Who Started It - The Decision to Open Up

~  23 min read ~

How did we get where we are? What stories do we tell each other (and ourselves) about the decisions that got us here? In season 5, episode 66 of the Project Relationship podcast we dig into how the way we remember and tell our stories affects the way we view our relationships, and our partners.

Here's the graphic on cognitive bias mentioned in the episode.

The following transcript was generated by AI, so enjoy the AI-flavored word choices and unconventional spellings of names.

Intro

Joli Hamilton
great relationships don't just happen. They're designed. But how do you get the love you really want? When you haven't had the models and examples you need it.

Ken Hamilton
We've learned the hard way that talking about stuff can change everything. But it doesn't come naturally. That's normal.

Joli Hamilton
Welcome to the project relationship Podcast. I'm Dr. Joli. Hamilton. I'm Ken Hilton. Join us as we explore the ups and downs of creating a custom built love. We'll get

Ken Hamilton
personal and talk about what's worked for us hear from Joli about what the research can teach us about love and answer listener questions.

Joli Hamilton
It's time to reimagine relationships from the ground up. Welcome to the project relationship podcast.

Origin Stories - Who started this adventure? Who's telling the story?

We're gonna talk about something I find really interesting about relationships, because it's something I don't hear talked about very often, but it comes up with my clients all the time. And it comes up on this podcast all the time, what's their origin stories,

Ken Hamilton
origin stories,

Joli Hamilton
every relationship is going to have its origin story, okay. But also things that happen, decisions that are made in relationships have their origin stories to like the decision to shift from monogamy to consensual non monogamy, okay, with decision to also the decision to have children. The decision to move across the country, the decision to sleep in separate beds, the decision to the all being decisions, especially ones that put you potentially out of alignment with what we think of as the general cultural story, or, dare I say the word normal, normal setting on the dryer, it bears nothing to this conversation, really. But there's a a set of accepted norms. And more importantly, there's a set of accepted, imagined norms, like what we imagined people will expect of us. And then when we do stuff, when we make decisions that take us out of that are out of alignment with that. How we create the narrative of what what that decision is like, Who made that decision? Who was who was the main actor who instigated it, the way we tell that story. We repeat it, origin stories get repeated over and over again. And they can get used as weapons. They can get used as ways to actually help us through new things. Yeah. Okay. So jump right to an example to make this easier to understand I

Ken Hamilton
do that I think that would be helpful. Starting to get the picture though.

Joli Hamilton
Okay, I know I sprung this topic on you, but it comes up a lot. And I want to write about it. Because what I find is, the origin story can be something used for growth, or something used as a weapon.

Ken Hamilton
I can see that because if a if blame is part of the story, then it can be This was your idea. So these are all your prompts.

Joli Hamilton
Okay, so let's use us as an example. The origin story of us deciding to live in this house that we live in right now. Okay, specifically, so this isn't just about like, how did we meet though? That is certainly one like the the, how did you meet? How did you get together? Especially if your story wasn't just a simple like, well, we bumped into each other or we swiped right. If it's at all complicated, that narrative can certainly become part of how you present yourself to the world and to each other. Okay? origin stories are about where we place responsibility. Sure, origin stories are one of the ways that we craft a narrative about who's responsible for the outcomes in relationship. So for you and I, we live in this house now this house that we live in, I bought back in 1997 when I was which is like a bajillion years ago. I cannot believe that's true. But there it is. I bought it when I was very, very young. I was like three years old. I got married and the house next door to my parents home went up for sale and my mom was like, hey, the house is for sale next door and somehow it like, here we go. We wanted to buy

