Heart Versus Head
A podcast that helps couples fight better and connect again.
Heart Versus Head
Breaking Up
What's the key ingredient that will predict success in repairing or improving your relationship? In this episode, Randy and Beverly explain why both partners having a willingness to learn makes all the difference in the world. And they go on a crazy aside about how infidelity isn't what sinks most relationships.
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, Randy Hampton and Beverly Craddock.
SPEAKER_02:Hey everybody, it's Randy and Beverly. Welcome to the podcast Heart vs. Head podcast. Great to have you along. Happy that everybody's here. Beverly, we need to talk about something. It's probably time. We need to talk about breaking up. Not us. Talking in general. We want to help you out. We see it a lot. People that end up coming to us and saying, hey, I'm having some trouble with my relationship. How do I know? How do I know if it's worth it? keeping the relationship going or is it time to break up? So I thought we'd explore that a bit today, Beverly.
SPEAKER_01:It's not just people who are assessing whether to stay or go. I think breakups is worth talking about because when couples come in and the unfortunate thing is that by the time couples reach out for help, they're usually one foot out the door. When you think about the success of coaching, counseling marriage retreats, all of it, it's starting from a very limited... beginning. It's starting from a place where there's already been a lot of damage.
SPEAKER_02:Absolutely. Yeah. By the time most couples, now it's not all couples. Some couples will be like, hey, we're great. We're taking the next step. We're moving in. We're getting married, whatever. And we want to make sure that we stay great and continue to communicate. So we do see those couples. But by the time the other couples arrive, there's already some crap. There's already some stuff in their relationship that they need to We get asked all the time, what's your success rate? When you're starting with 80% of the people that walk through your door are already having conversations about breaking up, having conversations about, do we belong together? What happened? You're not the person I got into the relationship with, all of those things. So when 80% of your customers are walking through the door already headed for the exit, it can be tricky. We don't save all relationships. Some of them are at a place where they can't be. So what do you think makes the difference, Beverly? How do you draw that line? I kind of know how I do it in my mind, but how do we draw that line between knowing is a relationship worth working on or are you throwing energy away?
SPEAKER_01:I think it's always about having a willing partner. Sometimes we'll find that one partner, and I hate to pick on heads here, but sometimes heads will truly point to the heart as the problem because they're a logical thinker. They really don't think that they're causing the problems or that really it's the heart that needs the work. They're the emotional one. They're the one that's crazy.
SPEAKER_02:It's pretty common. We heads are so used to pushing the And controlling it, when we see a heart who doesn't do it that way, we think, oh, they're doing it wrong. It's easy, I think, for heads to look at their partner as crazy. In the same way that hearts often look at us heads as narcissists or without feelings, it's easy for a head to look at the heart partner and go, okay, they're nuts. And so really when we work with couples, we'll see that quite a bit where the heart partner feels like everything is their problem or is very overwhelmed and very emotional. And the head partner's just disconnected and kind of stands back and go, look what I'm dealing with, this crazy person. The reality is, in all the work that we've done with clients, I would tell you it's generally the head partner that's kind of the screwed up one. But that's really hard to understand, I think, at first. You got to kind of do the work and realize, wait a second, maybe I'm doing this wrong, trying to make everything about my head and logic and all of those things. And sometimes you just got to feel it. And it's not to say that heads are wrong. Nobody's wrong. We just do it the way we do it. But Beverly's right. Heads are the ones that always are like, I have nothing wrong with me. It's them. That heart partner, they're kind of crazy.
