24- What If Your Anger Is A Smoke Signal

We name the bone deep exhaustion that comes from carrying the mental load alone and explain why anger can harden into contempt over time. We outline a three phase path to feel the grief underneath, shift the patterns that keep you stuck, and find repair without abandoning yourself. 
• recognising depletion as the driver behind criticism testing and hostility 
• distinguishing stuck dynamics from physical or emotional abuse and prioritising safety 
• understanding anger as a smoke signal and contempt as a protective wall 
• identifying grief as the feeling under resentment and why it needs space 
• noticing how overfunctioning and moving goalposts can lock the cycle 
• practicing accountability without blame by separating behavior from story 
• allowing tasks to be done differently while meeting a minimum standard of care 
• making repair through small daily moments rather than one big catharsis talk 
• facing the ceiling when a partner is unwilling to grow and choosing with open eyes 

If this resonated with you, sign up for my group coaching program for mental load owners called Glass Wing. 
If you want your partner to sign up for their program, forward them my video for non-mental load owners called Break water. 

Come follow me on instagram @MentalLoadCoach and subscribe to my newsletter here. 

Schedule a free consult with me for my group coaching programs:

1) If you are the primary mental load carrier, click here

2) if you are the partner of the mental load owner, click here

Transcript

Bone Deep Burnout And The Mental Load

1:15

If you found this video, I wanna start by saying, welcome the exhaustion you feel and have been caring for years now is bone deep and you've been doing it alone. Nobody sees it, and that is real. I'm not gonna talk you out of it. What I want to do in this video is to help you understand what has actually happened in your relationship, why you perhaps feel the way you do, and what it might look like to find your way through it. Is that something you wanna do? I wanna say something upfront. This video is not for every situation. There's something important I need to name early on, and I'll get to it in just a moment. But first, I want you to know that I see you. Maybe you've been the one holding everything together for years. The mental load, the schedules. The appointments, the school stuff, the forums, the grocery lists, the bills, the remembering, everything. And that's been. On you, and somewhere along the way you stopped just feeling tired. You started to feel angry, and then the anger got sharper and you found yourself saying things that you don't really even recognize. Being critical in ways that almost feel automatic and second nature, and you're maybe testing your partner. Watching to see if your partner will follow through and already knowing that he won't follow through, that he won't remember, that he won't do things the way that you both agreed on feeling something that if you're. Honest has started to feel less like frustration and more like hatred, contempt, and feeling ashamed of that because you love your kids and you know that your kids love your partner because you remember you used to be this light and caring and lovey-dovey person, and you don't wanna be this person that you are right now. And I wanna say something very clearly that shame is not useful here. What happened to you? Makes sense. And the path moving forward is not about becoming someone who feels less, it's about understanding what you are actually feeling. So you could choose into what you wanna do with it versus just automatically discharging. So before I go any further, I need to say something directly. I want you to hear that everything I'm gonna share in this video is for a specific kind of relationship, one where there is real imbalance and real disconnection and real patterns. That have built over time, but not for folks who have experienced physical or emotional abuse. If your partner controls your access to your money, your friendships, your freedom, that they publicly humiliate you, that they are critical towards you and isolate you and withhold resources from you, including your kids, that is abuse. Your partner demeans you, threatens you, isolates you. That's a pattern to work on, with a professional. And if you've been carrying the mental load, because he's made it clear explicitly that you will be punished if things weren't done a certain way. That is a reason to consult with a professional. The basic things that you need is support and safety and basic stability. And that doesn't happen. And if you start stirring the pot and start training things in a relationship that has abuse in it, then it will get worse. So I recommend that you don't listen to anything that I save. You're in an abusive relationship. Just shut this video off and get. Help a different kind of help. This is not the kind of help that you should receive. For everyone else where relationships are genuinely stuck and both people are in pain, but there's like physical and emotional safety, basic safety that's there. I don't mean like it feels safe, but you are not worried about your life being threatened or your basic resources being taken away from you. This is for you. So I wanna offer you a reframe, not to dismiss what you're feeling, but because I think it'll actually help what you are experiencing right now. The anger, the criticism, the contempt, and the testing, and a hostility. That's not who you are. That's what depletion. Looks like in a relationship when depletion is left unchecked, when depletion doesn't have support, when depletion doesn't have. With when depletions met with dismissiveness, that is what happens to a person who has been caring too much alone for too long, while the person who is supposed to be their partner didn't show up in a way that they needed Your anger makes complete sense, and it's every single bit of it. And here's the thing, I want you to sit with that anger started out as a message. And now it's become a wall. A wall called contempt, and the story you've built around who your partner is, what your partner's capable