Maggie:
Hey everyone, welcome. Today I am so delighted to bring you another client interview. We are going to be talking with Kati and I did not ask Kati how to pronounce her last name, Kati, how do you pronounce your last name?
Kati:
Hi, Maggie. You say it Rehm. R E H M, Rehm.
Maggie:
Okay. Fabulous. Kati Rehm was here and she is a life coach who also has a master’s degree in social work. She helps busy moms love being alive in their whole life, not just being a mom. In their marriages, with their friends, with their family, everything about their life when mom-hood overtakes it. Right. That’s one of the things she does. So we’re going to talk about her experience in marriage coaching. She’s going to share some of her perspectives as a life coach and as someone who’s a mental health professional as well. And I’m so, so excited to welcome you here. So welcome Katie.
Kati:
Thank you, Maggie. It’s such an honor to be here. I’m excited to talk to your people today.
Maggie:
I love it. So I mentioned a little bit that you work with moms, but do you want to tell people a little bit about what you do before we dive in?
Kati:
Sure. Let’s, let’s go for it. So I am a master’s level social worker. I have a background in cognitive-behavioral therapy. Before I became a life coach I worked one on one with survivors of sexual assault and domestic violence for over a decade. And then I discovered life coaching fell madly in love with it. Madly in love with the model, the process, everything about coaching, and decided this is it. Like, this is the ticket to helping people achieve better mental health and clarity in their life. I became certified through The Life Coach School, and you don’t know this Maggie, but I met you two years ago at The Life Coach School masterminds in Plano, Texas.
Kati:
I sat behind you. Now at this time, I knew who you were. I think everybody knows who Maggie Reyes is. I knew who you were, but I’d never met you before. And I sat behind you and you turned around and you shook my hand and I could just feel the love. Like I could just feel like this love that you have for human beings just like radiating from you. And it was so funny because, at that moment, I was like, this is my life coach right here, particularly for the relationship issues that I was experiencing at the time. So to everyone out there listening who may never have the opportunity to actually see Maggie face to face, you can hear the love in her voice. Trust me. It radiates from her being.
Maggie:
Oh my gosh, I did not know about this story. And I just like love that we live in a world where you think everybody knows who I am. That’s very fun for me right now. But we do have a Life Coach School community. And in that community, a lot of us sort of start knowing each other, which is very beautiful, but I love that we met and I didn’t even realize that. That’s amazing. It’s so good. So tell me, why did you decide besides meeting me live and knowing that I keep it real for real, it’s the same in person as it is on the show. Why did you decide that you wanted to work on your marriage more than working with me? Why did you decide to do it?
Kati:
Oh, Maggie. I think that it wasn’t a decision to work on my marriage. I think it was for me at that point, there was just no more choice. It was, I had to work. Does that make sense? I had to work on my marriage. Before that fateful day that I met you in Texas, my husband and I had just been struggling. We had been married for about three years at that point. And we had immediately had a young child. Now to your listeners who also have children, they know very well that our relationship is taxed when you start having children. It can be a very stressful variable thrown in and we were not coping well to put it lightly. We were not coping well with the level of stress that everyday life brings to a relationship. So young children, work, finances buying a house, all of it, it just accumulated till literally one day it just came to kind of an explosion point.
Kati:
And I suddenly found myself awake at 4:00 AM most nights on my iPhone Googling, should I stay in my marriage? Or should I go? And let me tell you, it was interesting because in our situation, all of our friends, everyone around us, our community, was like, you know, maybe you should just go consider going. So it was a set of circumstances that it was almost socially approved at that point to just exit the marriage. And so there was one side of me that said, yes, this isn’t making sense anymore. Like, I don’t think this is really serving our, our needs, or our best interests. We should go. But the other side of me just ate at the thought of leaving. So with this kind of cognitive dissonance that I was experiencing, should I stay or should I go? I was just so confused. And so my husband and I did end up going to couples counseling.
