Latest / The Dr. Psych Mom Show with clinical psychologist Dr. Samantha Rodman Whiten / The Elephant In The Room Of Your Relationship: Often, It's That You're Settling For A Lack Of Real Connection

Transcript

The Elephant In The Room Of Your Relationship: Often, It's That You're Settling For A Lack Of Real Connection · The Dr. Psych Mom Show with clinical psychologist Dr. Samantha Rodman Whiten

• 0:06
  Hi everybody, and welcome to the dr.
• 0:07
  Psych mom show today we're going to be talking about when there's
• 0:10
  an elephant in the room of your relationship and how this
• 0:14
  usually means that you're settling for a lack of real
• 0:16
  connection with this person and you don't really want to think
• 0:19
  about it. Please do subscribe though.
• 0:21
  The most recent episode was there's a kind of porn that can
• 0:24
  help with Sex Lies and the one that's going to be coming up is
• 0:27
  when you're arrogant or condescending often the only way
• 0:30
  your wife can assert herself is by not having sex with you.
• 0:34
  So that is a real important. Important one.
• 0:36
  For you guys who have been called are again to
• 0:38
  condescending by your wives, or for women listening to discuss
• 0:41
  with a husband or to learn about themselves as to why your sex
• 0:45
  life. May not be good if your husband
• 0:47
  is a prick. Anyway, moving on to today.
• 0:50
  So there are often these elephants in the room of
• 0:54
  relationships by which I mean, there's an issue that the couple
• 0:57
  does not really discuss, but it is very awkward, like silent
• 1:02
  known variable, sometimes only known by Person though.
• 1:06
  And here are some of the examples that I see, firstly,
• 1:09
  that the per one person is not attracted to the other person.
• 1:11
  Really, never has been sometimes, it's that one person
• 1:14
  is no longer attracted to the other person.
• 1:16
  Sometimes it's that you don't really find your partner that's
• 1:19
  smart or interesting or funny or whatever it is that they think
• 1:23
  that you find them. Sometimes it's that there's no
• 1:28
  sex like you're not having sex at all and you never talk about
• 1:31
  it and there's no sexual connection or sex goes badly or
• 1:34
  there's Edie. Erectile dysfunction or female
• 1:37
  on orgasm you or what have you. So yeah.
• 1:40
  Some so a lot of the time there's this elephant in the
• 1:44
  room and people once they get divorced, if they get divorced,
• 1:47
  will go back and say I never fell right in that relationship.
• 1:51
  There was always this thing going on in the back, you know,
• 1:54
  I could never fully get over that.
• 1:57
  Like XYZ, if you are feeling this and you're dating you
• 2:02
  should get out. You should just get out you Not
• 2:05
  be in this relationship, you don't deserve to feel like this,
• 2:08
  the kind of people who end up feeling like this, are adult
• 2:10
  children of dysfunctional families because they always had
• 2:13
  a secret. The secret is that the family is
• 2:15
  crazy, at least one person. So adult children of Alcoholics
• 2:18
  are used to hiding things. They're used to having double
• 2:20
  lives. Same thing with adult children
• 2:22
  of somebody who's very angry hoarder, a somebody with PTSD,
• 2:27
  depression, anxiety, whatever. If there's, at least one parent
• 2:30
  whose Behavior, you could not share to the world and it was
• 2:33
  known that you couldn't share that then.
• 2:35
  In your set with having a double life forever until you go to
• 2:38
  therapy at work on it or work on it without therapy, whatever.
• 2:41
  But you gotta understand it to work on it and therapy can help
• 2:44
  with that. So if you're an adult child of a
• 2:46
  dysfunctional family, then you are used to having a secret, a
• 2:49
  family secret that we cannot tell.
• 2:51
  So, then it's very easy to get into these kind of relationships
• 2:55
  and like people who marry people, who end up being gay are
• 2:59
  often have this kind of background because it's like,
• 3:02
  they always knew that the sex wasn't there.
• 3:04
  They always knew the Wasn't there.
• 3:06
  They saw sometimes even the way that the partner would look at
• 3:09
  people of their same-sex and they just diverted their eyes
• 3:13
  because it they're used to having an elephant in the room.
• 3:16
  The elephant in the room for example, is Mommy, doesn't leave
• 3:18
  the house, mommy is terrible. Agoraphobia will leave the
• 3:21
  house. We don't talk about it, somehow.
• 3:23
  We just tell everybody, Mommy, sick, or mommy's tired or dad,
• 3:26
  he's an alcoholic or Mommy beats the shit out of us or whatever.