Ken Hamilton
a home in the garden. Yeah,

Joli Hamilton
yeah. Yeah, hopped on my Hot Wheels, made my way home. Okay, so we we somehow managed to buy this house through the help of our parents and also through the stupidity of not knowing what the hell we were doing, because we absolutely cannot afford it yet. But we bought it and The story of how you and I came to own it later, was a really important part of how we talk about where our relationship went. So later, I was getting a divorce. And we had to figure out what that meant, like, where's the house gonna go? And you, you had to decide you didn't like the house you were living in. Your partner didn't like the house, you were living in that much. You both wanted more land, I had more land. So the decision was made. And already see how I'm I'm telling a story. Yeah, I'm crafting a story that started with what the two of you were deciding, yeah. But I had a role in that. And I didn't want to not have this this home anymore, even though it had tons of problems, including, you know, being next door to my parents, which isn't necessarily plusses and minuses. But, you know, I'd given birth to my babies in this house, I homebirth. Damn it. It mattered to me, um, but crafting the narrative around decision it was and who pressed go and who did what became a big bone of contention that could be brought up in the arguments that the three of us had, as we were going through harder parts that came up a couple years later in our relationship. So, you know, fast forward a couple years, we did wind up buying this house all together, sort of, except it wound up being you and I who bought the house, and she didn't sign on to the house, right? And without getting into the assignment doesn't even matter anymore, because that's over. But the story

Ken Hamilton
doesn't matter anymore. But the story can still contain the elements of blame or responsibility or coercion, or powerless, feeling powerless,

Joli Hamilton
right? Yeah. So depending on who's telling the story, in what context, and for what purpose for what desired outcome, each of us could paint ourselves as blameless or up to our eyeballs in blame, or as a victim, or as persecuted and harmed? Or as a rescuer? Like, Oh, sweet. Yeah, I mean, you could absolutely paint yourself as the rescuer. And that origin story becomes really part of so many other stories that how do we make decisions about money? Now? How do we make decisions about who gets to be in what room of the house? How do we make decisions about who owns the house? Their name is on the deed? How do we make decisions about what happens if we aren't together anymore? Who would get the house

Ken Hamilton
and those stories and how they're told how those stories are told? informs those kinds of decisions later on? Yeah, for saying Oh, sure. And informs

Joli Hamilton
the arguments that get had, what arguments and especially what I find is the passive aggressive arguments, the arguments that aren't arguments, like, No, we're not arguing. This is just a discussion. Let me explain to you how we got here. And that explanation carries with it okay, so we were just talking about a house just the decision about the house. How about the decision about whether to fuck? How about the decision about being non monogamous? Yeah, about having a complicated family? How about the decisions that we made about combining our family? Yes.

Ken Hamilton
How about homeschooling about not homeschooling, right?

Joli Hamilton
Who made these decisions, was empowered and who wasn't? I see this every day. Okay. attached to every decision. There are at the very least there's you've got your Drama Triangle. Goodness, I can't remember the theorists name. Cartman Carmen's Drama Triangle, you've got the victim, the persecutor, and the rescuer these roles, right? Whoever's telling the story can jump around into whichever position they happen to want to occupy. We are so capable humans are storytellers. We are capable of rewriting stories on the fly. We're capable of telling true stories from multiple perspectives all at the same time. Yes. It's why

Ken Hamilton
we make stories. We don't have to make them up. We don't have to change, we just have to pick a just the way of a lens

Joli Hamilton
to look at them, leaving some facts out putting some facts in highlighting certain things, adding certain pieces that maybe actually didn't get learned until later. But we go back and retroactively sort of add them to the story because we know, we know the outcome. So we can sort of assign meaning and motivation in the moment. And maybe it's true, but is it true? And we don't really know and Ah, okay.

Ken Hamilton
Okay, so see what you're saying.

Joli Hamilton
Yeah, this is why this is such a juicy, juicy topic to me. Because you're saying yeah, when you have an origin story, we that that serves a certain purpose. If your purpose changes, you might look and notice that you change how you tell that story. Oh, man.

Ken Hamilton
Yeah,

Joli Hamilton
when when you and I first decided to get married, we had been both on the not married, like not getting married trained. We were very like anti marriage as if marriage rather than us was to blame for our disasterous first attempt, right? Which is sort of funny, because while an institution like that a paradigm can be problematic, we were still, we're the ones in our stories. But how we chose how we chose to tell that story has changed over the year, over the years, just this year. Oh, yeah. And yet, there's a groove. There's a deep worn groove where some of the details and some of the facts we have agreed to, and they become sort of this. They become what we, we create a shared story that has the same sort of facts in it, and we repeat it a lot. And the thing that we repeat a lot becomes the story. But in fact, it may leave out whole perspectives. It may the repeated story, yeah, becomes this sort of crafted narrative. I could draw an example from, you know, just a movie, like, take a story like, Oh, something simple, like, a Christmas, Carol, Dickens A Christmas Carol, there are some really key features, right? And they repeated, there are so many renditions of the story of a Christmas carol, right? So many renditions, and most of them grabs and key lines out of Dickens novel, and they and they ground to that. But details can be different. And those details can shift how you feel about the characters, whether the characters feel like they are responsible for their actions or whether stuff feels like it just happened to them. Whether you feel sad for them, whether you pity them, whether you feel like they were victimized, whether you feel like they were empowered, and made choices, whether you feel like they were likable or not.

