When was the last time you felt frustrated, annoyed or downright angry at something your ex did? If it was recently, or if you’ve ever thought, it would be so nice if they’d just do things the way I do them, then this episode is for you. In this episode, we'll explore the concept of 'manuals'—those pesky expectations we impose on others—and how releasing them can lead to dropping the excess suffering you’re feeling.
You’ll learn that ‘manuals’ are the unwritten expectations we create about how others should behave to make us feel good. By recognizing these manuals, we learn to let go of unnecessary emotional burdens, improve our relationships, and embrace the dualities of life, particularly during challenging times like divorce.
In this episode I’ll cover:
• Exploring the 50-50 principle in life
• Understanding the concept of manuals in relationships
• How expectations create emotional resistance
• Recognizing personal autonomy in interactions
• Emphasizing self-responsibility for our feelings
• Empowerment comes from owning what you can actually control
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Full Episode Transcript:
When you're going through divorce, sometimes what you want most is a giant hug from someone who's been through it, knows exactly what you're going through and can help you along the way. This podcast, becoming you Again, is that hug. In many different ways, this podcast is going to help you with the mental, emotional and physical stress that you are feeling as you go through your divorce and beyond. I am your host, karin Nelson, and you are listening to Becoming you Again, episode number 198. Welcome to Becoming you Again, the podcast to help you with your mental and emotional well-being during and after divorce. This is where you learn to overcome the grief and trauma of your divorce. We're going to do that by reconnecting with yourself, creating lasting emotional resilience and living a truly independent life so that your life can be even better than when you were married.
I'm your host, karin Nelson. Welcome back to the podcast. How are you doing? How did your holidays go? I have to say I had a really good reminder about the 50-50 of life over the holidays. Now, this is a concept that I teach in episode 176, divorce healing using the 50-50 principle, and so if you're not quite sure what I'm talking about here, go listen to that episode, so you'll have a better understanding. But, man, I really noticed this on Christmas Eve and Christmas day with my family. So for us this year me and my ex and my partner and his ex we don't do the typical separation of time over the Christmas holiday Like a lot of divorce decrees do or divorce people do. Many divorce decrees divide the holiday as one parent gets the kids the day school gets out for the holiday until December 27th or something like that, and then they go to the other parent and they get them until school goes back in after the new year. Right, but we have really not ever gone by that division of time and instead we divide it so that one parent gets the kids on Christmas Eve Eve and then does their Christmas on the morning of Christmas Eve and then has the kids the rest of that day until the evening when they go to the other parent's house and they do their Christmas on Christmas Eve and then Christmas Day on the actual Christmas Day. It's a little confusing, but it's been working for us. We've been doing it for years and I really actually enjoy it Not having to not see my kids for a very, very long time and still getting to celebrate Christmas as close to the day as possible or actually on the day.
But anyway, my point is that this year we had Christmas Eve Eve as our Christmas Eve and Christmas Day as Christmas Eve. But the point is okay, I'm getting kind of confused, but here we go. The point is that I noticed on our Christmas Eve Eve, when we were all together as a family, it wasn't perfect, right, people were annoyed, the vibe was kind of off. My son had to work until like eight o'clock so we couldn't even really start doing any of our things. Like you know, our family planned things that we'd love to do on Christmas Eve until he got off work. It was just weird. There was just kind of a weird vibe.
I especially wasn't feeling very good. I had been sick, I was tired, I was stressed, I wasn't feeling super happy or super excited about everything and it just wasn't what most of us me included in that hope for when it comes to a Christmas evening, where you just kind of picture everyone getting along and having fun and enjoying your time together, and so, as I look back on it, that was like the other half of the 50, right. And then on our Christmas day, which was actually Christmas Eve morning it was totally the other half of that 50. It was so fun. People were absolutely enjoying themselves opening presents, laughing, enjoying themselves opening presents, laughing, enjoying, watching what we gave other people, what other people gave us. I especially was feeling refreshed and a little bit better from being sick and it was great. And I just had this complete reminder that life is 50-50. And in that 50-50, nothing has gone wrong. It was totally fine and normal for things to be 50-50. It was totally not a problem that Christmas Eve didn't go perfectly and that everybody wasn't happy or feeling it, and it was totally not a problem that Christmas morning was great and that everybody seemed to really be enjoying it. They are what they are. It was a mixed bag of sorts and it was totally fine to have both experiences. And so did you notice some moments of 50-50 during your holiday? Did you notice any kind of mixed bag of experiences? And, if so, what are you telling yourself about that? What are you telling yourself about the negative half of the 50 that didn't go just as perfectly as you wanted it to? Are you telling yourself that it means that your holiday was horrible, that it was terrible, that it was just fine, that it was perfect or something else. These are just things to think about, okay. So again, that was a huge tangent to what today's episode is actually about, because, you know me, I really like to go off on the tangents, but it was just something that I had been thinking about and wanted to talk to you guys about. But anyway, so today's episode I'm going to talk to you about manuals.
