04 – The Real Problem

It’s easy to think that the experience we’re having in our marriage comes back to who we married. But what if that’s not true?

This is couples coaching, and I’m Natalie clay.

So we’re going to mix it up a little bit today, and I’m going to be doing this podcast with my sister Jody Moore of Better Than Happy.

What are we talking about Natalie? Today we’re talking about the “real” problem. The “real problems.”

This is one of my favorite topics.

We think we know what the real problem is, right?

Yes, I think we’re pretty certain most of the time.

Yeah, tell people what we think. What most people, not us, but what most people think.

The real problem is, well, it tends to be the things our husband said to us or the things our wife didn’t do. Or, something that the sister-in-law always does.

I hear that one a lot.

I hear that one a lot too. So, in other words, other people are the problem for sure.

Other people or things outside of us. What about the president of the United States?

He’s a problem for me, I’ll be honest.

You might have to steer clear of that topic.

Yeah, and definitely the amount of money we have in our bank account. That can for sure be a real problem for us.

Yes.

The number on the scale.

Okay, yeah, that definitely is a problem.

Uh huh.

Oftentimes our kids. Things they do and say caused me some problems.

Yeah, and you know, we’re kind of joking. Being lighthearted here because we just like to and we’re a little tired. I don’t know where this is going to go. It is 8:45 PM and we’ve been teaching all day, so you’re getting us a little bit giddy. 

But, in all seriousness, there are things that happen in the world that I think a majority of the people in our lives agree with us is a problem, right? Like, my child is sleeping with his girlfriend or my father is sick or my spouse is looking at pornography.

Yes, so there are things that may feel like heavy, serious things. But the truth is, those things are actually never the problem. 

Yeah, and this is confusing because it I think most people would agree that any of these things were a probelm. “Obviously if we don’t have enough money, that’s a problem.”

Wait a second. Let’s talk about the third one a bit. I really liked this concept for anyone, but in particular, my audience of married couples. People come to me talking about the issues in their marriage. When we think that it’s these things that cause trouble for us, then it becomes really problematic, because then we need to change that person. We need to change the things our husband is doing or that our wife is saying in order to feel better.

So. I love this idea. I learned that really circumstances don’t have that much power over us. Really, it’s the way we choose to think about these things in our life that cause the experience we’re having.

I feel like that’s so liberating when I talk through this with my clients. I help them see that really all these things that we think have to be in place for us to be able to enjoy our marriage, really don’t need to be. We don’t have to change those things in order to change our experience, which can feel hugely liberating.

Let’s define it for people who might be new to these tools:

A circumstance is a fact. It’s the thing that is happening outside of us and is not at all an opinion. When we are coaching people on this, we can’t include any adjectives or words that are subjective that could be interpreted in different ways.

One of the things we talk about a lot is that circumstances in and of themselves are neutral. They’re just the events or the thing the person said, or maybe even the thing that they did — as long as you can articulate it factually.

Like, “My husband was really rude to me.” Not a circumstance right? Because it’s not factual. We don’t know what “rude” means, what you think is rude may not be rude to me.

But let’s talk more about the idea of neutral circumstances. What about murder? Let’s say you know somebody kills another person and that’s just the circumstance.

You might wonder, how can murder be neutral? 

Let me clarify. Most of us don’t think of murder as neutral, right? To most people, it’s a negative thing. But, maybe to the murderer, it was a positive thing. It’s not that we want to neutralize everything in our lives, but we just want to recognize that all circumstances are inherently neutral…until we have a thought about it. 

I find that clients misunderstand this. Sometimes they’re like, “Oh my husband and I tried to go all day only saying circumstances out loud and never thoughts and we couldn’t really do it.”

But the goal isn’t to just stop having and sharing thoughts. We’re not saying that you should neutralize everything in your life. We’re saying it’s important to distinguish between neutral circumstances and our thoughts about those circumstances.

So why don’t you talk about thoughts? 

The thought is what comes after we hear of a circumstance. It’s how we think about this boring neutral fact that everyone in the world agrees on. 

For example, if somebody says, “My husband told me I’m not thin enough.” I think most of us hear that and have a reaction to that. We think, “Oh, that’s not kind.” Or, “He shouldn’t have said that all those things.” All of our opinions that follow are “thoughts” we have about the circumstance being that he said, “You’re not thin enough.”

