ERP 151: How To Handle The Trouble Of Outshining In Relationship

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Hi, thank you for joining today’s podcast episode. Today’s episode is 151, “How to handle the trouble of outshining in relationship.” Together let’s revisit the intention of the Empowered Relationship Podcast, as a community… And yes, we are not in physical presence with one another, but we are sharing and are learning together, despite whatever phase we’re in, whether or not we’re longing, and visioning, and attempting to cultivate lasting, loving connection, or perhaps we’re preparing to get married and we’re really trying to solidify the foundation of the partnership that’s getting created…

Or perhaps we’re in relationships and dealing with some difficulties, and maybe some power struggle, or having experience of reacting to one another, or perhaps feeling a sensation of dullness, and a lack of fulfillment in the dynamic, and maybe even experienced some hardship and pain… Or maybe even experiencing a breach of trust, or betrayal, or a loss, or even grieving the relationship as in a breakup or separation…

In all of these different phases there’s an enormous opportunity to learn and to grow… And as we talk about principles on this podcast, we are in a shared journey. Yes, we all have a unique expression; we come from different backgrounds, experiences, and as my hairstylist would say, we’re all unique snowflakes… And I love that recognition, that even if there are general terms of guidelines, that we’re each gonna respond a little differently.

However, the intention here is that there is a learning, there is an opportunity that’s calling us in relationship… And it might bring us to our knees at times, inviting us to turn towards deep vulnerability, and also will expand us… And as we talked about in last week’s episode, even that expansion might bring up feelings of limitation, based on past fears or past hurt, or past limiting beliefs.

The intention of the Empowered Relationship Podcast is yes to educate, is yes to provide tools and resources and tips to consider. More importantly, my hope is that we can inspire one another to be brave, to be courageous, to take risks, and to be willing to experiment with something new, so that we can have a different result, again, in the interest of growth and developing ourselves, as well as developing the quality of our connection.

If you’d like to join me in centering into this intention together, let’s take a collective breath inhale, and a collective breath exhale… So perhaps exhaling all your air right now… And the inhale… And the exhale. Awesome, thank you.

One quick note before we get started… I wanna invite you, if you’re interested in deepening your practice with these principles, or looking for more support, guidance and coaching, I wanna invite you to visit DrJessicaHiggins.com. Secondly, I would love to get your feedback on ways in which we can share more in community. Now, I know I have a Facebook page; I actually have someone that I’ve been working with that has been posting, but it still feels impersonal.

I guess I’m just interested in ways in which you could feel more supported by me, by this curriculum, by these principles, and how we can support and inspire and uplift one another. So if you’ve got ideas, I would love to hear from you… And please, directly e-mail me [email protected]. I’d love to hear from you.

I get so much positive feedback around how these podcasts make such a difference in your lives, in your relationship, and really help you transform the things that you’re experiencing in such a positive way, and I love hearing your feedback… And I do know there’s a power in community, especially with how often we feel separate, and how social media often has this lens of facade, or presentation around how everything’s great, and we often feel less supported when we engage with social media… So I’m not interested in that. I’m more interested in how you can feel supported. If you have some thoughts, I would love to hear from you.

I’ve been working with a few people to really fine-tune my systems and really look at ways that I can further help and support your growth.

Let’s get started with today’s topic, “How to handle the trouble of outshining in relationship.” Again, in episode 150, “What to do when stuck in self-sabotage”, I really talked about how we have difficulty accepting and embracing new levels of success, love and abundance, and this is something we all face at some time or another, and often this is occurring beneath our conscious awareness… So we have a tendency to sabotage that expansion process with our own limiting beliefs and patterns.

Gay Hendricks summarizes this upper limit problem, as he would call it, and I’ll quote him here:

“The Upper Limit Problem is our universal human tendency to sabotage ourselves when we have exceeded the artificial upper limit we have placed on ourselves.” If you’re interested in more of that, please check out 150.

For today’s episode, I really got curious about how couples negotiate success. This can be success in their own right, or in a collective effort, as if they have a business together.

In today’s episode, I wanna address the fear of outshining your significant other, and I also wanna address the fear of outshining as a couple, as the couple accomplishes more success together… Whether or not, again, that’s in their collective effort, or if they’re in their own respective careers, but being successful as a couple.

I’m also gonna give you four suggestions around how to negotiate the pitfalls or the traps of success in relationship. This, again, is from The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks. It’s funny, this topic spawned two other topics… One is partner envy, which I’m gonna be addressing, as well as partner competition and how to deal with that. I’m not gonna be addressing that in today’s episode, but stay tuned for more.