Ken Hamilton
Yeah. Wow. Yeah, I see what you're saying. Same story,

Joli Hamilton
same story, all the same

Ken Hamilton
narrative elements.

Joli Hamilton
Albert over any version, you know, you've just got yet all these different versions and Bill Murray. Yeah, right. Okay, different, very different. Now. Bottom line, in all of those, we get a scrooge who is a miser who withholds not only money, but love and care for others, right? We do this all the time in our stories about how relationships that didn't work out the way we wanted, even relationships were in the didn't work out the way we wanted, we will paint someone else as the Violator or the oppressor or the the Harmer in our story, if we don't, if we if we just want to be able to be in that victim spot. And I don't mean to say that there aren't real abuses and real oppressors there are you know, like, there is objective wrong, but we can also create take fairly neutral, nuanced, complex, other people and make them into the one sided figures that we need them to be

Ken Hamilton
one sided. Yeah, right.

Joli Hamilton
And that happens a lot when we have a like a romance ends. But it can also happen in a romance that continues. So I see it in in clients who come to me and they're transitioning from monogamy to consensual non monogamy. And they'll what they have is a story about who started this.

Ken Hamilton
And depending on how it's going. That story has a different meaning.

Joli Hamilton
Yeah, so our life who started this Can I mean when I put it that way? It's pretty funny.

Ken Hamilton
It is funny. All right, who started this? So

Joli Hamilton
are we currently having a good time in our relationship? Yes. From my perspective, we are to yes, if you'd said no, I would have said okay, cool. I guess we'll have a follow up episode. But, um,

Ken Hamilton
we'll give you a fight episode one of these days.

Joli Hamilton
One of these days, I've had a couple people request a fight episode. We'll just have to hit record. Sometimes we do fight. Oh, yes, we are. Yeah.

Ken Hamilton
So yes, I think I'm doing well.

Joli Hamilton
It's really easy to go back and tell our origin story. And paint a picture of two flawed, but likable characters. Right. Right. You know what? Not all the time like a ball, Lord,

Ken Hamilton
either. Right.

Taking Responsiibility

Joli Hamilton
So when I watch people retelling their origin stories specifically around this, um, well, one of the things that they're missing is the gift that taking responsibility will give them when I When I decide to own the fact that I chose to end my first marriage that I chose to pursue you that I chose to live in this house versus another house, regardless of your actions, that those were my choices when I take responsibility, I feel not only empowered, but I feel a certain ability to look at how complicated those decisions really were. And how I was influenced by a lot of factors. But when I push the responsibility on to you and I say something like, Well, you were unwilling to leave, leave your spouse I've, yeah, I've never heard it that way. Because I didn't really summer. Well, no, I think I have Yeah, okay. Let's go there. You were unwell. I left myself you didn't. Now? I don't really think I wanted you to. But I'm guessing there were times where I did. Like if I if I could really put myself back there. Yeah, there must have been times when that's what I wished you would do. Yeah. And it really, it would leave me in a spot of being disempowered to say, uh, you, you made it this way. It was your unwillingness. Oh, like, rather than Hey, I chose. I chose that. If I put that on you and said, Well, you started this you wanted us to be non monogamous? Because you want it? Like, you you want to have your cake and eat it too. That's the common line I hear. Um, I forget my own volition

Ken Hamilton
in in CNM. I've heard it as Caden eat it. Oh, no. It was in a movie a long time ago. What my cake and eat it too. No. Anyway, that's a terrible pun. Now it's out on the internet. It wasn't mine. It was in a movie.

