Want to take your relationship to the next level as a man? One of the more important changes you make has to do with how you receive feedback or hurt from a partner when they’ve been impacted by you in a negative way. It’s easy for us guys to “lawyer up” in these moments instead of showing up first as a lover. Listen in to learn more about being a lover, not a lawyer!
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All right. And welcome back. On today's episode, I want to talk about an area that a lot of us men get into trouble when it comes to relationship.
And this is a pattern and a tendency I've often seen in myself. Just ask my wife. But I see in a lot of men as I support them in men's groups and coaching and everything I do. And it comes from this tendency for us guys to want to fix things, right, to bring things to an end, or as I was telling some of my guys in one of my programs last night, to reduce tension is one of the big drives of the masculine part of all of us.
So how this often manifests, and this will kind of lead into the main point of this episode, is in our kind of drive to try to fix problems. So particularly if our partner, whether she's a man or a woman, comes to us, one of the defaults for men is to try to fix the problem. Oh, it's this. Well, have you tried this? Oh, you're feeling this. Well, maybe if you thought about it this way, you wouldn't feel that way. There's a drive to get the person out of whatever feeling or experience they're having.
Right? In order to hopefully diffuse that tension, either that tension in her so she'll feel something different than she's feeling, or sometimes the tension in ourselves. Right? There were definitely times that I Realized, oh, wow, yeah, I dropped the ball on that, or I wasn't thinking about that, or honestly, I just wasn't conscious and I didn't want to feel that because I think of myself as a good guy that loves my partner and it doesn't feel good to know I hurt my partner.
Then other times where, yeah, I actually don't think anything I did directly contributed to the situation. What I learned by this process of being first a lover and not a lawyer was that by resonating and attuning to my partner and just feeling it, just acknowledging, yeah, wow, I get that it impacted you in this way. I don't try to change what she's feeling. Even if I think, you know, the reasoning she's feeling, it isn't necessarily me or what I did or whatever that might be.
The game changer for me came when, well, the realization that even when I have a good intent for something, my choices, my action, my presence, my behavior can still impact my partner in sometimes negative ways. And the default script I would get into would be to argue about that and, and make her wrong for feeling what she was feeling and try to explain why she shouldn't be feeling it because it wasn't my intent.
And like I said, that was pretty disastrous. That would only get my partner more frustrated and have her feel even less connected to me and more distant to me. Now, the alternative, when I first lean into lover and not lawyer and really just slow down and acknowledge what she's feeling like, yeah, wow, I get that and I feel that. And I see how that would impact you that way. You know, that wasn't my intent, but I really get this is, this is what happened, and I'm sorry, even though I didn't intend for that clearly had an impact on you.
And now this is not about overextending or becoming over apologetic like a lot of nice guys, it's just acknowledging that my partner was impacted in a certain way. And I'm genuinely sorry that she's having to feel that, but I'm sorry that my actions impacted her in that way. And if I've attuned to her and she feels me feeling her, and I'm not trying to change or explain or lawyer or defend, she'll often soften and then our connection can take a different path.
But when I lawyer up and it's all coming from the head and there's no heart, as I often say, head evokes head and heart evokes heart. So if I'm lawyered up, which in my Mind is a term for, yeah, kind of closing down our hearts and focusing and really coming from our heads. That puts my partner in that same spot where then suddenly we're arguing about details or perspectives or facts or things.
And that's not what my partner is wanting in these moments. She's wanting connection. She's wanting to re establish connection because it's the re establishment of connection that's actually going to help us both unwind, feel safe and reground. The thing about lawyering is it doesn't leave much room for a connection. It's more of like if you think of a lawyer going into court, it's kind of like a battle.
I'm here to persuade and convince the other person that my perspective is the one right perspective in truth. And the problem with that, particularly with our partners and feminine partners, is that if we're holding to there's only one right truth and that's more important than your feelings. Well, you can just feel, even in how I said that, how that's probably going to land in our partner that oh my God, we're going to feel missed or you don't care about me or you're trying to change me.