The fear of outshining as it relates to relationship is where one partner is afraid of outshining their significant other, and that they actively work to monitor and even dim down their expression to protect their partner.

In an article titled “Are you inadvertently dimming your light? When you have a pattern of being afraid of outshining”, there are a few notable excerpts that I wanna read to you, and points… And if you’re interested in learning more from this article, I’ll make sure to put the link on the show notes. Again, you can find the show notes on my website, DrJessicaHiggins.com, click on Podcast, and you can find all the episodes, with the most recent one at the top.

In this article, “Are you inadvertently dimming your light?”, she talks about when you try to not outshine, that it’s really about people-pleasing, and that you’re trying to protect somebody from feeling bad due to you feeling good, and that there was an association formed at some point between your talents, achievements, accomplishments with someone else feeling inadequate, not good enough, or perhaps jealous or envy.

She says “You may have mistaken love and care for dialing down yourself, and even if the person’s actually evolved and moved on with life, you’re still continuing the behavior.” One of the things that she provided that I thought was really helpful – she gives a list of some things that people feel challenged by if they experience this fear of outshining… I’ll list just a couple of them here.

1. Not wanting to outshine with your feelings and opinions. This is likely to be the case if you were raised by someone who dominated the home with their feelings, opinions, needs etc. possibly belittling yours in the process.

I have many clients that fit into this example, especially people that have been brought up in alcoholic families, or families where their parents struggled with some mental health stuff, or even some crises where their mood was not stable… So kids learn they have to monitor themselves in the attempt to create more safety, more harmony, more consistency in the home… How to kind of manage themselves so that their parents were okay, rather than feeling that permission and that space that their needs mattered, their feelings mattered.

A client comes to mind – I’ve been working with him for quite a while, and he has made such brilliant progress, and at the same time he experienced significant challenge and trauma when he was little where he would wake up to his parents fighting and being drunk, and he would have to basically mediate… And he was so little that he felt so overwhelmed and terrified, and how much of an adult situation, and how chaotic and extreme that experience felt for him, and so he had to monitor himself in the attempt to try to keep peace in the home. This has had such a big impact on him and his ability to even allow himself to feel… Not only feel his authentic feeling when he feels scared or upset, that he can make room for that, validate that, give an opportunity to soothe the difficult emotions.

It also affects him when he’s happy… That he is very aware that if he gets too happy, he gets nervous and he starts to worry, or he starts to feel that he is not good enough, or somehow fundamentally flawed… And there’s this early experience in him that was so repetitive and chronic that he felt like he always had to be hyper-vigilant and en guard, and that he couldn’t really feel that full permission to feel happy, or to feel sad, or whatever the range of emotion.

So to this point of not wanting to outshine with your feelings and emotions – from a very early age he learned that he had to monitor himself to try to take care of his parents.

Another suggestion in the article was putting aside a talent or hobby out of fear that your peer group would ostracize you… And this is especially true in the case where you’ve been penalized in some way for outshining. This also occurs with siblings, right? You don’t wanna be the favorite one, or you try to push your parents or family members to attend to your sibling, so that you’re not feeling that you’re outshining them.

One last one – suffering from impostor’s syndrome, and so not internalizing your accomplishments and achievements, while at the same time feeling bad, and like a fraud. And of course, to internalize these would alter your self-image, and you may be afraid of upsetting someone in your life. Part of the reason why you might have this impostor syndrome in the first place may be because you’ve gotten in the habit of denying what you’re good at or your strengths to protect others.

I have a client who is dealing with this hardship as she even identified having this impostor syndrome… And her story is remarkable, where she came from an upbringing where there was the surroundings and her community of a lot of poverty, a lot of hardship, and just a lot of crises going on… And that’s often true in communities that have been disenfranchised and have had inter-generational trauma, essentially.

So she came from this upbringing where all of her siblings struggled, and most of everyone she knew was getting pregnant at a very early age, and she had an opportunity to go to a very prestigious college, and then went on to law school, and is an attorney, has a husband, has two children, and is thriving by all measures. She talks about this struggle of straddling these two very different worlds and feeling like she’s an impostor… But it also limits her capacity to feel that she can embrace her success and embrace her roots… And that outshining – she feels like she’s possibly betraying her people, her community, and then she’s also feeling as though she doesn’t quite fit or belong in the world that she’s living in. Part of our work has been can she craft a new narrative, can she reclaim what’s true for her? And it might be unique,  but that she can basically integrate the different parts of herself.

