Latest / The Conscious Divorce / The Giver Gives & The Taker Takes
Transcript
- Justin: Hi, and welcome to the Conscious Divorce Podcast. I'm Justin Milrad. I'm a certified divorce coach, financial planner, MBA, and the author of U2.0, Divorce a Better Way Forward, and the founder of Reclaim and Reboot, Transformational Divorce Coaching. I've lived through divorce myself. I've coached hundreds of people through it. And I built this podcast because I believe that how you move through divorce matters. The decisions you make before, during, and after this process will shape your life for the next decade, maybe even longer. Here's a quick disclaimer before we dive in. I'm not an attorney, I'm not a therapist, and I'm not a financial advisor. Nothing in this episode constitutes legal, psychological, or financial advice. What I am is a strategist and a guide who has walked this road and helped a lot of people walk it better. in those specific domains. What I can offer you today is context, framework, and clarity. And one quick thing before we get started. I do this work because I believe it matters. I'm not doing it for a corporation. I volunteer a significant amount of my time to help people navigate one of the hardest transitions of their lives. This podcast helped you even one episode, even one insight. I would be genuinely grateful if you took 60 seconds to subscribe wherever you listen. And if you're willing, write a short review. Reviews help real people find the show at the exact moment they need it most. That is not a small thing. That is something life-changing. So thank you in advance for that. This may be one of the most important distinctions you ever understand if you want to heal, co-parent well, and build a life you are genuinely proud of after divorce. Let me start with a question. Think about the biggest relationship of your adult life, your marriage, and ask yourself honestly, over the course of that relationship, who gave more? I don't mean financially. I don't mean who cooked more dinners and earned more money. I mean who gave more emotionally, who made more concessions, who bet more, who absorbed more stress, smoothed over more conflict, took more responsibility for keeping things together. Most people listening right now already have an answer. It came fast. It may even come with a little ache. And maybe, just maybe, that answer is part of why you're here. Because that imbalance, that feeling of having given and given and given, and then watching it end anyways, is one of the most quietly devastating experiences a person can carry through divorce. So today we're gonna talk about the give or take or dynamic. What it really means, where it comes from, how it shows up in marriage, in divorce, and especially in co-parenting. And by the end of this episode, I want you to walk away with something more useful than a new label to put on your ex. I want you to walk away with a new understanding of yourself because that's where the real work is. You may have heard this phrase before, the giver gives and the taker takes. It's been circulated in business and entrepreneurship cycles, popularized by thinkers like Joe Polish and Dan Sullivan. And the service level interpretation seems obvious. Some people give, others take, choose your company accordingly. But I wanna go so much deeper than that today, because if we stay at the surface, we're gonna miss something critical. The most important thing to understand right from the start is this, giving and taking are not simply character traits, they are patterns, and patterns come from somewhere. They come from early attachment experiences, from family systems, from what we were taught explicitly or implicitly about our own worth and needs, from strategies we developed as children to feel safe, loved, and connected, and then carried without revision into our adult relationships. Attachment theory, which began with the work of John Bowlby, and was later explained by researchers like Mary Ainsworth and Sue Johnson, tell us something profound. Our earliest relationships with caregivers create internal working models, mental maps, blueprints. They tell us whether the world is safe or dangerous, whether other people can be trusted or not, and whether we ourselves are worthy of love and care. When those early experiences are characterized by inconsistency, emotional unavailability, or having to perform love to earn it, we grow up with strategies. And some of those strategies look like giving. Not the healthy, grounded, generous giving that comes from abundance, but the anxious, compulsive, self-erasing giving that comes from fear. And on the other side, the patterns look like they're taking. Not the healthy receiving of care that every human deserves, but the entitled, unconscious, often regulated taking the least people around you feeling invisible and depleted. neither of these patterns is simple. Neither is all good or all bad. And today I want us to hold them with a lot more complexity than the internet usually allows. The shadow side of both archetypes. Let me start with givers, because I suspect a lot of you listening identify as one. If you're a giver, I wanna offer you something that might be uncomfortable to hear. Not all giving is generous. Sometimes giving is self abandonment. It is a slow, quiet sacrifice