• 3:31
  So, people who end up in these situations often have they Came
• 3:35
  by naturally, their ability to have a double life.
• 3:38
  And this is very upsetting when you think about it, because
• 3:42
  think about how you don't have to think about it.
• 3:44
  You probably lived it being a child who can't tell anybody
• 3:47
  what's going on, but now you've replicated it.
• 3:49
  So it's even more sad. You've replicated it as an adult
• 3:52
  and you can't tell anybody what's going on.
• 3:55
  And everybody says, oh, you so excited for your wedding coming
• 3:58
  up and you're like, oh yeah, it's so exciting.
• 4:00
  We're so happy. We're looking forward to it.
• 4:02
  And meanwhile, like you haven't had sex with this guy and like,
• 4:05
  Six months, you know his video game addiction is up until like
• 4:08
  4:00 in the morning. He's drinking all the time or
• 4:12
  you know it's your wife. She's incredibly anxious.
• 4:15
  She's super cold to you. She's on and off she cries for
• 4:17
  no reason. You don't know what the fuck's
• 4:19
  going on. You think that she's like, does
• 4:22
  something you don't really know but you don't think about it.
• 4:25
  She had some kind of mental illness.
• 4:26
  We don't really think about it. We don't put it in those terms.
• 4:28
  I see people like this all the time that they were ignoring
• 4:33
  big, big red flags during. During the courtship and got
• 4:36
  married anyway. And guess where I see them
• 4:39
  therapy, right? Because this shit does not go
• 4:41
  away. So how do you deal with this?
• 4:45
  Then if you're married and there's always been an elephant
• 4:48
  in the room, then you got to go to therapy and the way that
• 4:50
  they're happy can really help in this situation.
• 4:52
  Particularly because, you know, I've said there isn't for
• 4:55
  everybody, maybe you could just journal in this case, when
• 4:58
  there's an elephant in the room, you need to tell another human
• 5:01
  being that's like a key part of the healing and getting shit out
• 5:04
  there when there. Is a big fucking elephant in the
• 5:06
  room. You got to tell somebody.
• 5:09
  So, even just coming that changes the whole frame, because
• 5:11
  you were never allowed to do that as a kid.
• 5:13
  So, when you come in and you say to a therapist, our problem is
• 5:17
  that we haven't had sex in a year.
• 5:19
  It's like you could see the relief honestly, on the person's
• 5:21
  face. At least the one who's talking
• 5:23
  because it's like, they don't tell that to anybody, they
• 5:25
  probably haven't even spoken it out loud in their relationship.
• 5:28
  There are people, of course, who have many problems that they
• 5:31
  discuss in the relationship and there's a couple levels.
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  There's people who have problems that they discussed with
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  somebody else and also with each other.
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  They're like, the best, of course, this is, this is not
• 5:43
  good to have this level of problems.
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  But if you're going to have big problems, it's best that like
• 5:48
  there's somebody else. You talk to so like, let's say
• 5:50
  the girl talks to her sister. Oh, my husband, I haven't had
• 5:53
  sex in six months. What do you think is wrong?
• 5:55
  And she talks to the husband, why don't we have sex anymore?
• 5:57
  All right, fine. This is a best case scenario if
• 6:00
  you're going to have a problem, at least you're not, you don't
• 6:03
  have a secret on top of a And as anybody.
• 6:07
  Well, I don't know what anybody knows about sexual abuse, but
• 6:10
  that's the worst part of it frequently is not the abuse
• 6:12
  itself, is the secret, the secret it eats at people.
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  So when I was working, as a younger person, as an intern
• 6:19
  with children that had been sexually, abused, I talked about
• 6:23
  this periodically in my podcast, we use trauma-focused CBT where
• 6:27
  you actually draw out the story. Like, they make like a book.
• 6:30
  And they talk about the sexual abuse that happened.
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  Scene-by-scene. You may say, that is crazy, but
• 6:35
  But it works, it help if the opposite of a secret.
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  We're literally talking about it.
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  We're saying then what happened where and you know you have to
• 6:42
  have a good Therapeutic Alliance if the build a lot of trust with
• 6:44
  the child and then you write out everything that happened and you
• 6:48
  write a story and then they tell the story to hopefully their new
• 6:52
  foster parents or adoptive parents or sometimes the
• 6:55
  counselor in the group home that they're close to a sad situation
• 6:58
  group home. But you know, it's better than
• 7:02
  still staying in that situation that they were in prior to that.
• 7:05
  Anyway. The reason that this is very
• 7:07
  transformative and Curative is because there's no more secret.
