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How Do I Know if I Have Resentment?

Resentments, if not dealt with, can cause numerous problems in a relationship. But it’s easy to talk about resentments, yet not always so easy to identify them. What exactly does it look and feel like to have resentment?

I once coached a couple who, after ten years of marriage, were both resenting each other for various reasons. The husband, who had been unwilling to communicate his feelings to his wife over the years, had been taking out his anger on her unwittingly.

The wife, of course, resented his treatment of her—but in the end, she truly had no idea of the reasons for his anger or why he held on to it. But I could see the light bulb turn on as she remembered something helpful.

As it turned out, her husband’s mother had warned her even before they’d gotten married. “He’s like a volcano,” she had said. “He just lets it bubble up underneath until one day he erupts.” Unfortunately, the wife found out just how true that statement was.

Had the husband brought up issues in the relationship periodically as they arose, the volcanic eruptions could and most likely would have been avoided. So, what would I have told the couple if I’d coached them years earlier?

How to Tell if You’re Harboring Resentment

The first clue that you’re experiencing a resentment is your frustration. After talking to or being with your partner, if a conversation leaves you feeling irritated or like you’re being treated unfairly, it’s a good idea to stop and consider what about the interaction bothered you—especially if you realize you’ve been irked for quite a while.

You may find yourself judging the other person in your mind. If you hang up the phone or a Zoom call—or even end a text chat—and you notice yourself thinking judgmental thoughts toward them, that’s a resentment.

For those low-stake relationships in your life, those people who aren’t in your immediate circle, that’s not such a big deal. But if it’s your partner, it’s something that needs to be addressed. When you withhold these feelings, it’s disrespectful to the person and to the relationship.

Here’s a quick video about resentment:

Resentment Creates a Toxic Relationship Environment

There can be any number of reasons you might feel like withholding is necessary in the moment. You might be afraid the other person will be upset or even end the relationship. Maybe you don’t want to “create waves.” More than likely, you just don’t want your partner mad at you.

But the truth is, the waves you’re creating below the surface can turn into a tsunami later on.

Holding back your feelings in your relationship serves only to create an environment where your true self-expression can’t flourish. Once you have identified those feelings of resentment to do something about it as soon as possible so you can avoid a more intense situation in the future.

Resentment Remedy

The quick and easy remedy for resentment: speak up! Not only will being truthful make you feel better, it will build trust and show respect for your partner. The result is a solid foundation to the relationship where you both feel comfortable expressing your feelings honestly.

Speaking up shows that you truly care for the other person in the relationship—and that you want to work out the smaller issues so they don’t become bigger ones. You can’t control their reaction to your words, but what you can do is see the situation for what it is: a growth opportunity.

Allow yourself and your partner that opportunity for growth by becoming more aware of your feelings and communicating them. You will be more prepared for future situations, and you’ll give your partner the chance to learn about you as well.

If you’d like to learn three important insights to help you work through disagreements and communicate better or learn how to clear a resentment, sign up for my free training here.
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Photo Credit: KS KYUNG – Unsplash

What’s the Most Important Need in a Relationship?

Thinking about your needs in a relationship, what would you rank as number one?

Putting the toilet seat down…communicating often…intimacy? Most likely, honesty and monogamy are pretty high on the list.

It’s probably hard for you to pick just one because there are several needs in relationships and partnerships that most people would consider very important. Some of them are as individual as the person. But there are a few—four, in fact—that I would say are universal, and I talk about them often.

But there is a HUGE one—the biggest, perhaps—to any successful relationship.

What is it?

The Most Important Need In Your Relationship

It’s pretty simple. The most important need in a relationship is to feel emotionally safe.

That’s right. If you don’t feel emotionally safe, how could you possibly open your heart to another person?

If you’re building an emotionally safe relationship foundation, bringing your true feelings to the partnership and feeling like you can express them freely is going to be vital to that base. Your feelings and emotions are the essence of who you are as a person, and you need to feel secure enough in the partnership to be able to express them.

