My Partner Reads My Newsletters
And he made a good point to me on Monday when read the last one I wrote about cleaning the shower. He said that the article made it look like he is unreliable.
When he said that to me, I denied it.
But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that he was right. I was seeing him as unreliable. And even though I was doing some good work on “making peace with unreliability,” I was still missing a very important underlying belief.
So I Did Some More Work
This time I questioned the underlying belief, “He is unreliable”
And I saw more clearly than ever that he is way more reliable than me. For example, he gets up every day on time, unlike me. That means, he does my early morning kitchen routine for me many times while I’m still sleeping, and has for more than a decade.
I picked on one tiny place where I could find him to be minutely “unreliable:” the shower. I thought, “Aha! Now I got him!” A place where we didn’t even have clearly defined rules. And I zoomed in on one time in three months that I happened to clean the shower three times in a row.
I used this minute detail to distract myself from what I didn’t want to see about myself. The fact that he’s the reliable one in the house, and I’ve just been trying to keep up.
So As I Write This I See More Work for me To Do
I can question my self-judgments like: “I should be more reliable, like him.” And “I need to wake up consistently early.”
Without those thoughts, I can imagine that my life would be much more peaceful. I would allow myself to sleep in when I do. And I’d be much more grateful for my partner’s willingness to do my chores when I don’t wake up early.
Even just glancing at this now, my heart is already changing from defensiveness to gratitude.
And That Is Exactly Why I Keep Doing The Work
Again, and again, again, I find layer after layer of my stressful stories melting away. And I am left with nothing but appreciation for everything my partner does for me.
With a little questioning of my stressful thoughts, I become the luckiest man in the world.
Have a great weekend,
Todd
“Your partner is your mirror. Except for the way you perceive him, he doesn’t even exist for you. He is who you see he is, and ultimately it’s just you again, thinking. It’s just you, over and over and over and over, and in this way you remain blind to yourself and feel justified and lost. To think that your partner is anything but a mirror of you is painful. You don’t see your partner; you just see what you believe about him. So when you see him as flawed in any way, you can be sure that that’s where your own flaw is. The flaws have to be yours, because you’re the one projecting them.” Byron Katie, Question Your Thinking, Change The World.
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