of, what he'll never be. That wall is now doing something to your anger that your anger never intended to do. Your anger was supposed to send a smoke signal that something needed to be changed. Your contempt is a wall that's put up that's. Insurmountable that keeps out the possibility of anything being different. That doesn't mean the wall is your fault. It means that it is your responsibility and it built itself. You didn't intend to build it. It just built itself to protect you. And if you want something to change, if some part of you still wants that, even a small part of the work is understanding what that wall is protecting. Asking whether it still needs to be there Underneath contempt slash hatred slash despising, your partner is grief. Not anger. Anger is not beneath that. It's grief. Grief about what you thought was gonna be grief about what you hoped your partner to show up for you in what fashion they showed up. They could show up for you and grief about how many times you reached out for them, but they weren't there. They, they didn't meet you and grief about the version that you've become. To, and had to put away in order to keep functioning that grief deserves to be felt. And it probably hasn't been because there's been no time, no space, and it's not necessarily really practical to hold your grief when you're so busy holding the mental load. And what's really tough is that when you're carrying the mental load, it could start to feel like you are doing everything right. Your partner's doing everything wrong in terms of the mental load distribution. That is really true. There's a huge imbalance about what people are carrying. An absence is real too, like your partner being absent, but something also tends to happen gradually over time. The person who's a mental load owner carrying everything starts to make it very hard for anyone else to do anything. Redoing things after they do them. Criticizing the method or giving incomplete instructions or moving the goalposts, once something is complete, the goalpost is moved. Needing it to be done a specific way, your way in order for it to count. I wanna be careful here because I know that how this can land. This is not about lowering your standards, it's not about tolerating genuinely. Terrible effort, but there's a real question worth sitting with. Is there a difference in your relationship between things that genuinely need to be done a certain way for safety, for the kids, for things that actually matter, and things that need to be done your way because it need to be done in a way that you had more control over the outcome and. Maybe it was done. That control was needed in order for you to feel less alone and unsupported. The question is not an accusation, it's an invitation because the answer to what's keeping your system locked is behind that question. And here's the painful truth, if your partner can't do it without being criticized. They will eventually stop trying to engage with a mental load, and if they stop trying, you have confirmation that everything you have already believed to be true. You already believe that he will not disengage, he will not engage. The cycle feeds itself. You are critical. He pulls away and you're the one exhausted at the center of it. So what does it actually look like to work? With this stuff. The first phase is the one people skip. It's let yourself feel what you actually feel, not the anger, which is a top layer, but the thing underneath. When did you stop believing they were gonna show up? Can you remember a specific moment or was it a slow burn? What did you think this life was gonna look like and when did you realize it wasn't gonna be the way that you hoped it would be? That's. Grief work. It's not about going back to reiterating every disappointment, but it's about acknowledging that something real was lost, that you didn't get the partnership that you hoped for, that you had to become someone that didn't, that you didn't plan for in order to keep everything from falling apart. You're allowed to be devastated by that. You're allowed to mourn it and it's. Actually really practical to mourn and to grieve what grief work does when you actually do. It's not just about. Thinking about it, intellectualizing it, it begins to loosen the hatred because hatred or contempt is a hardened form of grief. It's when you don't grieve, the grief turns into hatred, and that's what grief looks like when it has nowhere to go. It goes sideways. It goes to your partner in the form of hatred, snarky remarks, cutting remarks, condescending remarks controlling remarks. When you finally see the grief itself, the contempt doesn't have to do that job anymore of discharging it to your partner, and this is not the work you should do alone. If you have access to a coach like me or a therapist like me who works with a specifically or trusted person, you can reach out to them and. It's really helpful to do this with someone. It's really not easy to do this alone. Phase two is where the accountability lives, and that's what I wanna say before I say it. Accountability is not the same as. Blame. Blame says You, cause this accountability says you have a role to play in this, and that role is the only thing that's actually in your control. And here's what that pattern work looks like. The first piece is learning to sit and separate what your is actually doing from the story you have built about who he is. He is lazy, he's stupid, he's useless. That's a story. It's a story built from real observed events, real disappointments, real evidence, but still a story and stories close off the possibility of seeing something new. So what does he actually do? What does he actually not do or. You can get back to Observating observing behavior rather than seeing him as a fixed identity, you give yourself a chance to notice if anything is changing or to be curious about something. If. He responds. So the second piece is overfunctioning. This is the hardest one to look at is because overfunctioning feels like competence and it feels like responsibility. And in many ways both of those things. Has is a fixture in our identity, but overfunctioning