Heart Versus Head
A podcast that helps couples fight better and connect again.
Heart Versus Head
What's In Your Backpack
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What are the things that you brought to your relationship? Do you have specific beliefs about what it means to be loved? Are there things your partner should "just know" that they should do to show that they love you? In this episode, Randy and Beverly discuss how our individual definitions of love are formed and why humans naturally (and wrongly) assume that everyone does it the same way. This time on Heart Versus Head, it's backpack cleaning time!
Heart Versus Head is a podcast about relationship styles and how those relationship styles influence communication in the most important relationships. The hosts - Randy Hampton and Beverly Craddock - are a married couple who are sought-after relationship coaches, award-winning authors and regular people who (like everyone in relationships) are just trying to stay connected through all the noise of life in the modern world. You can learn more about the couple and their work at HeartAndHeadCoaching.com, where you'll learn to fight better and connect again.
Welcome to Heart vs. Head, a podcast that helps couples communicate and fight better. Here are your hosts, Randi Hampton and Beverly Craddock.
SPEAKER_01:Today's podcast is interesting because it addresses some of those really crazy things that our partners do in the relationship. A lot of the time, these things come up once we've moved in together or been dating for a while, around the maybe two-year mark, possibly. There's
SPEAKER_02:a delay. Yeah. That their crazy comes out. That's what Beverly was saying in a nice way.
SPEAKER_01:When we meet our person and we go along life's journey together, what happens is we tend to go on that journey with a backpack of sorts. And this backpack is a bit of an analogy for all of the stuff that we either learned in childhood, maybe our siblings or school. And especially the stuff we learned and picked up from our past relationships. We get hurt. We learn different things from the relationships that we observe. Could even be our grandparents, aunts, uncles. And all of that stuff just gets loaded into our backpack. And then off we go. And we're holding hands, going down this journey in the relationship. And we each have a backpack. And that's why it's not necessarily unique to hearts and heads today. It's more about, well, what the heck do people bring in their backpack?
SPEAKER_02:What's in your backpack? We all have this stuff. And even if you grew up in what was the perfect childhood, which I don't know that that's out there, but- I
SPEAKER_01:had a lady who claimed she had a client who claimed she had the perfect childhood. This was many, many years ago. And I was stunned by that listened to her explanation and it truly sounded amazing. So my question was, well then, why are you here? And basically having that perfect childhood was traumatizing.
SPEAKER_02:Oh, there you
SPEAKER_01:have it. I just
SPEAKER_02:can't relate with all of my friends and their problems.
SPEAKER_01:Right, and her friends were jealous. So we actually did a session.
SPEAKER_02:Did a little work.
SPEAKER_01:So they're No one is free from this backpack.
SPEAKER_02:Even your lack of trauma could be traumatic.
SPEAKER_01:I want to break it down a little bit. One of the areas I'll pick on myself first, go first, and then I'll let you share a little bit. But the one that comes to mind personally is this list of things that I thought a partner should provide. And it wasn't until Randy and I got into a conflict around it where I had expected something from him and it didn't happen. He asked me, where does this come from? I would never heard about this. And I started to realize that I had a list in my head, a list that I wasn't even really that aware of until I started talking about it and going down the list and said, well, I guess it includes things like flowers for Valentine's Day, which we've talked about before, what I would expect from you on a birthday, consoling me when I'm crying, even if it has nothing to do with you. Just certain things that I grew up and because I was the youngest and my siblings were quite a bit older, I always had somebody who would take care of any need. And it was great, great as a kid.
SPEAKER_02:And there were how many of them?
SPEAKER_01:Children have a lot of needs. Right.
SPEAKER_02:Oh, don't worry. They grow up to have a lot of needs. But
SPEAKER_01:I had no idea that all of those needs would just be my expectation when I tucked away in that backpack and every partner that I was around, especially long-term partners, which I've only been married twice, but I did expect each partner to basically provide all of those
SPEAKER_02:things. Mm-hmm.
SPEAKER_01:And we wonder, why doesn't our partner do this? something around people pleasing. That one's real common. We see that a lot with clients. There can also be things where one partner comes in and like me, they have this huge list of things that they expect. They want to know why their partner isn't doing all these things. And we all kind of sit around scratching our head going, wow, I don't know. That's a really wild list.
SPEAKER_02:Who knew? Were they in the vows? Were we supposed to do that? It's funny what we grow up with, what we learn. I mean, and it is, you know, it is somewhat of the traumas that we carry too. I mean, I tell the story often of, you know, kind of my anxiety carrying around my anxious for things like when Beverly and I first got together, I remember we went to the store one time for something and Beverly was like, okay, you go over here. I'll get this. And she just like disappeared.
