Hey Julia Woods
Join me, Julia Woods, a couples coach and wife of over 3 decades, as I share some of my client's stories and my own so that you can be encouraged, inspired, and gain new results in your marriage.
Hey Julia Woods
3 Daily Drivers of Disconnection in Marriage
Marriage disconnection often stems from three powerful yet hidden forces: self-reliance, self-sufficiency, and self-absorption that create patterns of isolation within relationships.
• Self-reliance tricks us into thinking we must figure everything out alone
• Self-sufficiency creates the false belief that having needs is weakness
• Self-absorption naturally follows when we focus only on our own experiences
• Codependent family backgrounds often teach us it's unsafe to need others
• Daily FANOS exercise helps couples practice healthy interdependence (Feelings, Affirmation, Needs, Ownership, Struggle/Sobriety)
• Recovery from "independence addiction" requires vulnerability and confession
• Creating safe spaces to express needs transforms relationship dynamics
• Community support is essential for marriage growth and healing
• True connection emerges when we accept our design as relational beings
If you're looking for support on your marriage journey, join me for Breakthrough, my couples communication workshop.
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Welcome to hey Julia Woods podcast. I'm your host, julia Woods, founder of Beautiful Outcome, a coaching company focused on helping couples learn to see and understand each other, even in the most difficult conversations. On my podcast, I will share with you the real and raw of the messiness and amazingness of marriage. I'll share with you aspects of my relationship and the couples I coach in a way that you can see yourself and find the tools that you need to build the marriage you long for. Welcome to another episode of hey Julia Woods. I am so excited you are here and excited to share with you a topic you chose for today's episode, which is three daily drivers of disconnection in marriage. I recently asked on Instagram stories which of these three topics do you, as in my audience, most want to hear about, and there was a landslide of 67% of you wanted this topic slide of 67% of you wanted this topic. And that doesn't surprise me, because that is the biggest thing that my clients hire me for whether it be to join my community, to come to my marriage retreats or to have me coach them is. We feel disconnected as a couple and we long to feel connection. I know that that has been a deep, deep longing in my own marriage and something that I have been working at for 35 years, and what I can tell you is the connection my husband and I feel now in our marriage is a connection I've literally never known was possible. And what I didn't know, at the key, at the heart of what was blocking my merit, my connection in my marriage, is what I'm going to share with you today. So there are three daily drivers that we live in as human beings, and it is the society it's becoming more and more the societal norms. What I want to do with you in today's episode is I'm going to share with you these three drivers that I believe are going to surprise you. They surprised me and what those actually look like day to day. How are they different from each other? What do they actually look like? And then I'm going to give you an exercise at the end that will actually begin to help you move away from these three daily disconnectors into deeper connection as a couple. So hold on through the end, and that's what you will receive in this episode.
Speaker 1:So what I experience is the three daily drivers of disconnection are, first and foremost, self-reliance. There is a belief in our society, especially with women is that I am not to have needs. I need to rely on myself. I need to figure this out. I need to make this happen right. I am feeling disconnected in my marriage. I've got to figure this out. I've got to make this happen. It is up to me, and if I can't figure this out, if I can't fix this, something is wrong with me. Does that resonate for you? Are you functioning in self-reliance? How might that actually be getting in the way of the connection that you long for? I'm going to talk a little bit more about how that was impacting my marriage.
Speaker 1:The second daily driver of disconnection is self-sufficiency. Self-sufficiency I am supposed to have no needs. I am too messy, I am too much, or I'm too messy, I am too much or I'm not enough. So I am supposed to be sufficient in my own self. I should be everything I need. If I'm not enough, then that's a problem. If I'm too much, then that's a problem. I need to hone that back in. I need to rein that back in. I need to be able to meet all of my own needs.
Speaker 1:If I'm, you know, grieving, if I am sad, I need to put a mask on and pretend like I'm okay. I need to put a mask on and pretend like I'm okay. If I'm lonely, then I need to just deal with that and fix that on my own and pretend like I am deeply connected. If I am hurt or overwhelmed, you know I need to get it together. I need to appear strong to my spouse and the problem with believing I have no needs is I don't need my spouse. My spouse feels like I don't need them, and this is at the heart of disconnection. If my spouse doesn't feel I need them, then there really is no root system that calls us together.
