journey from there has taken many twists and turns, which brought her to the work she does today, helping other women spot the flags and, more importantly, communicate their needs and feelings in their own relationships.
• 2:37
  Mary: Marcel LeBlanc is the conversation architect and has discovered that one honest conversation can save a woman years of resentment, loneliness, and the quiet grief of not being seen.
• 2:48
  Mary: Years spent building a life with the wrong person or with the right person in the wrong way.
• 2:54
  Mary: Welcome to No Shrinking Violets, Marcel.
• 2:56
  Mary: Thank you for having me.
• 2:58
  Mary: I'm honored to be here.
• 2:59
  Mary: So I think we're going to have a great conversation because as you heard, there's some personal stuff here, but I can't wait to just dig into this because I hear so much of the themes that you work with in the work that I do as a therapist.
• 3:12
  Mary: But could we start with having you tell us a bit about your story and the moments that you think brought you to this work?
• 3:18
  Mary: Because you have you have a pretty good story, good slash, you know, not good.
• 3:25
  Marcelle: Well, hindsight was merciless to me.
• 3:27
  Marcelle: I was in a 10-year marriage that ended with my husband taking his girlfriend to the British Virgin Islands on our uh 10-year anniversary.
• 3:37
  Marcelle: And I never saw him again when he was caught.
• 3:41
  Marcelle: And that was just what I found out to be the explosion at the inn.
• 3:48
  Marcelle: But the biggest damage that was done was the 10 years of being misaligned with a partner and not knowing personally what I wanted from myself and in a relationship.
• 4:00
  Marcelle: And through my business with Velvet Box, I had the absolute honor of speaking with thousands of women in different conversations who were managing resentment and disappointment and disconnection in their relationships.
• 4:21
  Marcelle: And what I love to see is strong, educated young women who are thriving in their career.
• 4:27
  Marcelle: They've discovered a life partner they love, they're aligned with, they're really fostering a common language.
• 4:34
  Marcelle: But what I find is that they don't treat the most important relationship that they're ever going to have, which is their life partner the way that they should.
• 4:43
  Marcelle: In fact, a lot of these ladies knew that their relationship was on borrowed time and they refused to have that one conversation that was either going to fix or deepen the relationship or move it on and give themselves a shot at being happy.
• 4:58
  Marcelle: Do you know anybody like that?
• 5:02
  Mary: Oh, yes, yes, for sure.
• 5:04
  Mary: So I totally, you mean obviously you heard I was one of those people.
• 5:09
  Mary: And I'm so fascinated always by how we end up doing that, because you know, we're talking about women who are not doormats.
• 5:17
  Mary: I mean, I never thought of myself like that, especially professionally, but yet I would end up in these situations.
• 5:22
  Mary: So I know that for you, you tell a little bit more detail, you know, on your website.
• 5:29
  Mary: So I'm curious, you sort of knew, right?
• 5:33
  Mary: Like you had clues along the way, but I think you did what I did and what a lot of women did.
• 5:39
  Mary: You had things happen and you dismissed it.
• 5:44
  Marcelle: The clues were everywhere.
• 5:46
  Marcelle: Prime example was he worked out of town sometimes and I'd pretend to be asleep.
• 5:53
  Marcelle: And when the garage door closed, I'd hop out of bed going, I have a couple days with the dog.
• 5:58
  Marcelle: It's gonna be great.
• 5:59
  Marcelle: I felt a sense of relief.
• 6:01
  Marcelle: We would have dinner.
• 6:02
  Marcelle: One time we were having dinner with some friends, and they asked us, Do you guys want to have kids?
• 6:07
  Marcelle: And I answered no.
• 6:08
  Marcelle: He answered yes at the same time.
• 6:11
  Marcelle: And there were lots and lots of clues that sort of stacked up like that.
• 6:17
  Marcelle: And I didn't know what to do with them at the time.
• 6:22
  Marcelle: I just didn't have the the language, the education.
• 6:27
  Marcelle: I didn't know what I wanted.
• 6:30
  Marcelle: I I teach people three things to look inward, to give it language, and to say it in a way that allows the person to respond.
• 6:40
  Marcelle: But when I started out in my relationship, none of those things were happening.
• 6:46
  Marcelle: I just let momentum take control.
• 6:49
  Marcelle: Before you know it, he proposed.
• 6:53
  Marcelle: I wasn't sure, but my family liked him.
• 6:56
  Marcelle: My dad was Catholic and we were living together.
• 7:00
  Marcelle: So if we got married, we'd rectify the living in sin part.
• 7:05
  Marcelle: And saying no just felt bigger and messier than saying yes.
• 7:11
  Marcelle: And I just let momentum do all the deciding for me.
• 7:15
  Marcelle: That's that's how I lost 10 years of my life.
• 7:20
  Marcelle: We are, I think, incredibly strong, resilient people.
• 7:23
  Marcelle: I see women all the time that are doing incredibly strong, amazing things, and we wouldn't consider ourselves to be hopeful.
