#57 When Your Husband Isn't Concerned...But You Are

We talk about the tension of lying awake worried about our adult kids while our husband seems calm, and how that can make us feel alone and pressured. We reframe what his “lack of concern” may mean and practice a calmer way to respond so we can be peaceful, grounded, and present. 

• common differences in how mothers and fathers process concern 
• the meaning we attach to his calm and how it fuels loneliness 
• awareness versus urgency and why urgency creates tension 
• the trap of seeking validation so we can feel relief 
• overfunctioning and emotional burnout in motherhood 
• questions to uncover the fear underneath the worry 
• sharing concern with your husband without pressure or blame 
• releasing the belief that everything depends on us 
• choosing peace, staying present, and building connection to grow influence 

If you're a mom with adult children and you're looking to preserve and protect your peace, to feel grounded, to feel present, to deepen the connection that you have with your children and to grow your influence in their lives, then I just want to invite you to take a look at my free guide, the five things your adult child needs to hear from you. 
If you have any questions or would like to go deeper into this topic or how it affects you in your own life, you can find me at Sharon KCoaching.com. That's SharonKCoaching.com. 
If you've enjoyed listening, please subscribe and leave a review on your favorite platform. And feel free to share with anyone you think might benefit from what you've heard. 

https://subscribepage.io/The-Five-Things-Your-Adult-Child-Needs-to-Hear-From-You

Click the link below to set up a free discovery call to begin your transformation today.  Or email me @ smurph923.sm@gmail.com to find out more about how I can help.  