The range of emotions we feel—positive, negative, and everything in between—needs to be expressed. If we don’t feel safe enough to let them flow freely and that the other person in the relationship will receive them, then we aren’t feeling emotionally safe. That’s when walls are built, partners are shut out, and the connection breaks down.

Check out this video about the #1 partnership need:

Creating the Safe Space You Want

It’s important to take a look at your behavior in the relationship. It’s a given that you want to feel emotional safety from your partner. But you have to ask yourself, “Am I behaving in a way that makes my partner feel emotionally safe?”

Yes, this is going to require some self-reflection, but trust me, it’ll be worth it. If a partnership goes two ways, it’s only fair that behavior is reciprocated as well.

So, take a look at the way you treat your partner and think about whether you’d feel emotionally safe in their shoes. Are you allowing them to feel and express their feelings with you, or are you acting judgmental, critical, or closed off toward them? Do you have the attitude of “Your emotions are welcome with me?”

If you don’t feel emotionally safe in your current relationship, start by changing what you can—you. Creating a place of emotional security for your partner will allow them to do the same for you. If your partner still isn’t creating that safe space for you, then it’s up to you to determine how much you tolerate.

If you don’t know how to feel emotions, then you’ll want to unlock your emotions and start feeling them. Don’t be like me, and spend decades emotionally constipated. Do the work to start feeling now.

Don’t Ask of Your Partner What You Can’t Do for Yourself

Besides taking a look at whether your behavior is creating an emotionally safe space, it’s necessary to take a look at the way you deal with yourself. Do you have the capacity to be comfortable with your own emotional experience?

It’s important to be comfortable being yourself with yourself. Because if you are constantly resisting and fighting feeling your own emotions, there’s no way you’ll feel comfortable expressing them to your partner.

Once you can get to a place where you recognize and accept the way you’re feeling, you can share it comfortably with someone else. But that’s the kicker—you have to accept your feelings, without judgment, and be cool with whatever they are. Then, you’ll be less likely to tolerate someone who won’t.

So, can you do that? Can you own whatever you feel and be with it? If not, then it’s unfair to ask your partner to be with you if you can’t be with you.

Emotional Safety Creates Strength in Relationships

Once you’re able to be comfortable with your own emotions, you’ll be more prepared to determine your emotional security in any partnership and ensure you’re fostering that environment on your side. When you are both in a place where you feel emotionally safe—you can let down your guard and be yourselves—anything is possible.

To help you determine where you are in your relationship, take this free quiz.
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Photo Credit: Milan Popovic – Unsplash

What Are the Two Main Insecure Attachment Styles?

Relationships are complicated—but they’re not impossible to navigate with some effort. When you and your partner take the time to learn about yourselves and each other, it can make a world of difference in the way you relate to and communicate with each other.

One of the things you can study and learn about is our attachment styles—the relational blueprint that we learned growing up. It’s essentially the template for the way we approach relationships in our adult lives. Many of us don’t have too much specific memory of that, but it’s hardwired into us by our caregivers and our experiences with them.

There are a few categories of attachment styles, but here are the two main insecure types. First, let’s take a look at exactly what “insecure attachment” means.

What Is Insecure Attachment?

Having an insecure attachment style means that you feel insecure in some way in your relationship. Insecure relationships are characterized by anxiety, a lack of trust, and a lot of fighting or distance. Maybe you worry that your partner is going to abandon you; maybe you’re afraid they will judge you, condemn you, or be unaccepting of you; maybe you feel like they might suffocate you and take over your space or try to control you. Whatever the cause for anxiety, it comes from the way you attached to your primary caregivers growing up.

Here’s a quick video about insecure attachment styles:

Insecure Ambivalent

Psychotherapist Stan Tatkin categorizes the insecure ambivalent attachment style as the “wave,” because it can be very up and down. Waves tend to feel lots of emotions and maybe express themselves quite a bit.