of your own needs, preferences, desires, and eventually your own identity in service of keeping the peace, earning approval, or managing someone else's emotional state. giving is rescuing, taking on responsibility that belongs to someone else, solving problems they never asked you to solve, working harder on their well-being than they work on their own. Some giving is a transaction with a hidden invoice. You give and you give and you tell yourself you don't mind, you're fine, it's okay. And somewhere beneath the surface, a ledger is being kept. And then one day in a therapist office or divorce attorney's waiting room, or at two in the morning, when you can't sleep, you look at that ledger and you feel a rage so old and so deep that you barely recognize it. Dr. Harriet Lerner in The Danger of Anger describes this beautifully. The person who over functions, who overgives, takes on too much, manages, fixes, and rescues. It's not actually in a healthy relationship with generosity. They're in a relationship with control. Because if I do everything, nothing can go wrong. If I give everything, you can't leave. If I need nothing, I will never be abandoned. If any part of that lands for you, stay with it. It's not a verdict. It's a window. Now let's talk about takers. The word taker makes most people think of a selfish calculating person who is consciously exploiting others. And yes, that type exists. But in the landscape of marriage and divorce, the reality is so much more complicated. Some takers are emotionally immature. They simply have not developed the internal capacity to track their impact on others, regulate their own distress, or take consistent responsibility for their behavior. This is not malice. It's a developmental deficit often rooted in early experience where emotional attunement was absent. Some takers are operating from scarcity. They take because somewhere deep in their nervous system, they believe there is not enough, not enough love, not enough safety, not enough of whatever they're grasping for. Their taking is desperate, not calculated. Some takers have narcissistic traits, which sit on a spectrum and are far more common than full narcissistic personality disorder. Researchers like Craig Malkin describe narcissism not as simply selfishness, but as a specific kind of emotional hunger, an insatiable need to feel special, exceptional, and set apart. Narcissistic taking is not about you. It's about a wound so old it has no memory. And here's the part that matters mostly for today's conversation. Understanding why someone takes that way, they do not obligate you to keep giving to them without limits. It simply means you stop making their pattern about your worth. because that is often where the deepest damage happens in divorce. The giver depleted and resentful does not leave because they finally believe they deserve more. they leave or get left and still carry the wound of wondering if I had given more, would it have been enough? The answer is no, and I'll explain why. How this dynamic plays out in marriage. Most give or take her dynamics in marriage are not conscious. They do not begin with one person saying, I plan to take everything this person has to offer and give nothing back. They begin with two people each bringing in their own attachment history and their own unexamined patterns colliding in a way that feels at first like they fit perfectly. The giver often finds the taker exciting, magnetic, confident, seemingly self-assured. The taker consciously or not finds the giver as a source of emotional regulation, admiration, stability, and care that they may never have experienced reliably before. For a while this works. The system is in equilibrium. The giver is rewarded with moments of closeness with feelings needed and essential. The taker is rewarded with comfort, support, and someone who will consistently show up even when they do not. But over time something shifts. The Gottman Institute, which has studied thousands of couples over decades, has identified what they call the Four Horsemen of Relationship Breakdown. Criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling. These patterns almost always emerge from cycles of unmet needs and unrepaired disconnection. In a give or take dynamic, here is what it often looks like. The giver begins to feel invisible. Their sacrifices go unacknowledged. Their needs go unmet. They begin to speak up gently at first, then more directly. The taker whose capacity for self-reflection may be limited and whose defenses may be thick hears criticism when the giver intends connection. Conflict escalates. The giver backs down, the patterns repeat, the ledger fills. Dr. Emily Nagoski in Come As You Are writes about the importance of completing the stress response cycle and what happens when we don't. Resentment at its roots is like a stress response cycle that never completed. It's a wound that hardened into armor. By the time many couples arrive at divorce, the giver is not sad. They're exhausted. They're not angry. They're hollow. Years of giving without sufficient return have left them in a kind of emotional depletion that sleep cannot fix and vacations cannot touch. And the tragedy is this, many of them still, even now, feel guilty for leaving because givers are very good at making other people's