A Message For Heads

While Heads will often focus on the emotional chaos of being in a relationship with a Heart partner, there's something important that can get missed beneath all that. In this episode, Randy tells the story of the moment he knew that Beverly was the perfect partner... at least, perfect for him. It's a short episode since Beverly is off island for the day but it's an important message about the real value of Hearts.

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.

Transcript

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Welcome to Heart vs. Head, a podcast that helps couples communicate and fight better. Here are your hosts, Randi Hampton and Beverly Craddock.

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Hey everybody, welcome to the podcast. It's Randy Beverly. How's this week off? She's traveling and off island. So you get me and this is really going to be a conversation that's intended... for the head partner. I wanna talk to heads because I think there's something that a lot of us miss when it comes to our relationship. And I know a lot of our listeners out there as we kind of track the demographics and stuff, there's a lot of hearts out there listening. So if you haven't convinced your head partner that maybe they need to listen to some of this, this might be just the podcast for you to help encourage them. I wanna tell you a story because it's been happening a lot lately with clients. We get clients that come in, heart clients, and they're so frustrated with the way that as hearts, they feel all of this emotion. Because for a lot of hearts, it becomes overwhelming, especially when in our relationship, the emotions get big. We get into conflict and we just feel really emotional and hearts tend to wrestle with that. And they often look at us heads and they go, oh, wow, I wish I was more like that. I wish I could control my feelings or I wish I could suppress those feelings. So I want to tell a story that's important, I think, for heads and hearts will hopefully get this too. It's a story about the moment that I realized I was going to be with Beverly forever. The moment I realized that I had found the most amazing person that I Not a perfect person, shh, don't tell her I said so, but an amazing person that was perfect for me. Beverly and I had been married for about 10 years when all of this happened. It's kind of funny to say, you know, it wasn't until 10 years in that I was aware that Beverly and I were going to be together forever, because that was always the plan. I didn't marry Beverly thinking it was some kind of short-term or medium-term thing. thing, it was always the intention to be together forever. However, as a head, we often beat ourselves up kind of internally wondering if we're worthy, a lot of those things. It took 10 years to figure out that even if I wasn't worthy, Beverly is a great big heart as somebody that's guided by her feelings and guided by caring about how other people feel and making decisions based on how it feels for her and how it feels for everybody around her, Beverly is a great big heart, was capable of accepting me even when I wasn't good enough. Let me tell you that story. Beverly's first husband was, well, Mark, was, from what I've heard, an amazing guy and really also a great big heart himself, and was just this incredible guy, but he had a challenge. He drank too much. Beverly's first husband, Mark, was an alcoholic, and he wrestled with it for years and years and years. Now, I had only met Mark twice in life. Once, when Beverly and I worked together many years ago, she was going through her divorce. I was still married to my first wife at the time, and Mark had come by the office, and I happened to chat with him just for a very short period of time, just a couple minutes, very surface-level conversation. Didn't think much of it. Years later, After Beverly and I had gotten married, Mark had come through town. We were living in Denver. He had driven through Denver and wanted to drop something off or whatever. So really had only met Mark in person twice. As much as everybody that knew Mark would tell you what a great guy he was, I didn't have that impression of Mark. The impression I had of Mark was the things that I knew from being around Beverly and the things that I knew from being around her kids. And I had never, in all the time that I was around Beverly and her kids, never seen a birthday card or a Christmas card or a phone call to say happy birthday or hey, I'm proud that you graduated or anything from Mark to his children. There was also not any child support. Beverly single-mommed as an amazing tough lady single mom to those kids and did it on her own. And so as the second husband coming onto the scene, my perception of Mark, fair or not, my perception of Mark was that's not a good guy. That's a guy that occasionally calls every once in a while and will talk to Beverly, but forgets to ask about his kids. And so I couldn't understand that. And so about five years ago, Beverly got a call one morning, we were at our office here in Honolulu and Beverly got a call. It was about nine o'clock in the morning and the call came from her son. Her son was living in Miami, Florida at the time, an adult. He is a pilot and he was living in Miami, Florida and he got a call from the coroner, the medical examiner in the county in which Mark lived. And the coroner told her son, I'm calling, I wrote, you know, we're