Heart Versus Head
A podcast that helps couples fight better and connect again.
Heart Versus Head
The Rope
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In this episode, Beverly tells the story of the time she reacted out of anger and frustration and did something terrible. The story leads to a discussion about addiction, disappointment, anger and hope. Is there a murderous twist to the story? What do you do when you reach the end of your rope?
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_02:Welcome to the Heart vs. Head podcast. Randi actually today is unknowing.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, good.
SPEAKER_02:what we're going to talk about. I have full confidence in him. I would be remiss if I didn't take this opportunity this week to acknowledge something that I went through. I think it would help a lot of hearts. What I'm talking about, first the story, what I'm talking about is my ex-husband died in 2019. And between his death the end of June and the funeral, and then his children and I spreading his ashes on the Fourth of July, this week has always had a little bit of a different meaning ever since his passing. Now, this is my ex-husband, and I don't know if you're new to the podcast. However, a brief history. This was a high school sweetheart. We dated seven years, got married, had a couple of kids. We were two hearts, people who make decisions around other people. We were married for about 13 years. During that time, his name was Mark, and he had an addiction. He had trouble with alcohol. I sought out some counseling. decided that I couldn't go any farther, divorced him, hoping that he would stop drinking. But yet he just continued down in a spiral until his death. I want to talk about something that happened during that 13 years. So the first half, I'd say six, seven, maybe even eight years was really terrific. You know, after we got married and things were pretty great, we had a couple of kids. Life was good. I did notice the drinking was picking up and eventually the drinking became the nail in the coffin, if you will. One of the things that happened during that time period, it was a time in our life where we went through a lot of fighting and counseling. He'd been through three treatment programs, extensive programs. One was even an entire year where he could not drink for a year, but then come out the following day and get plowed. So it was a very frustrating process. I often now in my coaching business tell clients that I fully understood what it's like to forgive somebody 70 times 7 which is a reference spiritual reference about how we are to forgive others when we first met high school sweethearts and for Christmas that year I bought him a climbing rope now he was a rock climber and I was not but it was something that I learned to share with him and really And the climbing rope brought tears to his eyes. He had never received such a generous gift. Climbing ropes were very expensive then. I spent all of my summer savings as a waitress for that climbing rope for him. As a heart, I just wanted to give him something meaningful. I loved him so much and obviously made a good choice. And so that climbing rope had a lot of good years. Then later in life, fast forward through children and the alcohol, the addiction getting worse. And there's this moment where toward the end of my time with him, my chapter with him, where I was kind of at the end of my rope. I had forgiven him so many times. and he had a climbing rope. This was not the same rope. It had been several years, but it was a pretty new rope that he had purchased. And I was so mad, I went over and I just took a knife and I cut the rope.
SPEAKER_01:Wow, look at you.
SPEAKER_02:Randy says that because it is
SPEAKER_01:so out of character for me. Totally out of character for Beverly. Totally out of character for hearts.
SPEAKER_02:So it's a big moment for me and not one I'm proud of at all.
SPEAKER_01:And the symbolism of it. of the climbing rope and just that this had been this great gift, not the same rope, but it'd been a great gift and it really was meaningful to you. And then when the relationship is going south, when things are bad, when the frustration is high, when the hurt is maxed out, you take it out on a climbing rope and it just, it makes so much sense, even though it seems completely irrational, which is heart. I mean, it is probably a heart thing.
SPEAKER_02:Sure. And I don't know that I even thought about all those things at the time. It was just pent up, built up anger and frustration to the point where I needed something to release that. And cutting that climbing rope felt pretty good.
SPEAKER_01:Felt pretty cathartic.
SPEAKER_02:Until I realized You know, after I did it.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, here comes all the other
SPEAKER_02:stuff. Go ahead. In the heat of the moment, it was great. Five minutes after, what have I done is the question in my mind. And I'm just kind of staring at it and, you know, all kinds of dilemmas of, oh, my gosh, I'm going to have to tell him. He's not going to be happy. This is not good. This is not like me. Yeah. My son had opened the garage door and he said, what are you doing? And I knew in that
SPEAKER_01:moment. Your son was probably what? Eight, nine years old about that time.
SPEAKER_02:And he knew I was up to something because I probably gave him the look of guilt. And he said, what's going on? And I said, nothing.