pain their responsibility. How divorce exposes and amplifies everything. Divorce is a crucible. It does not create your patterns. It reveals them under pressure and at scale. The giver who spent years managing, accommodating, and absorbing often enters divorce continuing to do exactly that. overextending in mediation, agreeing to unfavorable terms to avoid conflict, being reasonable when the reasonableness is being exploited, prioritizing the other person's comfort or the children's stability so completely that they forget to advocate for themselves at all. The taker who spent years taking without accountability often enters divorce the same way. Dissembling about assets, ⁓ using the of instruments of pressure, leveraging the giver's guilt against them, hot then cold, just enough warmth to keep hope alive, just enough distance to maintain the upper hand. And here's where I want to be very direct with those of you who are in this right now or have been through it. Divorce is not the time to be the bigger person in a way that requires you to be smaller. There is a version of high road taking that is healthy. That is wise. That preserves your dignity and your children's wellbeing. We're going to talk about that in depth. But there is another version that is a continuation of the same pattern that exhausted you in the marriage, giving without discernment, accommodating without boundaries, hoping that enough generosity will finally be enough to soften someone who is not genuine that they had the capacity to soften. Divorce will also, for many people, trigger what researchers call regression under stress. Your nervous system, flooded with cortisol and threat signals, will default to its oldest strategies. If your oldest strategy is giving, you will over give. If your oldest strategy is controlling, you will over control. If your oldest strategy is withdrawing, you will disappear into yourself. This is not a character flaw, it's neurobiology. But naming it is the first step to interrupting it. The question is not who you are in your marriage. The question is who you're gonna choose to be in your divorce and beyond it. Co-parenting, where the give or take dynamic gets highest stakes. right, ⁓ is where I wanna spend most of our time today because co-parenting is where the give or take dynamic has its most profound and lasting consequences, not just for you, but for the children. Let me say something plainly. Your children are watching not just what you do, but who you become. Not how you treat your ex, but how you treat yourself. Research on co-parenting and child adjustment is clear and consistent. Children do not suffer primarily because their parents are divorced. They suffer because of the quality of the parenting relationship that follows divorce. ⁓ Arons, Mavis ⁓ and others that children in low conflict divorce households often fare well as, or in cases, better than children with intact but high conflict homes. What damages children is not the absence of the two parent household. It's the presence of sustained parental conflict, the use of children as messengers or spies or weapons, the emotional unavailability of parents consumed by rage or grief, and the chronic stress of living in a household where love feels conditional and safety feels uncertain. The ACE research, Adverse Childhood Experiences, tells us that the number of stressors a child is exposed to in early life directly predicts a range of health, behavioral, and relational outcomes well into adulthood. Parental conflict is one of those stressors and the intensity, frequency and duration of that conflict matters. So when we talk about how you navigate the give or take or dynamic in co-parenting, we're not just talking about your wellbeing, we're talking about the architecture of your children's nervous system, their attachment to future partners, their model of what love looks like. This is the stakes. The over-functioning parent. Let me describe a scenario that I hear constantly as a divorce coach. Parent A. let's call her Maria, does everything. She manages the school schedule, the medical appointments, the extracurriculars, the birthday parties, the homework, the emotional processing after visits with the other parent. She picks up the slack every time the other parent cancels, is late, or fails to follow through. She tells herself she does it for the kids, and she does, but she also does it because she can't tolerate the chaos that results when she doesn't. Parent B, let's call him David, shows up inconsistently. He cancels sometimes, fails to communicate about important things, occasionally makes promises to the kids that don't materialize. But when he does show up, he is warm, fun, and present. And the kids love him for it. Maria is exhausted. Maria is resentful. Maria on some level knows that by over-functioning, she is not just carrying the extra weight, she's enabling David's under-functioning. And yet she cannot stop, because stopping feels like abandoning the children to chaos. co-parenting form, and it has a predictable end point. Maria burns out, Maria's parenting deteriorates, Maria eventually either explodes or collapses, and David is somehow, impossibly, the one who looks stable by comparison. What Maria needs to learn, and this is the hard, real work, is the difference between