What you make it mean is the thought part. That’s where the adjectives, the subjectivity, and the opinion all come in, right?

Yeah, now the reason this is so important is because all we’re ever wanting is to feel something. When people come to me and they say I want to have more connection in my marriage, that tells me that there are some circumstances happening. And then there’s the thoughts about the circumstance — and it’s only because of those thoughts that they are feeling disconnected.

We tend to believe that our feelings are created by the circumstance, right?

Like we said in the beginning, that’s what we think is the real problem. But the real problem is the thought we’re having about what they said. 

What you’re saying, Natalie, if I understand you correctly, is that thoughts create feelings.

That’s exactly right.

Circumstances don’t. They never do. 

There’s the illustration I give to people. There are these three tiers. From circumstance and then there’s the feeling, and like you said, we think the number on our bank account is causing us to feel stress or worry…But there’s always that something in the middle, and that’s the thought always in between those two things.

The reason it’s really great to know that is because then we can start looking at that thought to decide if that’s helping us feel what we want to feel about that circumstance.  That’s where we gain some leverage over these facts in our life — over the dollar amount in our bank account and over the things that our spouse says to us.

Let’s give a couple examples to make sure we’re not losing anybody that might be new to this.

Let’s just use that same thought I just gave you where the woman’s husband said to her you should lose weight. Let’s say those have to be his exact words for us to call that the circumstance.

Right, that’s right.

But sometimes clients will say, “My husband thinks I should lose weight.” 

And, I’m like, “Why do you think that?”

It’s because her husband said “how many calories are in this meal” or he looked at her while she was eating the ice cream. “I could just tell by his look.”

Make sure we don’t let our brains trick us. A circumstance has to be the facts, so if he literally said, “you should lose weight,” we’ll call that a circumstance.

So when my client told me “My husband said the words ‘you need to lose weight,’” then what happened is a bunch of thoughts. 

Her thought in the moment is “he’s so cruel.” Now, that’s one thought that her brain offered her. But again, thoughts are something that we have some control over. So, other options could be something like, “Wow, I wonder why he said that?” Or, “maybe he had a rough day and he’s sure short with me.” Or, “I completely disagree, I like the way I look.” 

Please don’t think that we’re saying it’s okay for your husband to talk to you in a way that is unkind or judgmental, or any of that. That’s not what we’re saying at all. But what’s really key here is to notice that you think you’re feeling bad because your husband said you need to lose weight. When really, you’re feeling badly because you’re thinking “that was so mean.”

That’s right.

And it triggered the part of you that judges yourself for your weight, which is also not necessary right?

That’s what’s really going on here. All problems are thought problems.

Some of you listening have heard us talk about this before and you’re like, “Yeah, I get it. I totally understand that. I’m on board.” Others of you are like, “Really?”

If you’re thinking that, it’s fine, just stay with us.

I hear a lot of clients say, “okay, so you’re just telling me I should think positively about everything.” How would you answer that, Natalie?

I would say definitely not. Again, going back to some of our earlier examples, often we want to keep the thoughts that we have. Like, when we were talking about murder. We think murder is wrong. That’s a thought I want to keep. I don’t want to feel positive about murder.

But in a situation where I want to stay married to my husband, I want to love my husband and I want to love myself and not hand that power over to him, that’s when I might realize that thought isn’t helping me because it’s making me feel bad. Maybe there is a different thought I can choose. So, I don’t give all the power to my husband to change. 

He can have whatever opinion he has, but I want to choose how I feel. So, for that reason, I can choose to think something different, right?

But you can have a conversation with your husband. Like, “Look, I really don’t want to be spoken to in that way. I’m not okay with that. It’s not okay to talk to me that way.”

When we say “all problems are thought problems,” I think people misinterpret and they think we’re saying, “okay, just sit back and let people take advantage of you.” And that’s not what we’re saying at all.

Standing up for yourself with confidence — and not imitating the behavior you don’t like in your spouse —only comes from first thinking a different thought.

That’s right. It’s funny because we think we have to feel bad, or else we’re letting them walk all over us. But really, that’s such a disempowering stance. Instead, if you just decide that what he said means nothing about you and whether or not you need to lose weight, you can then better look for information about him and some of the experiences he’s having or where he’s coming from. 

You can just let him own all of that and you can decide to disagree with him statement without it meaning anything about you. And, you can decide to have a conversation with them and say, “You know what? You don’t need to tell me if I need to lose weight or not.” He may or may not listen. But you don’t have to let him decide how you’re going to feel in that conversation.