SPEAKER_01:I'll meet you at the checkout.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. And I'm like,
SPEAKER_01:okay. Where'd
SPEAKER_02:you go? And okay, what's your mom's name? Mom... Yeah, we don't know. We didn't even know. I didn't know my mom had a name. You were pretty little. Right. And so you're like, I don't know. So they get on the intercom, you know, they're like, Randy's mom, come to the customer service counter. Mom comes up there. She's like, oh my gosh, where'd you go? You wandered off. And I got a balloon. And
SPEAKER_01:so you got rewarded for that. I got a balloon. Yay.
SPEAKER_02:Yay
SPEAKER_01:me. They gave me a balloon
SPEAKER_02:because I was a nice kid. I have this at So Beverly does this to me in the grocery store when we're dating. She's like, okay, go. We were in a hurry. We kind of had to work through that. Beverly got to deal with the shit in my backpack. When we're in a relationship, all of a sudden, not only do we have all of our stuff, which we've become really used to dealing with or suppressing and not dealing with, and then we've got this person who brings out all their stuff too. Even not in the worst of lives because I would tell you I had a relatively good childhood. And then I would tell people years later stories about my childhood and they would go, oh my God, that's horrible. And in the book I wrote about anxiety, me six in the universe, it talks about, there's a chapter that talks about boiling frogs and how, when we grow up, maybe with this backpack, when we grow up, we get so used to it. There's this old wives tale, or maybe it It's true that if you put a frog in boiling water, the frog jumps out. If you put a frog in room temperature water and slowly boil the water, the frog will sit there and boil to death.
SPEAKER_01:It gets used to it.
SPEAKER_02:Right. We get used to the stuff in our backpack and then we're in a relationship and all of a sudden this person is bringing out something they're completely familiar with, comfortable with. All of a sudden we're like, whoa, because it's so
SPEAKER_01:Different.
SPEAKER_02:Different. And we don't know how to deal with our partner's backpack and all
SPEAKER_01:their stuff. In a hurry, it seemed like when we went to the store and we would divide and conquer. When I was a single mom with the kids, that was what we always did. We went into the store. This was before cell phones, so no way of calling or texting and asking what aisle you're on. We would just all run and get our stuff, and we'd meet at the checkout. And it always worked, and there was never any fear or nervousness about it. It was always just
SPEAKER_02:what
SPEAKER_01:we did. Heresy.
SPEAKER_02:It's ridiculous. It's crazy. Why would anybody shop that way? I understand. I understand. I get it. It is a faster way to conquer, to divide and conquer the store.
SPEAKER_01:So there's a lot of versions of this. Obviously, it's very unique and specific for people. So it's hard to really dive in and talk about things that maybe the listeners are going through. However, perhaps you could look at the relationship and wonder, that is kind of interesting. You know, my partner does this thing. I've heard in our couple's work, I've heard one partner say, why do you ignore me and just really be overly needy when it comes to attention? And I think that one rings a bell for me a little bit because, again, growing up and being the youngest and having all of that attention, it was real easy if I wanted attention as a kid, I could go to anyone and they were super excited. It was like I was the family puppy or something They always wanted to hang out with me. So it does seem kind of odd when my partner's sitting there and, you know, Randy will be on the computer watching
SPEAKER_02:cat videos. Okay. It's not, it's not cat videos, but
SPEAKER_01:anyway, they're
SPEAKER_02:about as useful as
SPEAKER_01:the cat video. That's our longstanding joke that Randy's always watching cat
SPEAKER_02:videos.
SPEAKER_01:I used to just start talking to him and then get upset if he wasn't present and looking at me and draw And it took some time and a few conversations with Randy to realize that maybe that wasn't the best way. I mean, that's the way I grew up, but that doesn't mean that my partner is going to do that, which is funny because in all of my other interactions, I would never do that. I would never expect a coworker or a best friend or someone else, a neighbor to drop everything and give me their attention. So it really is only in really intimate type relationships where we have that prior experience somewhere and we've tucked that away in the backpack and we expect that our partner will do what we, our background, what we're used to because wasn't everybody that way? Didn't everybody have that experience? It's what humans tend to do. You can especially tell that it's from childhood if we really think that everybody kind of does it. It's like a personal type thing. Children always look at things from a very personal standpoint. Another example I've heard clients talk about is, why don't you love me the right way? You just aren't doing it the right way.