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  So they're yeah. They're the kid that had that
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  bad thing happen, but it's out there.
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  And they know that at least one person is proud of them for
• 7:17
  telling their story and does not think that they are somehow
• 7:20
  broken wounded damaged or less than because of it.
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  Because, of course, the group home counselor, or especially
• 7:27
  about new foster parent, or whoever in addition to the
• 7:30
  therapist, of course, says, I'm so proud of you that you did
• 7:34
  such a good job on your Our story and you were so brave and
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  this is a really good thing, etc, etc.
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  So in fact they're getting positive validation for sharing
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  their story. So this is is the opposite of
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  having a horrible secret gnawing at you.
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  So, you can use this analogy as an adult, if you come in, and
• 7:51
  you finally say to a therapist, for example, you know, my spouse
• 7:56
  calls me bad names and we're not allowed to talk about it, you
• 7:59
  know, we don't talk about it, then you did talk about it, you
• 8:02
  talked about it to somebody, and somebody says, well, that's
• 8:04
  really terrible. That's Okay, I want to work with
• 8:06
  you on getting into a different Dynamic and, you know, figuring
• 8:09
  it out. Did you finally?
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  It's you feel wonderful in a sense.
• 8:12
  Yeah, you still have the problem but you don't have the secret on
• 8:14
  top of the problem, which can really just destroy you.
• 8:18
  Having a secret like this, I see it with Children of Hoarders,
• 8:21
  you know, adult children of Hoarders, always recount how
• 8:24
  difficult it was, because they always had to make up reasons
• 8:27
  that nobody could visit their house.
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  It was always a different reason and it's just crazy.
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  It just kills you, same with alcoholic.
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  Same with drug addict everything.
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  I It's similar. So anyway, the point is, if you
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  have an elephant in the room in your marriage, the first thing
• 8:40
  you gotta do is talk to somebody about it.
• 8:42
  Frequently having no sex or terrible sex or weird sex, you
• 8:47
  know? But I don't mean like kinky sex.
• 8:49
  I mean, weird sex and that like for example like you're just
• 8:52
  just masturbate separately and nobody talks about why you're
• 8:55
  not allowed to touch each other you know or something.
• 8:58
  I don't talk, not talk about what it's hot that you
• 9:00
  masturbate together. This is not the situation.
• 9:03
  The point is when there's a big sea Quit or the secret.
• 9:06
  Is that like you have no love. Like, there's no love.
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  You haven't said, I love you and years and years and years.
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  You and you don't know if you feel it, or I just a million
• 9:15
  things that your paper that your spouse is an alcoholic, that
• 9:18
  your spouse is addicted to something that your spouse has,
• 9:21
  you know, very, very depressed. And we're not allowed to talk
• 9:24
  about it, you know, whatever. So, the first thing to do is to
• 9:28
  get into therapy, if they won't come to couples, you got to get
• 9:31
  into individual, and at least have one human being that you
• 9:34
  talk to about this. If you want a you religious go
• 9:36
  talk to a pastor about it, it's better than keeping it to
• 9:39
  yourself. You know, of course I'm biased
• 9:42
  towards therapy therapy isn't for everybody though.
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  So you got to talk to some human.
• 9:46
  Maybe you could talk to a friend or family member if you if you
• 9:50
  can't even think about going to a therapist.
• 9:52
  But a therapist is very objective and obviously trained.
• 9:55
  So I put that higher in terms of what you need to deal with right
• 9:59
  now in terms of, getting your ducks in a row and the therapist
• 10:01
  will often tell you. Yeah you got to tell other
• 10:03
  people to you know like family. Somebody.
• 10:06
  And if you have children, this is extremely important.
• 10:08
  Yeah, the children don't know shit about your sex life fine.
• 10:11
  But if your secret, if you are elephant in the room is like
• 10:13
  Mommy, your daddy's your spouse being Mom, your daddy's, or you
• 10:17
  you being mommy, or daddy, the mental illness of this person,
• 10:20
  then you are training your kids to lead a double life and you
• 10:23
  can't do it anymore. So you can say to your kid.
• 10:26
  We don't tell anybody, what goes on in this house implicitly or
• 10:29
  explicitly, you were just telling them they're going to
• 10:31
  have anxiety or depression later on and probably be A strange
• 10:35
  from you, from anger toward you about having to keep something
• 10:38
  hidden. So if your elephants in the room
• 10:40
  is that your spouse has a drinking problem, you that
• 10:43
  cannot be you just got to today, could be your day to say, you
• 10:47
  know what? I'm going to go to an Al-Anon
• 10:48
  meeting and I'm going to finally talk to somebody else.