Kati:
We sought out a therapist and we went to a therapist for a full year. And at the end of that year, I still was in this cognitive dissonance place. Should I stay? Or should I go? And it was at that point where I realized, you know, there’s work that I need to do. I need to be able to clean up my own thinking and then bring me as a clean thinker for lack of better words, to the relationship. And that was when it was, you know, as a life coach, as someone who just, I mean, I geek out about the human brain. I will study the human brain until I’m blue in the face. It was at that moment where I thought why, of course, yes, I need a marriage coach, 100%. And so the first session I ever had, I believe you asked me a question similar to that, but the answer was, I’m confused.
Kati:
I don’t, should I stay? Or should I go everyone around me is telling me if I want to leave, It’s totally okay. Go for it. But my heart just aches. There’s something here. And I knew that I was doing something in my relationship to contribute to the negative results that we were getting, but I had no idea what that was. I could not objectively say I’m doing X, Y, and Z, and this is why our marriage is so poor right now. And so I also knew that if I was going to leave this relationship, I would just recreate the pattern of behavior, whatever it is that I’m doing in this relationship. And I’m completely unaware of it. I’m just going to take that with me and recreate it into the next relationship. So I started marriage coaching with you because I wanted to get out of a decision and I wanted to understand, what am I doing here? I wanted to know what I was contributing to the situation. And it boggled my mind that I had no idea what it was. I mean, I’m sure you know, I have a background in therapy, I have a master’s in social work, I’m a life coach myself, and I can’t see what it is that I’m doing. Holy heck.
Maggie:
Well, a couple of things come to mind. I love that you shared that because I always say we can’t see our own blind spots. Like this is normal. This is because we’re human. It’s like we don’t have eyes in the back of our heads. We cannot see our own emotional blind spots for the same reason. And at the same time, we have to see it to heal. It is like one of my sort of principles that I talk about all the time. And so it’s like we have to bring it into our own awareness to be able to do something about it. And if we can’t see our own blind spots, we need someone to help us see them. And I love what you said about, you’re an expert in this and you still needed help as we all do, right? Like I work with a coach. I’m a big believer that coaches have coaches because they help us move forward faster and all of those things.
Maggie:
But I remembered when you were talking one time, my husband and I had a disagreement about something and we’re not big sort of arguing. We sort of just disagree lovingly, but we still hurt each other’s feelings from time to time cause we’re human. And we have this big disagreement and we overcame it. And I remember my husband talking to me afterward and saying, you know, we live and breathe this stuff, and it’s still hard for us. Can you imagine someone who doesn’t have this level of commitment and guidance and understands how the results of their marriage were created? Like he just saw how even, even for us, right. I teach this stuff and I still get tripped up sometimes. Right. And so I love that. You’re bringing that to our conversation. It’s like so many of my listeners are very like, self-aware do self-development work have been to coaching, therapy, workshops, you know, read a bunch of books. It’s okay to not have it figured out. Even us experts have those moments when we need help to figure stuff out. So thank you for sharing that.
New Speaker:
Oh, Maggie, I love that. I love that story that even as a marriage coach and that it is okay to not have it figured out. And part of that is being okay with the fact that it is okay to not have your marriage figured out. I think so many of us enter a marriage with this beautiful idea of what our relationship is going to be like, the wedding day happens and now the magic will unfold before us. Yeah, there is magic, but there is a lot of non-magic to that happened. What if we just decide to be okay with that? What if we don’t have to make that mean that this is not the right marriage? What if we don’t have to make that mean? That that argument that we just had is an indicator that he is the wrong man for me, I made the wrong choice. What if it doesn’t have to mean that at all? What if it just means that we are two humans on a journey together trying to figure our stuff out.
Maggie:
I love that so much. And here’s what people forget magic is engineered, right? And I love that you use that term because it reminds me when I talk about the five-star marriage and I talk about that welcome home feeling and really imagining, you know, we don’t want a mediocre motel marriage. We want a five star, you know, Bora, Bora resort, marriage. And what’s that like, but when we think about that, just five star, just like magic. There’s a whole lot of planning and intention and dedication and practice and rehearsal and messiness that goes into every magic trick, so to speak.