SPEAKER_02:Okay. Yeah, I love clients when they say, love me different. Because I don't know what that means. We just do it in our way. And then we think that everybody does it the same way. And it it leads to so much miscommunication. Because if you assume that your partner feels and experiences the world in exactly the same way you do, it really builds a lot of resentment, disappointment, frustration when that partner is doing things differently. And it's pretty easy to sit back and go, oh, they're wrong. You're doing it the wrong way. No, they're doing it their way. And I get it if you're building a project or something that there may be a right way to do it. But we're talking about the complexities of humans and there's just not a right way. Now, that doesn't mean nobody's wrong in what they're doing or violence and emotional abuse. Those things don't belong in relationships. That's just true for everybody. But when it comes to how we experience love, what we see as loving, That's really different for people because some people will see love as attention, right? Beverly talked about getting attention. And so her brain says, if people love me, they pay attention to me. If they don't pay attention to me, they don't love me. And that's not exactly true. We all just kind of, we define it and see it so differently.
SPEAKER_01:There's a line that you use with me that we've talked about, which is Randy will say to me love me more love me more and that one strikes me is always confusing which is why we've had to talk about it because a heart loves 200 with all that i have and when he says love me more i i just don't have another ounce
SPEAKER_02:it's kind of become humorous but when i'm having a day or whatever beverly says what do you need from me i just say love me more and i don't mean i need I just need you to do something differently or exceed what you're doing. I just need you to keep doing what you naturally do, which is love me. So maybe that's where I got to love me more.
SPEAKER_01:I would drop the more because that just doesn't work
SPEAKER_02:for me. I can't say love me still.
SPEAKER_01:I like that one. Continue to love me.
SPEAKER_02:Carry on. You're doing
SPEAKER_01:great with loving me.
SPEAKER_02:It's easier to change your definition of it. loved me more. Know that that's what I mean when I say it. We define things like love a little bit differently, each of us, because it's not attention for other people. There's all kinds of ways that we can feel loved. Gary Chapman, a famous book, he talks about love languages. How do we experience and feel love? Well, those things come from our backpack. They come from how we learn to define being loved. If you grew up with a dad who worked far away and made a lot of money and would come home on the weekends and bring a gift, then when you're dating somebody and married to somebody years and years and years later, and you don't get the gift, your brain goes, that person doesn't love me because they don't bring me things. And that's not fair for that other partner.
SPEAKER_01:Hopefully we have stimulated some thoughts in your mind around perhaps your own types of backpack items or maybe your partner's items. Sometimes with heads, when they're in fix-it mode or rescue mode, that a lot of times that comes from maybe another partner. I know some middle children trying to please everyone. Sometimes these things come from a long time ago. Sometimes partners, maybe a heart would feel responsible for their partner's a emotions overly responsible, which is not our job to make other people happy. Some of the things that you might think about is a conversation, and it's always a delicate conversation. If one partner is perhaps overreacting or maybe underreacting, maybe they go silent, shut down. Maybe they are triggered by anything that sounds like criticism or disapproval. Those are things that likely come from somewhere in their past.
SPEAKER_02:Get out the flashlight and check out their backpack. Where's that come from? What's that belief? What's that feeling? And talk about those things because that's how you help your partner heal, not just who they are now, but all that junk that they've been carrying around in their backpack. You make their backpack lighter. You make your life easier because you're able to figure out what are you about?
SPEAKER_01:Even areas where trust and security, some people feel like they have to earn love. They have to be perfect or act a certain way. Those things are triggers. And sometimes people have issues with distance or being apart for a while, or maybe when their partner goes out with the boys or the girls. These are all areas for conversation, just wanting to understand your partner, maybe having a conversation around where these things come from. and how the values and the backgrounds are different for each of us. And once we can have just a real safe conversation around that, it can be a lot of enlightenment around those issues. We help a lot of individuals deal with their own baggage. It's something that is very common. We do see it a lot. And when a couple is triggering one another or they're in one of these cycles, we do recommend individual work so that They can look at their own backpack and decide, do I want to keep doing that? Does this serve me?
SPEAKER_02:Does this help me anymore?
SPEAKER_01:Right.
SPEAKER_02:Thanks, everybody. That's the pod for this week. We will talk to you next time, heart versus head.
UNKNOWN:Aloha.
SPEAKER_00:Thanks for listening to Heart vs Head. You can learn more at heartandheadcoaching.com and check out new podcast episodes every Wednesday. If you have a question for Randy and Beverly, send an email to info at heartandheadcoaching.com.
