23- A Three-Phase Plan To Recover After A Relationship Ultimatum

Ultimatums are an attempt to send you a warning signal: fight this last fight for our relationship

This is what you need to do:
1) get your internal bearings. Don’t suppress your defensiveness, need to explain or fix it tendencies. But metabolize those reactions so they don’t leak out sideways and cause you to withdraw and her to be even more distrusting.
2) don’t collapse either. Don’t go into your victim mode or silent mode.
3) feel your feelings. Discharge your anger in healthy ways, like talking to a professional (me!) that is trained to not teach you a feminized version of masculinity.
4) recognize the deeper layers of shame that might be coming up and don’t let that hijack your response. Work with the historical shame that comes way before your partner ever entered the picture. It’s the “I’m not good enough of a man” shame
5) deepen your familiarity with your home and the members of your home and see it as a living ecosystem. Start to take end to end responsibilities without prompting and appreciation from her. Be consistent. Work quietly, even when she corrects and re-does some of your work. Continue moving forward.
6) repair and take radical responsibility of the structural imbalance and the role you played in it. You were socialized to disengage and not recognize the mental load. Take responsibility for that and apologize specifically for the impact that your disengagement had on her
7) keep making small deposits. Ask her about her day without requiring her to respond. Take notice about what she cares about. Ask her about it.

I do this in my group coaching program and I walk step by step in teaching people how to do this. If this is you, go to this link: https://www.cedarandrain.org/breakwater 