The insecure ambivalent “wave” style comes from a history of inconsistent attachments as a child. That could mean that maybe a parent was physically there only part of the time and you never knew whether you could count on them. You probably felt anxious when they weren’t around. It could also mean that maybe the parent or caregiver wasn’t always emotionally available to be there for you and you probably felt rejected by them. What made it confusing was that they were there some of the time too.

In your adult relationships, you probably feel anxiety when your partner withdraws—maybe you feel somewhat needy or helpless when that happens.

Insecure Avoidant

Insecure avoidant, or in Dr. Tatkin’s terms, an “island,” is someone who grew up in a family that didn’t place a lot of emphasis or value on relationships in general. Your caregivers probably didn’t take a lot of time and effort to build a relationship with you, and you were on your own quite a bit. As a result, you learned self-preservation as opposed to relying on others.

In this environment, you learned that relationships weren’t going to help meet your needs, so you withdrew to deal with stress and issues on your own. You probably told yourself that you couldn’t rely on anyone else and that you could only trust yourself.

This can get complicated because in adult relationships, you typically end up with a wave, an insecure ambivalent. They just want a connection with you, but your style is to withdraw because that’s what you’ve always done. You might even get irritated with them when they approach you, but it makes you anxious because you don’t feel you can rely on them. That leads you to avoid the one thing that would actually lead to connection with your partner—talking and working through the issue. Since you haven’t yet experienced a relationship where you can rely on someone, it can feel scary (or annoying) to you when your partner asks you to.

Take a Risk

If you identify with either insecure attachment style, you might feel like it’s just easier to be single. But most of us would rather have a partner in life, to experience connection and to be known. When you take the risk of allowing the other person to know you and face them to work through issues (or give them a little space if they withdraw), it leads to a fulfilling and secure relationship. Don’t get me wrong—it’s going to take some work. But once you know how you’re wired, you can be sensitive to your partner’s style and learn how to communicate and be a team by balancing each other out.

If you’re in a relationship with a man who withdraws, check out this free training for three secrets to pull him back.

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Photo Credit: Everton Vila – Unsplash

Attachment Styles and Romantic Relationships

No intimate partnership is free of problems—they’re unavoidable. In fact, any relationship is subject to issues, but it’s even more noticeable in your closest partnership since that’s where you spend most of your time.

It’s completely normal to go through the “honeymoon phase”—however short or long that may be—and suddenly you start to see some patterns emerging in your partner that you hadn’t seen before. This may be the point you wonder whether you know the person at all, or they may wonder the same about you—but all of this is normal as well. Essentially, it all has to do with attachment styles and the way you were raised. What are attachment styles and what do they have to do with your adult romantic relationships?

Childhood Shapes Your Life

There are a few different ways to categorize attachment styles, but first, it’s important to remember that everyone experienced some type of relational challenges in their childhood. No one is perfect, so you can expect to look at yourself, your past, and your partner and see some type of issue because we’re all human.

And partnering with someone as an adult will wake up past issues that you maybe thought you left behind, but they’re still there because they were engrained into you. If you spent a minimum of 18 years with your parents or other caregivers, that’s quite a long time to learn from them and adopt what I call the “relational blueprint”—the foundation for any relationships in your life from that point forward.

With that in mind, understanding attachment styles is key because it will benefit you in relation to your own behavior and emotions as well as in your relationships.

Here’s a short video on attachment styles and relationships:

Attachment Styles: Seek and Avoid

To break it down as simply as possible, there are two main insecure attachment styles: the type who seek and the type who avoid. Seekers would be someone who, as a kid, would go to a parent or even a sibling in times of difficulty to talk or work through a problem. A person who seeks probably experienced a childhood where family relationships were sometimes good and sometimes bad.

Avoiders would be someone who avoids when under stress because they felt that their relationships were not supportive. Maybe the parent or sibling didn’t want to deal with things or left the child alone to figure stuff out, so that person learned that “going it alone” was the best thing to do.

