Allison came to coaching feeling stuck. Her marriage had gone flat. Her husband wasn't giving her the time or attention she needed, and she was frustrated and hurt.
She was adamant that he needed to change and wanted help getting him to do that.
That's not what happened.
In our early sessions, it became clear that Allison was focused entirely on her husband — what he wasn't doing, what he wasn't giving her and who he wasn't being. The more we dug into it, the more a different picture started to emerge. She was waiting for him to make her feel valued. And the reason his approval mattered so much was that she wasn't giving that approval to herself.
She had been loving an idea of who her husband could be rather than who he actually was.
That's a hard thing to hear. It took her some time for that to sink in.
Gradually, she shifted her focus, and instead of trying to change him, she started working on her relationship with herself, building real self-compassion instead of waiting for it to come from him. She started putting her own needs and well-being first, not out of selfishness, but because that's the only place she actually had any power.
Something unexpected happened. As she became less demanding and less reactive, the tension in the relationship dropped. Her husband relaxed and they started talking more. They started spending real time together.
Nothing about him changed. Everything about her did.
"I realized I needed to love myself instead of expecting him to do that for me."