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Transcript

Why Ultimatums Hit So Hard

1:15

Your partner gave you an ultimatum. Maybe it was explicit, maybe it was implicit. Maybe it was just a look that they gave around how they are not fighting with you anymore. And they went silent. They went quiet and they went internal. However it came, you got the message that something was different and it's. Probably gonna be over soon. And right now part of you wants to fix it fast and wants to apologize and promise and do better and do whatever makes her stop looking at you like that. And this is where I want you to pause and slow down because what you do in the next few weeks will either change your relationship or it won't. And the difference is not going to be an apology. It's gonna be something way harder. I work specifically with folks who are male identified and folks that are carrying relationship strain and tension in the household. A partner who is has a partner who is exhausted and done with being patient. So we found this video, something in the title really landed for you. This isn't about villainizing anyone making anyone feel bad. Not you, not your partner. What I wanna do is give you the full map, three phases, and this is what the situation's actually asking of you. Before I get into the phases I need you to give you one piece of context that changes everything. The ultimatum is not a threat, it is the last form of direct communication someone can give you. When all indirect communication has failed. Indirect and direct communication has failed. Think about what led to this moment. Think about how many times your partner probably tried to tell you something. And they probably tried to tell you that something was wrong. Maybe in words, maybe in actions, maybe through pulling away, maybe sometimes through passive aggressive remarks, maybe sometimes through blaming or attacking, and sometimes just straightforward asking you and hoping that you wouldn't forget. Fingers crossed somewhere in that history. Their voice didn't land. Not because you're a monster, but because you weren't built to receive it or you were too activated to hear it. Your life was full and it kept getting pulled, put off. The ultimatum is what happens when someone has run completely out of options. It means they haven't left you, but they're telling you that there's still something to fight for. So that's good news. And they need to know if you are willing to fight for, that's the context. Use it as a portal to notice and learn what is there left to fight for? What is it that you need to do to fix your part of how you contributed to the dysfunction? That's key to here. Like it's not just. Partner or you, but it's both of you that contributed to that dysfunction phase one. Called stabilization or the stabilized phase. It's the one that most people skip, which is why everything else falls apart. When you receive an ultimatum, your nervous system is going to go to one of these three directions. Some people go hot, defensive, angry. Explaining and trying to win the argument. Some people try to go cold, shut down, collapse, quiet, disappear in into their scrolling or into their work. Some guys go into performance mode, overcorrecting immediately doing everything for two weeks and then sliding back. None of those things are effective long term, and none of those things are you actually responding to it. Those are your. Reactive parts responding, and your partner could definitely tell the difference. Stabilizing means before you try to fix anything outside of yourself, you need to get your internal system online and stable and regulated enough to make conscious choices. Concretely, this looks like three things. First, slowing your response down, not in a passive way, but in a deliberate way, not like. Cool, calm and collected, like I'm going to be zen about it, but really intentionally noticing how you can slow down your breathing and pausing and not reacting right away. And this is not weakness. It's not being passive. It's not letting your partner walk all over you. This is you getting your thinking brain online before your mouth opens Second. Notice a part of you that wants that credit, there's gonna be a part of you that starts doing things differently and wants your partner to notice immediately, and that part's going to make this so much harder. Not because one acknowledgement is wrong. That's not wrong. It's human. But because your partner is not in a place to give it to you yet, and if you're doing the work for her response, you'll stop when the response doesn't come Third. Staying. The most important signal you can send right now is not a grand gesture. It's continued presence. You didn't leave. You're still here, and that is what is the most important, number two. Number two, the phase two is called change of conditions. This is where the real accountability lives. Here's something I really wanna invite you to sit with. When a partner reaches an ultimatum, the person carrying the mental load in that house has been carrying it for a long time by themselves. For the most part, the planning, the wor, the worrying, the invisible labor, the emotional labor that never shows up on a list that you can't actually hire out or outsource, but that load is helped by one person for long enough, and it produces exactly what you've been experiencing. The criticism, the test, the anger that seems disproportionate, that coldness, that is not a personality problem. That is what depletion and exhaustion looks like in a relationship. So changing the conditions means taking on a real durable share of the household, and from start to finish, not I'll do whatever you tell me to do, but that leaves the mental load still with your partner. You see what needs to happen, you figure out how you do it. You figure out the whole way through without being asked. Without being thanked, and that's something that is really difficult because it requires you to develop a kind of familiarity and depth in interaction that in your household, family wise, memberwise as well as you go wise, that you weren't. Ever taught to have or to do? You were male identified folks. Were not taught to notice things. We're not, you are not taught to track things, and that's a real deficit. And it's yours to close that deficit now because you're an adult making a choice about what kind of partner you wanna be. And here's a practical starting point. Pick three domains in the household that you'll completely. Own and not ask for help with. From the moment noticing needs to happen to the moment it's done. And when you do them every week without announcement. Here's the hard part. When they don't acknowledge it, they, your partner might sometimes criticize you and sometimes they might redo it after you, but you have to keep going. Because you're not doing it for the acknowledgement. You're doing it because it's right, and because consistency over time is the only currency that will eventually rebuild that trust. The third thing is. Enormously important and the timing really matters. Most guys wanna start here and skip the first two phases. Go straight to the connection, straight to the apology, straight to the intimacy, and doesn't land because nothing has actually changed. Reentry works when you have enough evidence, behavioral evidence, not verbal promises, and I'll do better speeches. The conditions that are actually shifting, that evidence builds slowly and it does not build from one conversation. What reentry looks like in practice is not baked. Romantic gestures, not flowers, not long apologies and conversations about the relationship, but it's small, low pressure bits, a question that's genuinely. Curious that shows you're curious about your partner's day. Stay in the room when it's uncomfortable instead of leaving, noticing something that matters to your partner and not mentioning it and mentioning it without an agenda attached. And so when she is sharp with you, or cutting or playing some attacking strategy or testing, you. She's probably done it for a while. Your protocol is that you acknowledge what she's feeling. You stay present and release the outcome. You don't defend yourself, you don't explain. You don't wait for her to soften before you do anything and whatever. And so there's acknowledge, connect, and release is your map for every hard moment. Acknowledge, connect, release, acknowledge, connect, release. And it sounds like this. If she throws a jabbing comment at you or she cuts your. Like confidence sound was this really patronizing, condescending thing that she says. You're gonna say, I hear that you're exhausted and I'm not going anywhere. I'm staying here and I'm committed to this moment. And then you mean it. When you're building, when you're building in this phase is not the relationship that you had. It's a different one. One where she could slowly, cautiously start to believe that you are actually different, and that takes time. There's no timeline that I can give you, but I could tell you that consistency built in phase two is what makes phase three possible. I wanna end with something honest. One person doing this work can shift this whole system. I've seen it happen. It happened with my partner. My partner was this person that came to me and said, Angela, I know you're exhausted, but I'm not going anywhere, Angela, ouch. That really hurt me and hurt my feelings, what you just told me, but I'm not going anywhere. Angela, I wanna take responsibility for X, Y, and z. And I wanna carry more of the mental load. This is where I'm gonna, I wanna start having conversations with you about that. And they kept consistently coming to me little by little, and that trust was slowly rebuilt. So what I also have to tell you is that if your partner's contempt has fully stepped in, let's say they hate you, it's not anger, it's not frustration. Like they full on hate and despise you. Your partner needs to do their own work for this to be fully repaired. This is like not fully in your control. What is in your control is who you become through this, whether or not this relationship makes it. The person on the other side of this work is a different person, a more present person, someone your kids will know in a way that might not have otherwise. And I'm not talking about being a doormat. I'm not saying. Be my punching bag. You could say whatever you want to me that you feel like it. You could discharge any anger or hatred that you want on me, you could do anything to me because I deserve it. That's not what I'm saying. And that is a different thing. That's being permissive. That's like not having boundaries. What I wanna invite you to is in this moment, the ultimatum is fresh. You don't know what to do next. You could be a person that's not a doormat. That's not really aggressive either, but also has like boundaries, but also is firm in being treated like a human being. Someone that's not gonna be like, okay, I'll do everything you need me to do to change, but you could really step in and do that work to repair, but also build some skills in to take more ownership of what you haven't been taking ownership with at home. Mental load wise, if this landed for you, share with other partners, people that you have solidarity with, and even share with your partner if you're the partner that's in deep contempt right now. I have a program that works with partners that are not sharing the mental load and have been delivered an ultimatum, but also I work with a person who's delivered the ultimatum. So any of those people are you, go and check my program out. I look forward to hearing questions and comments. Feel free to send them.