https://calendly.com/smurph923-sm/discovery-call

https://sharonkcoaching.com/

https://subscribepage.io/The-Five-Things-Your-Adult-Child-Needs-to-Hear-From-You

Transcript

The Lonely Feeling Of Worry

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Murphy, and I'm a certified life and mindset coach, and I help women who seek to be happy and holy. Each week I'll bring you tools and insights to help you on your journey to the heights. I'm so glad you're here. Have you ever found yourself lying awake at night thinking about one of your kids? You're worried about something that's happening or a decision they're making, maybe a direction they're heading in, and you know, you just can't sleep, and also you look over at your husband and he's sound asleep. He's completely at peace. He's not not concerned, and you're thinking to yourself, how are you not worried about this? Or maybe, you know, why am I the only one who's awake thinking about this? Well, today we're gonna be talking about what it feels like when you feel like you're carrying the concern all on your own, and it appears that your husband isn't. Well, I want to just say that before we dive in, I want to welcome you back. Thank you for joining me today. I'm gonna be talking a little bit about, I've been steering a lot of my conversations and my episodes about parenting, especially adult children. The way I'm moving into my coaching is I'm working specifically with women of adult children. Now, that doesn't mean that it's not going to touch everybody in every area of your life. So if you're somebody who is not a mom with adult kids, I just want you to know that this is all everything that I teach and I talk about is it applies to everybody of every walk of life, these tools and these techniques. You can find something in here that will help you. But I just wanted to mention that a lot of what I'm gonna be driving the content towards and what I'm gonna be speaking about is what I'm helping women with currently within my coaching practice. So if you notice that, that's why. Today I'm gonna be talking specifically about when your husband isn't concerned, but you are. Now I wanted to start off by saying that this dynamic is incredibly common in many marriages, especially with adult children where you have adult children. There's often a difference in how mothers and fathers respond. I don't know if you noticed this. I noticed this in my own marriage. When our kids were little, my husband and I agreed on most of the things. We, everything that was happening, we kind of had the same ideas and beliefs. And as our kids grew, we started to realize that we had different ideas about how they should be raised, what was right, what wasn't right, and the main things we were on the same page with. But some of the little more nuanced things, it became more apparent that we had different ideas, and likely because our parenting styles are what we've adopted from our own, our own families of origin, right? So this was definitely true for my husband and I. But I want to just also say that it's true that often, now I'm just generalizing here, but it's fairly accurate that mothers tend to carry more emotional awareness. We have more relational sensitivity, and we are more aware and concerned about subtle shifts. That's just part of our nature as women, right? We're nurturers. This is why we're mothers. And fathers, not to diminish what they do, they often are more detached. They trust independence. They kind of have a let's play it out, relax, everything's okay here, kind of mindset. Again, I'm just making generalizations here, so maybe if this doesn't apply to you and your husband, but that's that's fairly common. And neither one of these approaches is wrong, but it can cause you as a woman, as a mother, to feel very lonely, and the one who feels like you're caring at all. And the reason that you can sometimes feel very lonely is because the inner dialogue that you have going on in your mind can sound something like, I'm the only one who sees this. I'm the only one who cares enough. And if I don't do something, no one will, right? And that creates pressure. Now, I just want to point out that it's pressure, not just concern, but also pressure. And that's where you start to carry the emotional weight, because there isn't that kind of emotional weight when it's just concern. What matters here, because this is where it gets heavier, is that it's not just that he's not concerned, it's what we make that mean. We have a feeling that he's not concerned, and then we start to attach meaning to that, and we think he doesn't care, he's not paying attention, or I'm all alone in this. But often his lack of visible concern actually just means something really different. I mean, it can mean it can mean different things, but it it could mean that he just trusts that your child's ability to figure things out is is greater than your ability or your trust, right? It might mean that he just processes emotions differently than you do, which is very likely. Or it might just mean that he doesn't internalize things in the same way that you do. So instead of he doesn't care, it might just be he cares differently than I do. And different doesn't mean disconnected, it just means he's he's wired differently, and as men they often are. Now, women, we have a strong sense of emotional awareness. That's just part of our our DNA, and that's why we're called to be mothers. Again, that's that's the way God created us. We tend to notice tone, we notice when there's a disconnect or distance, we notice subtle changes that our husbands often don't. But when we notice these these things, what happens, there's an awareness and it quickly can turn into urgency for us. If we notice something feels off, it can turn into I need to fix this, I need to address this, I need to do something. Whereas your husband, on the other hand, may experience, or if he notices it at all, he may something feel off. Let's give it some time. And so here's the key awareness is helpful, but urgency seldom is helpful. That creates tension. So when you start to feel anxious, your brain wants relief. And one of the ways that it tries to get relief is by pulling others into the same level as cons of concern. Did you ever notice that? When you start to feel anxious and you're experiencing something, you share this with someone, especially our our our partners, our spouses. And when they don't react like we do, we we get upset. Like, why are you not aware of this? Why are you not noticing this? And so you notice yourself bringing it up multiple times and you try and explain why it matters. You start to feel frustrated because he doesn't match your concern. But here's the truth the peace that we're trying to find, right? We're trying to calm ourselves. It cannot depend on someone else agreeing with our level of concern. And we do this as women, this is why we a lot of times we'll call up a girlfriend and we'll start to explain it. And very often they will jump on board and say, Yeah, I understand. They don't necessarily calm us because that person can't help us in the situation, especially with our kids. But they affirm that we're okay for being concerned. When we're in these situations and we start to feel alone in our concern, what typically happens is we start to overfunction. We start to think about it constantly, we reach out to our child, maybe more than we normally would. We try to manage the situation more closely, and we start to carry the emotional weight for everyone. But that overfunctioning is not healthy and it doesn't help us in that situation. We start to get, we start to get burnt out. When we start to do more than our share emotionally over the long term, and it doesn't fix the