Latest / Reflect Reclaim & Liberate - with Sallyanne Hartnell / Be Difficult - You Live Longer

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Be Difficult - You Live Longer · Reflect Reclaim & Liberate - with Sallyanne Hartnell

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Reflect, Reclaim and Liberate, a podcast covering all things relationships, separation, and divorce.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: How to create healthy, happy, fulfilling relationships without sacrificing any part of yourself.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: Supporting anyone feeling challenged in their relationship or marriage.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: These are confidential conversations for you if you're navigating separation, divorce, or reorganising life afterwards.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: Decide whether to stay or leave a relationship or marriage, divorce with less drama, and consciously choose what's next for you.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: I acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which this podcast is recorded, the Warren Tree people of the Coolin Nation, and pay my respects to their elders, past, present, and emerging.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: I acknowledge them as the original storytellers of this land.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to this week's episode of the podcast.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: And if I'm really honest, this one was really quite fun to draft right for you.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: So I hope you enjoy listening to it as much as I enjoyed creating it.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: Let's talk about difficult women.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: Let's talk about difficult women, about being one.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: I've been called difficult a lot and for a really long time.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm okay with that.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: Completely comfortable, okay with that.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: And some days I would even say that it is one of my superpowers.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: And even though it wasn't explicitly stated, I know there were two instances just this last week where others would have used the word difficult or maybe something even stronger to describe me.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: Now we'll get to those instances, or at least one of those, but first I want to go back to when my kids were little in the early days after their dad and I had separated to one old story about me being difficult, me being a difficult woman.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: Now I'm pretty sure I've shared this story before on the podcast.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: I know I've spoken about it at events, so maybe, maybe not.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: But anyway, it's worth resharing here, even if you've heard it before.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: There was a moment in our parenting after divorce lives that I recall, I can still feel it in my body.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: Um, a moment that really hit hard, but for me hard in a really good way.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: And it was a time when my kid's dad, my ex-husband, forgot, he forgot to show up to our son's kindergarten event.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: And it wasn't because nobody had told him the preschool would send the same email to both of us, and maybe even I think there was a printed invitation that came home, which I would have passed along.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: Same reminder, sitting in his inbox, exactly like it sat in mine, logged on my calendar, but somehow he forgot and he didn't show.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_00: So I was really upset on his his behalf.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_00: But when my ex-husband said, Why didn't you remind me?
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_00: something just kind of snapped.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_00: I was so furious, and I was so furious that I was really controlled, and I just said to him, Because I'm not your wife anymore.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: And later further in the conversation, I said, and I'm not your EA either.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: Let's be clear, he did have one of those at the time.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_00: He had gotten every email the school, the preschool had sent, just like I had.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_00: And this episode is really about the moment that I said that to him, that line, I'm not your wife anymore, it's not my job, and about what it costs you, us, to hold a line like that, hold it in for years before you finally say it.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: What it costs you to hold in before you say it, and what it costs everyone else the day you do.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: It's something I work on with my one-to-one clients.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_00: Realigning, I guess, the boundaries, the barriers about what you do and don't do, because there is a third job, right?
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: There is a third job, and I've spoken about it before I know, and it's the mental load.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_00: When you're the one who does all the remembering, the permission forms for school events, the prescription refills, whose shoes don't fit anymore, who's got a dentist appointment on Thursday, where everybody has to be, and when that's not just being organized, that's not just being on top of things.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_00: That is a job, an entire unpaid, invisible job running underneath the other two jobs, right?
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_00: The job that you have and the job that the other parent has, the jobs that everyone can actually see.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_00: And and my part in that story that I've just shared, and it's something I see so many others do too.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_00: Is I was so used to being the one who held all that that it just became second nature.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't question it, I just held it all for everybody, and I see so many do it, right?
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_00: So many, predominantly women, it is gendered.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_00: Um, that we just hold it all, we do it all, it's invisible, it goes unnoticed until it doesn't.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: And I kept doing it even after we separated.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_00: Out of habit, yes, because as I said, I was so used to being completely across everything that was kid related.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_00: And then, really interestingly, I kept doing it even when I realized what was happening, telling myself that I was doing it for the kids, and some of it was, but some of it was just easier on my heart than watching or fearing, watching him actually or fearing that he would let them down, fail them.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_00: Easier than that awkward phone call from the school when he forgot to pick them up early, easier than my son standing at kindergarten looking for a dad who didn't show.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_00: But there's a cost to doing all of that, right?
