Creating Love and Connection With Your Partner while Mothering Small Children.
When children enter the picture, relationships often shift to accommodate the demands of parenthood. Amidst the exhaustion, monotony, and mental load, the spark between partners can fade with feelings of frustration, anger, resentment, and distance emerging and creating distance within the relationship. This transition from lovers to housemates or partners to co-parents is a common struggle many of us face.
In a recent coaching session, a client shared her feeling of impending relationship breakdown. She had been struggling with her toddler’s behaviour, and in this instance, she had resorted to yelling at them. Her partner voiced his disagreement with her parenting, and an argument ensued. The disagreement escalated, resulting in accusations about parenting styles and, ultimately, both partners withdrawing into silence, blaming each other for the outcome. The increasing occurrence of these types of interactions had been leaving her feeling isolated and depressed, and she came to me questioning the viability of their relationship and her worthiness as a mother—a scenario familiar to many women I speak with.
So how can we create love and connection with our partner when every interaction ends up leaving us feeling disconnected?
The first step is curiosity. What is going on in the moment? What happened? How am I feeling about this?
Most of us would say yelling at your child does not align with the parent we want to be. When someone else remarks on our behaviour, we feel judged by the other person. We get angry at them for judging us, need to defend ourselves against their accusations, and an argument follows. But what is really happening is subconsciously, we feel a deep sense of shame for our behaviour and shame that we lost our self-control. We are judging ourselves for how we treated our toddler. If we didn’t feel this shame, we wouldn’t feel the need to defend ourselves. If we aren’t defending ourselves, we are able to be more open to creating connection through the shared experience of navigating these moments. You might ask your partner to take over for a while so that you can get a moment of respite. You might ask for their perspective on how to manage the situation differently. You might form a plan together for how to handle next time.
So, how do we stop feeling shame and guilt when we don’t get our parenting right? How do we stop judging ourselves and our partner? We offer ourselves self-compassion. We believe that we are always doing our best, and sometimes our physical, mental, or emotional capacity doesn’t allow us to be the person we want to be. We allow ourselves to be enough.
When you continually create these moments of connection with each other, you set the stage for your romantic relationship to thrive. When you are disconnected and blaming each other, naturally, your relationship will suffer.
If you are struggling in your relationship, life coaching can help you get the root cause of what is creating the problems. You will learn tools and strategies that you can take away and implement after the first session to initiate change, create a connection with your partner and feel the love again.
Alex Washington is a Certified Life Coach specialising in empowering women dealing with the multiple challenges of modern life, including stress, being overwhelmed, burnout, emotional regulation, work/life balance, health, and relationships.
Alex practices on Thursday afternoons at Beattie Street Health.