• 10:50
  Who understands about my spouse being an alcoholic.
• 10:52
  And I'm going to think about getting my kids into therapy for
• 10:54
  this, because we can't ignore it anymore, no matter what my
• 10:57
  spouse does or doesn't do about their addiction.
• 10:59
  So that could be a thing that you resolved.
• 11:03
  So if it is not such a huge Cham and I huge, everything is huge
• 11:08
  and its own way, but if it is not something that your children
• 11:10
  readily, observe such as an intimacy deficit, such as let's
• 11:14
  go back to the one that you're not attracted to your spouse.
• 11:16
  Let's even go to the one where you used to be, and now you're
• 11:18
  not. So the, so, this is again,
• 11:21
  higher level problem. It isn't that you were never
• 11:24
  attracted to your spouse but that you just stopped being
• 11:27
  attracted to your spouse because let's say they put on 50 pounds,
• 11:29
  very common situation, I see in practice.
• 11:31
  So at this point you should turn to your spouse and say I mean, I
• 11:35
  know you're not going to right now, but this could be the first
• 11:37
  step in like, you know, starting the chain reaction that
• 11:40
  eventually, you would turn to your spouse and say you
• 11:43
  frequently asked why we don't have sex and they say, I don't
• 11:46
  know, I think it's me. I it is it is not fully me could
• 11:49
  be me to, you know, I'm going through perimenopause, right?
• 11:53
  But it isn't fully me. The number one thing is your
• 11:55
  weight gain and I'm sorry and I sorry to say it.
• 11:59
  I know it may sound harsh. I didn't want to lie to you
• 12:02
  anymore. I wanted to give you the ability
• 12:04
  to Potentially deal with this situation because that is why I
• 12:09
  cannot have sex with you. And I have an article about this
• 12:12
  or many post actually about this on my site.
• 12:15
  This guy says that his wife is obese, his mother.
• 12:17
  His abusive mother used to be obese.
• 12:19
  He just cannot deal with obesity.
• 12:20
  He's told the wife but for and nothing changes her.
• 12:24
  No, she can't change anything or what.
• 12:26
  I mean. I'm not saying like she's being
• 12:28
  the, you know, malicious in her weight gain, certainly not.
• 12:31
  But in this situation he told her she couldn't do it and then
• 12:34
  he had to get Out of the relationship.
• 12:36
  And I don't say know why. I mean, I think in this
• 12:38
  situation was more than 50 pounds.
• 12:40
  Either way, if you have to get out of a relationship because of
• 12:43
  something that, you know, it doesn't ideally sound great to
• 12:47
  the world, but, you know, that, like you can never be with this
• 12:50
  person because of this, then you have to.
• 12:52
  But you got to be honest with them first because maybe it is a
• 12:55
  situation where they don't really know the extent of how
• 12:58
  upset you are about this. Now, we're talking like, as you,
• 13:03
  I'm sure have not listened to Single podcast I ever made.
• 13:06
  Maybe you have, there was a situation where there was this
• 13:09
  guy who wrote any said, I can't call my wife, beautiful, because
• 13:12
  she gained weight, and, and she's so she's not beautiful.
• 13:17
  She's just hot. I had sex with her and she wants
• 13:19
  me to call her beautiful. But I can't.
• 13:21
  I could just call her hot if you still have sex with her, and you
• 13:23
  still think she's hot and you're just being a dick wad.
• 13:26
  Not calling her beautiful. You gotta go to your own
• 13:27
  individual therapy to stop being a dick but that's a whole
• 13:30
  different situation than this one with the elephant to the
• 13:33
  room, where the weight gain is a thing that Makes you unable to
• 13:36
  like, sleep with the person, touch the person, look at the
• 13:38
  person and there are people like that especially like this guy
• 13:42
  who had an obese abusive mother and so he's triggered by it
• 13:44
  whatever. So the the point is, you got to
• 13:47
  give your spouse the possibility of changing something.
• 13:50
  Or at the very least, just the respect.
• 13:52
  This is your spouse, does not like in my preceding podcast
• 13:56
  where I was like. Listen sometimes if you just
• 13:59
  want to fade out after dating, somebody off the internet for a
• 14:02
  couple times, you know, it's not Ball.
• 14:05
  And some people would even prefer to be ghosted than to be
• 14:08
  told. I wasn't actually very
• 14:09
  physically attracted to you after.
