Relationships Are Hard, But How Hard is Too Hard? Assessing Workability.

Being in practice for nearly 20 years, there are certain issues I see over and over again and certain things I get asked by clients a lot. I’ve made it my business to study those things so I can deliver satisfying and easily understandable answers and address their needs.

In SomaField language, I’m talking about the core principle called Psychoeducation—being able to deliver relevant information (psychological education) to clients that helps them understand, name, organize, and normalize their experience as well as helping them understand psychological concepts.

Today I’m going to share with you one of the little ditties I end up repeating to clients often when they ask me this:

“I know relationships are hard, but how hard is too hard? I know they take work, but how much work is too much?”

Basically, clients ask me this when they’re in a struggling relationship and in some type of process around deciding whether they should stay or go, whether it’s worth it, whether they’ll be able to move through this together, whether there’s hope, or whether it should be this hard.

First, I have to give a disclaimer. Everyone is different. Everyone needs different things from a relationship to be happy. We know this because we can look at other people’s relationships and say. “That’d never work for me, but it works for them.”

However, I do think there are some key baselines we can establish about relationships that work. Let’s talk about what I call Workability, which I find to be the necessary foundation for a relationship to function securely and healthily. If workability is the foundation, then the other things we may need in relationship (things like overlapping tastes, family planning, social similarities, conflict compatibility, etc) rest on top of that.

The way I define it in this context, Workability has 5 parts:

• Growth

• Good Faith

• Collaboration

• Sobriety

• Mood

Growth

What I mean by growth is that each partner wants to grow of their own accord. It’s already part of their personal ethos to want to learn, do better, and be open to feedback as grist for this mill. They don’t just want it, but you witness them do it and you can see the resulting positive change. Maybe they’ve been in therapy before, have a coach, read, have solitude in nature, are deeply self reflective, have a spiritual relationship, or are in a community practice circle of some kind…my point is that this can happen in any way that’s effective for them (and affordable to them). It generally helps if your partner cares about growing in the directions that you also care about and is willing to accept your influence and vice versa.

Good Faith

What I mean by good faith is that each partner is on their journey of growth not just because it’s already part of their personal ethos, but also because they want to grow or change and are willing to do the work for that to happen. The reason I say Good Faith is because this means that the work they’re doing on themselves is in a productive direction, isn’t weilded against you to get you to comply to their ideas or direction of growth, and is healthily collaborative.

Collaboration

What I mean by collaboration is that each partner is committed enough to the relationship that they’re willing to collaborate to try and minimize damage to each of you and to the bond. They’re holding the needs of the relationship equally with you. You’ve heard this before: “It’s not me against you, it’s us against the problem.” This also means that collaborative partners don’t threaten the bond or the relationship when things get difficult.

Sobriety

What I mean by sobriety isn’t that you or your partner never indulge, but that neither of you is coping with active addiction. This is because active addiction is about denial. And in order for a relationship to be healthy and workable, you have to be able to receive influence from your partner about their experience, your behavior, and their sense of the dynamics between you. This is extremely difficult to do or to trust when one or both partners are wrapped up in denial.

Mood

This means a handful of things. The atmosphere of the relationship, overall, needs to feel buoyant, good, happy, generous, optimistic, etc. Not too serious, not too dark, not too devoid of play. Otherwise, it will feel like work, and humans don’t manage to stay whole and feeling like themselves very well under these conditions. Yes, you’ll go through hard things together and there will be dark times, but the mood of the relationship will need to recover in order to feel generative and positive again rather than stuck in the mud of the dark or hard time.

The reason I emphasize Workability is because just think of everything a close relationship requires of us in order to stay afloat healthily. We have to acknowledge when we’re wrong. We have to accept someone who does things in ways we never would. We have to listen when we don’t agree. We have to make love a verb even when we don’t want to. We have endless choices of how to manage our impulsivity in an argument. We have to be willing to accept feedback from someone we disagree with. These skills are easiest when both partners are Workable.

If we don’t do these and many other things, the relationship goes flat, we get estranged, we grow resentments, we automatically make them wrong in our heads, we judge them, etc. so the skills I list as part of Workability are important. Couples under these pressures distance, stop talking, argue a lot, or have affairs.

If you do a lot of couple’s sessions with your clients, like I do, you might use the principles of Workability as a way of thinking about and assessing the couples in front of you. They’ll come into session telling you what they want to work on and you might notice how those things fit into these ideas around workability.

For instance, it’s difficult to work on something like communication styles with a couple who aren’t collaborative, so in that case, the way I’m going to help them work on their communication is through the lens of learning how to minimize damage, not threaten the relationship, and how to be generous and spacious with each other.

I hope this helps you!

Please forward this to anyone that comes to mind if you think they’d enjoy it. :)