Joli Hamilton
Okay. When I have done that, I wind up feeling really helpless, like the world's happening to me.

Ken Hamilton
So I have had trouble taking responsibility. I, I don't take responsibility for as much as I should, by my own judgment, and that has been much worse in the rest of my life. And it is now and the feeling of helplessness that goes along with it is intense. So yeah, not taking responsibility passing off responsibility. I agree completely leaves a feeling of helplessness,

Joli Hamilton
helplessness, and helplessness. Um, you know, many of us were, we're, you know, we're like, well trained to assume a helpless position. In our childhood, I was not, I was trained to believe I was responsible for literally everything that ever happened. So I still carry that around. So I often will over assume responsibility. And yet that helplessness, it can be a common thread I see in non monogamy where when we get bumped and bruised, especially during the early days, when we're trying to figure out what is our agreement going to be? And then hey, what's it going to actually feel like when you go out? Yeah, like for real? Okay? The rubbers meeting the road now, or the rubbers meeting? Something else? Sorry?

Ken Hamilton
Sorry. Come on. There was nothing I could do, man.

Stories are Multifaceted

Joli Hamilton
Um, why is this the pun episode? What's up with that? Sorry, everyone. Um, when that happens, we might have feelings, they might be really uncomfortable, they might be really uncomfortable. And so what do we do? One thing to do is displace my own responsibility and say, well, and we go back in the past, and we start dredging up how you got us here? And how a decision you made is what got us here. And what I find is that people will repeat their origin story, they'll they'll tell it again and again, in a way that tends to place one partner in a one down position and one to one up position that's using the language from Terry reels. Relationship work, one down one up, grandiosity. And on the one hand, and despair and right, yeah, shame, shame. On the other hand, grandiosity versus shame. And it gets repeated so often that it starts to feel true. And then we start to talk about the truth of the situation. And this is where I definitely do need to take responsibility. The truth of the situation is always going to be complex and multifaceted and could always be told from a billion different positions, right? Like, we see that happening with Marvel movies right now. They're making these like, different takes on the superheroes or we see it. The Arthurian legends have been retold, like Another point from the perspective of verse Morgana from the from the witch right and you take and you change the perspective, Maleficent is a good example, right shift the perspective not sleeping beauty, but from Maleficent perspective, all of a sudden, everything shifts for you. And while there still darkness, and challenge and love, and happiness and all of these things, most of the time, humans are trying to flatten stuff out, we want to explain it, the root of explain in Latin is is to flatten, to flatten to lay out to lay flat two.

Ken Hamilton
And now you have one side. And that's what you said a minute ago about a one sided person, right, you now that the this person shows up in the story is one sided, right? They're not. They have lots

Joli Hamilton
and it's not just a coin. So how I describe people most often is that we're all like, multifaceted geocodes. And there's the, you know, God that's been cracked open, and there's so many facets and they're intricately connected. And the depth and how you look inside the jewel is different depending on which direction you look in it. And there's all the unconscious stuff, you've got that, that rocky side that you don't even really know what's back there, you can't really view it, right. And we are all that we are all multifaceted. But when we tell our origin stories, it is so tempting to flatten out the situation and explain it as though there is a truth. And I am a huge, hugely problematic person for doing this in the past, trying to get to the truth. And I have really come along to the idea of constructivism and the idea that there are multiple truths at any one. Like always, while also understanding that there are objective facts, it's just that they're they're different from truth. And they can also always be learned, like we can always learn stuff that then shifts what the facts are. Oh, it's so complicated

Ken Hamilton
is complicated. Come along, oh, my goodness, yeah. You you've developed a lot of skill and, and allowing something to be multi dimensional, allowing stories, events, experiences to be multi dimensional. Where Yeah, they're not interest.