• 7:31
  Marcelle: But for some reason, we don't have the language to speak up in a relationship like this.
• 7:38
  Marcelle: And we're not doing it, we're doing it because we want to be thoughtful.
• 7:43
  Marcelle: We want to be kind to the person that we're with, if that makes sense.
• 7:48
  Mary: Yeah.
• 7:48
  Mary: Well, and you that momentum, I think, is really important because we have this idea of we have this amazing, beautiful wedding.
• 7:57
  Mary: I mean, we just saw what Taylor Swift did.
• 8:00
  Mary: Nobody can really live up to that.
• 8:03
  Mary: But it's, you know, it's interesting to me that even someone like that who has made billions of dollars and is certainly a self-starter and so talented and so intelligent has made so much of it about the wedding and all of that.
• 8:20
  Mary: And so I think that's just feeding into this societal thing.
• 8:25
  Mary: And you're right, we'll plan this and we care about what our family thinks and other people think.
• 8:32
  Mary: So we are very quick sometimes to dismiss any misgiving.
• 8:37
  Mary: And so I'm curious, with all with your situation and the women that you've worked with, what do you think makes women, I'll say, like us, smart, successful women, what do you think makes them stay when there's that part of them, that instinct that knows it's not right?
• 8:56
  Mary: Or if a friend was describing what was happening, we'd probably be pretty quick to say, are you sure this is right for you?
• 9:02
  Mary: But we don't often do that for ourselves.
• 9:05
  Marcelle: I think the our competence, our high competence gets in the way.
• 9:10
  Marcelle: We succeed at a lot of things.
• 9:13
  Marcelle: So we're resilient.
• 9:14
  Marcelle: We can, we can, if we wait long enough, if we hope long enough, if we wait for him to work to get better, if the kids are going to get out of school, we're always waiting.
• 9:28
  Marcelle: And I think that that's what happens is we don't realize the only thing that keeps moving on is time.
• 9:35
  Marcelle: I had I had a young lady that when I was talking to her, her name was Lauren, and she came to me and she used the words slow death with her relationship.
• 9:46
  Marcelle: And as she's describing what's going on in their relationship, it does sound like they're strangers in the same house.
• 9:53
  Marcelle: They are scrolling through Instagram while they're eating dinner.
• 9:57
  Marcelle: They, of course, like their own different Netflix shows, so they've retreated to separate rooms in the house to watch their Netflix shows.
• 10:04
  Marcelle: And some nights she says, I just have these awkward silences, and I go to bed early to avoid them.
• 10:12
  Marcelle: And as she's laying there having these one-sided conversations as we do, she thinks about breaking up.
• 10:20
  Marcelle: And that feels too catastrophic to her.
• 10:22
  Marcelle: So on all the other nights, she convinces herself, this is normal, it's good enough, it's what married people look like.
• 10:31
  Marcelle: And so on our first call, I asked her, I said, Lauren, what do you want?
• 10:35
  Marcelle: And she knew immediately.
• 10:37
  Marcelle: She gave me a list of things that resemble more intimacy, connection, excitement.
• 10:42
  Marcelle: But the problem wasn't knowing what she wanted.
• 10:45
  Marcelle: It was admitting to herself that without these things, that the resentment would set in and the distance between them.
• 10:53
  Marcelle: And so I asked her, Lauren, let's look ahead 10 years.
• 10:58
  Marcelle: What does your 10-year self look like?
• 11:00
  Marcelle: And she immediately started crying and says, I know that I don't want to live like I'm living right now for 10 more years, but I'm overwhelmed.
• 11:08
  Marcelle: I don't know what to do.
• 11:10
  Marcelle: I'm afraid that I cause a big fight.
• 11:12
  Marcelle: And so we picked one thing that was important to her that was bothering her, that needed her attention, that needed attention.
• 11:22
  Marcelle: And we crafted a conversation around that one thing.
• 11:25
  Marcelle: And when the big moment came to have that conversation, all the catastrophic things that were going through her head, none of those things came to fruition.
• 11:36
  Marcelle: Do you do you know what he said?
• 11:38
  Marcelle: I felt it too.
• 11:40
  Marcelle: And so that moment gave her so much confidence that she continued to be honest in their relationship.
• 11:50
  Marcelle: And that one conversation didn't fix or repair the relationship.
• 11:54
  Marcelle: But what it did do was crack the silence and end all of that secret suffering.
• 11:59
  Marcelle: And later she came to me and she said, I thought I would be breaking us up.
• 12:03
  Marcelle: I just needed to go first.
• 12:05
  Marcelle: I was restarting us.
• 12:07
  Marcelle: And the moral here is admitting to yourself that there's these conversations that need to be had while they're still one at a time and having them and giving your relationship a real shot at happiness.
• 12:23
  Marcelle: That makes sense.
• 12:25
  Mary: Yes.
• 12:25
  Mary: And that communication is so important.
