By Ben Rosenthal, Psychotherapy Intern
Last month we went over leaning into failure, and allowing ourselves to experience distressing feelings (check out part one of this post here). We ended with a Buddhist parable, which I will repeat as we head into our next section, in case you want to just start here!
There is a Buddhist teaching about two arrows. The first arrow is the actual injury: the hurt, the disappointment, the mistake. But the second arrow is the one we habitually hit ourselves with after the first. I’m a failure. I’m a loser. I’m going to ruin this kid. I’m going to ruin this partnership. That first arrow is just the nature of being alive. And we can’t always stop that second arrow, especially at first, but we can get better at noticing it and not building our entire day around it, not building our predictions around it. We can practice being open and present to a new possibility.
For Partners
People who find themselves cast as “the fixer” are taught that our job is to take care of things. Especially in partnerships. So when their partner comes to them upset about something they did, it can land pretty hard. That I’m a bad partner feeling can be so intolerable.
What if it was ok to do something wrong though, and it says nothing about your value? What if how we orient around failure is entirely the second arrow, one we engage with at our own choosing? What if your partner bringing you their hurt is actually them handing you something tender, and asking you to hold it?
Because here’s what I am seeing with a lot of couples: Someone tries to be vulnerable. Their partner, flooded with their own sense of failure, gets defensive, or jumps to fixing. Maybe they try to explain themselves and what they intended, or maybe they just shut down. So the gift doesn’t get held. After that happens enough times, their partner stops offering it. And then the wall goes up between them. Whatever part of the relationship that made them feel like a good partner at first can feel entirely stifled.
But what if that pattern, that feeling, can actually be an opportunity to feel closer, not further apart? If we can just let go of all the baggage of “I did it wrong.”
Fixers are often told to listen to their partners and to try not to solve the problem as the solution to this disconnect. But what if it was less about passively listening, and instead it was about the fixer asking themself, can it be ok for me to be a failure? Can it be ok that I can’t help at this moment? Can I allow myself to be that vulnerable? Could it be that practicing inner attunement with the hard parts of yourself is what will let you really show up and listen to your partner?
For Parents
There is so much to get right. Feeding, sleep, car seats, bottle cleaning, every single decision feels extremely intense. On TikTok there’s always a parent who is waking up at 5am and drinking their green protein slurry before their first feeding. Maybe they even share some vulnerability of their messy hair, how tired they are. But it’s still curated, still perfect, in its imperfection.
But what if it’s true that the best parent, the best nurturer, the best caregiver, makes dozens of mistakes daily? What if it's true that parenting can be a bummer, can be messy, and there is nothing wrong with that?
And what if each mistake is a chance to practice? To get in touch with your feelings, to ask for help? An experience that shows your child what it looks like to be a person.
What Kids Are Actually Learning
When your baby is tiny, learning happens on more of a biological level. Babies are tiny scientists running experiments. They predict, they get it wrong, and they adjust. As a parent, you’re doing the exact same thing. You misread a cry, the dysregulation gets worse, and then you finally find that moment of ease. Sometimes it takes a few minutes, sometimes it can take hours. That cycle of losing each other and finding each other again is how babies learn the world is safe. You literally can’t do it without messing up.
As kids get older, this learning is on a more contextual level. They watch you. They watch how you engage with yourself when you make a mistake. They watch how you engage with them when they fail. They learn what it means to mess up from watching how you mess up.
So what if we model that failing is just the nature of life? It is ok to fail, to learn, to say how you feel about it. You will still be loved, and still belong. Which might be the most important thing we can teach them, and ourselves.
A Slow Process
I wish I could say failing is going to start feeling good. But it probably won’t. The goal isn’t to feel better about failing. It’s to get better at feeling it.
There is this gap between what we feel and what comes next. In our standard life, we mostly blow through it completely on autopilot. But if we can slow down, even the smallest amount, in that gap we get to choose. Instead of the automatic choices we’ve built, the “How do I make this feeling stop,” we can choose “What kind of partner do I want to be right now? What kind of parent?” Then we take one small step in that direction, with the uncomfortable feeling still in tow. Honestly, we don’t even have to do that. We can start with just noticing the gap. It’s a slow process.
And to be transparent, therapists fail too. We misread situations, we say clunky things, we invalidate people’s feelings. And we get to practice exactly what I’m asking for in this post. We slow down, we get curious, we repair. I can’t ask anyone to do anything I’m not willing to do myself. We all have to be brave.
If you recognize yourself in any of this, if feeling like a failure (or any feeling, ultimately) is something you’ll do almost anything to avoid, and it’s organizing your behavior in ways you don’t like, you don’t have to practice this stuff on your own. Reach out to schedule a free consultation with one of our therapists (including me), or check out our groups and workshops.