SPEAKER_01:What's interesting is that a lot of couples think that infidelity or affairs, cheating, would be the number one reason why couples would seek help or would break up. And What's interesting for us being on the other end and helping couples is that while we do have to look at the affair and the breakup in that way, we also take this lens of looking deeper because there is a reason before that, something that was happening that led to that cheating, to that affair. In fact, most listeners would probably be surprised that the most common common reason for a relationship breakup is actually poor communication. It's what underlies or makes every relationship worse. When partners struggle to express their needs, to communicate their expectation, to resolve that conflict, to feel heard or validated, and if we can't communicate, ultimately it's going to create that distance. And just that unresolved resentment. So couples will eventually start to feel as though they're roommates, that they just don't have any connection. Maybe the intimacy or sex has fallen off because of that. We also look at values or even goals that might change over time, so we grow apart. And there can be those continued fights, the unresolved conflict, the over and over frequent themes that we can't seem to get past where we're not even listening to one another anymore because it's the same fight over and over and over again and eventually we lose respect We don't appreciate that partner. Perhaps we feel like we're doing all the work. The weight is unequal. What we do is we really help couples to get to that underlying issue, that communication breakdown, and then to help them to create a different vision for their future.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, you're absolutely right that it's communication that's the key to this because we've helped a ton of couples that have been through infidelity. There are reasons behind it and there are things that happen when infidelity occurs. Ultimately, it does involve one thing. One thing is still necessary in order to help those clients and it doesn't guarantee that every relationship works, but ultimately, both partners have to want to. You've both got to be committed And I think if both partners are committed and willing to learn and willing to grow and willing to learn to communicate, willing to learn to be honest, then I think interventions like working with coaches or counseling can have their usefulness. It doesn't guarantee it. You can both be wanting to make the relationship work, and that in itself is not enough. But willing to learn... to communicate, willing to learn to be honest. And I say learn. It's not willing to communicate or willing to be honest. It's willing to learn to be honest for a lot of people. What we say is, oh, we want honesty and we want communication. And the person says, well, I'm being honest and I'm communicating. It isn't that they aren't. It isn't that they don't want to. It's they don't know how. And that is where the problem. So if you're both willing to learn, then you've got a chance. And I think that's what it takes. And willingness to learn is willingness to sometimes fail. Failure is how we learn. You've got to be willing to fail in your relationship. You've got to be willing to try to come forward and to talk about things and then realize, okay, that's not the way I need to talk to my partner about those things. There's better ways to do it. That willingness to learn does involve a willingness to fail, which involves maybe the willingness to be vulnerable, to put it out there in front of your partner and go, okay, here's my bad stuff. What we find more often than not is when partners are willing to do that, their partner's going to respond in a totally different way than they think their partner's going to respond. It's not all the criticism. It's not all the damage. The partner is able to go, okay, wait, I can help because I can help you with that. That's what I do. That's really where couples can have the biggest impact. And some relationships don't belong together. We wanted to specifically talk about these things. But if you are in a toxic relationship, if you are in a toxic relationship, if you are in a relationship where you're not growing, if you are in a relationship where your partner does not allow for your growth, if you're in a relationship where there's violence, there's a lot of reasons to get out of relationships. There are reasons to break up. There if those reasons exist, no amount of anybody can change it if somebody's not willing to change. And so that willingness to learn and grow and change is, I think, at the core of it. But there's relationships out there. And if you're in one of those where you feel discouraged and you're like, is this over? That's a great thing to actually talk to your partner about. That's a great place to start a conversation because you're now going to be able to learn what going on in their mind too.
SPEAKER_01:Sometimes I think couples get together and in the beginning, it's that dopamine filled phase of the relationship. When love is that drug, we're both hearts. And the problem with that is that that's not sustainable over a long period of time. So every couple will eventually go opposites. This is the heart and head theory. And when they do, that's where the problems come up. Now, it's not a problem that we're opposites. It's actually a very well-balanced way to be in a relationship. It's actually the strongest position. If we're two hearts or if we're two heads, we're going to struggle. Two heads are going to be that roommate, no passion. Two hearts are going to be so much passion that no one's working on the future. And the thing about opposites is that when we turn opposite, we no longer connect in that same way. We don't don't communicate the same way, that's where the breakdowns occur. And that's where couples struggle. And some couples will be married 40 years and never get past that phase two problem in decisions that all couples will eventually go through.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, it's a phase of the relationship, certainly, where you start making decisions from your core relationship style. You are in your relationship. You're acting in heart mode. You're acting in head mode and your partner's probably doing it the other way. And when you can learn it and really learn it, you've got a chance. You've got a chance when you can look at your partner and go, well, wait a second. That's why you do it. That's how you do it. That's how you do life. That's how you make those decisions. Couples get stuck in it because we see that other person and we're like, how can they be that way? How can they be different than they were when we got together? Back when all the dopamine was running high and everybody was high on the dopamine good feelings of falling in love, we're both hearts. And so it is that change along the way. Eventually, that other partner goes back into head mode. And Beverly's right. There's extremely strong balance in that. It's a great way to raise kids. It's a great way to live life. It's a great way to stay connected if you can learn that each of you has this strength. This power, this ability because of your relationship style, it's fabulous. But you better understand it because like Beverly said, there's couples that come in and they've been together for 40 years and they're still arguing about what partner A did 25 years ago. It can be sticky.