Over the Christmas holiday, I took two weeks off from face-to-face coaching with all my clients, but I still offered email coaching, which is basically just like written coaching between the two of us if you need it. If you're not a client of mine, you may not know this, but when you purchase my coaching package, we meet once a week for Zoom coaching for 45 minutes, but then you also have 24-7 access to me through email for any coaching or help or guidance that you might need in between our sessions, and then I get back to you within a reasonable time. And so over the holiday, all of my clients had access to me through email coaching. One of my clients reached out to me at one point was something that she was struggling with, and my answer to her was to explain this concept of the manual. Now it's something that we have coached on before. However, I hadn't used this specific title of the manual and how it shows up in our relationships, and after I sent her the email and we kind of emailed back and forth from there, it kind of got me thinking that this concept is probably something that I needed to talk about on the podcast, too. I haven't talked about the manual in this way. I've talked about it in other ways, because it really shows up in our lives if you're not paying attention, but I haven't talked about it in this way, and so I'm going to talk about it today. So what is the manual? Now?
The manual is a concept from one of my mentors, brooke Castillo, and she describes this as a set of beliefs about how someone else should behave so that we can feel better. Now, basically, it's like an instruction guide we've created in our mind for other people. That kind of lists how we want them to act or behave so that we can feel good and we can feel happy. Now, listen, we do this with everyone. We do this with our partners, with our kids, with our exes, with our parents, with our friends, our bosses, coworkers, the lady in the grocery store, the person who doesn't put their cart away, the person driving in traffic, like we do it with everyone.
Now, we typically don't understand that we're using this manual that we've created in our head. We just believe that we are objectively correct about how everyone should behave, and all of those beliefs are based on our own thoughts and our own priorities, and our own priorities and our own values and the own kind of person that we want to be, et cetera. Right, because our beliefs comes from all different things. So, for example, you might believe that people should put their carts in the little cart holders in the grocery store parking lot. You might believe that your kids should treat you with respect, or your partners should say I love you when you say it to them first. Or our parents should want to spend time with their grandkids, or our boss should have our back and be rooting for us. Right, like we might believe all of those different things and we might objectively think that they're all true and that's how everyone should act.
Now, the problem with manuals is that when you believe people should be a certain way and then they don't abide by your unwritten, unspoken manual, you feel terrible, you feel let down, you feel angry, you feel neglected, you feel manipulated, you feel like insert whatever emotion you might be feeling when someone does something that is not according to your manual. So I want you to think about like just a normal manual, like a manual that you'd get when you buy a new TV or a new microwave or a kitchen mixer or something like that. Right, when something doesn't work like it should, you can look in the manual and you fix the problem. You just look it up, you go online, you find the product that you have and you're like troubleshooting or how do I set this thing up? And then you follow the directions and it works for you.
However, unfortunately, having human manuals is not useful because humans have autonomy and they get to do whatever they want. Okay, and as a caveat, you also get to do whatever you want. Right? It's not like everybody else gets to do whatever they want and you don't. No, you also get to do whatever you want. You also have autonomy. I'm going to talk about that in a minute, but listen to me right now. I am not saying that you shouldn't have manuals or you shouldn't be thinking these things, or that you're doing something wrong when you work from manuals in your brain about other people. Of course you do. Of course you will, I do too. We as humans, we all do this. We all have thoughts about how people should behave. That aligns with the way that you were raised. It aligns with your values, it aligns with your morals, it aligns with your culture, probably, and your beliefs, like.