In this article, she really recommends that trying to not outshine someone is attempting to control the uncontrollable, a misappropriation of energy, and that we’re judging ourselves and we’re judging other people in particular areas, and that we’re much more than these parts that we’re judging.

Anytime we are negotiating success individually in relationship, or success jointly in relationship, we are going to experience additional layers of challenge. Intimacy and relationship in and of itself is challenging, and then to have these additional layers as we are trying to expand our capacity, the upper limit, and dealing with those limiting beliefs, limiting patterns, and a tendency to sabotage… And Gay Hendricks, in The Big Leap, towards the end of the book he talks about the fact that unfortunately, relationship takes the brunt of these limiting behaviors, in the form of arguing, criticizing, accusing, projecting, withholding, withdrawing… All of these things that we tend to take out on our partner.

To quote Gay Hendricks, the greater success you achieve, the bumpier your relationships tend to be. Gay referenced a research study that had been done many years ago, but he concluded that in fact based on all of his coaching, that there was so much truth to it… And the study basically looked at the relationships of successful people, and found that 80% had unsatisfying marriages and relationship. They broke down three types of relationships and the way that they’re unfulfilling, unsatisfying.

Basically, I’ll just briefly mention that they had fallen out of love together, or perhaps they never had passionate love to begin with, that they just have a relationship based on friendship, or highly conflict-ridden relationships… And again, all of which were deeply unfulfilling and unsatisfying.

Gay’s point in bringing this up is the fact that when we are experiencing success, again, we have the tendency to take it out on our partner, or that our relationship gets the brunt of this… So he really is emphasizing the importance of working with upper limit problems to basically be able to consciously expand rather than sabotage our relationship.

I’m going to read an excerpt from his book that shares an example of what this upper limit issue looks like, for a couple that are in business together and creating massive success, but also feeling a lot of relationship challenge, and how working with the upper limit issue can actually provide a huge opportunity for a breakthrough. This excerpt is from page 101, again, out of The Big Leap, by Gay Hendricks:

“I worked with Sarah and Jonah, a married couple who shared the leadership of a family business that had grown rapidly to 40 million dollars in annual revenues. In our first session, they traded complaints about various things… The one that had really got his goat, he said, was when she accused him of sexual flirtations with two of the employees. He had hottedly denied having sexual feelings for either of the women, and the issue had quickly escalated into the same squabble that had been going on for months.

One of the hazards of family businesses is that squabbles spread through the non-family employees faster than the family usually realizes. The couple had finally decided to come to see me when a key employee took them aside one day and said “I don’t know what’s going on between you two, but can you please fix it as soon as possible? It’s driving the rest of us nuts.”

I called a timeout and asked Sarah and Jonah when this cycle of arguing had first come up. Their answer confirmed my suspicion that it was an upper limit problem. The squabble had erupted on the heels of their best ever quarterly earnings report. They had not noticed that their squabble had broken out right after a celebration.

An upper limit problem puts people into an altered state of consciousness. We go unconscious in the sense of losing touch with our rational faculties. We don’t see the bigger picture. I asked Sarah and Jonah a specific question designed to wake them up to the trance of their argument: “Would you be willing to consider that your conflict is not about what you think it’s about?”

Early in my work on transcending my own upper limit I made a key discovery… If I could consider, even for a moment, that I was not upset for the reason I thought I was, I could break out of the trance I was in. Then I could begin to see what the real issues were. When awakened from a trance though, many of us come to a startled “Huh…?” That’s how my clients responded, so I gave them a quick explanation of how the upper limit problem works.”

And again, this is partway through the book, so again, if you’re just tuning in, I encourage you to check out 150, where I describe what the upper limit is and how it works.

“Sarah and Jonah got the concept quickly, but like recent occupants of a trance, they didn’t see how it applied to them. I offered them the possibility that they were having trouble accepting the higher level of success and abundance, and that their arguments were not about sexual flirtation or any other things they were squabbling about. Perhaps those subjects needed to be addressed, I said, but not until they got the bigger picture into focus.

The bigger picture was the tendency to sabotage their good feelings because they were not accustomed to receiving the higher level of abundance and success. I suggested that through squandering their energy on criticism and the sexual flirtation issue, they were keeping themselves trapped into their zone of excellence.