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_00: And so after that kindergarten incident, I stepped back.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_00: I stopped being the reminder, I stopped being the calendar, I stopped carrying, absorbing, holding, doing what wasn't mine to do or carry or hold.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_00: And he noticed.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_00: So did the kids.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: But the good thing is he stepped up.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_00: He stepped into the space that I'd created by stepping back.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_00: So, yes, there were moments, there probably still are moments, um, if we're really honest, when things don't get done, don't get seen, don't get planned for, don't get remembered.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_00: But that's not on me, and that is not me being difficult, even though in that moment, way back when, when I declared I am not your wife anymore, he would have felt me being difficult.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_00: But after that I stopped doing some things and I started doing some things.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_00: I stopped reminding him of things that he already knew about or had access to information about, and I started letting him feel what forgetting actually costs.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_00: I stopped softening it for my kids if or when he missed something, and I started letting them experience that disappointment and having that land where it belonged.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't become cold or hard or cruel about it.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_00: I just reflected back to them what they were feeling.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_00: I allowed their feelings to be true and real about it, and they started stepping up to.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_00: They started pushing back and communicating as they got a bit older with their dad if he forgot or was late or whatever it was, whatever the thing was, right?
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_00: I just stopped being the memory for two households and started only holding what was actually mine to hold, remembering what I needed to remember for my kids in my household.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_00: I also stopped, uh, did I?
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_00: I was gonna say I stopped explaining myself when I said no.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_00: I think I probably started doing that earlier anyway, but I I made a strong point decision, conscious decision to stop explaining myself when I said no or was unavailable.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_00: And I just started trusting that no was a full sentence and really honouring my boundaries around my availability.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_00: I also stopped waiting to be understood or fully explaining myself before I acted, before I acted.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_00: I started acting and let the understanding come later, or not at all.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes that understanding doesn't come from the other person, right?
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_00: And as I was making notes about this episode, I did think that it was all going to be about co-parenting and relating after separation, after divorce.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_00: It was all going to be about me and my ex, about marriages, about exes, about the particular exhaustion of co-parenting, parallel parenting, parenting with someone who outsourced his memory, his remembering, his organizing to me for a really long time.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_00: And then this week happened, life lifed around me, okay?
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_00: And it turned out to be also about family, extended family.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_00: I have had this week some genuinely hard conversations with members of my family, people that I love and I care about.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_00: Those kind of conversations where I wasn't raising my voice, I wasn't shouting or ranting, and I wasn't intentionally trying to wreak havoc, cause pain, make things hard.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_00: I wasn't intentionally trying to be difficult, but something underneath all of it was very, very clear.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_00: They wanted me to agree, or at least to concede enough ground that we could, in their own words, get on the same page.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_00: Thing is, we are not even on pages in the same book on this particular topic.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think we are even in the same bookshop or library.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_00: We are not getting on the same page.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_00: And I wasn't refusing to engage, I wasn't refusing to talk about it, I wasn't being argumentative or combative or hard ass.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_00: I was just pointing at the same issue and describing what I saw, which happened to be a little different from what they were seeing.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_00: And because it didn't align with their position, because it wasn't the version where everyone just nods and moves on, I became difficult.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_00: I was the problem.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_00: I became difficult and not just difficult, probably way more than difficult in the way they responded, they said it.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_00: Being difficult, being a difficult woman, being called difficult is often not about raising your voice, being loud, or refusing to compromise.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_00: It's not about being an arsehole, right?
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes it's simply about refusing to see it their way when their way is actually not up for negotiation, right?
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_00: It's the one way, my way, or the highway kind of thing dressed up as let's just get on the same page.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_00: Being difficult might just be setting a boundary where disagreeing with someone else gets wrapped up in the same thing under the same label as being combative, being argumentative, but they are not the same thing.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_00: So if you've ever tried to have one of the these sorts of conversations with someone who uh sees or equates disagreement with disrespect, where there is only one right answer in their view, and it's their it's their right answer, right?
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_00: You already know that that label gets applied, whatever you do, right?
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_00: And often with my clients, this is exactly what happens during divorce or mediation or through parenting afterwards.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_00: You get called difficult simply for having a different opinion, a different view of the same thing.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_00: You are being difficult, you are difficult, you are making this difficult.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_00: No, I just have a different opinion on this matter.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_00: I see it differently, I view it differently than you do.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_00: The difficulty is actually with the other person, not with you.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_00: And there's a real cost, right?
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_00: There's a cost mentally, emotionally, maybe even physically, because it impacts our cortisol levels, our stress levels, and that has knock-on effects into our physical health, right?
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_00: Some of that invisible workload, the mental and emotional load expected of us, particularly expected of women, that we carry across relationships, whether we're mothers or not, that cost of caring, the cost of caring we are expected to do, the noticing, tracking, the planning, the worrying, the constant low-grade vigilance that we live in, making sure nobody is forgotten, nobody misses their drum lesson or appointment or whatever it is.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_00: And it doesn't just stop at our own kids either, right?
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_00: It's that elderly parent that you're helping support or care for, whose maybe medical appointments need booking and organizing and transporting to and from, and caring for the generation above us just gets added incrementally, quietly to the load without ever being openly asked for, exactly in the same way caring for the generation below us was added, right?
