Marriage is an Inside Job? Huh? What?

Michelle Obama said in an interview that she realized "it wasn't up to my husband to make me happy."

But when she said "I had to learn to fill myself up" you were probably wondering.......how?

How do I 'fill myself up?'

Because when you're tired or overwhelmed, old patterns of reactivity show up. It's just how it is.

Life has so many ups and downs.

You need something robust, something effective when negativity's strong pull is taking over.

You need something reliable when you are tired, overwhelmed, feeling unappreciated.

You need something that will stand up in the intimacy of your own heart, in the intimacy of your intimate relationship, in the privacy of your own home.

Or when the two of you need to solve something challenging together? Something that makes feelings prickly? Something where you feel misunderstood?

We have a very limited set of skills that we've been taught.

A limited set of skills that don’t work very well.

With the skills you've been taught, you can either push away the feelings with positive thinking or drown in your negative thinking.

That’s all we have available. That’s all we’ve been taught.

I've tried pushing negative thoughts and feelings away, using positive thinking. It's exhausting.

And when negativity was too much, I've tried escaping into antidotes—ice cream, Netflix, anger, depression. These were even more exhausting.

And that’s all the tools we’ve learned.

Self-compassion (the skill you WERE NOT taught growing up) calms and soothes the need to either push away or fall into negative thoughts and feelings.

You progressively spend less time swinging between being too hard or too easy on yourself. When you are having negative feelings, you find yourself naturally going to self-compassion.

Once you're no longer overwhelmed by the negative thoughts and feelings, then it's a good time to go back to your intimate partner for a productive and solution-oriented conversation.

Instead of allowing your feelings to propel you into a solution that doesn't work, you have the capacity for real problem-solving in the moment.

Instead of using stop-gap measures which end up causing more problems than they solve, when you use self-compassion, you know what is needed in that time, place and circumstance.

You hear from yourself what part of you needs care, what kind of care and how specifically to do it. As opposed to 'figuring it out' all this becomes obvious, when you've taken the time for this all-important step of self-compassion.

I was so confused. When I needed help, why was that the time I couldn't find help anywhere?

"I'm taking care of everyone else, but who's takes care of me?" was my mantra at those times.

The answer became myself; I took care of me and I knew how.

And I got support because I knew how to appropriately ask for it and I knew exactly was was needed.

I never appropriately asked Michael — he was supposed to 'know' what to do for me—even though I had no idea.

With self-compassion, I knew exactly what to ask for and how to ask for it.