Attachment Styles: Islands, Anchors, and Waves

Psychotherapist, relationship expert, and author Stan Tatkin has created his own categories for attachment styles, and he discusses three main types:

Islands, which are the avoiders and like to be left alone. Islands process emotions internally and tend to find ways to self-soothe rather than asking for help from others.
Anchors, which are the seekers who look for justice and fairness—most likely because that’s what they experienced in family relationships growing up. Anchors are skilled at tuning in to the other person’s tone and expression.
Waves, which are in between islands and anchors. Waves may have experienced inconsistent attachments in childhood, varying from neglect or complacency to focused attention at times. Waves tend to rely on others for help when they need soothing.

Attachment in Adult Relationships

Being able to categorize your own attachment style and your partner’s can go a long way in your relationship. It can help you understand behavior and the reasons behind actions rather than judging your partner or writing them off as either too needy/clingy or too withdrawn.

So, the best way to avoid more sabotaging behaviors? Understand your attachment style. Even better news is, once you understand attachment styles, you can create a secure attachment together in a relationship when you’re both willing to work on yourselves and your styles. Learning and effort in this area will help set you up for a successful relationship and give you a strong relational foundation to build upon.

If you’d like to learn three keys to communication and conflict, check out this free training.

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Photo Credit: Kelly Sikkema – Unsplash

The Biggest Tips For Long Distance Couples

Did you know that 1-in-10 marriages start from a long distance relationship? It’s true.

There are many struggles that come with long distance relationships. Navigating professional lives, social and personal schedules, scheduling conflicts with time-zone differences, and the inability to connect physically on a regular basis. Combined with collaboration issues, jealousy, insecurity, it’s honestly quite shocking how 1-in-10 long distance relationships end up in marriage.

It sounds so difficult. So, how do people do it?

A while back I spoke with Connor and Vienna, a couple in a successful long distance relationship, in a podcast about their long distance relationship.

Connor Beaton is the Founder of ManTalks, and Vienna Pharaon is a licensed Marriage & Family Therapist in New York. Together, they shared how setting expectations and being open to discussing hopes, dreams, agreements, disagreements and beyond openly is the biggest tip they could give to someone engaging in this type of relationship.

Setting Expectations

From the start of the relationship, it’s very important to set expectations with each other. Whether that be your engagement frequency, your hopes to one day live in the same city, or as simple as what you expect to get out of the relationship. Getting these things out on the table creates open communication which is the key to success in any kind of relationship.

Oftentimes there are covert expectations, that are sort-of unspoken expectations, that need to be voiced and heard in order to keep that open line of communication. We have these with friends, family, and our partners. If these “assumed” needs, or expectations, are not discussed directly then it can lead to let down and disconnect. We all know what happens when we assume, right?

Communication Styles & Needs

Communication needs vary from person to person. Some need a lot of attention and daily contact, while others need much less to feel happy and comfortable in their relationship. Discussing these needs openly properly sets the expectations and can eliminate frustration, let down, and conflicts.

Communication styles and approaches vary drastically from person to person. Introverts, extroverts, and all those in-between communicate very differently. Some rely on interactions with many others to feel complete, while others are content to only converse with their loved ones. Understanding these styles is very important when it comes to jealousy or feeling unwanted.

“Why is he always out with his friends and doesn’t want to Facetime with me on Friday nights?”

“Why does she always seem unavailable when I’m available? What is she doing?”

Again, being open and honest with communication is going to make for a much better relationship. Setting time for each other and understanding each person’s needs and wants makes for smooth sailing.

Putting voice to what you expect, or hope for, is important from the very beginning. Being able to do this without fear, judgement, or requiring too much, or too little, is very freeing. While this is especially important to long distance relationships, it’s really important in any relationship.

What are some of your tips for navigating a long-distance relationship? Drop a comment below.

Listen to the full podcast for more advice on long distance relationships.

How to Get What You Want in a Relationship

In life, you may not always be able to get what you want…but does that mean you should just give up trying to get what you want when it comes to relationships?

It can be easy to fall into the pattern of setting aside your needs, settling for less than what you truly want, and minimizing your desires in order to please your partner in a relationship. But where does that leave you?