Maggie:
So it’s like we expect magic to just arise out of the air. Right? Cause that’s what it looks like when we’re outside of a magic trick or a magic performance. But in reality, the people who are putting on that magic performance, spend sometimes months, days, weeks, years perfecting right. That magic so it looks so effortless. So we come to marriage and we think it should be effortless. And it’s like, wait a minute. You know how it becomes effortless. I have some news for you. How does it become effortless? It’s after you work at the, all the stuff that I teach on the podcast, all the stuff that we work in, in coaching after you work at that over time, it becomes your new normal. It becomes the way you think it becomes the way you show up and then it starts being effortless. But it’s like a hundred hours of practice leads to effortless.
Kati:
Maggie, can I tell you something very vulnerable? So this is such a good place for us to go because of that idea that you’re going to enter into a relationship that’s magic and that it just is going to happen. And I had that idea. I thought that even though, as a life coach, I knew very well that my results were a product of my actions, my feelings, my thoughts about the circumstance. I still had this underlying unrecognized belief that good things would just happen to me in my marriage. Therefore, following the logical conclusion, I also had this underlying belief that when negative things happened, they just happen. And it was maybe our second coaching session together where you said to me, Katie, did you know that you are playing the victim role here? And I was so shocked when you said that like here I am, you just used the victim word.
Kati:
I am educated, you know, domestic violence, sexual assault advocate, social worker, a self-proclaimed feminist victim. What I am not a victim. I was, in my relationship believing that the negative things were just happening to me and that was evidenced through the way that I was talking about things. So it wasn’t as if I was just walking into a room and saying, honey, how could you not have put the peanut butter lid back on? How could you do this to me? I mean, it wasn’t that obvious in the victim role, but it was in the sense of, he didn’t put the lid on the peanut butter again, I just, I feel so sad. How is it that he could do that? Now that’s a ridiculous example. I know it’s just the first that came to mind.
Maggie:
Listen people argue about all kinds of things. Sometimes it’s the peanut butter. It’s all right.
Kati:
Again, the power of life coaching is that even the parts of your brain where you think you have so completely worked on and honed in, and maybe you even consider yourself an expert in, it could be that you’re doing those very things in the context of your relationship. And you’re not even seeing it. And the power of coaching is that you have this objective person, Maggie, who comes in objectively with nothing more than love and kindness and compassion and belief in you and can show you, look, Kati, you’re being a victim here. Oh, it blew my mind. I was living my life as a victim in my marriage. And I had no idea that I was, that I was doing this.
Maggie:
And one of the ways we like to talk about it and both of us trained at the same coaching school so we both use similar terminology, Is we think about this idea called emotional childhood versus emotional adulthood. So I’m going to share that because I think it’s so applicable in the general world, you might call it victim, victim mentality or something like that. But I really love this distinction because also makes it sort of more neutral and easier to really see and measure. So in emotional childhood, which kind of, when we’re feeling like we’re a victim of our circumstances are a victim of her husband or things like that. I always use the example of the Popsicle. If I’m a child, let’s say I’m four or I’m five. And somebody takes my Popsicle away.
Maggie:
Then that determines my happiness. I will cry like a banshee, I’ll be loud, I’ll have a tantrum. Right? Cause the Popsicle went away. Now I am 47. And if somebody said, you have to drop the obstacle for some reason, right. I could understand that maybe I need to give the Popsicle for whatever reason. And I can regulate how I’m feeling. I have the ability to decide how I want to react to the absence of my Popsicle, right? So what’s totally appropriate as a child, by the way, there’s nothing wrong with a five-year-old who cries when somebody takes away their Popsicle. But when you’re 45 or 47 or 50 or whatever the case may be, it’s a moment to say, Hey, am I still crying Because somebody took away my Popsicle or did I realize I could just go buy a freaking case of obstacles if I want to write? Like I get to choose what I do next.
Maggie:
And so that sort of victim mindset, when we sort of bring it to, are we an emotional childhood? Are we in emotional adulthood knowing that we will be human and go back and forth between those two things on any given day, a bunch of times? Right? I could be so disappointed if zoom went out or my favorite Netflix show was cut off by a thunderstorm or something, it’s like, oh no somebody took away my popsicle. I could be in emotional childhood, right, As an adult and see like, okay, but I’m not going to decide my whole life over that. I’m just going to have a mini tantrum, right. I think that’s useful for people to understand.