Sarah and Jonah greeted my interpretations skeptically, but were curious enough to stick with me a little longer. As we explored together, Sarah gave me more details on how she was experiencing the situation. Right after the quarterly earnings report, she had suddenly found herself being extremely critical of herself, as well as Jonah. “Out of nowhere, she said, I would suddenly start making mental lists of all my shortcomings and Jonah’s, too. Then I couldn’t keep from starting to criticize Jonah out loud; then he would start on me, and we would be off and running.”

What about those accusations of sexual flirtation though? Where were they coming from? I knew from past experience that when you hide feelings inside yourself, you start seeing them in other people. This is especially true with sexual feelings. I wondered if Sarah had felt a sexual attraction to someone else, hidden those feelings away deep inside her, and suddenly started focusing on her husband’s sexual feelings. If so, she wouldn’t be the first or the five millionth person to do this. I call this projection, and there are dozens of chapters in psychology textbooks on how it works.

Simply put, if you have some emotion within you that you don’t know how to manage, you seal that emotion away and start trying to manage other people’s versions of it. I decided to play the hunch. “Think back to before all this started. Did you have some sexual feelings of your own that you hid down inside you?” There was an electric feeling in the room. They both seemed stunned, with a deer in the headlights look of wide-eyed astonishment on their faces. Then Sarah broke the silence with an attack on the messenger. She shot me a hostile glance and sneered “So you think this is all my fault?” “Absolutely not”, I said. “This is not about fault, or blame, or anything like that. It’s about helping you find out how things work in your relationship.”

Jonah suddenly chimed in with an observation. “I’m remembering that party…” She rolls her eyes as in “Here we go again…” I asked him to tell me about it, and suddenly, the whole scene was illuminated. They had attended a large party at a home of some friends. It so happened that Sarah’s favorite wine was being freely poured, and in the course of the evening she’d had, in other words, more than my share; she had become engrossed in a conversation with a young man who had just finished his MBA at a local university.

On the way home from the party, she and Jonah got into a huge argument. It started when she made mention of the young man’s ease of communicating his feelings. Jonah’s difficulty with communicating his emotions was a frequent subject in their arguments. “Let’s return to that moment and see if we can figure out what was really going on”, I said. I suggested that there was something completely innocent, but very important about her interaction with the young man.

I asked Sarah to tune into her deepest feelings and look for anything she might be hiding from herself. It took only a few seconds for it to emerge… Tears came, and she said that her conversation with the young man had triggered a deep sadness in her. She despaired that she would never have the kind of easy flow of communication with Jonah that she felt with the young man. It also triggered gloomy mid-life thoughts that she was 45 and over the hill and might not ever experience the kind of deep emotional intimacy she yearned for in her marriage.

When people communicate at the deepest level, as Sarah was doing, it inspires others to drop into that level themselves. Jonah listened with rapt attention, and when he spoke, it was to say in a hushed tone “I never realized how much that meant to you. Whenever that subject came up, I just heard it as criticism.”

I summarized: “You felt attracted to the young man because you were connecting with him on an emotional level. You really want that kind of connection with Jonah, but you despair of ever getting it. If you don’t get that, you’re going to fail to accomplish one of your biggest life goals. That’s big stuff. No wonder you started accusing Jonah of being attracted to a  couple of the youngest women on your staff.” She nodded in agreement. Jonah leaned forward and said “To be fair, I have to say I am attracted to them, although I would never act on it. They both have  a kind of easygoing quality to them. Sarah and I used to have that when we were younger. I miss that. Everything is always such a big deal now, because we always have to be thinking about money, the business, the consequences of every little thing.” When he said this, I noticed a new quality of attention on Sarah’s face. This was exactly the kind of communication she was looking for from him.

When he spoke to her from that deeper place in himself, he became the man she wanted to be married to, inviting her into the place where her dreams could be fulfilled.”

I shared this excerpt with you as it encapsulates the power of getting connected with the deeper feelings that are going on, and really having transparency and honesty as we are addressing challenges together in relationship.

How to avoid the traps of success – again, this is referenced from The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks… And there’s four tips. This is not all of what he offers, this is just a subset of what he’s suggesting.