The point of understanding this concept is to help you bring in some new perspective so that you can hopefully feel better and not carry around such animosity or anger or judgment toward other people that you have to deal with in your life, other people that you have to deal with in your life. The point is to understand that we have manuals for people. It's not to go around now hoping that those people will just change so that I can then be happy because now they're following my manual. Like. That's not the point of understanding that we have manuals, right. The point is to see how much suffering having this manual is causing you. It is causing pain and suffering for you. That is unnecessary. It is causing disconnection from yourself.
So by continuing to use this manual as your guide for how people should act and when I say should, I am putting quotes around that right how people should act and when I say should, I am putting quotes around that right, how people should act. You are judging their behavior as wrong and bad and you're holding yourself as superior to them and that you're good, you're better than them. Right, and there's a flaw in this type of thinking. It's believing that your way is the only way of doing things and that it is the right way of doing things. Now I want you to just take a beat. If you often think in these terms of I am doing it the good way and I'm doing it the right way, there is a lot of pressure that comes along with believing that your way is the right way, your way is the only way, believing that you know what's true and right and that no one else is doing it correctly feels so heavy.
This, in my opinion, is a form of arrogance, and arrogance is completely based out of fear, and if you're tired of living from a fear-based life, then this might be something that you need to understand or kind of accept, because arrogance is not confidence. Confidence is based in self-trust. Confidence isn't based off of comparing yourself to how other people are doing it. Confidence is like not full of judgment at all. Confidence is based off of how you are acting and how you are behaving and how you're showing up in your life. Confidence is like believing in yourself, trusting yourself, having your own back. Arrogance, however, is based in fear, because there's this belief that you're better than other people in some way. You have more knowledge, you're superior, you have more power, things like that and the fear that surrounds arrogance is that you might someday be knocked off your pedestal and you might not hold the top spot any longer, and that feels very scary.
And we also become major flip floppers on what our values are, what our beliefs are, on what our values are, what our beliefs are, what's important to us, because we have to one up someone else. So when I'm talking about manuals, what we're really doing is we're creating emotional resistance, and this emotional resistance that we create with our manuals for others shows up in resistance to other people having their own beliefs, resistance to other people having free will or autonomy, and that it's not okay for them to do that. And what's really interesting is, as I learned about manuals and was kind of applying it to my own life, I can totally pinpoint a lot of my manuals that I developed in my in my life were based from what I was taught and what I believed for a very long time, as I was raised as a Mormon. When you are Mormon, you are taught that you belong to the one true church. Like that is very clear to any Mormon. That is a very huge belief. Like that, you have the truth and everybody else is lost. So you're basically told from the time that you are three that you know how the world works and how heaven works and how God works and because you know it, you have special blessings that have been given to you and, yes, you're encouraged to share that knowledge with others so that they can choose to have it too.
But basically what I'm saying is I grew up believing I was in some way superior or better than other people because I was in on the secret that I had the truth. I I believe that I was a member of the true church and I was taught to believe that. To believe that and that idea alone informed my manuals for other people and how I thought of other people, I think, more than anything else, and it really, for me, informed me in a lot of shitty ways. For a very, very long time, I just thought that I was better than people who weren't Mormon. I thought I was better than people who drank alcohol or smoked cigarettes or had tattoos or had sex outside of marriage. And that arrogance, that thinking that I was better, that pride that I held, that I had this knowledge and I was so superior. It came off as so judgmental toward other people. I was so judgy to people, I was mean, I was rude, I would treat people unfairly, inferiorly, all of these things. I was coming off as a person that I didn't want to be, but I didn't even know I was doing it until I was out of the church, until I had left that behind, and I started to look back and recognize how I was treating people, the kind of person that I was being, the kind of judgments that I was making based off of this idea that I didn't want to hold onto any longer.