Kati:
And how easy, I mean, let’s just be honest here, Maggie, how easy is it for our brains to automatically go to the place of, my husband made me angry. He has made me so upset. I’m so sad. I’m so unhappy in my life because if he would just do, insert whatever, I’ll feel so much better. And how easy it, it feels almost as if that is just a natural for our brains to do. And when we come into emotional adulthood and recognize, really recognize that he can do him, it is his life. He is not responsible for the way I feel. And when that, goes from just knowing that. So knowing my partner is not responsible for the way I feel, if like we can know that intellectually, but then in the heat of the moment, are we actually living that? Like, can we actually feel it?
Kati:
That was another groundbreaking moment for me in my coaching with you as my coach. That listening to your podcast, knowing all of the things that you have taught me about being in a relationship and showing up that I could hear these things and know them and understand these concepts, intellectually understand the concepts of emotional childhood, emotional adulthood, intellectually, but in the heat of the moment, when the lid comes off the peanut butter jar, I’m reverting right back, making him responsible for the way I. Making him responsible for the results that I’m getting in life. And it felt in that moment, just natural, even though intellectually, I knew it wasn’t. And so something that you and I did that was so powerful was that you would with love and compassion, call me out on these, these experiences that I would have in my relationship where I was just assuming that this is the natural conclusion you would call me out.
Kati:
And then you would paint a scenario for me that would help me see the ways that I was creating my own results. You just have this skill about, well, you’ll usually say it like this. Did you notice that when you showed up, he softened for you? Oh yeah. When you did this, he did this. Did you notice that when you took responsibility, he took responsibility? It was little things in our relationship that I might be telling you a completely different story about the peanut butter in the jar and you pull from that story, this recognition that you’re growing and that he’s growing and to have a coach be able to paint that reality for you is just so powerful because my brain would have just breezed right by it. I would not have even seen that as a triumph or a win.
Maggie:
I love that so much because you would just share the facts. You’d just be telling me your story the day to day thing, whatever it was that happened. And you would just be sharing the facts of the story, but you were interpreting facts in a particular way, right. That was like, wait, but if we just look at the facts, the neutral facts out of that story, and now let’s look at how do we interpret them. I would interpret it as it sounds like you solved it. It sounds like he met you halfway. It sounds like he wanted to do the thing and help you with, or do whatever the thing was. Right. Is that possible? Could that be another interpretation of those same facts?
Kati:
Yes. Yes. And I like to think about it and keep in mind that when we first started working together, I was so confused. I didn’t know, am I going to stay, am I going to go? And I also knew that I had contributed to the negative results that we were getting in our relationship, but I had no idea what it was that I was contributing. But one of those things that I was contributing to those results was that if you think about it, like in life, we have a choice on, I like to think about glasses. To enter a situation and we have a whole range of different colored lenses in which we could look at the situation. I knew that I was viewing my marriage through a pair of glasses that had a particular tent or lens. I had no idea what that tint or lens was. And what I wanted was to view my marriage with a set of glasses that had clear lenses. Like I wanted to really be totally sure and confident of the fact that I was interpreting the circumstances accurately and not bringing my own perception, my own stories about who he is and who I am and who I thought he was going to be or who he should be into the situation.
Kati:
What I learned in our time together was that those glasses that I was consistently wearing in the context of my relationship, those lenses were painted in the shade of defensiveness, resentfulness, and desperation, just a darn right neediness, of feeling desperate and how that resentfulness and that desperation just colored my perception of everything he did. And I still remember the day you called me out on that. And it was just like, I mean, it, it was like the earth stood still. As long as I am seeing everything he does through a lens of desperation and resentfulness, I am not going to know like the truth of this situation. Maybe he just accidentally left the lid off the peanut butter jar. Maybe really wasn’t being spiteful and passive-aggressive. Maybe he wasn’t out to get me by leaving that lid off. Just maybe I couldn’t see it because the resentfulness and the desperation was just in my face. That was the color of the lens that I was seeing. And you painted a different picture. You would take that situation and you would show the alternative. And it just was so clear. It became so crystal clear. Is it magic? No, it’s life coaching.