• 12:28
  Mary: And it's something that when we start to think, like you're describing your client, we build these barriers because we construct this worst-case scenario.
• 12:39
  Mary: And I think the longer we let it go, it's almost like there's something blocking our voice, like getting it to go past that and actually start to say something gets so much harder.
• 12:51
  Mary: But you point out that by communicating, you either recognize that it's not the right relationship, or you recognize that the relationship is okay.
• 13:04
  Mary: You just need to do some work.
• 13:07
  Marcelle: Well, we need to let reality enter the room.
• 13:11
  Marcelle: So I think I believe women need to stop analyzing the other person and start being honest with themselves.
• 13:21
  Marcelle: What are we what do we know is true?
• 13:25
  Marcelle: What are we avoiding?
• 13:27
  Marcelle: What are we tolerating?
• 13:28
  Marcelle: What are we explaining away?
• 13:32
  Marcelle: And then identify those things.
• 13:35
  Marcelle: I, you know, I had a a coach that told me years ago.
• 13:38
  Marcelle: He says, Marcel, he says, you would prefer to look directly into the sun instead of the mirror.
• 13:44
  Marcelle: And he says, when you start to look into the mirror, he says, we can really get some work done and your life will change exponentially.
• 13:52
  Marcelle: And that willingness to look inward is where it starts.
• 13:57
  Marcelle: We can't be honest with our partner if we don't start being honest with ourselves.
• 14:03
  Marcelle: And then we give it language.
• 14:05
  Marcelle: So we don't need to solve the entire relationship, but what we need to do is give one thing that's calling for our attention.
• 14:14
  Marcelle: And we break that part up into four pieces.
• 14:18
  Marcelle: We identify what's been bothering us, how we feel, what the impact of that is, and then make a clear request and know what we want.
• 14:30
  Marcelle: And we don't want to bring in six months or six years of frustration, which sometimes we do.
• 14:37
  Marcelle: It gets, we've been having these one-sided conversations.
• 14:40
  Marcelle: We've been having it with our girlfriend, Chat GPT, uh, Googling at night, our therapist, and and months and months and years of frustration come squeezed out into one moment.
• 14:54
  Marcelle: And he's only been having the conversation for five minutes.
• 14:59
  Marcelle: So we want to keep it one thing while it's still one thing.
• 15:02
  Marcelle: And then say it and give that person a chance to respond because the response is information.
• 15:11
  Marcelle: Maybe he didn't know, maybe he felt it too.
• 15:16
  Marcelle: Maybe he wants to work on it or he might not.
• 15:21
  Marcelle: But at that point, you've allowed reality to enter the room, and we're not dealing with assumptions anymore.
• 15:31
  Mary: Well, and and one thing that you brought up that I think is really important is we're not responsible for everything, for making things work.
• 15:40
  Mary: And I think when we do have discontent, we can often judge that.
• 15:44
  Mary: Like, well, I feel this way, but look, he's such a great provider, or, you know, he's doing these things and it's okay.
• 15:52
  Mary: And I think we can negate what we want because we judge it, or we've been told, and you and I talked before we started recording about shrinking.
• 16:01
  Mary: Sometimes when we are who we are, and when we're younger, we kind of get the smack down for it a little bit, or we get judged for it, or stop being so loud, or stop wanting so much, or whatever that message is.
• 16:13
  Mary: And I think we carry that sometimes into relationships, maybe even starting with being smaller than we want to be.
• 16:22
  Mary: And then we've taught our partner that we don't have needs that we actually have.
• 16:26
  Mary: So I think, first of all, not taking the responsibility for how everything turns out, and also, like you're saying, to start at one point and just accept that here's what I wish would be happening, here are the feelings that I have.
• 16:41
  Mary: And I think that's really hard to not pull in all of that emotion.
• 16:47
  Mary: How do you keep people from, you know, just showing that resentment or showing that frustration or starting with these statements of, I can't believe, or whatever, you know, we ever we want to really say, how do you help people not sort of make it worse?
• 17:05
  Marcelle: Well, we we also have these conversations where you know the part where you're going, you always or you never, and it really starts the other person on being defensive.
• 17:18
  Marcelle: So that's why it's really important to identify first, as women, we're never taught to figure out what we want.
• 17:27
  Marcelle: We can make a long list of things that we don't want, but we don't know what our values are.
• 17:35
  Marcelle: We have inherited values from our family.
• 17:38
  Marcelle: We are doing what good looks good from the outside because we feel judged.
• 17:44
  Marcelle: And so that doesn't allow us to connect with ourselves and know what we want.
• 17:49
  Marcelle: So once we figure out what we want, the important part is uh to keep it from blowing up, is to keep it to one thing and to be specific and make sure that every time something is trying to get your attention, when you start to feel those emotions, to stop and analyze, you know, what am I feeling?
• 18:16
  Marcelle: Instead of analyzing him, there's not a whole lot we can do uh about their response, at their about their behavior at that point.
