Episode: 113 Can You Accept Your Partner’s Dark Side?

s Sara Khaki 00:05

Empowered people make informed decisions that lead to living a life without regret. This is Sarah Khaki and Shawna Woods from Atlanta Divorce Law Group, and this is the Happily Ever After Divorce Podcast.

Welcome to the Happily Ever After Divorce Podcast. I’m Sarah Khaki with Atlanta Divorce Law Group, and I’m joined by our managing partner, Shawna Woods. Shawna, I’ve been having this thought—this sort of thing I’ve been toiling with in my head. I don’t want to call it an epiphany yet, because I’m still working through it. It’s the thought of the dark side of your partner. What is your partner capable of doing at their extreme, right?

So let me back up and give you an example.

I’m going to go ahead and use my own personal example. I said I wouldn’t, but I’m going to. So, a few months ago, Hisham and I set a personal budget. We have a budget with line items for everything in the household. I also have my own budget—my splurge budget. Well, I broke that budget. And I broke it with full intention. Shocking. Shocking.

Naturally, it upset Hisham. When he brought it up to me, I was defending my position—why I was breaking this budget, blah, blah, blah. Obviously, I didn’t have any good arguments, but I was still standing my ground.

So it led into one of our back-and-forth arguments—or fights, if you want to call it. I was having a conversation about it with my friend Lee, and she said something that has just been toiling in my head. She said, “Well, this is what you do. This is who you are. Why is this such a surprise? Like, you know, 20 years into this thing, and we’re still surprised that this is what Sarah’s going to do. She’s going to break the splurge budget.”

And obviously, this is kind of funny—Sarah breaking the splurge budget—but there are things people do in relationships that are very hurtful, very harmful. You’ve seen signs of it. You’ve seen them do it in the past and apologize for it, and then they repeat it again. And we’re still upset the next time. And then we’re like, “I can’t trust you. You don’t say what you’re going to do. You don’t do what you say you’re going to do.”

But the thought I had is: don’t we really know what our spouses or partners are capable of? Don’t we know their dark side? At some point, don’t we have an idea of, this person—this is their vice. This is where their human instinct overcomes their ability, their subconscious ability, to override it, right? Their instinct is going to kick in. This is their vice. This is where they fall short.

And taken to an extreme, this is what they would be capable of from their dark side.

Then I think there’s a choice: do I want to accept this or not?

So first question—because there’s a lot packed in here—do you think it’s realistic to have that expectation of each other? To say, “Hey, man, you know what I’m capable of. You know my dark side. We’ve been together long enough that you should kind of know this. This shouldn’t be a surprise where you’re like, ‘My God, my whole life is in shock because I can’t believe you did this.’”

s Shawna Woods 03:25

Yeah, it’s very interesting, because I think there are two different parts to this. One is that there’s a certain acceptance of things from your partner, right? You don’t like them, they irritate you, but you accept them because they’re going to do it. It’s so ingrained in them. You’re not changing them. So you’re like, “All right, I’m accepting that.”

And then when you say “dark side,” I think a little bit more—rip from Yellowstone. How dark is dark? Are you capable of murder? Can you accept certain things in your relationship—what you call the dark side—or are these just the things that really bother the other person?

I think some of that is about letting certain things go. My daughter and I were joking one day, and she said, “Well, you first had to be dramatic about it.” And I laughed and said, “But you’ve met me, right?” You knew that was going to be my response to that particular stimulus, or whatever it is.

There are certain things where you just kind of go, “Okay.”

s Sara Khaki 04:28

That’s who you are. You’re an overspender, or you’re an over-promiser, under-deliverer.

Okay, so let’s go to dark side. Let’s talk actual dark side. What about when you marry your person and you find out that, at a younger age or at some point in their life, they had a highly addictive behavior and have fought addiction their whole life?

s Shawna Woods 04:56

That’s a hard thing to do. For anybody who’s either dealt with addiction or loved somebody who’s dealt with addiction, when they’re deep in it, they can do things that they wouldn’t do otherwise. And it can be shocking.

So how deep do you accept their dark side? How deep do you accept the things they are, quote unquote, capable of?