Maggie:
I love that. So good. Tell me about learning to trust yourself. Cause I know that’s something that has been really important to you feeling better in your relationship and you showing up differently is just learning, it’s almost like recalibrating and learning to trust. You know, you had these glasses that were tinted this way. You’re like, well, I don’t like these, these aren’t helping me. I want some other ones, maybe that’d be different. But then there’s this process where we’ve been looking through these glasses and we do doubt, Oh, should I use these glasses or these other glasses? And we sort of doubt on that. Tell me about learning that process of learning to trust yourself.
Kati:
I would say. And, you know, again, speaking from a kind of a mental health background and just, you know, as a self-proclaimed feminist that I think that my own process of learning to trust myself is maybe going to be a lifelong process. Maybe the beauty is in the journey and not just summiting the mountain. and that has been a very recent aha moment for me because as a woman who wants to be the strong woman who wants to be the woman that has it all together, I’m doing air quotes here. It was hard for me to see and admit that I was not trusting myself. Gosh, darn it. I just wasn’t, I was second-guessing everything. and again, second-guessing everything and then blaming it all on my husband, blaming that discomfort on my husband, on his actions. So the process of learning to trust myself really, I think begins with understanding that it is a journey. It’s not a summit. You’re not going to go, you know, go and reach the peak one day and you’re there and everything is perfect.
Kati:
So Learning to trust the process, learning to trust that right now, in this moment, in this say, for example, this particular argument with my husband, I may not have all the answers. I may not know in this moment exactly how I want to show up. Maybe in this moment, I don’t even know what I actually want. Maybe, in this moment he has said something that has kind of pushed a button within me that I didn’t even know I had. And now I’m feeling a little confused and flooded. Learning to Trust myself means that in that moment, I don’t have to run from that. I don’t have to be ashamed of the fact that I’m feeling flooded. I don’t have to be confused by the fact that I don’t know what my boundary is. Gosh, I’ve never even considered this before. I can just be in that moment.
Kati:
And when I recognized that suddenly these arguments that any couple has where I used to become flooded and then either shut down or just lash out, it means now that we will, of course, have an argument. I may start to feel that flooding happen. And then I can just, I see it. I can feel it. I am aware of it now and willing to just be there and show up for me. So even if that looks like honey, I have to walk away from it. And I just go into the bathroom or be behind a closed door. Yeah. And just breathe. Yeah. Or even if I say to him in that moment, I don’t know. I don’t know what I want. I need more time. So learning to trust myself as learning to accept that in the moment, I may not have all the answers. I may not have a perfect response. I may not even show up in a way that I’m particularly proud of. But that’s okay. As long as I’m okay with that, then later I can look back on it and I can say, wow, I learned, I had no idea that that was a button. No idea. Why was that a button for me? All he did was leave the jar of the peanut butter. Why did that make me so angry? What was that about me? What does that say about me? Let’s get curious.
Maggie:
I love that. Yeah. So powerful. I noticed that that really has nothing to do with him. Right. So many times where like I remember one of my clients saying, it was so much easier when it was his fault.
Kati:
Oh my God. It’s so much easier. Oh gosh, darn it, Maggie. Right?
Maggie:
It’s like, Oh no. Now I have to get curious about myself and why, why the peanut butter? What is it about this? Like what’s going on. But all of that work is really self-development where it’s really self-awareness and, and figuring out whatever I need to figure out so that I can be the partner that I want to be. So you’ve talked a lot about some of the challenges. How has your relationship now, like tell people a little bit about what you’ve created because you’ve created some beautiful things.
Kati:
My relationship now is not what I thought I wanted it to be. How’s that for an answer? I thought that I wanted, Oh gosh, Maggie. I feel so silly saying this, but I think a lot of women are going to be able to relate to this. I kind of wanted that like Prince charming, Disney relationship. Where he cares and dotes on me and buys me flowers every day and tells me how beautiful I am and rubs my feet. And, you know, makes me breakfast in bed and takes care of the kids while I go to the spa. And I mean, I mean, maybe not literally, but yeah. Kind of like if I’m going, to be honest, that is yeah.