situations, it just exhausts us and we have burnout. When we start to fall into those patterns over the long period of time, it just wears us out. So this is where we're called to do some work. So instead of focusing on, you know, what should I be doing here? How should how do I fix this? That's when I'm inviting you to just stop and turn inward and ask, what am I afraid might be happening here? What am I believing about my role as a mother right now? Or why does this feel so heavy to me? Right? Just kind of break it down, unpack it a little bit. Because when we start to get in those anxious states, we lose all sense of reason and everything just starts to pile up. So it's just slowing down and focusing on what am I really believing here? What am I thinking this is happening? We can start to just narrow down what we're focusing on. And often what's underneath those concerns is, as I talked about in the past episode just recently, was fear. Fear of failure, fear of losing connection with our children, or fear of regret. Fear of regret. And so this is where I'm going to call us back to again as mothers to find peace. We know how to do this, right? We have to get control of our thoughts, our mindsets, we have to work on ourselves because the peace is foundational. And I want to just touch on this. You don't need your husband to validate your concern in order to care deeply. You can trust what you're noticing and you can feel concern without your husband needing to match that concern. You can care deeply without having to carry it all. When you do talk to your husband from that place, it can shift from urgency to just sharing instead of like, don't you think this is a problem? Why are you not responding? To just something as simple as like, I've been feeling, I've been noticing this and I'm concerned. I just want to share with you where I'm at. That statement alone is just I this is what I'm noticing, and I'm concerned, and I just want to share where I'm at on this. You're owning your part in it, and you're not expecting him to come in and agree with you so that you can feel like it's okay. And in that statement to your husband, you're also not putting him on a defensive position because he may not know how to respond to that. He doesn't feel pressured, right? You're not trying to convince him that he should be feeling or reacting differently. You're just connecting, you're sharing with him in a very matter-of-fact way. This is what I'm noticing. I'm feeling concerned about it, and I just want to share with you where I'm at. Now, sometimes there's an unspoken belief in this, and that belief is that if I don't stay on top of this, things will fall apart. But what happens is we start to put ourselves in a role that's not ours. We try and make ourselves God, and we do this often as mothers, and we don't realize it. We are not God in our child's life. We are their mother, and that's very different. We're not the Holy Spirit in their life. We got to remember that God is present in our child's journey. God is present in our husband's perspective, God is present in ways that we can't see. And it's not our role, it's not your role to carry everything, but rather to trust. So what does this look like in real life? Well, it's noticing when you're spiraling, when you start to get that anxiousness and you're you're looking to your spouse. And when you notice that you're frustrated because they're not reacting like you are, that's a good sign. And then it's just choosing not to bring it up again right away. If you notice it, we like I said, that anxiousness, we start to take over and we we quickly move into that overcontrolling kind of place. It's gently redirecting our thoughts. It's trying to identify and uncover where we're coming from and just giving yourself some space, just relaxing into the situation. If your husband isn't that concerned, no, I don't know your situation specifically. But if he's not that concerned, maybe it's okay to just let it rest for a time, maybe even just a few hours without going into overdrive. That doesn't mean you're ignoring the situation. It just means you're choosing not to live in a constant worry. And I want to stress there, you're choosing not to live. Because it's a choice. Remember that. So if this is something that you are noticing or you're experiencing in your own life, I just want to offer you this question. What would it look like in your life to care deeply and to be concerned without having to carry it all? Because you're not meant to carry all of your child's choices, their life, their decisions. It's our role as mothers to raise our children and to be there for them and to guide them. But we are not meant to carry the load and the responsibility of everything our child does or does not do in their life. We're also not meant to carry our husband's life or his responses or how he shows up. We can't do that. Even if we want to. And I don't know why we would. I think we think sometimes that's why, you know, of course, we know this when we get married, how often are we told we can't change our spouse? We think we can do those things, but we can't. We're not meant to carry that. And I mentioned this as carrying it because those are burdens, those are heavy burdens that we carry. Our child's life, our husband's life, his responses, those are not meant to carry ours to carry. We are responsible for our own emotions, and that should be manageable. We should that's what is ours to be responsible for. But when we're trying to carry our own emotions, in addition to our child's life, our child's emotions, our husband's life and his emotions, that's when it becomes too much. What you are called to as a mother is to be peaceful, to be grounded, and to be present. Those three things. You're called to be peaceful, grounded, and present. And if you can focus on those three things, that is where you will begin to grow in connection. You'll deepen connections with your child. And that's what we're looking for. And over time, the influence that we're wanting in our child's life, which is really where this whole episode started out with, right? We're concerned about something that's happening in our child's life, the decisions they're making, the path they're on, the things they're doing or not doing, what we want to do is to have more influence in those areas of their lives. And the proper way to do that is to start from peace, to be present to them, to work on the relationship, to deepen your connections, and naturally to move to a place of influence. If you're a mom with adult children and you're looking to preserve and protect your peace, to feel grounded, to feel present, to deepen the connection that you have with your children and to grow your influence in their lives, then I just want to invite you to take a look at my free guide, the five things your adult child needs to hear from you. There's five simple things that I believe every one of our adult children needs to hear from us. This is going to help deepen the connection that you have with your child, which is the foundation to growing your influence. So if you're interested, go ahead and grab that free guide. Share it with anyone that you might be interested in it. I'll leave a link in the show notes for you to go ahead and grab that. And until next time, onward and our board, my friends, to the heights. Thanks so much for listening today. If you have any questions or would like to go deeper into this topic or how it affects you in your own life, you can find me at Sharon KCoaching.com. That's Sharon the Letterk Coaching.com. If you've enjoyed listening, please subscribe and leave a review on your favorite platform. And feel free to share with anyone you think might benefit from what you've heard.