SPEAKER_01:Standing there with a knife and a bunch of cut rope.
SPEAKER_02:Which I'm sure the next day when Mark was sober, I'm sure he went and told his dad that I had cut his rope. But it
SPEAKER_01:wasn't for something. Several years. some of his climbing gear and stuff. And that then the kids ended up with. And so I'm sure it was in just the conversation about the climbing gear and all of those things. And it comes up that your son remembers that.
SPEAKER_02:Right. And he remembered it as mom cutting the climbing rope as though I was trying to kill my first husband.
SPEAKER_01:He remembers it as mom tried to kill dad, which it wasn't. And even if the rope was was too short or whatever. Mark was a skilled enough climber. He wasn't going to run into that problem. And quite frankly, I suspect Beverly's guilt would have kept him from going climbing with it anyways, because you would have jumped back in.
SPEAKER_02:But... And I guess what I go back to this story about is you can look at that story, and I'm sure listeners can poke at it and wonder, oh, I've been that mad at my partner, or what about forgiveness? What about frustration? What about the duality of even forgiving and frustration? And I guess one of the things I want to talk to hearts about is that is forgiveness is really never about excusing what someone's done or forgetting that. Sure, we all make mistakes. Things happen. People can apologize. We can forgive. But really, forgiveness is for you. Forgiveness is a way for you to release some of that frustration and knowing that you can even forgive and still be angry because sometimes things are just unfair and there's hurt and sometimes I think
SPEAKER_01:the way that I talk to my clients about forgiveness is kind of on an old Buddhist story. There's a story of the Buddha talking about something. He says, if a man gives you a gift and you do not accept the gift, who has the gift? And I think that we take on so much stuff from other people, including anger and things like that, and maybe we don't need to. And so I kind of look at forgiveness as that opportunity to say, okay, look, things are screwed up. you didn't act right. I didn't act right or whatever, but we don't forget about it. We don't do all that. We just, we're just not going to carry it anymore because it's too darn heavy. And so that's kind of my approach to forgiveness.
SPEAKER_02:And forgiveness can definitely, definitely be helpful. I think as a heart, one of the things that I struggled with is, and we've talked about on previous podcasts that hearts can forgive fairly easily and we can forgive and we can move on, and that's all well and good. It's 50-50 in a lot of respects, but it is a good quality to be able to forgive. The other thing, though, is that Mark would convince me that he was going to be successful the next time, that there was hope. And what I was really going through is something called false hope. So false hope is something that a person does when they convince themselves that this time will be different. Many times it's called false hope because we end up experiencing that same letdown. And even what can come with it is feeling really bad or even like self-blame. So the reason that I think hearts do this is because first of all, connection to a heart is our oxygen. And so it's easy for a heart to give extra chances to people because we What we really fear is being disconnected. We fear that more than even being hurt or let down again. I'd rather hold on rather than face the heartbreak of being done forever.
SPEAKER_01:It's an interesting concept because heads don't do it that way. We just, we draw a line and when somebody crosses the line, we go, okay, we're done. Does doing it that way for hearts keep hearts stuck sometimes in a bad relationship because they're too quick to forgive? No.
SPEAKER_02:I don't know. I think people are too
SPEAKER_01:unique to weigh in on that. And so there's definitely some balance that has to occur there. But yeah, I see the false hope because it's easy to believe the best in people when you are connected to them. When you're connected to somebody as a heart, you are able to go, oh, I see your potential.
SPEAKER_02:Right.
SPEAKER_01:Not I see who you are. I see that who you could be. Only a lot of times those people we head a lot of times aren't capable of the potential that hearts put on us on the relationship.
SPEAKER_02:That's a little bit unfair because I think that potential is potential. We all have potential. I might see different potential than you think your potential is. We could argue about potential. I think you
SPEAKER_01:could take the trash out. Right. And I think that is what happens eventually in relationships is when we're the same, we do go opposite for
SPEAKER_02:various reasons. In this case, we do go opposite for various reasons. Because the addiction caused him to be very weak and not show up, I had to be very strong and carry the family. I had to work harder, work longer, do more things around the
SPEAKER_01:house. I look at you as kinder and more compassionate and all the, and well, you are, but I mean, I think we look at the heart as this, this big loving thing from a head perspective. And I think hearts often look at the head and go, oh, well, that person is emotionally stoic. They're not affected by all the feelings that I'm affected by. Therefore they are strong and maybe strong at suppressing our emotions, but, but.