prevents the other person from fully stepping in because the space is already filled. You already have it organized, you're already on top of it. Every time you redo something that your partner does, you communicate to them, I don't trust you to do this, and that communication receives enough times, produces exactly what you're trying to prevent, which is for them to step into more responsibility. And this is not about doing less and watching things fall apart. It's about being willing to let some things be done differently, even if it's not on your terms. That would still meet the minimum standard of care. That, and it's different than the way they, that you would do things. And it sometimes it means not stepping in, it's about letting the dishwasher be loaded in that way, about giving the instruction once to do something and then leaving him to do it or them to do it. Monitoring it without commentary, without redoing it. And that could feel really hard. I could speak for personal experience about that because my partner and I have very different way of doing things and. It was really uncomfortable at first to see him approach parenting, in a way that I wouldn't approach parenting or approach, like doing the laundry, the dishes a certain way, especially for the party of you that's been holding everything together for years. You're like, oh my gosh, he's doing something different and. It is bugging me out. And that part really needs that compassion that's been working so hard. It needs to be gently told, you don't have to do this alone anymore, even if that doesn't feel true yet. And the third piece is the, one of the most, the what with the most grief in it. It's tolerating your partners in completeness, not pretending that something. Not pretending that he is someone that he isn't. It's seeing him clearly, his actual limitations, his actual effort, his actual personhood without the story collapsing into, I hate I hate who he's become. He's useless, he's, incompetent. All this stuff. That's a different kind of seeing and it's possible, but it requires you to have enough of yourself back online that you no longer need the contempt. To protect you because that contempt is a wall that. It is a fortress that protects you. So phase three is what becomes possible when some of that grief has been felt, and some of that pattern has been examined. It's not a grand conversation about the relationship. It's not a moment of catharsis where everything's resolved and you vented and everything has been on the table. It's not that it's smaller than that, it's more like mundane and day to day, it's the first time you let. Your partner do something without commenting. It's the first time you notice something that they did right, and you let yourself acknowledge it internally, even if you don't say out loud, and repair is not becoming someone who feels less. It's about becoming someone who has more access to what you actually feel. It's about being vulnerable. It's about sharing your feelings. It's about sharing your belonging and your hopes, and sharing about the love that went underground'cause it was too painful without. Reciprocity and repair requires you to say out loud how you are holding yourself accountable to contributing and maintaining that dysfunction. And that's hard because you genuinely are the person that's been harmed by your partner's disengagement, but also at the same time contribute to. The harm you are not the only one that contributes to it, but repairs, acknowledging I have a part to play in it. And that's really hard because like you've suffered so much with holding that mental load all on your own. This roadmap works one person doing real internal work. But it has a, like a limit. And if your partner is genuinely not capable of. Meaning where you're at. If he's unwilling to grow, if the dynamic is like one sided, you will hit that ceiling and at that point, the most let you do for yourself is continue to grieve, and now you have more information to make a decision about your future with open eyes and the inner work that you do to hold yourself accountable, to look inside and grieve to. Notice the contempt. It's not lost. It's not wasted. It makes you someone different. Contempt and des despising, someone is not only protective, but it's a poison. It's a poison that you ingest and it really only hurts you. And so when you do this work of examining that contempt, it's who you become on the other side. Who's more pre someone? Who's more present, who's more grounded, who's lighter? Someone who knows yourself because you're like going back to who you were. Not like in a naive way, but someone who's like more unburdened. That's everything. That's like a big part of how magical this work is. So we made to the end of this video and something landed for you. I wanna leave you with one thing, the version that you are, that's angry, exhausted, contentious, hostile testing. Your partner. That's not who you are. You are someone who became res, like responsive and protective to someone who genuinely. Is in a rough position and has disengaged. So you deserve care and not judgment and that path to come back home to yourself, it's not about becoming less of a person, it's not becoming like a doormat. It's about getting access to more of who you actually are and how you actually feel what you actually want. And the more that you know what you want, the clear your decisions will be, so that pass is available to you. Whether or not your partner changes, it has nothing to do, whether about whether or not your partner does this work or not. It's available to you now, so if you want more support working in this reparative path, I work with folks. That are trying to do this work. And I have two separate lanes. I have a coaching lane for mental load owners and I have coaching lane for non-mental load owners. It's built for communities creating community for where you're at. So if this resonated with you, sign up for my group coaching program for mental load owners called Glass Wing. If you want your partner to sign up for their program, forward them my video for non-mental load owners called Break water.