Kati:
And my relationship is nothing like that. My relationship is kind, and it is even in the moments where we do have arguments because we do, you know, he’s kind of a fire, I’m kind of a water personality. You know, we have our, we have our clashes when we do have those arguments, before for coaching. I used to think, Oh my gosh, what is wrong with my marriage? What is wrong with my husband? This is the wrong relationship. I can’t believe, I can’t believe he said that. What does that mean? Does he not respect me? And the spinning in my brain would happen. Now we have an argument and it’s just an argument. It’s really just that simple. It really is just a, my brain doesn’t spin. And if it starts to spin, I can see it now and I can see it. I can watch it. I can observe it. And then interestingly enough, I can move on.
Kati:
My marriage now is, Oh my gosh, we laugh more? I remember talking to you and saying, I want a fun marriage. I want to have fun. And I remember crying, Oh, I cried in many of our sessions together. And, just thinking I’ll never have a fun marriage. Like, I don’t think I can. Our relationship is fun now. It’s not fun because you know, he changed. And he’s all of a sudden the Prince charming, who laughs at all my jokes. Right? It’s fun because I’m lighter. I’m lighter. There has been, I’ve released A, This burden that I had, which was well to put it simply. It was the burden that I had was he needs to make me happy and I need to make him happy. And I’ve released that. I’ve let that go. And I had no idea how heavy it was. I mean, can you imagine Maggie really believing that it is your job to make your husband happy and that it is his job to make you happy. That sounds exhausting. I mean, just like the objective, like step, it sounds exhausting, but it’s something that we were taught as small children we’re taught.
Maggie:
In our modern society, this is the cultural narrative that we are taught.
Kati:
It’s exhausting. There’s no way to have fun in a relationship where think that every single thing you have to do is dependent upon how your husband is going to feel about it. That is exhausting. Yeah. I don’t do that anymore. And interestingly enough, as soon as I let that burden go, he did too. And we never had, like, I didn’t sit him down and say, husband, it is no longer my job to make you happy. And it is no longer your job to make me happy. I did not do that. Even though I am a life coach, he would have rolled his eyes.
Maggie:
I love that. You said that I let it go. And he responded and we didn’t sit down and have to have a conversation about it because so many people think if we talk about it more, that’ll be the thing. And I always kind of think about it. Like you want to throw more communication at it. It’s like maybe communication Isn’t the problem. So many people think that, right?
Kati:
Maggie, I feel like that could be a podcast episode that needs to happen. Because again, as a woman who likes to talk and who is very interested in human behavior yes, I want a process like bring it on. Let’s talk about our feelings. Yes. Not my husband. It really was less communication and more of the way that I was showing up. And it wasn’t even the things that I was saying or doing. It was the way I felt. Yes. I could hone in particularly a stressful moment in any part of our given day in our relationship. If I could hone in just an inner sense of trust and love for myself. Yes, it radiated outward. It radiated outward. So I went into this coaching, thinking that I needed to fix this marriage or figure out whether to get in or get out.
Kati:
What I recognized was that the process began with me and learning to trust myself, learning to really just love the process that I’m going through, and accept it and learning to be okay, not being perfect. Willing to look kinda, you know, to have a marriage that does argue sometimes that is not the hallmark reading of, you know, your childhood dreams, but to let go of the perfectionism, you have to learn to trust yourself and to trust the process. and to just show up from your highest self and what that actually means, which is different for everyone. Whoever you are as your highest self, and particularly for women who are parents of young children, we’re going, going, going all day long. Like we don’t have time to sit down and think what, what is, who is my highest self? Like who do I want to be? Who do I want to evolve into? How do I want to look? We don’t have time to do that. Life coaching, working with you every single week meant that I had an hour in my schedule, set time done, where I designated to deciding and really creating for myself like who that highest version of Kati Rhem is. Yes. And then taking that and applying it to the environment of my relationship. It’s changed everything. It’s changed everything. Marianne Williams says it takes one sane person in a relationship and gosh, darn it. It’s true. Right.