SPEAKER_02:Well, it still comes off as strong, you know, when you have a. If you have
SPEAKER_01:migraine, you'll see a client. I could
SPEAKER_02:never do that. I do see that potential. So I do lean that direction because I'm a heart. I think what would be better for hearts is, especially in this situation with addiction, it can be a very challenging issue to deal with. And I think it would be better to balance potential with reality. I think if I had the ability to sit down with him and say, well, give me some proof to give you that chance, proof that you can do it. can and will, that this will be different this time. Because otherwise, I was just kind of overriding, ignoring some of those red flags. I think some of it had to do with, I kept telling myself, if my husband had cancer, would I leave? Of course not. Oh, thank God. But here he had alcoholism, which some people refer to as like a disease.
SPEAKER_01:A disease, sure.
SPEAKER_02:Although it's difficult because you see him choosing to drink repeatedly. So I was caught up in that he has cancer. If he had cancer, I would stay. He has this. And is it fair to leave? Am I bailing?
SPEAKER_01:At some point, there were things in the relationship that said, no, it's better to go. There were moments, and you've talked about them to me, and the listeners certainly don't know, but there were things where it got a little physical. It wasn't an over-the-top kind of thing, but it certainly reached a point of not quite as safe as it should be, and that was part of an escalation of a growth of the disease of alcoholism in Mark's world. You got out, and you can sit and you can look back at all those things that happen and second-guess it all you want. As a head, I would go, that's a waste of energy. Don't bother. As a heart, that's not quite the way it works.
SPEAKER_02:I think that at the end of the day, I obviously did the right thing, especially now that I have the hindsight of knowing that he was going to continue down that path and eventually die from the autopsy said that multiple systems and organs failed due to alcohol. I guess what I'm hoping that hearts will learn from This podcast would be that you can love someone and you can also love yourself from the standpoint of protecting yourself. You can love someone and still say no. You can be kind to them and cheer them from a distance, but you can still walk away. And I think these are things that if I had known that way back then, so much younger then, then I feel like maybe that last chapter didn't have to go on for so long or so difficult. I wouldn't have maybe reached the point of that rope, the end of my rope.
SPEAKER_01:The end of your rope, metaphorically, and physically standing in the garage with a knife cutting it. I love that story. And that story actually came about recently. We had been watching Jenny and Georgia on Netflix, which is a fascinating series. And probably in the next few weeks, Beverly and I will do a podcast and we will break down some of Jenny and Georgia just because the relationship dynamics in some of that show are phenomenal, at least phenomenal to talk about. Doesn't make them healthy. And so that kind of came up as we looked at Georgia with her maybe murderous past. And so we were talking about that and the rope story came up. So I love the rope story. Beverly is very, very, very much not a cold-blooded killer. She's the most kind. She can't hurt animals. She can't step on bugs. She's just the nicest human being. Well, yeah, the
SPEAKER_02:conversation was, I was saying that I really could relate to Georgia, that there were so many instances, so many times where I felt that way. Her character was resonating so much with me, so much pain and frustration and-
SPEAKER_01:But
SPEAKER_02:then it was good at the end of that to say to Randy, but I never killed anyone. And then I went,
SPEAKER_01:well,
SPEAKER_02:there
SPEAKER_01:was this one time. Maybe I could have, had I not. Yeah. My son thought I did. Well, yeah. And certainly thought you were trying to. And had Mark gone climbing with the rope and something bad happened, ooh, maybe Beverly could. Oh, that would have been bad. All right. That's it for this time around. Beverly and the cutting the rope. We will, like I said, we'll talk about Jenny and Georgia a bit in a future episode soon. If you have not seen the series, maybe go watch a couple episodes. It's actually really, really kind of funny and interesting and kind of a, it's a pretty well-written show, but we'll chat about that some other time. And if you don't watch Jenny and Georgia, that's okay too. And you can skip that episode when we get to it.
SPEAKER_02:My last thing for hearts is don't give up on hope. Hope is extremely important in our life. Just balance it between between hope and reality.
SPEAKER_01:Reality.
SPEAKER_02:Taking care of your own self, too.
SPEAKER_01:Aloha. Thank you, everybody. We'll talk to you soon.
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.