protecting your children and protecting them from the natural consequences of David's choices. Her children need to know their mother. They need to see her whole, not hollowed. They can survive their father's imperfections. They can't afford to lose both parents, one to absence and one to exhaustion. When the taker's co-parent. Now let me talk to you about what it looks like and feels like when the taker is on the other side of co-parenting. Taker's co-parent in many forms. Some are high conflict, litigious manipulative, weaponizing the children with regularity. Some are low level difficult, inconsistent, self-absorbed, emotionally unavailable to the kids without being overly abusive. Some are intermittent, periods of engagement followed by withdrawal, which research shows is actually harder on the children than consistent absence. What most taker co-parents have in common is this. They are not particularly interested in the infrastructure of parenting. They want the experience of being a parent, the identity, the warmth, the fun without the labor, the discipline, the difficult conversations, the showing up when it's inconvenient. Can you relate? Do you know someone like this? I think we all do. And if you have a taker co-parent, you already know something that took me a while to really absorb as a coach. You cannot co-parent with someone who does not want to co-parent. You can only parent alongside them through parallel parenting. This is not a concession. This is a strategic and emotionally accurate reframe. Co-parenting requires two adults who are both committed to the children's well-being above their own grievances. When only one parent has that commitment, the goal shifts from co-parenting to parallel parenting, and that is not a failure. It is wisdom. Parallel parenting means reducing direct contact with the difficult co-parent to the bare minimum necessary. It means communicating and writing through platforms like our family wizard or talking parents so that there is a record emotional escalation is limited. It means making decisions within your parenting time without requiring the other parent's input or approval and expecting them to do the same. It means accepting that your children's experience of parenting with the other parent is different from their experience with you. And that different does not always mean worse. Kids are remarkably good at calibrating to different environments, as long as each environment is emotionally safe. What parallel parenting is not is war by other means. It's not a tool for punishment. It's not a way to minimize the other parent's relationship with the children. It is a structural solution to a structural problem. Triangulation in the children. One of the most damaging patterns in high conflict co-parenting is triangulation. The drawing of children into the adult conflict. And I want to be honest, this is not always intentional. Some of it is, but a lot of it happens in small, seemingly innocent ways. It's asking your child how their time with the other parent went and then reacting, even subtly, in a way that communicates your disapproval. It's using your child as a messenger because it feels easier than direct communication. is allowing your child to comfort you in your grief, reversing the parent-child relationship in a way that burdens them with their emotional weight. Dr. Jennifer Doherty's research on parentification, the process by which children take on adult emotional roles shows that it produces significant long-term consequences, anxiety, enmeshment, difficulty forming autonomous adult relationships, and a persistent sense of responsibility for others, emotional states that can last decades. Your children should not be your therapist. They should not be your allies in conflict. They should not be your emissaries, informants, or emotional support animals. children, protected by your adult capacity to handle your own pain without exporting it to them. If you need to talk, talk to a friend, talk to a coach, talk to a therapist, talk to this podcast if that's what you've got, but protect your children from the weight of your divorce. That is the most generous gift you can give them. And it is also quietly one of the most powerful acts of setting a limit on the taker's ability to keep using the children as leverage. instead of reacting. Here is a nervous system truth that I come back to constantly in this work. When your co-parent does something that triggers you, sends a hostile text, cancels on kids, makes a unilateral decision that they weren't supposed to make, your nervous system responds. Cortisol and adrenaline flood your system. Your prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain responsible for reason and perspective and long-term thinking goes partially offline. You are, in that moment, neurobiologically compromised. And in that state, every action you take will cost you more than it needed to. The single most practical skill I teach around co-parenting conflict is what I call the pause protocol. When something triggers you, you do not respond immediately. You wait 24 hours if possible, at minimum until your nervous system is returned to baseline. You regulate first, exercise, breathing, movement, sleep, and then you respond. A response comes from your values. A reaction comes from your