Joli Hamilton
It hasn't been easy. I was doing that, because it's what helped me feel safe. Right. i That is why I wanted there to be an objective truth I could claim to. And I wanted, I have a great memory, which is nice. But you know, there also is like no such thing as, like, they're still the stories you tell yourself only from my perspective. And I'm still reconstructing it every time. We know. Like, that's how your brain works. You're reconstructing the story. And so what I find is when people add an element of responsibility that borders on blame to their narrative around who started this, who made this decision, it leaves you like, it's like having a seat, one of those emergency pull cords in on the bus, like, you know, like, Oh, okay. So I could at any point, pull this cord. And you have to take responsibility for wherever we are. Because when I pulled on this emergency thread, it says, You did this, you are responsible. And now I'm going to jump into that victim position, you become the persecutor. And often I'm going to look for the hero who's the hero of the story, I might also find myself to be the hero as well, I might jump back and forth between the two. Or I might see that there's no hero, and I'm just looking for one. I'm just hoping that someone will appear,

Ken Hamilton
which now changes the way you look at the world. Yeah.

Joli Hamilton
So something that I recommend folks think about when they when they're considering their origin story is talking about it from multiple perspectives all the time. Like, and not just, you tell your side and I'll tell my side because that is that two sides of a coin. I want the multifaceted multi dimensional, like what if so I can use my imagination for this. We have imaginations, they're incredibly powerful. Let's use them. I can imagine what it might have looked like a great perspective for me has been to use my mother like what might she have seen? Like, my mother's gone, gone for 11 years and some now I can sort of see. I just imagine I'm just trying to imagine what she might have seen of our origin. And I don't know very much, but I can sort of get myself a little outside. I can also write a story I Write a story and imagine I was you. What might I have been feeling? It's just a way of practicing not assuming that my perspective is the only one. and is therefore the correct one. Even though my truth is my truth, and how I feel about it is how we feel about it. Feelings are by nature, transient. They will change. We've talked about this

Ken Hamilton
context dependent. Yeah, I mean, you, that's exactly what we're talking about, you have the exact same story in two slightly different ways. And you get a completely different set of feelings from

Joli Hamilton
and so no, people come at this from different directions. And I have seen some people really struggle with this for different reason, not because they struggle to, to see multiple perspectives, but because they struggle, seeing all of these perspectives, their Myers Briggs code, like if you're going to do a Myers Briggs, MBTI indicator, they're likely to have a P in the last position, like, I'm an INTJ. They're likely to have a P, you are a P. On that last step, fourth position is judging versus perceiving. Judges discern really quickly, we tend to make decisions and we're like, they're there with clarity. This, this is what I see. perceivers often see so many possibilities. And they can feel all equally true. I once was having a conversation with our, our middle son there, and I asked him what color the sky was because I was having trouble getting the truth out of him. He had stolen something. And I was just really struggling with him because he was not. I mean, he was holding the thing he'd stolen, telling me he hadn't stolen it. It. It was a kind of funny situation from out here. But I was trying to get him to understand what truth was. And I said, What color's the sky Quinn? And, and he said, Well, pink and gray and blue. And I'm like, God, dang, he is so right. But this is not helpful. He was able to see so many, so many possibilities. And that is a huge skill. He's got a gift, that way that he can see so much potential. And he returned to the thing he stole, and it was all fine. Little kids do stuff. And that was one of my favorite memories of his still is it's one of my favorite memories of him because it's, it was the first time that I saw why he and I didn't understand each other. He was like, six or seven years old. He was he was young. And he saw nuance in the sky. He didn't say the sky is blue.

Ken Hamilton
He thought about

Joli Hamilton
the differences. We were inside at the time, by the way, he was not describing it. He was he was really that open to possibility. I was like, whoa, okay. We think completely differently. At that point, I actually de escalated the conversation cuz I was like, I wow, we're just not going to be able to communicate about this. I passed off the the discipline about the the thing that had happened to you because I was like I this, this doesn't make sense to me anymore. And I'm going to wind up being the villain here. Because I don't understand him. at a fundamental level. This really took me this was one of my first dives into what's the psychology that's going on here? What's happening that he and I can't get on the same page and was a big part of how I came to understand. Help people work. Because I really believe that he was being honest in that moment. But I thought, oh, oh, we're so different. That's how I want to see you. We're so different.