It could leave you in a number of places, none of which are good. If you’re constantly behaving from a place of fear—fear that your partner might leave you, might yell at you, might belittle you—then you’re not being true to yourself and your needs or desires. If you feel like you are always dodging or walking on eggshells in order to avoid conflict, that still means you’re acting out of fear.

Truthfully, it is possible to get what you want in a relationship. There is one big thing you can do as well as a few things to avoid in order to reach a place where you’re getting what you want from a relationship.

If you feel you’re not currently getting what you want, starting with what not to do may help you understand where you are—and where to go from there.

How to Have a Mediocre Relationship

Chances are, no one has ever begun a relationship aiming for mediocrity. “I think I’ll enter this relationship to demean myself, stifle my voice, and diminish my needs,” said no one ever. So why would we allow ourselves to get to that place? Further, how do we find ourselves in that place to begin with?

The greatest way to get a relationship that consists of mere scraps is to deny your desires and change your behavior, interests, etc. based on what you believe your partner wants. In doing this, you compromise not only your needs, but your core as an individual.

You most likely know someone who’s a classic example of this. Maybe you have a friend whose personality seems to change based on the person they’re dating at the moment. You find yourself wondering when that person you’ve known for years decided to take up hunting, became a pro wrestling fan, or shifted from being someone who talked nonstop to someone who barely says three words to you. Typically, it’s easier to recognize in another person, although once you notice it, you may want to do some self-reflection, too.

Changing any aspect of your personality to conform to someone else’s is definitely the way to achieve mediocrity in a relationship. When you get down to the nitty-gritty, you’ll realize the reason you’re doing this is to avoid conflict with your partner.

Avoiding conflict and trying not to “rock the boat” aren’t necessarily bad things in themselves—until they cause you to compromise your voice and your needs. So how, then, do you get out of this cycle?

Telling the Truth Is Crucial

If you want a healthy two-way relationship where you both get what you want, the biggest thing you can do is tell the truth.

It seems simple, sure. But when you think about it, your partner can’t possibly know your needs, wants, feelings, etc. unless you are truthful about them. Stifling your thoughts and desires leads to unhappiness, but truth-telling leads to freedom.

Before you can tell your partner the truth, it’s imperative you tell yourself the truth. You might try to convince yourself you love skiing, for example, but if you truly don’t, it makes things worse for yourself and for the relationship if you’re dishonest about it.

Expressing yourself freely is vital to getting what you want, because you want to feel that your relationship is a safe place to do that. You want to be assured that you can speak your truth, even if it means getting upset, and have your partner stick by you and learn more about you from the experience. You want to feel comfortable sharing your innermost thoughts—and you want to know that your partner has a desire to discover how you tick and what it takes to help you share your truth.

Telling the truth about your feelings and thoughts needs to be mutual for both partners to be happy in a relationship. So remember to be truthful with yourself, be honest with your partner, and encourage your partner to do the same with you.

Here’s a short video on the subject:

Don’t Be Afraid to Ask for What You Want and Claim It

If you’re afraid to be vulnerable in your relationship, your partner will never know the real you. You’ll feel stifled, and your wants will become invalidated—but in this case, by you and not by your partner. Your partner can’t possibly fulfill your needs if they are unaware of them, now, can they?

Instead, let go of that fear. Recognize that you are an amazing person just as you are; it’s essential for you to believe that. When you speak truth and ask for what you want from a place of that belief, it changes the relationship dynamic.

Think about what you want in your relationship. It could be a deeper connection, more sex, a better conflict resolution process; your wants are unique to you. Don’t diminish them! Your desires and needs are valid and don’t belong on a shelf just to make your partner happy. Claim them—honestly—and communicate them to your partner. Ask your partner to meet you in that place.

After all, if you’re willing to meet your partner in that place as well, then you deserve to have that reciprocated.

It’s not too much to ask for what you want, so let go of that belief. Be truthful with yourself, claim your feelings, and share them honestly. It is possible to get what you want in a relationship.

For a look into working through differences and disagreements quickly in your relationship, sign up for a free training here.

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