Yeah, that’s right.

Let’s give some other useful thoughts you could use in that situation. I you gave one, “He’s wrong.” Or, “This has nothing to do with me.”

Yeah, It’s all about him. Because it’s hard, right? Especially if this is a woman who is sensitive about her body image. It’s very challenging to hear someone that you care about whose opinion you maybe care about say that to you and just deflect it with, “I don’t care,” right?

We get that that’s hard. But I love the thought, “this isn’t about me. This is about him.” It genuinely is about him, right?

It’s hard for some people to wrap their heads around, but it really, really is about him.

What might be going on for him, do you think?

Yeah, so that’s always interesting to take a look at. In one of my favorite 30 Rock episodes, Jack hires a private investigator, Steve Buscemi. Steve makes a comment. He says, “It’s like I always tell my assistant. Your weight is a reflection on me.” I just really could relate to that, because I was a personal assistant for a while. But anyway, relating that back to this…there’s something in your husband that made him decide to say these words, and it’s not coming from your weight.

Remember, your weight is the circumstance, and now he’s having thoughts about it. His thoughts have everything to do with him. His thoughts are telling us something like, “Maybe she’s unhealthy. Maybe she’s going to get sick.” But who knows?

And it and it doesn’t necessarily mean it is coming from a caring kind place, yeah?

Probably not, let’s be honest.

Yeah, he might be thinking, “your weight is a reflection on me,” right?

But even if his thought was “I’m not attracted to you and so you need to lose weight,” then that still only tells us about him. That tells us nothing about whether or not you actually need to lose weight. The only thing that determines whether or not you need to lose weight is how you feel about it.

Okay, so this is just really good to know. The real problem is our thinking. Sometimes, we want to think a thought that causes an emotion that doesn’t feel good.

I’m just going to go a tiny bit deeper here for a minute. How do we know what emotions are positive and what which ones are negative? Like, is there even such a thing as a “negative” emotion?

If you think about what we typically consider negative emotions like fear, sadness, overwhelm anxiety…all those emotions that don’t feel good in our bodies…yet, we go to movies to feel those emotions. Like, your husband, for example, loves horror films.

He thinks it’s fun in that controlled environment where you can step outside of reality for a minute. 

That’s his way of feeling entertained, yeah? I think he really feels alive in that moment. Even for those of us that don’t like horror films, we like movies that make us a little sad and then maybe feel happy and joyful and light and laughing.

We like to feel a lot of emotion. If I go to a movie and I don’t feel a lot of emotion, I’m like “that wasn’t good.” 

That’s right, if you follow the plot of a lot of television programs, you’ll notice we love the whole drawn out process of all those emotions. There’s some anticipation that feels a little bit uncomfortable, but without that uncomfortable feeling, your story is really flat.

That’s right. So that’s why I’m asking are negative emotions really even “negative,” right?

Are they really even negative? Or, is it just the fact that we think those emotions are created by circumstances that are real — as opposed to a movie screen — that makes us think we need to try to manipulate and control those circumstances to escape those emotions?

Whereas, if we were just willing to feel them and know that we’re the creator of them with our thoughts, then maybe, like your husband said, it can feel more like a controlled environment.

What if it’s all a controlled environment? Because it’s really only our thoughts creating it.

Well, that’s pretty deep, sis.

I told you.

The one point I would like to add to this is after we start really experiencing this practice. Once we’ve learned it and we start noticing this in our life, then we tend to use it against ourselves. 

What I hear from a lot of my clients after we’ve talked through this a bit is, “I know this is just a thought.” We start thinking, “well, this doesn’t feel good and I shouldn’t be thinking this because I know this is making me feel that now.” I would say that’s not necessary.

Yeah.

Yeah, because really, this is good news. This is something that should only be used to help you feel whatever you want to feel, not to be used against you be.

It’s this idea that you have so much control over what you feel in your life.

Again, all we’re ever wanting is to feel something. We’re wanting to escape negative emotion and feel something good. So, we know that it just comes back to our thoughts and that puts the power in our hands to really decide more deliberately what we want our experience to be.

Amen, Sister Clay.

All right, that’s the real problem.

That’s the real problem every time.

Remember, of all the emotions you can choose to feel, love feels the very best.