• 18:24
  Marcelle: The only thing we can do that's successful, I think, is look inward and organize our thoughts and be and be able to have that conversation.
• 18:36
  Marcelle: And it's an incredibly vulnerable moment.
• 18:39
  Marcelle: So I think it's important to prepare.
• 18:43
  Marcelle: I have when once we figure out what we're gonna say, prepare it, have notes, bring your notes with you and say, hey, this is really important to me.
• 18:52
  Marcelle: So I want to have a successful conversation.
• 18:55
  Marcelle: So I I brought my notes.
• 18:57
  Marcelle: And then when you say it, you want to make sure that you give him a chance to respond.
• 19:03
  Marcelle: You know, so the vulnerability part is we start to get nervous and we want to be kind.
• 19:11
  Marcelle: And clarity is not necessarily unkind.
• 19:17
  Marcelle: I think it's uh your responsibility to allow him to come into the relationship and know what you're feeling and what's going on.
• 19:26
  Marcelle: And then give it some space.
• 19:30
  Marcelle: We we will we will edit when it starts to leave our lips, and then we fill all of the silence.
• 19:37
  Marcelle: We might sneak in three more things that might have been bothering us until the point completely misses the light of day.
• 19:44
  Marcelle: So it's important to do it while it's still one thing and one thing at a time.
• 19:52
  Mary: When you talk about women not knowing what they want, I want to circle back to that because I want to work in what you're talking about.
• 19:58
  Mary: How do we do this thing?
• 20:00
  Mary: Because I know communication can feel totally overwhelming.
• 20:04
  Mary: I can sit in my office and we'll talk it through and they'll say, Well, it's so easy for you because you're not in this situation.
• 20:10
  Mary: And I also can do it for a living.
• 20:11
  Mary: It doesn't mean it was easy for me and my personal relationships.
• 20:15
  Mary: So when you talk about women not knowing what they want, I think we can be curious and figure out how we feel.
• 20:23
  Mary: But how do you then help women figure out from the way they feel, what does that mean they actually want?
• 20:31
  Mary: I think that's a hard one to transition from, oh, I feel frustrated, but I don't know what'll make me feel better.
• 20:37
  Mary: How do you help them do that?
• 20:40
  Marcelle: I think you have to sit with it a while.
• 20:42
  Marcelle: What I do that's been incredibly valuable in my situation is journaling.
• 20:50
  Marcelle: I have something called a Vista Break that I do, where women are notoriously bad historians of their own lives.
• 21:01
  Marcelle: They continue to move forward.
• 21:04
  Marcelle: We're always climbing the next hill, one foot after the other.
• 21:08
  Marcelle: We're looking down.
• 21:09
  Marcelle: There's always a mountain in front of us, but we never stop and turn around and look at the vista, how far we've come, all of the mountains that we've we've already climbed, and acknowledge those things, write those things down, look at them.
• 21:27
  Marcelle: Then you'll start to see patterns of what makes you happy.
• 21:30
  Marcelle: And I that is an excellent start to figuring out what you want.
• 21:35
  Marcelle: You will start to reflect on those patterns and then it will become clearer as you do it.
• 21:42
  Mary: Yeah.
• 21:42
  Mary: Well, and of course, like you're saying, the experience of life, you know, I had many relationships and many that weren't the right thing.
• 21:51
  Mary: But I think one of the things I learned is that I need a lot of solitude.
• 21:55
  Mary: So you gave the example of couples who will start to spend more and more time apart.
• 21:59
  Mary: That's different.
• 22:01
  Mary: For me, I feel like I just need time to sort of clear my head.
• 22:05
  Mary: I might go to a movie by myself or want to just spend time in the evening reading a book by myself.
• 22:10
  Mary: And I learned that about myself.
• 22:12
  Mary: And it's not really our socialized way of being in a relationship.
• 22:17
  Mary: We should want to be together all the time.
• 22:18
  Mary: And if we want to spend time alone, it's wrong.
• 22:21
  Mary: But I just accepted that about me.
• 22:23
  Mary: And so when I met my current husband, out of the gate, I talked about that.
• 22:28
  Mary: That I need a lot of time alone.
• 22:29
  Mary: It is not personal.
• 22:31
  Mary: That's just who I am.
• 22:32
  Mary: And that's really been a thread that we've had to revisit in because he's more, he loves to do most things together.
• 22:40
  Mary: And that's okay too.
• 22:42
  Mary: There's nothing, nobody's wrong.
• 22:44
  Mary: And I think that is really an important thing to know that you're not wrong for what you want.
• 22:49
  Mary: But when you actually get to the point that you own it, it's so freeing because you realize, oh, I can just be who I am in this relationship.
• 22:59
  Mary: And it's still, it's still thriving, or it's thriving now.
• 23:03
  Mary: Maybe it was surviving before, but now it's thriving.
• 23:06
  Mary: So in my intro, I I said something that you have on your website that you either figure out you're in the wrong relationship or you figure out that it's right.