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_00: Some of it I'd argue is exactly what happened to me this week that tax, that cost of staying agreeable, towing the line, being on the same page in spaces and conversations where disagreement gets treated like a personal attack, loaded with the exhaustion of caring up and caring down.
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_00: Although my caring down is is less now that my kids are older, but there is still that load, right?
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_00: Pushing back isn't just an emotional boundary, it might also be supporting your mental and physical health, as I mentioned earlier.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_00: Every time you swallow the thing, you actually think.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_00: Every time you swallow the words to keep everybody else comfortable, calm, agreed with, your body registers it, it adds up, it's cumulative the way erosion is accumulative, right?
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_00: You don't notice the damage until you're already living inside it, and the body keeps the score, literally.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_00: So swallowing your words, allowing a boundary to be crossed over isn't just emotional and mental, or doesn't just have emotional and mental impact.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_00: It can actually literally be causing us physical harm.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_00: I heard Myth Warhurst reference some of this stuff at her book launch last week, and that is that research shows single women are not just surviving, they're happier and healthier than their married counterparts, and it traces back to Paul Dolan, a behavioral scientist at the London School of Economics.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_00: Because I, yes, I did go down the rabbit hole and find out whether this is actually factually true, and it is.
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_00: He found using national time use data that unmarried, childless women were the happiest and healthiest population subgroup he studied.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_00: What does that tell us?
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_00: It tells us that being married and having children has impacts on our health and well-being.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_00: Not all of them positive, right?
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_00: Research on chronic stress, cortisol, and autoimmune disease in women is real and it points the same direction every time.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_00: That staying small has a cost and it's not a metaphorical one.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_00: It is real.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_00: So back to being a difficult woman, right?
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_00: A difficult woman is only ever a problem for the people who need her to stay small or want her to stay small.
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_00: Compliant, agreeable, the good girl who doesn't rock anything, let alone the boat, right?
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_00: The truth underneath the label is you are not being difficult.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_00: You are being honest, you are being boundried, you are speaking your truth, you are behaving in ways that align with your values, you are claiming something that is already yours, your worth, your worthiness, your wholeness, your right to take up space, your right to speak the truth, your right to voice an opinion that is different from someone else's.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_00: But we get called difficult when we refuse to settle, right?
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_00: We refuse to stay silent, when we speak, even when, as it would have been for me this week, easier not to.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_00: When we ask for what we're actually worth, or when we refuse to settle for anything less than what we are fully worth, worthy of, right?
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_00: When we say, I don't agree, here is what I believe or know to be true, when we tell the truth instead of either remaining silent or just a comfortable version of whatever that truth is, right?
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_00: We get called difficult when we trust our own intuition instead of talking ourselves out of it, when we trust what our own bodies already know, even if no one else wants to hear that truth.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_00: We're not called difficult because we're being unreasonable.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_00: We are called difficult when we stop being convenient, when we stop, or maybe never even did in the first place, when we stop bending, accommodating, and arranging ourselves around someone else's desires or someone else's comfort at the expense of our own.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_00: That's the key point, right?
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_00: At the expense of our own.
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_00: We get called difficult when we stop holding and remembering things that are actually somebody else's responsibility.
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_00: Or when we look at the same issue as someone we love, someone we care about, someone we respect, and we refused to pretend that we see it their way, just to keep the peace, even when it's hard.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm not telling you here to go looking for fights, but if you're already in one because you wanted your boundary, your view, your version of the truth to be allowed to exist alongside someone else's, but that's not you failing to communicate.
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_00: If anything, it's actually the opposite.
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_00: And so being difficult might actually be necessary and it might even be the best and the healthiest thing that you can do for yourself.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_00: So yep, he said all those years ago I should have reminded him in his questioning, why didn't you remind me?
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_00: was an implication that it was my job I should have.
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_00: And this week my family said we should be on the same page.
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_00: But I'm not his wife, I'm not his EA, and I'm not going to pretend that I am on a page I've never actually read, or that is telling a story of my own life that I didn't actually write for myself.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_00: There is evidence that difficult women live longer if you need any more reason to be difficult.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_00: I don't.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_00: I'd rather be difficult and be here.
• 23:57
  SPEAKER_00: As I said at the beginning, I'm pretty comfortable being difficult.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for being here.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_00: I really appreciate you being here, listening, spending your time with me in your ears, and I really hope you got something out of today's episode.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_00: Until next week, bye for now.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Sally Ann Hartnell, divorce coach and strategist, and you've been listening to Reflect, Reclaim and Liberate.
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_00: You can follow me on Instagram at Reflect Coaching, and if you can think of anyone who would love or benefit from listening to this episode, please share it with them.
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_00: I'd also be so grateful if you would follow and review the podcast so we can get in the ears of a whole lot more people just like you who are ready to reclaim and liberate themselves in life and love.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_00: I hope you'll join me next week for another episode of Reflect, Reclaim and Liberate.
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_00: Until then,