wound. One of the most powerful things you will ever do for your children is show them what it looks like to feel something intensely and still choose your response. is the lesson. Not my parents never got angry, but that my parents got angry and handled it with dignity. That is what you're modeling, and it will matter for the rest of their lives. Resentment, healing, and the end of scorekeeping. I wanna talk about resentment now, because for many of you, this is the heaviest thing you're carrying. Resentment is not anger. Anger is acute. It spikes, it fires, it wants to move. Resentment is chronic. It settles into the body like a slow toxin. It colors everything. It lives in the sight before you look at the text from your ex. in the clench of your jaw when the kids talk about their weekend with the other parent, In the exhaustion you feel even on days when nothing particularly hard has happened. Research on emotional labor, especially Arlie Hauschild's foundational work, tells us that the invisible labor of managing emotions, soothing conflict, and maintaining relational equilibrium takes an enormous toll when it's consistently unreciprocated. It's not just the practical labor that exhausts givers. It's the emotional invisibility. The sense that their efforts is simply the expected water level and any variation is an intrusion. Resentment is what happens when grief has nowhere to go. It's what anger becomes when it cannot be expressed directly and it will not dissolve on its own. Here's the hard truth. Releasing resentment is not something you do for your ex. It's something you do for yourself because as long as you're carrying it, they are still inside you, still taking room, Still shaping your choices in your emotional state, sometimes years after the marriage ended. This is not freedom. This is the taker getting the last take. Post-traumatic growth research pioneered by Richard Tuddecky and Lawrence Calhoun shows that the most profound growth after major loss and disruption is not about returning to who you were before. It's about integrating your experiences and emerging with a deeper, wider, more grounded sense of self. It's not surviving your divorce, it's being transformed by it. The transformation requires two things, processing your grief honestly and releasing your death grip on the story that you are simply wronged. I'm saying that if I was wronged is the primary organizing story of your post divorce identity, you're still living inside the marriage and you deserve more than that. Practical principles and the eight ways to give wisely. All right, let's get practical. I want to give you eight principles that I work through with clients around giving wisely, holding limits and co-parenting with both generosity and self-respect. Principle one. knowing the difference between generosity and appeasement. Generosity comes from strength and choice. Appeasement comes from fear and exhaustion. Before any significant decision in your co-parenting relationship, ask, am I doing this because it is generally good for my children, or am I doing this to avoid conflict? Both can produce the same behavior, but they will produce different internal outcomes and different long-term patterns. Principle two, set limits based on behavior, not emotion. A limit is not a punishment. It is a description of what you will and won't do. When you communicate with a difficult co-parent, keep limits behavioral and neutral. I respond to messages about the children within 24 hours. Messages about the divorce or finances should go through our attorneys. That is not emotional, it is structural and structure in high conflict situations is mercy for everyone, including the kids. Principle three, stop rescuing the under-functioning parent. Every time you compensate for your co-parent's failures without communicating clearly that you are doing so and what the expectation is, you are training them that your limits are not real. This is hard because your kids are in the middle, but there is a profound difference between protecting your children from genuine harm and protecting your co-parents from the natural consequences of their choices. identifying that line is some of the most important work you can do. Principle four, communicate in writing wherever possible. Written communication with a difficult co-parent reduces emotional escalation, creates accountability and protects you legally. Use parenting apps designed for this purpose. Keep messages focused, briefed and child centered. Do not respond to provocations. When you feel the urge to fire back, draft your response, walk away, and return in an hour. The version you send after that pause will almost always be better. Principle five, give your children permission to love both parents. This one is painful. It really is. But research is unambiguous. Children whose parents acutely support their relationship with the other parent, even an imperfect one, have better outcomes across the board. You do not have to pretend your co-parent is someone they're not. You don't have to lie to your children. But you can say genuinely, I want you to have a great relationship with your dad. I want you to enjoy your time with your mom and then get out of the way. Principle six, regulate yourself before you parent. You cannot pour from an empty cup. And