• 23:16
  Mary: And so what's the what's the difference there?
• 23:19
  Mary: Is it really when you communicate how that sort of plays out?
• 23:24
  Mary: Or is there a way to recognize what's what before you actually get to that interaction?
• 23:32
  Marcelle: Well, I think once he has a chance to respond, I'll give you a prime example of my husband and I were in therapy.
• 23:39
  Marcelle: We knew that it wasn't going very well.
• 23:41
  Marcelle: And an excellent example of information was I wanted to work on it.
• 23:46
  Marcelle: I wanted to come to therapy.
• 23:47
  Marcelle: I wanted to figure out how to talk about it.
• 23:50
  Marcelle: And I remember he told the therapist, he says, you know, I just don't think marriage should be work.
• 23:56
  Marcelle: I go to work all day long and I don't want to come home and do some more work.
• 24:01
  Marcelle: And the therapist was really funny.
• 24:04
  Marcelle: She just took her papers and threw them up in the air from the file, and the papers fly all over the office.
• 24:10
  Marcelle: And she says, There's your information.
• 24:13
  Marcelle: She says, You need to proceed and do what you think is right from there.
• 24:18
  Marcelle: And and that was information.
• 24:19
  Marcelle: He he literally told me, I don't want to work on this.
• 24:24
  Marcelle: And I didn't hear that, and I just kept going.
• 24:29
  Marcelle: And a lot of times the story that we are telling ourselves is we're we're protecting a story that doesn't match what's actually going on.
• 24:40
  Marcelle: And that might serve us.
• 24:42
  Marcelle: I I'm sure it served me in that time of my life where I ignored it because I was in a situation where I was afraid.
• 24:52
  Marcelle: I didn't, I wasn't managing any of our finances.
• 24:55
  Marcelle: He handled all of the money.
• 24:58
  Marcelle: I was scared.
• 24:59
  Marcelle: So I I I just kind of quieted myself and said, you know, this is this is what people go through.
• 25:05
  Marcelle: This is how marriages look, and continued to suppress how I felt.
• 25:10
  Marcelle: You've you figure out what you want and you speak it clearly and then allow them to respond, then that response is is the information that you need.
• 25:28
  Marcelle: Yeah, because he basically was pretty clear.
• 25:31
  Marcelle: He was clear.
• 25:32
  Marcelle: He says, I don't want to do this, I don't want to work on it.
• 25:35
  Marcelle: I that was just that was as clear as you can possibly get.
• 25:40
  Marcelle: And I would, I I ignored it.
• 25:43
  Marcelle: It was I was protecting a vision of what I wanted my life to be like.
• 25:48
  Marcelle: And it definitely wasn't how do I untangle this?
• 25:52
  Marcelle: How do I survive on my own?
• 25:55
  Marcelle: It was okay, we have a house in San Diego, how do I continue to make this look?
• 26:00
  Marcelle: There's uh you know, I didn't know anybody that was divorced.
• 26:03
  Marcelle: I did I had no idea.
• 26:05
  Marcelle: So you kept hoping.
• 26:07
  Marcelle: I kept hoping, I kept hoping time, things might get better.
• 26:11
  Marcelle: We'll just wait some more.
• 26:12
  Marcelle: Yeah, maybe work is too stressful for him.
• 26:15
  Marcelle: We'll just we'll just wait a little longer, maybe we need a vacation.
• 26:19
  Mary: Yeah.
• 26:19
  Mary: Well, and there is another socialization piece here, I think, with what you're saying, that we again have this idea that if we fall in love, it all falls into place and we don't need to work at it.
• 26:33
  Mary: And I'm gonna say, as I mean, I'm a therapist, and in my first marriage, we didn't communicate clearly.
• 26:40
  Mary: You know, I just convinced myself, oh, we get along so well until the day he said, I don't want to do this anymore.
• 26:47
  Mary: And that was after 10 years.
• 26:48
  Mary: It's ironic that that was kind of the same, you know, the same sort of timeline as you had.
• 26:53
  Mary: But, you know, now I communicate a lot.
• 26:57
  Mary: And I think that was helping also to teach my current partner, like, I'm gonna talk about something.
• 27:02
  Mary: You know, it does, I'm not blaming you, I'm not expecting you to fix it.
• 27:06
  Mary: I need us to, you know, just be honest about what we want, and you can have needs too.
• 27:13
  Mary: And so I think there is that idea or that hope comes from that, well, something's wrong if I have to communicate.
• 27:19
  Mary: Isn't he supposed to just know?
• 27:22
  Marcelle: Oh, well, I don't I don't know any man that's been able to read minds or any person uh for that fact.
• 27:32
  Marcelle: And we we plan our vacations better than we do our lives.
• 27:37
  Marcelle: It's naive if we think that love is just going to get us through it.
• 27:43
  Marcelle: We get a partner and we want them to be the handyman, the IT guy, uh the the our spiritual guru, our workout buddy, our lover, our uh a successful and accomplished parent and make a lot of money, and that's a lot of stuff to put on one person.