Ken Hamilton
We're so different. And your perspective may

Joli Hamilton
be completely valid. It might also be irrelevant to a question at hand. In a conversation about say, who got us started down this non monogamy road? What is the more relevant detail? Is it that you wanted to stay married and have me as a girlfriend? Or is it that I was so bought into the idea that anything was possible? That I just jumped in? I was like, Yes, I am all in for that. What is the is the or is the relevant detail that that we never really talked about it? We didn't really get a clear we didn't have the words we didn't have the language. So we didn't really say we just kept talking about intimate friendships. Yeah. Is that a relevant detail in which one of us was doing that? Or was neither of us and we were just confused, literally just confused for like a while years trying to figure out what are we even talking about?

Story tellers have psychological bias

Ken Hamilton
So all of these things are? Well, what is the relevant detail was your question and it depends both on what you're talking about. And because we're humans, what you're what our goals are. Yeah, yeah. If I have a particularly like, rare Record debate, like, well, I want to prove this. So I'm gonna pick that detail. There you go bias in the storytelling

Joli Hamilton
right here, like there are so many different kinds of psychological bias. I love that huge chart. Like of all these biases that have been established through theoretical, an experiment experimental psychology. I love that chart because it's huge look it up, it's amazing, we should find it and put it in the show notes for this episode T shirts, there are so many biases, we can, we can always look at a situation from a particular angle. So what I like to do is say, let's tell this origin story in a lot of different ways and understand that our habit is going to be to choose the way that suits our purposes in the moment that suits my purpose, my desire in the moment, so if I'm feeling one down, if I'm feeling like you are overstepping a line, I'm likely to bring up a detail that reinforces that point. And if you are feeling like I am, stalwart and unmovable, you're likely to bring up a detail that reinforces that. And when it comes to the origin story about consensual non monogamy in particular, the story you tell can, like it can redefine what you're doing, like your whole relationship. And now there are other people involved. Yeah, right. And this is where I think it gets really, really tricky. Once you start having multiple partners, these people matter, these people matter. They're, they're humans, they're not disposable. And so picking and choosing a story that might allow you to encourage a partner to just discard another human right without any, you know, reconciliation, or thought or, or anything.

Ken Hamilton
They're not just stories, they can change,

Joli Hamilton
they can change the trajectory of agile, they can also change your day to day, whether you think you're happy or not. Well, you keep telling yourself a story that you have been taking advantage of. But you also tell me that this is the decision that you want to be making, then you're choosing your suffering, yes. Because you can change your mind, we can change our mind, we can also decide we can always disengage from other relationships. You know, we can do it with grace, and transition time. But I can also decide to sit in the mud. Yeah, and just stew in it. And that is a choice. But it is a painful one. I've I've been there myself. The summer of 2012 comes to mind. When I I could, I practically lost my words altogether, I could barely talk, because I was so mired in a set of stories that I told that left me in a victimized position in a sense that I was victimized. And I was choosing myself wearing them. What I mean is like, my life was going to happen one way or another. But I was choosing to see no meaning in it, and to focus entirely on how I'd been taken advantage of and the hopelessness of the situation. And that all turned on a dime on September 9 of that year, with one phrase one conversation. And all of a sudden, there was meaning again, there was meaning and the story could be talked about differently. So the origin story of your relationship is a powerful thing powerful. I encourage you to spend some time reflecting on how you tell the stories of who's responsible for what's going on in your relationship,

Ken Hamilton
how it went down and how it started. Oh, it started.

Joli Hamilton
Okay, well, big, big conversation conversation here. Happy to hear questions, deeper questions on this, you can always find me on my website www.jolihamilton.com, you can find the contact form there. And until later,

Ken Hamilton
keep talking to each other.

Outro

Joli Hamilton
Thanks so much for tuning in to this episode. I've got one more thing I'd like to share with you. And that you're just going to need to hop over to the website, listen to Joli calm there, you can grab my top five relationship guides for free right now.

Ken Hamilton
Go get those guides, they're great. They're easy to implement conversations that will help you take action in creating the love you really want.

Joli Hamilton
It's my mission to make absolutely everything talk about above. She managed to

Ken Hamilton
help me be able to talk about stuff that I once couldn't even imagine saying out loud. Now I speak openly with my lovers, my friends, my family, found you on a podcast out loud. Relationship work really can change everything.

Joli Hamilton
That really is a wonder one of my favorite things in the whole world. So when you're feeling the rough edges when things aren't going the way that you'd hoped in your relationships I want you to remember that relationships can be messy and that's good news