Part two of two. Last week was You Can’t Fix What You Can’t See, and the homework was to write down your markers. What your sinking looks like, feels like, sounds like, tastes like, smells like.
You sent them. Somebody picks up pine cones in the front yard. Somebody else knows they’re regressed when their teeth start hurting. Another one goes quiet, hides in YouTube, and loses interest in family and the whole messy business of life.
Every one of those is a person trying to get rid of a feeling.
This episode goes under the markers to the thing driving them. There’s a sentence already running when you go down, and you don’t arrive at it while you’re sinking. It’s preloaded. Corey’s is I’m in this alone, nobody cares. Pam’s is I’m never enough, with there’s never enough time riding alongside it.
Pam traces hers back twice. Once to being the kid in the remedial reading group who decided she’d never feel not-smart again. And once to the first fifteen or twenty years of their marriage, after Corey disclosed his porn use before the wedding, when she was certain she could never measure up to whatever she assumed he was thinking about.
Here’s the part that matters. Those sentences were accurate when they got written. That’s why they stuck. The problem is they’re a report on an old house, and your spouse is paying interest on a loan they never took out. So the question in the moment becomes whether it’s happening now, or whether you’re eight.
Also in this episode. Why “I’m regressed” said out loud works, and why it backfires if your spouse hears it as a call for rescue. Schnarch’s descending rule, which is settle yourself down, and if you can’t do that control your behavior, and if you can’t do that shut your mouth. Why you act better before you feel better instead of the other way around. Pam’s software iteration idea, where she’s on version sixteen but version one is still in there underneath. And the distinction that carries the back half of the show, which is clean pain and dirty pain. Anger festers. Sadness heals. Under most of the anger in a marriage is grief over the marriage you thought you were going to have, and that death isn’t the end of the marriage you’ve actually got.
Your homework. Last week we asked for your markers. This week we want your sentence. The one line already running under the surface before anything even happens. And where you first learned it.
feedback@sexymarriageradio.com or 214-702-9565.
Credit where it belongs. The trench, the depths, the ugly fish and the magic words come from Dr. David Schnarch’s unpublished manuscript Living at the Bottom of the Ocean. He calls it regression. Corey calls it sinking into the trench in Go First, out in January.
The post The Meaning Underneath #805 first appeared on SMR.