• 28:11
  Marcelle: And then we want to pile on reading our minds.
• 28:14
  Marcelle: I that's just it's it's not a reasonable thing.
• 28:18
  Marcelle: How is that working for you right now?
• 28:20
  Marcelle: I would I would ask.
• 28:21
  Marcelle: And I I've had success where some people will go, I don't know what to get you, or like, what does birthdays look like?
• 28:30
  Marcelle: I my last, you know, and I just write it down.
• 28:33
  Marcelle: I wrote it down going, if you pick any of these things from the 10 things that I put here, or if your birthday is really important to you, then say, hey, and you know, every year on this day, I want to wake up and be celebrated my entire day.
• 28:49
  Marcelle: I don't care what happens the rest of the year.
• 28:52
  Marcelle: Anniversaries don't mean a whole lot to me, but for all these reasons, my birthday is more important.
• 28:58
  Marcelle: And I don't know anyone that would, that's your life partner that loves you and cares would say no to those things.
• 29:06
  Marcelle: Who wouldn't want to know what success looks like if you spell it out going, this is gonna make me incredibly happy?
• 29:14
  Marcelle: And they're like, that's great.
• 29:15
  Marcelle: I can go ahead and follow this map.
• 29:17
  Marcelle: It's specific.
• 29:18
  Marcelle: I know I've done it, I've checked it off, and we're gonna be good.
• 29:23
  Mary: And it doesn't mean it means less when you move somebody in.
• 29:29
  Mary: Yeah.
• 29:29
  Mary: And I want to circle back to something you said earlier that when you finally say something after some prep, and you're talking about sort of how to prep, and I want to dig into that a little bit more, but it can be a big relief.
• 29:43
  Mary: It can land in a totally different way than you expect it to.
• 29:47
  Mary: And it actually, when it's a constructive conversation with a partner where there is a good foundation and it can be worked out, it actually brings you closer.
• 29:58
  Marcelle: Absolutely.
• 29:59
  Marcelle: Absolutely.
• 30:00
  Marcelle: You're on the same page, you know, you know what you want.
• 30:03
  Marcelle: Well, when we were having classes at Velvet Box, we would have these lectures, and the therapist was teaching, she gave a um a sheet of paper out to all the attendees.
• 30:18
  Marcelle: There's about 60 people in the room, and there was a stick figure on there of a person, and she gave out red crayons, green crayons, and yellow crayons.
• 30:28
  Marcelle: And you drew on there where you like to be touched in green, red where you hated to be touched, yellow was neutral.
• 30:35
  Marcelle: And if you were there with a partner, you can go ahead and switch.
• 30:40
  Marcelle: And I heard this gentleman exclaim, Oh my God, he says, I didn't know.
• 30:46
  Marcelle: And so I kind of meandered over there just to see what was going on.
• 30:52
  Marcelle: And he was holding his wife's paper, and the ears were just all colored red.
• 30:58
  Marcelle: And he says, We've been married 24 years, and I didn't know.
• 31:04
  Marcelle: And it wasn't the part about the ears that really caught my attention, but it was the 24 years that she had been managing something that she didn't like.
• 31:18
  Marcelle: And he just didn't know.
• 31:21
  Marcelle: And how wonderful would that have been?
• 31:24
  Marcelle: Because there was so much love there, you could tell, but there was no language.
• 31:29
  Marcelle: If he could have gone back in time and just heard those words, don't touch my ears for 24 years, that really, really made me sad.
• 31:41
  Mary: And it might have been part of what you alluded to before that we don't want to hurt someone's feelings.
• 31:47
  Mary: So if that's part of the foreplay or whatever it is, we're very afraid to say, you know what, I don't really like that.
• 31:54
  Mary: And sometimes when we just, it's like many men just want the information.
• 32:00
  Marcelle: Well, and and think about how much more hurtful it it is to hear that you've been enduring anything for an extended period of time.
• 32:10
  Marcelle: I I think that it's so much kinder to be clear.
• 32:17
  Mary: Yes.
• 32:17
  Marcelle: I think Brene Brown says that clear is kind.
• 32:20
  Mary: Yes.
• 32:20
  Mary: And it also, I mean, it makes us feel better.
• 32:23
  Mary: And if if they're offended by something like that, that is information.
• 32:27
  Mary: Like you were saying before, we're getting information by just saying, like, here's my truth.
• 32:33
  Mary: And I also want to say sometimes same-sex relationships, all of these things still apply.
• 32:38
  Mary: It doesn't have to be a man and a woman.
• 32:41
  Marcelle: Oh, it applies at work.
• 32:42
  Marcelle: Yes.
• 32:42
  Marcelle: Oh, yeah.
• 32:43
  Marcelle: We use a version of this at work as well.
• 32:45
  Marcelle: Absolutely.
• 32:46
  Marcelle: Yeah.