Maggie:
I love that. I call it the power of one. I’m like listen, one person can change the world and one person can change a marriage.
Kati:
Like Maggie. We don’t have to fix them. Like we don’t go have, we don’t have to fix our husbands. We don’t have to change anything. Did you know this? We don’t have to change anything about our husbands in order to have a beautiful marriage, nothing.
Maggie:
Okay. One of the things you told me that I loved, and I really wanted to share it in the podcast as we start wrapping up for today is you said he has no idea what we talked about. He just loves the effect of coaching, tell me about that.
Kati:
You know, I, the things that you and I talk about in our, in our coaching sessions, if I were to bring all of that to my husband, what would he do with that? Right? Like there’s just, no, he’s not in my brain. his brain doesn’t work like mine. So like, it just kind of seems again, as, as a person who loves to process things who in the past really desired to overprocess and over-communicate with my husband, just recognizing that he’s not the person to process my personal self-growth with, but he is the person that gets to experience the results of that. That’s so powerful. That’s the gift that I get to give him. And here’s the beautiful part, because remember I said that in the beginning, I didn’t know if I should stay or if I should go.
Kati:
What I learned was that the more I discovered my highest self and processed that, and then shared the results of that with him. Yes. He just started to grow and change and respond accordingly. And then it became so clear that the confusion didn’t have to exist for me anymore. Because roll with me here. If I had worked so intently on myself and then shown up in my relationship with a clear lens, shown up with clear lenses, but my partner still continues to operate on that, that kind of lower-level vibe, energy. Right. And is not willing to meet me. Yeah. It would have been a lot easier for me to decide, do I stay, or do I go? Because I am showing up with love and objective, without that desperation, without that resentfulness, I’m showing up from a clean place and I’m offering to him, here I am, meet me here. Be here with me.
Kati:
If he had said no, it would have been clear. Yes or no. It would have been okay. And I, and I love that in our coaching together, you supported me too. You didn’t have an agenda. You weren’t like you are going to stay in this marriage. It was none of that. You supported whatever I wanted to do. And knowing that that clarity would have happened as a result of me being clear with myself. But what ended up happening was my clear glasses went on. I showed up as the highest version of myself. I made a bid to him, here I am, meet me here. And he basically said, Ooh, I’m going to cry now. He basically said, honey, I’ve been here, let’s go. The whole time he was waiting.
Maggie:
Oh my goodness. Okay. So we’re going to have to wrap up on that. Cause we’re both going to just burst into tears, just going to have to like, that’s a beautiful, beautiful thing to end on. And I don’t know why, but because you mentioned the fairytale, it’s almost like a different fairytale ending. It’s like, Oh, and I’ve been here the whole time, loving, wanting you to, to make that bid towards me. Right. That’s so, so, so beautiful. And my hypothesis is, most of us are not married to jerks. Some of us, like you, said, if you do all your work and that person doesn’t respond, then you want that information you want to know. Right. But most of us really, I’m married to good people who want to love us. Maybe they don’t know how, or maybe they’re not doing it the way that we expected them to like, maybe there are tweaks to be made. But in that moment, when we’re able to be like, Hey, I’m here. Clear glasses.
Kati:
Yeah. Yeah.
Maggie:
Okay. How can people find you?
Kati:
My website, KatiRehm.com. You can subscribe to my blog. It’s a super fun blog.
Maggie:
She brings the fun. Let’s be real Kati, She’s like, I want to have more fun to now. She like brings the fun. This is the truth. I love it. Thank you for saying yes. Thank you for sharing from your heart. I know that our conversation Will have blessed someone today.
Kati:
Thank you. Thank you for the incredible work and inspiration and light that you bring into this world, because I know that so many women, so many marriages need your voice and are benefiting from the work that you do. You’re a gift. Thank you.
Maggie:
On that note before we burst into tears again, thank you everyone for listening, I will be back next week with more loving guidance to help you have a better marriage. Bye.