And it's been hard for me to drop this manual in many, many ways. It's still something that I have to be very conscious about when I meet new people, when I go new places, in my own relationships even. It's something that I really have to be conscious about and that I've struggled with for a long time, because I understand, and I know now that this idea is completely false, and when I use this manual in my relationships, all it does is create tension and distance me from my relationships, which makes me feel really shitty and I don't like it, and so it's something that I really have to be aware of. So realizing that you have manuals for others can help you let go of that pressure to need to be right, to need to be superior in some other way, and it also helps you let go of the idea that you actually have control over how other people behave, because the reality is you don't. The reality is that there are numerous ways of thinking and believing and doing things and behaving that probably don't align with the way that you think and you believe and you behave, but that doesn't mean that one is better or more superior than another. It just means they're different.
Now, this doesn't mean that you should just stop believing that someone who is abusing you or treating you crappy, that you should just let them and get on with life. That is not what I'm saying about manuals. If you believe that abuse is bad, which I hope that you do I hope that you don't. My cat is being crazy, so, if you can hear her, she's just like she's got the zoomies and she's running around and she's being insane. She's just like ran in here scratched on her scratching post. I don't know what she's doing, I can't see her, but I think she's under my desk. But anyway, okay, sorry for that little tangent.
But getting back to abuse, which is a very serious subject, and I'm sorry that I interrupted it with that, but if you believe that abuse is not okay and that people shouldn't mistreat you which I totally agree with and I hope that you believe that too, you don't have to let go of that manual is what I'm saying. You can keep that. You can still believe that abuse is not okay, that you don't want to be mistreated. But what dropping the manual in that situation does is it reminds you that you have power as much as the other person in the relationship has autonomy and free will to treat people terribly, to abuse people, to whatever. Guess what. So do you, and so you get to decide that being in a relationship where someone mistreats you is not a relationship that you want to be a part of any longer, and then you take steps to move on, to move out. You can realize that manuals aren't about someone being objectively right or objectively wrong, and instead you can lean on the idea that you are ultimately in control of your own life and how you feel.
Other people don't need to change their behavior for you to feel better or feel different. They don't need to follow your manual, for that Power lies in you realizing that you actually create whatever feeling you want on your own, without depending on others to change who they are in order for you to do that. So let me say that one more time you don't need other people to change their behavior for you to feel better, and I'll go back to this idea of abuse. If you're in an abusive relationship or you're in a relationship where people, where someone is mistreating you, you don't need them to change for you to feel better. You need to recognize where your power is, and your power is in deciding what you're going to put up with and if that power means you're going to leave. If that power means you're going to start saving money so you can get out. If that power means you're going to start saving money so you can get out. If that power means you're going to lean on outside resources to help you in some specific way, whatever that is. That power lies with you. If you want to feel better, if you want to feel different, that's up to you. And this is where the power lies in recognizing manuals.
The real power lies in realizing that you actually create whatever feeling you want on your own, without depending on others to change who they are in order for you to do that. So one step in that direction is to ask yourself how do you think you would feel if the other person followed your manual, like if you got somebody in your life and they are just being the worst according to your manual, right? They're just doing all of the things that are driving you nuts. How do you think that you would feel if the other person followed your manual? How? How you think they should be acting and behaving manual? How you think they should be acting and behaving? How would you feel if they just suddenly did it all of a sudden, right?
Then, after you figure out how you would feel, your job is to work on releasing the need for them to change and leaning into creating that feeling for yourself, asking yourself what do I need to think in order to feel this? What do I need to do with my body. How do I need to realign my nervous system so that I can bring my prefrontal cortex back online, so that I can think differently, in order to create this feeling that I am seeking? Because, in reality, it's all up to you. You are autonomous over your own feelings. You got this. This is where your power lies. All right, that is what I have for you today. Thank you so much for being here. I love you all. I will be back next week.
Hi, friend, I'm so glad you're here and thanks for listening. I wanted to let you know that if you're wanting more, a way to make deeper, more lasting change, then working one-on-one with me as your coach may be exactly what you need. Together, we'll take everything you're learning in the podcast and implement it in your life, with weekly coaching, real life practice and practical guidance. To learn more about how to work with me one-on-one, go to KarinNelsonCoaching dot com. That's W-W-W. Dot. K-a-r-i-n-n-e-l-s-o-n. Coaching dot com. Thanks for listening. If this podcast agreed with you in any way, please take a minute to follow and give me a rating. Wherever you listen to podcasts and for more details about how I can help you live an even better life than when you were married, make sure and check out the full show notes by clicking the link in the description.
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