• 32:47
  Marcelle: Absolutely.
• 32:48
  Marcelle: We we get people that what happens is it it might turn into a character assassination instead of dwindling it down and distilling it down into that one thing.
• 33:01
  Marcelle: Maybe you just didn't wear the the shirt that you were supposed to wear on the team day, but that doesn't make a person not a team player.
• 33:10
  Marcelle: You don't know what their response might have been.
• 33:14
  Marcelle: I mean, it it can be used anywhere.
• 33:16
  Marcelle: We've had great success in the retail stores with this.
• 33:20
  Mary: Yeah.
• 33:20
  Mary: Okay, so you talked about starting to explore what you feel and what you want based on what you feel.
• 33:27
  Mary: So when you get to the point, okay, I'm ready to communicate, are there mistakes people tend to make and are there steps that you can outline or do you outline with people that break it down a little bit?
• 33:39
  Mary: Where to start?
• 33:41
  Marcelle: Well, the start is once you have the conversation distilled down into something simple.
• 33:47
  Marcelle: It's it shouldn't take you 10 minutes to get something, the one thing that you're bringing attention out, is to stay on track.
• 33:57
  Marcelle: And the biggest problem we have is with the silence.
• 34:00
  Marcelle: We get so uncomfortable because and our confidence starts to kind of get shaky that when we deliver the message, then we want to fill that silence.
• 34:12
  Marcelle: And we're not giving that other person the space to respond.
• 34:17
  Marcelle: And so we start filling it in with all this filler, and then we might pull in another story and then maybe another hurt or two or three hurts from a couple months ago, and then it clutters things so much that the your point doesn't see the light of day.
• 34:34
  Mary: Yeah, silence is very difficult.
• 34:36
  Mary: And so being prepared to sit with that, I think is really important.
• 34:41
  unknown: Yeah.
• 34:42
  Mary: And you're not going to solve it in one go.
• 34:45
  Mary: I think it's being able to say, like, I need some time to think about this.
• 34:49
  Mary: And the immediacy, you know, so immediacy being what's happening right now, I think it's okay to say, so I'm really nervous about this, but there's something I want to tell you.
• 35:00
  Mary: I hate when you touch my ears.
• 35:02
  Mary: You know, and then let that play out.
• 35:05
  Mary: But you're right.
• 35:06
  Mary: I think it's like, oh my God, I just dropped the bomb.
• 35:09
  Mary: Now I have to scramble and fill this silence.
• 35:12
  Mary: But you're giving that person, you know, the respect of like, I'm gonna give you some time here.
• 35:18
  Mary: You don't have to respond right away.
• 35:20
  Marcelle: Well, and you don't want to drop a bomb.
• 35:24
  Marcelle: So I would say instead of I'm gonna go back to the the four things where you want to say what the issue is, the the concern, how you feel about it, the impact that it's having on you, and then what the clear ask is.
• 35:41
  Marcelle: So for the ears things, I would say, you know, when you touch my ears, it gives me anxiety.
• 35:49
  Marcelle: Because and the impact of that is that I get tense and I think about Uncle Charlie, that every time he came to Christmas, he would come and he'd yank on my ears, and I really didn't like that.
• 36:03
  Marcelle: And I would tell my mom I didn't like that.
• 36:05
  Marcelle: And so then I'm thinking about Uncle Charlie when you touch my ears.
• 36:11
  Marcelle: And so if you could not do that, and if you could stroke my hair instead, I would really appreciate that.
• 36:17
  Marcelle: Is that something that you can do?
• 36:19
  Marcelle: That's far less of that.
• 36:22
  Marcelle: Doesn't feel like a bomb.
• 36:23
  Marcelle: No, that that you've you've you've told them what your concern was, you've told them what the feeling was, the impact of them doing that was.
• 36:33
  Marcelle: I'm sure he didn't know anything about Uncle Charlie back when, you know, Christmas with the family, and and then just asked for a clear request.
• 36:42
  Marcelle: Who's gonna say no?
• 36:44
  unknown: Yeah.
• 36:45
  Mary: Yeah, and thanks for calling that out because I think we think it's a bomb.
• 36:48
  Mary: And then when we actually say it, it's like, oh, okay.
• 36:52
  Mary: Yeah, I felt you tensing up sometimes, but now I understand it's not personal.
• 36:56
  Mary: Yeah.
• 36:56
  Mary: And yeah, it wasn't me.
• 36:58
  Mary: You were recoiling from Uncle Charlie.
• 37:01
  unknown: Exactly.
• 37:02
  Marcelle: It hurt, you didn't like it, you know?
• 37:04
  Marcelle: No one liked him.
• 37:05
  Marcelle: He smelled like cigarettes or something.
• 37:07
  Marcelle: So that's the importance of having that conversation.
• 37:12
  Marcelle: But when you start, there's there's lots of feelings, and you have to there's so much emotion, and you want to distill all of that out and take it out, organize it, and say it in a way that comes out clear and allow him to respond to that.
