124. Why am I the Only One Doing All of the Emotional Work?
Meet the Host
Five years ago, after achieving my degrees and teaching as a professor, I was feeling proud that I had checked everything off my life list. But, I wasn’t satisfied in my marriage.
Today, I’m a relationship coach on a mission to resurrect the side of you that got lost in your marriage. Millions of people around the world soak up my content for advice on how to have a more satisfying relationship.
If you feel like you’re the only one doing all of the emotional work in your relationship, your resentment is probably building. You can start to feel like the marriage therapist of your own marriage.
You feel unseen and unappreciated, because you’re the only one holding space for your relationship. You’re the only one initiating serious talks or remembering special celebrations.
If this is the case for you, I have three things I want you to do. These three things will help you and your partner understand each other better and work towards a stronger, more balanced relationship.
Click the link to listen, and let me know what you think - I’d love to hear from you!
If this episode hits home and you’re ready to work with me, book a call so we can chat. On the call, you’ll share what’s going on, what you’ve tried, and I’ll share how I can help. Can’t wait to connect!
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Episode Transcript:
Karina: Amigos, welcome back to the relationship reset with me, your host, Karina F. Daves, relationship expert, speaker, and podcast host of this dope podcast. Today's episode is called, Why Am I The Only One Doing All Of The Emotional Work?
Now, my promise is always to you that these episodes are under 30 minutes. I'm actually striving for 10 to 15 now because I know you got places to go, but you got things to fix. This episode is for you if you feel like you're doing all of the emotional work. Now, if your partner or people around you or maybe you're second guessing, am I really doing the all of the emotional work? Let me just paint a picture about what this looks like. When you are doing all of the emotional work in your marriage, you are monitoring the marriage a lot. You're the marriage monitor, right? You're looking at emotions. You're trying to check in. You're trying to see where people are, what their thoughts are. You're the one constantly resolving each other's conflict. You're like the marriage therapist of your own marriage. You are the person that remembers each other's emotional needs. You are the person that holds space in this relationship. You're the one that initiates a lot of the serious talks. You are the one that remembers all of the special celebrations. You are the one doing all of the emotional work. So you're not crazy, but this partner, ⁓ you, who's a sitting, or if this is your partner who feels this way, this is how they feel, okay? You feel like you are holding on to a lot of the doing, and you have very little opportunities to be and actually enjoy this relationship.
I had a client ⁓ that, hey were a couple. are a couple. They've actually been working with me for a year now. And when they came to me, they felt like, you know, the husband was very much in this place of like, I'm the only one that's bringing up the goals. And she was kind of like, I'm happy. I'm just writing this out. And he was like, no, we have a purpose. And he felt like he was always the one initiating a lot of the conversations. He was always the one that was trying to bring them closer. He felt like the marriage manager and it was difficult on them only to realize through our work together that it wasn't that his wife didn't want to do any of these things. It was more so actually that she didn't feel that she was good at any of these things. Through our time together, you see we uncovered that she actually had some resentment towards her husband about his reaction towards the times of when she did try to do the work. Of when she did try to initiate a new habit. Of when she did try to participate and something that he was trying to lead, she felt that her husband was a perfectionist and it was very difficult for her to show up and in essence pull her weight. And throughout time, she didn't realize that because of her fear and insecurity to show up at her own marriage, it was actually causing her husband to be resentful, but in essence, she also carried some resentment. Very interesting, right?
And so for you, what this looks like is you will tell yourself over time, I'm just better at these things than my partner. You they'll catch on and months or even years later, you're exhausted. Your cortisol level is through the roof. You know, you've either gained or lost a lot of weight. You've let yourself go, whatever it is.
Your empathy has turned into a great pool of resentment. You feel very unseen. You feel very unappreciated. You feel very disconnected. You most likely haven't had sex in weeks and you just don't know where this marriage is going.
And what ends up happening is that it's either going to take just one more thing to tip you over and to blow up or you at the place where you're considering leaving. And I understand.
So what I want you to do if you're at this stage where you feel like you're doing most of the emotional work and you're asking yourself, I don't even know why we're together. I don't even know how this is going to work. I want you to do these three things. Okay.
First thing I want you to do is I want you to name it out loud. Plenty of times with my clients, I teach them this mythology called, let the record show. So when we share something with our partners, we have to keep in mind of what our intention is. Is our intention to change their mind? Is our intention to relate? Is our intention to just let the record show? And so in this case for you, It's important that if you feel like you're doing most of the emotional work that you let the record show. And I don't want you to describe what you're feeling with shame on them. I want you to describe what you're feeling as if...trying to figure out how to describe this, but I want you to describe how you're feeling to your partner as if you were on the first date. As if they had the cleanest of the cleanest slates. Envision that for a second. Give them a clean slate. That's going to keep you from dumping on the shame.
Numero dos. At that point, it's important that you both decide that you need to rebalance a couple of things and reassign a couple of things that make you feel like you're doing a lot of the emotional work. And what that looks like is you could say, all right, listen, one of the things I do every every day is I check in with you. How are you doing? Do you mind setting a reminder? ⁓ Texting yourself, I text myself, you know what? If you're on YouTube, OK, and you're watching this, I'm just going to show you something. I don't know if you'll see the rest of my messages, but here you can see, see that that's me. I'm texting. I text myself all the time. OK, you could text yourself. Reminders, tell your partner or yourself if you're the one. Text yourself. Check in with my partner. One of the things my husband and I use we came up with is called check the weather. So we check the weather a lot.
And the third thing that you're going to do, which is the one you're going to hate the most, is you're going to allow space for imperfection. This isn't a formula that's going to give you microwave results. This is life. This is marriage. This is a commitment. You understand?
And if you're sitting there and you're saying, Karina, I am tired as F and I really need some guidance because I'm about to go for the jugular when it comes to this, because I can't take it anymore because I've tried and it's just not working. Then we need to work together. Okay. Go to link in my bio. I primarily live on Instagram and Tik Tok and book a call so we can talk about everything that's happened so far, what you tried and how I can help. ⁓ And we got to get this together. Okay.
So let me pray for you. Father God, I thank you so much for the many revelations that you allow us to have throughout our lives and in our relationships that are supposed to be ideally our mirror. I thank you for ⁓ the deep conviction and the deep moments that we have with our partners. Some of them we may not even see as deep. And I want you to know right now, if you're listening as I'm praying, that even the simplest moments with your partner are the deepest. Sometimes God, we ask for peace, we ask for resolution, we ask for answers, but peace comes in the form of opportunities for peace. Joy comes in the form of opportunities for joy. And so would you let us see this week what those opportunities are? Because sometimes I get confused. Help us out, God. We thank you so much. In your name we pray.
All right. Thank you guys so much for coming back for another episode of The Relationship Reset. My name is Karina F. Daves. I am a relationship expert, speaker and podcast host of this podcast. If you enjoy this podcast episode, make sure that you share it with all of your amigos. Comment here on either on YouTube or here on Apple Podcasts on Spotify, wherever you are listening or send me a DM and my handle Karina F as in Frank Daves. All right. Love you so much. Bye.