going to inform you that your father is dead. Mark had died. Basically, years and years and years and years of drinking had just shut everything down. The coroner contacted Beverly's son because he was next of kin to determine, okay, what needs to happen now, what funeral home, what arrangements needed to be made, where the body needed to be sent and those kind of things and contacted Beverly's son. The challenge was Beverly's son, as an adult in his 30s at the time early 30s he didn't have a lot of contact with his dad for a lot of years and so he didn't know he didn't know what to do and there wasn't a lot of family mark's family had gotten a little bit burned out i think with the the years of of alcohol beverly's son called Beverly. So we're at the office, nine o'clock in the morning, Beverly gets a call from her son and he says, mom, dad's dead. Beverly, she and I were talking and we were trying to calm everybody down and kind of help the kids deal with this news because it's traumatic, you know, felt very bad for them. What an unresolved situation, a lot of stuff going on, of course. Tried to help make sure that they were okay. And then Beverly came into my office after about a half hour or so after everything had calmed down. And she came into my office and she said, I have to go. I have to go to Colorado. I have to go deal with this. Now, I'm going to tell you something that's probably, I don't, maybe this makes me a bad person. Maybe not. You can feel free to judge. My reaction in that moment as her husband maybe contained a bit of frustration, anger, jealousy, and a lot of different things. And she said, I have to go to Colorado and deal with deal with Mark. And I said, no, no, you don't. You don't. You can just pick up the phone, call the coroner, tell the guy, hey, we don't care. Throw him in a ditch. And I get it. I get it. That sounds horrible. Because as I tell it, I know it sounds horrible. But I've never claimed to be a perfect person, just a person trying to do better. And I said, we don't have to go. Just tell him we don't care. And my wife said, no, I need to go. And I said, well, Okay. And she did. She went to Colorado. Her kids met her there. We helped pay to cremate Mark. The kids took his ashes into the mountains, a place that he loved as a person, and they spread his ashes there. And I stayed in Honolulu. And there was this part of me that wanted to be upset about that because I thought, how can she still care for this guy after After everything he did to her, after all of these things, after the years of alcohol, the years of shouting and yelling and all of the things that go with drunkenness in a relationship, the divorce and raising kids on her own and having no support, no help. And how can she still care for this guy enough that she goes there? Because in my mind, there was part of me that said she cares for someone else. And that felt that. That felt strange to me. And then there was this other part of me that realized something in a moment. I realized that Beverly, as a heart, has an amazing capacity to care for people, to love people, regardless of the moments in their life where they're not necessarily the best people. She has an amazing capacity to love. And hearts do that. And I hear it from my clients so much recently about how hard that is and how exhausting it can be to just care so much because it hurts. And there's a lot of disappointment that can go along with that. But as a head in that moment, it was that moment that I realized Beverly was capable of great love. And as a person who's capable of great love, if she can love Mark, if she can love Mark after all that he did to her, I have a chance. I have a chance. She can love me even at my worst, even when I'm not my best person, even when I'm angry, even when I'm dealing with my own challenges and my own crap and my own not good enough in my mind. So that part of me that's always beat me up, that's always told me I wasn't good enough, suddenly realized I was. I was good enough for Beverly to love me. You see, heads, I tell you this story because I want you to understand that your heart partner has something magical. Your heart partner has a capacity to care in a way that you as a head don't. We don't And it's not that either of us is wrong. It's just that because hearts have so much emotion, they also have all the crazy. They have all the sad. They have all the angry. They have all the anxious and the lonely and all of those things. But they also have all the good emotions. They have all the love. And I realized in that moment that Beverly could love me regardless, regardless of who I was in the moment, of my bad moments. moments, she was still capable of loving me. And that, that was the moment I knew the value of what I had, truly knew the value of what I had. So heads, I know your partner is going to drive you crazy, and that's okay. I tell Beverly all the time that she's crazy, but she is exactly the kind of crazy I need, and she has a great capacity for love, and I need that. It's what I've always wanted in my life. So heads, you've got a partner that has something special, and they can love you exactly the way you always wanted somebody to, if you let them. Something to think about. Beverly will be back next week. Look forward to talking to you again on the podcast. Have a wonderful

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day. 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.