Speaker 1:The third daily driver of disconnection is self-absorption that I actually believe life is all about me. Now I can tell you that self-reliance and self-sufficiency increases self-absorption, because the more I live in this world of relying only on myself and believing that it's all up to me to make my life happen and that I shouldn't have needs, the more self-absorbed I become. Life I become the primary focus of my life and all I think about is what I think, what I need, what I want and when a problem needs to be solved. I simply worry about what I think, what I need, what I want, and I'm not concerned with what my spouse thinks or wants or needs because, after all, I don't need them. I'm disregarding who they are and what they need, which continues to drive disconnection. Now, my husband and I had no idea how much we were doing this.
Speaker 1:In our marriage, we began to discover that we grew up in codependent homes and at the heart of codependency is it's unsafe to need someone else. It's unsafe to need the people that we were designed to need. Our caregivers began to communicate to us that what we thought, what we believed, what we wanted and what we needed didn't matter. That life was how they saw it Like in a, in a codependent home, in a dysfunctional home, you are learned, you are taught, you learn, um, through day-to-day interactions, that what you see going on in the relationships that you think might be off or feel unsafe or unhealthy, you're not to talk about what you feel.
Speaker 1:You're not to talk about right. You're told to dry it up. You're told to, um, you know, grow up. You're told to, uh, be strong and not let your emotions get the best of you. So you're taught to not feel what you feel and you're taught to not think what you think and definitely don't share what you see, what you feel or what you think, because your parents can't handle that. They want you to like them. They want you to like how they're doing things. They want you to affirm them and let them know that how they're doing is great and the moment you express otherwise, great.
Speaker 1:And the moment you express otherwise, then you are ostracized, you are in trouble and some of you might've seen this when you married into your spouse's family or you began dating your spouse's family, when you began to question why do they do it like that? Why do you do it like that? And they're like we just do, don't mention that, don't bring that up, that's not going to go well. Or maybe you found yourself saying something like well, can't we do it this way? And you learned quickly oh, we don't talk, they don't want to talk about those things. We're just supposed to go along with how they do it, because how they do it is the only way they're interested in doing it. So that was how it was for both my husband and I growing up, and we learned you don't talk about anything that is uncomfortable to talk about, and in that you learn to take care of yourself. You learn to take care of your own emotional um upheavals. If you're lonely then, you know, just keep pretending like you're not.
Speaker 1:And unknowingly, my husband and I came into marriage learning not to need each other. My husband grew up believing that he wasn't enough and that he wasn't reliable, you know, because he wasn't invited into doing day-to-day tasks, he wasn't invited into seeing that what he thought was valuable, what he thought mattered, and so he just learned to stay quiet and let the women in his life do everything. And he learned to be the trophy that they paraded around. And you know, it was an off, often a joke, that he was the show candy and that sounds crazy at this point in our relationship, but at one time that was funny. We laughed about that, that.
Speaker 1:And so, subconsciously, I learned not to rely on him. And that worked for me, because I learned that there was a right way and a wrong way to do everything and I thought that I had the right formula of how to parent, of how to run a household, of how to clean, of how to run our finances. Because, growing up as a child, I learned to be over-responsible, because I needed to take care of me, because my parents their drama between them was full and that was all they could focus on, and so we learned to be very self-sufficient growing up and learned to rely strictly on ourself to survive. And so I learned growing up I needed no one, and this is how my husband and I's life functioned. I complained a lot about how much I needed him to show up, but, behind the scenes, what I didn't want to admit to myself or him is I actually didn't want to need him because I was way too scared to need him, and my husband didn't want to need me because he was way too scared to need me, because I was emotional, and he learned that emotions were scary and women were too much.
Speaker 1:Because he was needed in ways that were unhealthy. He was needed in ways that were enmeshed and inappropriate for his age, as the women in his life had a lot of pain and suffering and didn't know how to be with their own emotions. So they went to him to meet the needs that their husbands weren't able to meet, and so it was challenging and we began to see a problem in our marriage was we didn't need each other and we didn't actually know how to need each other, and our marriage fell apart. The marriage of what we wanted fell apart, because the less we needed each other, the more disconnected we got, and the more disconnected we got, the easier it was to be self-reliant and self-sufficient and self-absorbed, and it led to addictions. It led to more and more not needing each other, and what we discovered was what we had in our marriage was not really much of a marriage at all, and we both began to do the deep work of what we were carrying, what patterns, what systems we set up in our childhood that we were carrying into this relationship with each other, and what we began to discover was heartbreaking.