SPEAKER_01:So this last few minutes here that we have, I want to focus on an example. And the story that comes to mind is a couple that we saw a few years back. They have been married for maybe 35, 40 years. And unfortunately, there had been some infidelity. This couple came to us and right away, the first things they said is they had been to four or five different relationship therapists and and had fired them all. They were intrigued by our approach being very different, very alternative on purpose. So as we sat down and listened to this couple, what was interesting is He was the head, she the heart. However, because of his career, he was gone a lot, traveled. And so all those years with kids, she had to take on kind of a single mom. They were married, but she was running the household, doing all the things while he was traveling for work. And she became very headlight. So then over time, when he would come home and would miss her and have all these long months away, when he would come home, he would be in heart mode. So he was looking for love, connection, intimacy, and she was very much in head mode, very abrasive, sometimes could be viewed as critical, and was looking for respect and appreciation for all the work that she had done to keep the family together, to keep the house running. This is where the communication breakdown happened. This is where we had different needs that were not communicated.
SPEAKER_02:And this is where infidelity creeps in when the head partner comes home enough and goes, wait, I can't get that connection. I can't get that intimacy. Now they're not getting what they think they need in the relationship.
SPEAKER_01:It was a flipped couple is the way Randy and I refer to that, where they're coming in and she's appearing very, very head, he very heart. However, it doesn't take long because Randy and I've done this work many, many times, hundreds if not thousands of couples by now, and we could spot that this was a flipped couple. And so we explained to them what was really going on underneath the obvious, you know, kind of the forest for the trees, what they could not see in their relationship. So as we explained that, a lot of head nods, okay, they were pretty impressed. that we could drill into that within an hour. So then we did some coaching around that to kind of explain heart and head how they got where they got and why that was a problem, why that was going to create the environment that eventually led to the infidelity. So this couple came back. They were very excited about finally finding someone who could actually understand the dynamic. They came back for a second session. We worked on individual defenses, triggers, the things that really led to the flipping and not recognizing the different roles they were in. And by the third session, which if not familiar with our model, we usually see couples for about three sessions. We feel pretty good about turning things around fairly quickly. So by the third session, all smiles. And this couple was really happy because when we start to see some some change, some progress, we get very excited as humans. It's like a baby that is learning to go from crawling to walking. And if you watch a baby, they fall down a lot. It takes a lot of work. But before you know it, every failure leads to them learning to getting muscle memory. And eventually, that baby will stand and not only stand, but will very quickly go from standing to walking to running. And that's how humans are. We're very good at progressing once we get on the right path. And so this couple was very much like that. I think they came in for a fourth session because they really wanted to work on the future and going forward and making sure that they could maintain all that they had learned through the work that we did with them. One of the things about this couple and individually I really worked with the heart. She was the heart and had lost that heart through all of it, all those years. And when I really met with her individually, we were able to find that heart again.
SPEAKER_02:Super, super important that you settle into what's naturally your style in the relationship and understand it. If you're both willing to learn, you're both willing to work on it, the relationship's probably worth working on. If one partner's not, maybe it's not. Hopefully this gives you something to think about. That's Heart vs. Head for this week. Thanks for tuning into the podcast. Once again, we love seeing all of you around the world and where you're from and looking at the map and being kind of, I don't know, maybe like podcast nerdy about it. We're glad you're out there. If you have questions, if you have topics that you think you might want to hear our take on or our perspective on, drop us an email, info at heartandhead Thanks
SPEAKER_00: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.