• 37:32
  Mary: Yeah.
• 37:32
  Mary: And I like that you said bring notes because we feel weird doing that, but why not?
• 37:37
  Mary: Oh, yes, yes.
• 37:39
  Marcelle: It's gonna help because you it says you care.
• 37:41
  Marcelle: It says I I went through the trouble, I thought about this, and I want it to come out uh respectfully.
• 37:49
  Marcelle: And I I want to make sure that my my point is comes across.
• 37:53
  Marcelle: I don't want to get nervous, I don't want to fill the empty, empty space, and I want to give you a chance to respond to what I'm actually thinking about.
• 38:03
  Mary: Okay, so you mentioned Velvet Box.
• 38:05
  Mary: Tell us a little about how that came about.
• 38:07
  Mary: What is it?
• 38:08
  Mary: How do you help people through that?
• 38:11
  Marcelle: Velvet Box is a luxury lingerie and toy boutique, a small chain in North Texas.
• 38:17
  Marcelle: And that came about very interestingly in 2008.
• 38:22
  Marcelle: The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a law in Texas that said toys were illegal.
• 38:28
  Marcelle: So before that, we had to put a sticker on a sex toy that said for cake decoration only, or vice would come in and arrest clerks.
• 38:40
  Marcelle: And so when that happened, I had had the opportunity of traveling all over the US and Europe.
• 38:48
  Marcelle: And there was a lot of stores that were not intentional, they were not well thought out, curated.
• 38:56
  Marcelle: There was a lot of women that said, I'm not comfortable going into those stores.
• 39:01
  Marcelle: And so I I thought a lot about that.
• 39:03
  Marcelle: What kind of experience does someone need to be able to come into a store like this?
• 39:10
  Marcelle: And I think safety, upscale, education.
• 39:18
  Marcelle: And so Velvet Box did something that no other retailer ever did we went completely, no movies, no nudity in the stores.
• 39:28
  Marcelle: We were not 18 and over, and we put them in really beautiful parts of town, parts of places that I like to go.
• 39:37
  Marcelle: And I we developed something called Velvet Box University.
• 39:41
  Marcelle: And so we teach our sales associates two weeks before they even were able to have an experience with a customer.
• 39:51
  Marcelle: And I see us as a bridge and a particular lane in between medical professional and therapist.
• 39:58
  Marcelle: There's a there's a narrow lane where a velvet box fits in there.
• 40:03
  Marcelle: For example, we've had people come to us that said, I had a gentleman that had a radical prostectomy and went to his doctor and said, I can't take Viagra because I have a heart condition.
• 40:18
  Marcelle: And the doctor says, Look, I keep you from dying.
• 40:21
  Marcelle: I do cancer, I don't know what to tell you, you're on your own, best of luck.
• 40:25
  Marcelle: We'll see you in a checkup in one, three years, something like that.
• 40:29
  Marcelle: And so our associates, we have the product mix and we're able to talk to people on how to deal with their relationships and their particular issues and and and do better in their marriages.
• 40:45
  Marcelle: Wow.
• 40:46
  Marcelle: So I've I've I've been really proud of what we've done.
• 40:50
  Mary: Yeah, you've opened up a lot of communication, you've made it feel safe, you've made it feel fun.
• 40:56
  Marcelle: That's awesome.
• 40:57
  Marcelle: And surprisingly, it doesn't ironically, too, the person who is avoiding sex in her marriage is teaching people how to talk about sex in their marriage and have fun.
• 41:09
  Marcelle: And a lot of times the classes that we have, it's 45 minutes of communicating expectations and about 15 minutes of the mechanics.
• 41:23
  Marcelle: That's the most important part.
• 41:25
  Marcelle: And it just continues to present itself over and over again.
• 41:30
  Mary: Well, and you're doing what so many of my guests do, is you're taking personal experience and you're leveraging it to create something that helps other women.
• 41:37
  Mary: So I've loved our conversation.
• 41:40
  Mary: Tell us a little about where people can find you, and I will link your information in the show notes.
• 41:46
  Marcelle: You can find me at onekeyconversation.com forward slash growth, and you can go and download a set of free tools there to help you get started with this conversation.
• 41:57
  Marcelle: And if you have a girlfriend that you've been talking about with this stuff, go ahead and do it and maybe do the exercise with her and have those conversations or with your dog or anybody like that.
• 42:08
  Marcelle: But the free tools, go ahead and get started.
• 42:12
  Marcelle: onekeyconversation.com forward slash growth.
• 42:15
  Mary: That is awesome.
• 42:16
  Mary: Thank you, Marcel.
• 42:17
  Mary: Thank you for having me.
• 42:19
  Mary: It's been an honor.
• 42:20
  Mary: And I want to thank everyone for listening.
• 42:22
  Mary: Please share this episode with another woman who could benefit from the insights.
• 42:26
  Mary: And until next time, go out into the world and be the amazing, resilient, vibrant violet that you are.