Speaker 1:And what we began to discover was heartbreaking that we were deeply lonely, that we were deeply apathetic in our relationship with each other, and so this deep work led us to face a lot of things that were really really hard to face, and we needed a lot of help facing these things, getting really honest about our addictions, getting really honest about our self-absorption and how our self-reliance was driving us to live in apathy towards each other and towards relationship. I saw that my self-reliance was driving me to feel I needed to be superhuman, I needed to have it all together, I needed to act as though I could figure it all out, and I couldn't. And in that we began to face the deep, our deep need for others, for others that we were birthed crying out, needing someone, needing something far bigger than us, and out of pain and suffering, we had subconsciously learned to need no one, and so we began to realize that the future coming towards us was deep sorrow, deep loneliness and deep emptiness that neither one of us wanted, and we have been gradually working and learning how to need each other, and that has looked a lot of different ways. Other and that is looked a lot of different ways. It is looked like doing a lot of honest grieving about how we learned in the past to need no one and facing the truth as much as we can right, because we don't have our past. We have what we make up about our past, and so it has been hard to do the best that we can.
Speaker 1:One of the things that I have done is look at a timeline of my life based on pictures, based on what people have told me actually happened in my past, what my parents have told me of what happened and how they viewed me, and there has been a season of deep, deep grieving, confessing our addictions, confessing that I didn't want to need my husband confessing that I needed affirmation and was seeking affirmation outside of our marriage through my work and through I? Um, through approval, and my husband confessing his addictions and his way of getting self? Um, you know, getting his need for affirmation met in unhealthy ways outside of our marriage, and it has been deeply painful and deeply scary to decide to put the parts of ourself that we feared that others wouldn't like us, that our spouse wouldn't like us if they actually knew the depth of who we were, and deciding to risk it all and confess those things to each other, to each other, and then finding what it actually means to be who we were created to be and find our way to needing, risking and needing another human being in a way we'd never let ourselves need another human being. And we've done that and are doing that in a lot of different ways. A lot of it, like I said, we're getting help in learning what it actually means to need each other and we are carving out time for daily confession, to daily be honest with each other about the things we don't want the other person to know, to daily be honest with each other about the things we don't want the other person to know, to daily share with each other what we're really feeling, the scary things we're feeling, the things we don't want the other person to know. And there are different exercises that we are doing, that we are using different frameworks, the framework and the exercise. It's not the key, it's just a path. It's really about our heart and our willingness to give ourselves to this, to each other, in a way we've never given ourselves to anyone in our lives.
Speaker 1:One of the exercises that we use that I want to share with you. You can actually find it online. It's an acronym called FANOS and it stands for feelings, affirmation, needs, ownership and struggle or sobriety. And you know a lot of where my husband and I have found help and support is in the 12 step work, which is free. We have found ourselves and our need for other human beings in the circles that 12 steps offer. We were both raised by addicts, we were both raised in codependent homes, were both raised in codependent homes, and it is shocking, as we have discovered, how much the 12-step work is revealing elements of ourselves that we did not know were how we functioned in life and that other people saw the world the way that we saw the world and it led us all to really hurtful, painful relationships. And so FANOS is one of those acronyms that we have found that is common in the world of recovery and I wanted to share it with you today. So you just carve out time in your day and you'd walk through this acronym with your spouse, each of you sharing each of these letters that stand that make up the acronym FANOS.
Speaker 1:And so feelings is you share a feeling that you're experiencing with your partner. What are you feeling with as you interact with each other, as you interact in your day, what are the feelings that you feel? And we use the eight main emotions of hurt, sadness, loneliness, anger, fear, shame, guilt and glad Affirmation, acknowledging and appreciating something your partner has done for you in the last 24 hours. I know appreciation was something that my husband and I, in our recognition of this self-reliance, self-sufficiency, self-absorption, we began to realize how low our appreciation for each other actually was, and it's really been helpful to increase our appreciation for each other by daily affirming and acknowledging something that the other person has done for us that we really appreciate and want to acknowledge.