• 14:10
  All right. So that's a situation.
• 14:12
  You don't know that person. Shit.
• 14:14
  Really, this though is a situation where it's your
• 14:17
  spouse. You owe your spouse, some
• 14:19
  honesty and respect the honesty and respect.
• 14:22
  In this case is we have to talk about x x is the reason,
• 14:26
  everything is bad. Now what about you're going to
• 14:29
  say in the situation where you really have never been attracted
• 14:32
  to your spouse? And there's no coming back?
• 14:35
  Well, then I think, and I talked about this in its own podcast
• 14:38
  about when you've never been attracted to your spouse, I
• 14:40
  think is literally the title. You got to tell them because
• 14:44
  they deserve maybe to be with somebody who could be in love
• 14:47
  with them. Possibly.
• 14:48
  That's what I think. If you can't, if you can't fake
• 14:50
  it, if you cannot act like you were love with them and you're
• 14:53
  in love with them, for the sake, of your kids, or for whatever,
• 14:56
  which some people can do ice. Not my, I mean, you know, this
• 14:59
  is not what I would do but it's some people want to do it and
• 15:02
  it's like a philosophical question.
• 15:04
  Like if a tree falls. Sorry, like if a woman is so
• 15:07
  committed to having an intact, happy home that she can think
• 15:11
  for her entire life. Do you get passionate love with
• 15:14
  her husband till the day that he dies?
• 15:17
  And then I mean I don't know like it really is a
• 15:19
  philosophical question at the outside the purview of this
• 15:22
  podcast, possibly for philosophical podcast about
• 15:25
  whether she did anything wrong, I don't think she didn't do
• 15:27
  anything wrong because she got her goals met and she made him
• 15:30
  feel good. Same, really, as when I work
• 15:33
  with parents who can't bond to their child.
• 15:35
  So parents, who never threw their usually, it's because of a
• 15:39
  dysfunctional, very dysfunctional.
• 15:40
  Abusive, family of origin. They cannot bond to their child,
• 15:44
  right? And I work with mothers.
• 15:46
  Like this is some of the most rewarding work because it's
• 15:48
  never happened. That they haven't cultivated a
• 15:50
  better relationship after we work together with the child,
• 15:53
  because I let them think it seem like you're not doing anything
• 15:56
  bad right now. You are child doesn't know
• 15:59
  because frequently there's the most conscientious and
• 16:02
  assiduously of mothers because you're so anxious.
• 16:05
  The child who doesn't deserve to not be loved will pick up on
• 16:09
  that. They're not loved and so, we
• 16:11
  were gone. Of course, how could you be a
• 16:13
  loving mother? Look at the experience that you
• 16:14
  had. Also, you have postpartum
• 16:16
  depression. Also, you were going through a
• 16:18
  bunch of shit at the time of the pregnancy but you're not doing
• 16:20
  anything wrong. You're being a good mother right
• 16:23
  now, you are doing everything right?
• 16:25
  If you have to fake it till the day that you die, you will have
• 16:28
  been a good mother. This is true.
• 16:31
  You will have been a good mother.
• 16:33
  You will have done that out of the law.
• 16:35
  Of that, you're telling me you don't feel.
• 16:36
  You don't feel like this romanticize love.
• 16:38
  But obviously, you feel the love, love love that.
• 16:40
  You can behave the right way toward your child and that is
• 16:43
  love. And you know, it's something
• 16:45
  that you got to work on. But often after the people fake
• 16:48
  it, then they start to feel the love in some way for the child
• 16:52
  and then it grows and grows. So this is just an aside,
• 16:55
  something that is, you know, something that could be like
• 16:58
  something that somebody here is and it's like, wow, that is
• 17:00
  something I'm struggling with that.
• 17:01
  I didn't know I would get to hear about, but anyway, the
• 17:04
  point is that you House deserves to hear about the elephant in
• 17:06
  the room. You should not live a lie.
• 17:09
  If it's tearing you apart, you should not be somebody who ever
• 17:14
  tells your child. That they must lie about some
• 17:17
  elephant in the room of the family.
• 17:19
  If that is what's going on and therapy can help with all of
• 17:22
  this stuff because probably the reason you're doing this is
• 17:24
  because you had to lead as double life as a kid.
• 17:28
  So hopefully you got a lot out of this podcast.
• 17:30
  This one when various directions around the around the mulberry
• 17:34
  bush but hopefully Lie. Most of it was interesting to
• 17:37
  you, if not, what was it? 17 minutes of your life?
• 17:41
  All right, talk to you soon. Bye bye.