this is not a platitude, it's neuroscience. A dysregulated parent cannot co-regulate their child. A flooded parent cannot help the child process their own emotions. Before difficult transitions, before challenging conversations, building regulation time. music, breath work, a call with a friend, whatever returns you to yourself. Your children need your presence, not your performance. Principle seven, release what you can't control. You can't control what happens at the other house. You can't control what your co-parent says to the children about you, about the divorce, about their future. You can only control what happens within your household, within your parenting time, and within your own choices. Every unit of energy you spend trying to control what you can't control is energy you're taking away from what actually matters. Let it go. Not because it doesn't matter, but because holding it is costing you more than releasing it. Principle eight, the relationship you want your children to have with themselves. This is the one I always come back to. Everything you do in your divorce, how you handle conflict, how you manage your emotions, how you treat yourself, how you treat someone you no longer love, is a lesson your children are absorbing. not consciously, but deeply, and it will show up in their friendships, their romantic relationships, their professional lives. You are not just navigating divorce, you are establishing a template. Make it one you'd be proud of. Reflection exercise. I want to give you a short journaling exercise taken to your week. Find 15 minutes, maybe this weekend, maybe tonight, grab a journal or open a note on your phone and work through these questions. First, where in your marriage did you give from fear instead of choice? What were you afraid of? Second, what pattern did your grieving serve? Was it peacekeeping, approval seeking or control? Third, Where in your current co-parenting relationship are you continuing that pattern? Fourth, what would it look like to give generously and to hold the limit in one specific situation you're facing right now? And finally, What is that one thing you're still holding in resentment that you're ready or willing to begin to be ready to put down? There are no wrong answers here. Insight is the goal, not perfection. And here's your weekly challenge. Choose one interaction with your co-parent or one pattern in your co-parenting and apply the P.A.S.S. protocol. Before you respond, wait, regulate, and then ask yourself, is the response coming from my values or from my wound? Let me know how it goes. You can reach me at Justin at reclaim and reboot.me or through the shows channel. I genuinely want to hear from you. So here's what I want you to leave with today. The giver gives and the taker takes. That is true. but it's also incomplete. Because the deepest truth is this, givers choose who they give to and how they give and under what terms. That is not selfishness, that is maturity. That is the graduation from compulsive giving to conscious generosity. And takers, ⁓ even difficult ones, even ones who have caused genuine harm, are not their worst behavior. They're human beings whose patterns are rooted in pain. That doesn't excuse what they did. It doesn't obligate you to continue absorbing it either. But it can if you let it free you from carrying their story of your own. Divorce will ask things of you that nothing else ever has. It will ask you to grieve and build simultaneously. To be honest about who you were and courageous about who you're becoming. to love your children enough to become someone they can be truly proud of. just good victim of a bad marriage, but a whole growing grounded human being who came in through the fire and chose again and again to be someone worthy of the life they're building. You don't to become hard to become wise. You don't have to become passive to become peaceful. You don't have to keep over giving to be a good parent. someone else's taking define the way you live, love, and lead. The next chapter is yours. Write it with intention. If today's episode resonated with you, I'd ask you to do two things. First, share it. Send it to one person who might need it. You might be the reason someone shows up prepared for the hardest thing they've ever done. That matters. Second, if you want support, real strategic support, not just information, come find me. My website is www.reclaimandreboot.me. I offer a free 30 minute consultation and I work with people who ready to stop reacting and start building. My books, you 2.0 divorce a better way forward and the YouTube point or workbook are also there if you want a starting point that you can hold in your hands. I'm Justin Norad. This is a conscious divorce podcast. And remember if this episode gave you something, anything, please subscribe wherever you listen. And if you're willing to take 60 more seconds, please leave us a review. I say this not as a marketing request. I say this because I volunteer a meaningful amount of my time to create this content for people who are going through one of Life's hardest chapters a review helps real people find this show at the exact moment. They need it That's not a small thing. That is someone's trajectory changing. So thank you for that and I'll see you on the next episode Have a wonderful day