The Voice That Says Yes - the One That Says No

People come to relationship counseling both hopeful (or they wouldn’t bother to come at all) and fearful (or they wouldn’t need to come). You can represent these tendencies as the yes voice and the no voice. Both are strongly in evidence when couples in damaged relationships set out to try again.

In you are considering an investment of time, money and faith in starting over, expect there to be a part of yourself that wants that change and believes in the possibility of it coming to pass. Expect also that there will be another part of yourself, suspicious and wary after much pain and disappointment, that wants nothing to do with starting over.

Expect the latter part to be full of warnings and dire predictions. Count on it to be against your “setting yourself up for getting badly hurt again.” This part of you can be counted on to pounce on any backsliding in your partner’s behavior with “See, I told you so!” passion.

If your yes side and your no side are of equal strength, you are likely to drive yourself nuts with indecision. It would be understandable if you tried to resolve that indecision with a grand leap in one direction or the other. Don’t.

If optimism grabs the upper hand prematurely and you suppress your no voice, you will likely only scare it into even louder objections than before. You could find yourself leaping ahead only to quit rashly before the impulse to try again has had time to prove itself.

What to do? Accept the fact that neither your yes nor your no voice are going to go away – at least not soon. They both are, so to speak, family. Give each a full opportunity to explain herself fully – the argument for going ahead and the argument for giving up. Make sure that these two sides really listen to each other.

If you decide to go with yes and work at repairing your damaged relationship, make sure that your no side is reassured with a practical plan for getting out in a specific length of time, if your minimal conditions for relationship improvement have not been met. No vague promises here – your no side needs to be reassured by a definite exit plan from the relationship.

All of this is going to take time and work. But it will be work well spent - and much better than either refusing to give the relationship another chance, if you believe that one is justified, or putting on some blind “trust, no matter what” attitude and leaping blindly – perhaps off a cliff.