Speaker 1:The N stands for needs, expressing what you need from your partner in the next 24 hours. It might be emotional, it might be spiritual, it might be physical, it might be practical, but really letting yourself get curious. It has been a challenge to discover and be able to articulate something we actually need from the other person, and it's been very powerful to acknowledge that and then decide is that a need I can meet for you? Is that a need I'm willing to give myself to? And that's a big part of marriage is learning that no spouse ever is the perfect spouse. There's a grieving that comes along with accepting I'm married to a human being who is dark and light and got a lot of snakes in their garden and they're never gonna be able to meet all of my needs, and it's a big risk to share. Here's a need I have, and would you be willing to wrestle with whether you can meet that need?
Speaker 1:The O stands for ownership, and that is taking responsibility for something you've said or done that was hurtful or that was betrayal, in that you said you'd do something and you didn't do it. You broke a promise. Betrayal starts small, and when you're willing to daily take ownership for how you're breaking your promise or doing something that's painful to your spouse man, it begins to deal with things when they're small, so they don't grow into the big betrayals, into the big broken promises and broken commitments. And the S stands for struggle or sobriety. What is it that I'm struggling with? To stay grounded. What is it that I'm struggling with? To stay sober.
Speaker 1:And whether your addiction is work addiction, whether it's an eating addiction, whether it is a scrolling addiction or a spending addiction or a alcohol addiction or a gambling addiction or a sex addiction, like whatever your addiction is, you know, a therapist recently told us that it made a lot of sense to me. There's three kinds of people in the world. There are addicts, there are addicts in recovery and there are sociopaths. There are mutants in the world, and my husband and I had a really hard time acknowledging that we are addicts and addictions come in sets of three. And both of us have an eating addiction, we both have an addiction to sugar and carbs and I had a social media addiction and that's challenging, as I do a lot of work on social media and I didn't realize that I had gotten addicted to the likes.
Speaker 1:And I have a work addiction and I easily turn to competency as a way of getting affirmation, because that's the way I got affirmed as a child and facing those addictions and honestly looking at how I struggle with them, how I have a self-reliance addiction and I don't want to rely on anybody else. I want to be superhuman. How much time I spend in my head thinking I'm supposed to figure this out and I am supposed to look like I have it all together. Man, getting honest, getting vulnerable and accepting the humility of recognizing I have addictions that I need to face every day and being able to have a safe space with my husband to share my addictions and what I'm struggling with and how I've gotten out of reality and into this fantasy world of self-reliance and self-sufficiency and self-absorption, meeting my own needs rather than coming and honestly accepting that my needs are bigger than me and I need a bigger source than me. I need God to ultimately help me with my needs, and then I need to confess my needs to my husband and other people in my life that are safe. It's brought me to humility and a deep appreciation for humility.
Speaker 1:The gift of humility is being a relational creature and needing other people, being needy man that was something I learned as a child Do not be needy and the best way to survive. The best way to get love is to need nothing, and it literally destroyed my marriage. So I'd love to hear from you Did this matter to you? Do you resonate with this in any way? And, if it does, would you rate this podcast? Would you share this episode with a friend? That helps get this out to more people?
Speaker 1:And I want to be in front of people that resonate with this, that are looking for support, that are looking for a community of people who actually want to return to who we were made to be as needy relational creatures, that are finding that the deepest connection they actually long for is possible and available. Possible and available first and foremost, in their relationship with a source that's bigger than them, that needs God, that needs love from a source bigger than us humans, and that wants to find the second deepest ability to connect in their marriage, to create a safe space, to be community for their children and for their friends and family as a way of living in the world. And that's what I'm passionate about. I am passionate about community and healing from what I learned growing up to not need community. That led me to the deepest suffering of my life.
Speaker 1:That's bringing me back to what was missing for me, which is the deep need for community, and I am fumbling, working at creating a community, because I believe that marriage, first and foremost, needs to grow within community, and if that's something you want in your marriage, I actually would love to share the marriage growth community that I've created for this very thing, and it is small and it is, uh, I'm working to grow my ability to develop the intimacy within it, and it's made up of a lot of people who learn to need no one, who are working diligently to learn to need again.
Speaker 1:So, if you're interested in that, that link is below in the show notes and would you please let me know in the comments if this episode means something to you. And you can always reach me at uh, hey, julia Woods, on my social media platforms. You can, um find me on Instagram and you can find me, um at by emailing me at hello at beautiful outcomecom. Thanks so much for joining and I hope this makes a difference in your day and that you find the deep connection that you're longing for with your spouse by surrendering to your deep need for each other. Thank you so much.