I idealize marriage, even though I’m single—I really do. In my idealized version of marriage, you have married your ride-or-die. You have married the person who—proverbially—you’d bury the body with. You’ve married that person whose car we take.

And you hope that when they see your dark side—the things you may be capable of that you don’t necessarily want the whole world to see—

s Sara Khaki 05:39

Whose car are we taking?

Yes. Because we all have it.

s Shawna Woods 05:52

We all have it. And you want to be loved for it, too. How dark your dark side is—and whether a marriage is successful—is going to depend on whether the dark sides match.

s Sara Khaki 06:07

If the dark sides match and whether it’s a deal breaker for the other person.

Another one that comes to mind is when people very early on show you they have anger management issues. They have a temper, and they have a hard time managing their anger. They say they’re working on it. They promise they’re working on it. And then something happens, they snap—and we see that too.

All of a sudden it’s, “This person promised me this wouldn’t happen. This is something we worked on in therapy, and here it is again.”

And I think there are a couple of stages to this. The first time you see your partner’s dark side, it shocks you. Then you have to make a decision: is this dark side a deal breaker for me or not? Can I accept this person as a whole—the good, the bad, the amazing things they’re capable of, and the horrible things they’re capable of?

Because we’re all capable of just as much good as we are of evil. If we don’t recognize that, we’re going to be misled about who we really are.

So the first time, there’s shock. You’re learning something new about your partner. You make a decision. Hopefully, you’re in a partnership where you talk it through, and your partner says, “This is something I’ll be open about, and I’ll work on.”

Things go well for a while, and then you think the dark side is gone. Everything’s da-di-da—until it pops out again one day. The pattern shows itself.

What’s interesting about patterns is they never really leave us. They just walk alongside us. We’re always one lane away from stepping back into an old pattern. And when that happens, I think it’s almost more painful for the partner than the first time.

The first time, there’s surprise. The second time, it’s almost hopeless. Like, “We overcame this, and now you’re back here.” It can feel darker than the first discovery.

s Shawna woods 08:25

I think people who don’t want to experience that pain again can go into a willfully ignorant state. They know it exists, but they actively block that knowledge. They reframe it. They turn it into something it’s not.

You see this with serial cheaters. Typically, it’s the male partner having a series of affairs or seeing prostitutes, and the spouse doesn’t want to see it. She buries her head in the sand. “I’m not going to look at the credit card bill. I don’t want to know what’s on there. I’m not going to ask where he was. I’m not going to smell his clothes.”

Because she likes the person without the dark side. She’s accepting the dark side by being willfully ignorant of it, thinking she’s protecting herself—when really, she’s only hurting herself later.

s Sara Khaki 09:35

I definitely think part of what makes the dark side the dark side is that it’s kept in the dark.

If we bring it into the light—if your partner isn’t willfully blind to it, and you’re not willfully blind to it—and you acknowledge, “This is part of my pattern. It’s not going away. It’s always next to me. I just have to make a conscious decision not to step into it,” that changes everything.

Bringing the dark side into the light can remove the pain, the hurt, and the dysfunction.

s Shawna Woods 10:12

And a lot of what we keep in our dark side—again, not psychologists—are coping mechanisms we developed in childhood because our needs weren’t being met.

When you look at it that way, you’re not just exposing something shameful. You’re shining a light on what you had to do to survive. And then you can say, “This no longer serves me. How do I change it so it serves me and my spouse now?”

s Sara Khaki 10:49

I mention David Nagel a lot on this podcast. He has an amazing podcast called The Successful Mind Podcast. One of the greatest lessons he teaches is that your superpower also sits in your dark side.

When you bring your dark side out of dysfunction and into the light, you understand where it came from. You see what survival mechanism created it. And you realize it can actually create a lot of good. It can add value. It can be a massive source of power—for you and for the relationship—if both people stop being willfully blind and talk about it openly.

Thank you. Thank you.

Thanks for listening to the Happily Ever After Divorce Podcast. If you’d like to learn more, go to AtlantaDivorceLawGroup.com/resources.