Once your eyes are opened, you see these truths everywhere. And as they hit home, you see more and more of what needs to change.
Another woman told me this:
“You clearly have a microphone in our car. Just a few weeks ago my husband and I left a work party where we’d had an argument, and on the way home we were discussing what had happened. He thought that I didn’t appreciate him and said I had embarrassed him in front of his colleagues. I hadn’t intended to do that at all, but he was really, really upset with me and I just didn’t understand it. I thought he was overreacting. Then literally two days later your blog came out about something that had happened with you and Jeff, where you were at a party and you’d accidentally embarrassed him in front of a crowd. Suddenly, I got it—I immediately understood. And I was able to apologize to my husband from a place of understanding for the hurt that I didn’t intend.”
Her husband’s hurt came because of that under-the-surface self-doubt that I mentioned earlier, and his sense that all of his colleagues now “saw” that his wife didn’t respect him. He thought, If my wife, the person who knows me best, doesn’t respect or appreciate me . . . why should they?
Suddenly, she got it. And she was mortified. She told him how much she did appreciate him—but realized, as the days went by, just how infrequently she showed it! And how often she seemed to signal the opposite, whether by teasing him in front of a group, or by contradicting him in front of the kids. She told me that from that “aha” moment on, it was as if she saw everything so much more clearly—and knew exactly how to change it.
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