1. Be intentional about taking alone time to process, center and integrate. This is one of the complaints that I hear from people over and over again, that are in the beginning stages of living together, sharing space together. I have a friend who is engaged and is living with her fiancée, and they have been embarking on new territory together in so many ways, and she was lamenting on how to feel centered and how to feel grounded when being in such partnership. You’re seeing that person all the time, and this is one of the great difficulties in relationship, and I have a podcast that I’ll put on the show notes that is one of the biggest things to negotiate in relationship, is the challenge of intimacy, and the challenge of autonomy and how both are equally important and often in our culture and the romanticizing of relationship we prioritize the union and the intimacy, and there’s really little support around how to ground, how to process and integrate our love and connection through alone time.

And this could simply mean going into the other room and actually closing the door. Giving yourself permission to have real quality, alone time, and knowing it will be uninterrupted, whether or not you wanna journal, read, watch a show, some people like to take baths, or even go for a walk… There’s many ways to give yourself space to be with you and to process how you’re feeling and to integrate your experience and to be able to expand, to really contemplate some of these things.

Gay says “These periods of battery charging alone time give you the ability to master longer and longer periods of closeness when you’re in union with your beloved.”

And one of the cues that I get inside of myself is I start to feel irritable, or I start to feel moody, or even scattered or agitated, and that lets me know that possibly I have so much going on that I could really benefit from time to ground, to center, to process, and again, to integrate, and that that actually allows me to be more open to connection, rather than trying to do things half-heartedly.

2. Prioritize transparency and vulnerability. This is something that I am actively working towards with couples in my coaching – helping them understand what is going on for them emotionally, and what’s going on on a deeper level. I have seen the powerful shift of being able to simply say “I am scared. I am overwhelmed. I am tired. I’m hurt”, and that this is something that the significant other can really hear and tune into.

As Gay was talking, when someone speaks from a deeper level inside themselves, not with blame, not with criticism, but real transparency and willingness to access that deeper place and reveal that, there’s a shift, and the person responds. It’s almost — again, I’ve used the analogy of tuning forks. When one person accesses that place in themself and is willing to share it, it invites for a deeper level of tuning in and connectedness, that the person will often lean into that and want to follow suit.

3. Accept the discomfort and be interested. When you’re experiencing challenge, instead of turning away, it can be extremely powerful – that’s all of what we’re talking about here, is to be able to be curious and have a state of wonder about what might be going on, and being able to access the deeper issues or hidden barriers or concerns, and to get out that real truth. And that if we can be in a place of acceptance and wonderment, that we really have power to create great change.
4. Develop an accountability measure. Friends that are familiar with this concept, or want to share with them, and then be in a position where you guys can remind each other of the upper limit issue, that perhaps you guys can invite a deeper level of awareness and questioning, and again, curiosity around what might be going on there.

Several times I’ve had my husband query me about “I wonder what’s going on there?” and wondering about the upper limit, and I have so appreciated that reflection. And I have a dear friend that has commented to me when I’ve had major technical issues, and I’ve had my fair share… And I still — I had one this last week, it was Gmail had switched their platform and I had some e-mail fetching errors, and I had my tech support person help… Anyway, I ended up with an e-mail box of over 14,000 e-mails that I had already received, and now I’m contending with all of these e-mails that I have to sift through and delete… Anyway, total time suck. So I’ve had — whether or not it’s that, or I had some major issues in the beginning of the year, when I’ve tried to do a launch… I have all these tech issues and I have had people ask me “Is that normal?” and I’m like “I actually don’t know…”, and then to be in the position of like “Is that an upper limit issue?”

It can be so helpful to have people in community, in your inner circle, remind you of this concept and how we have the tendency to sabotage or limit ourselves… And to be in the process of growing that we wanna be mindful of that process, whether or not it’s friends, or if you have something that you systematically check in around in a journal process… Whatever it is, not losing touch with this concept. It’s easy to learn it and be familiar with it, and be inspired by it, and then forget it. So it is a practice, like many of these things are.

In summary, if you notice a fear of outshining, I’d encourage you to work a little deeper with what might be going on there, whether or not you use some of the resources that I’ve mentioned, and perhaps just do some deeper inquiry… Or if you’re interested in getting coaching around that, I encourage you to do that.

Or if you and your partner are accomplishing more levels of success together, that if you can be in partnership around reflecting on relationship challenge with his lens, of the upper limit issue, that will allow for a deeper level of understanding and possibility for connection and expansion.

Thank you for listening to today’s episode 151, “How to handle the trouble of outshining in relationship.” If you have a question that you would like to submit for the Empowered Relationship Podcast, or if you would like to receive live laser coaching on the show, I encourage you to reach out to me on my contact page on my website, DrJessicaHiggins.com. Until next time, I hope you take great care.

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