How do I be there for my stressed out partner who is in academia because it’s wearing down our relationship?
Dear A Stressed Out Partner of a Stressed Out Academic,
Watching someone we love struggle and be stressed and feel helpless to change anything about that experience for them is one of the most human experiences. I want to start by making it so clear that your emotional reactions and responses to this season of your relationship is so natural and human.
I am going to mostly stick with the emotions for this letter and then get to a few practical suggestions at the end. As with most advice letters, I have so few details of specifics (relational dynamics, length of relationship, patterns of support, etc.) that any attempted tailored advice toward your relationship would like inevitably fall flat. Therefore where I think I can be of the most help is supporting you to identify the emotions you may be feeling and from there you can explore ways to move through them. There is always such a precarious balance to be found in what ‘work’ can be done by you individually, what ‘work’ she can do individually, and what ‘work’ can be done relationally. I don’t have the balance of that for you, but the emotional reaction of stress (not an emotion) was the only feeling named in this letter, so I thought we could dive into what else could be at play emotionally and feelings-wise.
Grief - one of the biggest disservices I believe we have done as a society when it comes to emotions is ‘brand’ grief to only irrevocable loss like death or destruction. Grief is one of the most frequent emotions out there, and one we so rarely identify as feeling. What I hear in your letter is a mourning; what the relationship was with less time dedicated to work, who your partner was outside of stress, the connection and attunement that has probably disappeared during dinners at desks, rolling over in bed to find a laptop light cloaking the room, or phone check-ins colonized by shortened responses with deep sighs. (These are just guesses but it is what came to mind when reading your letter) To acknowledge that there has been a change in your relationship, even if seasonal, and therefore will shift, is to grieve what it was before. It is not burying the relationship to grieve what has been lost since your partner has been in academia. It’s probably one of the most honest things you can do for yourself, to be face-to-face with mourning. One thing about grief is it demands to be felt.
Loneliness - it is lonely to feel like you’re going through your work and family stresses and struggles on your own, particularly if you are already feeling disconnected from your partner because of her stress. There is a truthfulness to saying you are feeling lonely in a relationship with someone you love as it is happening. If you are truthful to yourself about it, then you can do something about it. Whether that is have a conversation with your partner about the loneliness, start therapy, create protected time with your partner without phones or laptops, scheduling evenings with friends on her late working nights so you still have support from people who love you, etc. There are always so many ways to contend with loneliness, but I think, if it is what you are feeling, it deserves to be witnessed and named as such. One of my favorite phrases from the parenting book The Whole Brain Child by Daniel J. Siegel & Tina Payne Bryson is “name it to tame it” - identifying the emotion makes it more navigable.
Curiosity - my most beloved complex emotion. I found myself picking up on a sense of ‘stuckness’ from your letter and the best antidote I know to stuckness is curiosity. Can you get curious about what you need or what you want to be different? Can you get so curious that you get specific? As in, if you miss your partner or you want more of her attention, can you identify two, three, four ways to reconnect that feel good to you? If this is a season of your relationship where you partner can’t hold your emotional stress from work in the way that you are used to, can you identify where else you have emotional outlets? Are you okay with that? Why or why not? Be as curious as you can with your emotions and identifying ways to feel through them and creating solutions to problems. I like curiosity because it can be playful and experimental - you’re just testing out what makes you feel differently. You don’t have to solve your partner’s workload in academia (I mean truthfully you can’t) so that energy is much better spent down rabbit-holes of experimentation.
Resentment - this one is a personal story. I was once in a long distance relationship with someone who, in his spirals of hating long distance, would push me away through fights. It was the most counterintuitive thing to me because I always thought, if you miss me, why are you creating a gulf out of a river? And there was no reasoning that pattern out of our relationship so I did the only thing I knew how or thought I could, I brewed a storm of resentment. But I wasn’t in a place to recognize that feeling within myself while I was in the relationship (that came nearly five years later in therapy) and I realized how that resentment poisoned the relationship. It wasn’t the only thing that poisoned it, but it certainly was strong enough to make it’s way into the bloodstream. (Lots of liquid metaphors here, interesting). The point of sharing this is I am not sure if you’re resentful but I would recommend exploring that as a possible feeling at play, exploring if it’s present and perhaps if it could be seeping its way into your relationship (counterintuitively creating more distance than the stress is). If so, then reread curiosity above.
Engage with each of these emotions. What I mean by that is, notice any sensations as you read this. Are you pulled to one section more than another? Do you want to avoid one or two in a way that surprises you? If you had to create an art piece at the end of each day, about your relationship, what colors would you use? And which colors correlate to which emotions? If you wrote a letter to your partner, what emotions can you recognize in it? If you sat down for a meditation, what do you feel your body is communicating to you? Is there one section you want to bring to your partner to talk about together? Take some time to listen to your reactions (thoughts, emotions, sensations) - they always have important information for you.
Now for the practical bits, as I understand sometimes mental health support or advice columns can give all this amorphous intangible considerations when all one really wants is helpful ‘to-trys’. So here they are.
Three practical pieces:
Complete the stress cycle together - ‘complete the stress cycle’ is a term I first heard from Dr. Emily Nagoski and Dr. Amelia Nagoski from their book Burnout. It does a fabulous job at framing the modern world stressors (such as an academic paper deadline) with the old wisdom of our bodies (stress response cycle) and making a compelling case to ‘do’ something to complete the stress cycle even if the stressor isn’t gone.
For example, when there was physical danger to our ancestors like an animal chasing us, once they were safely in shelter or killed the animal, the body transitions itself out of flight/fight/freeze/fawn into a state of equilibrium. And it is a whole process, not just one state of danger and one state of safety. For as intelligent as we are as a species, our bodies still frequently get stuck at some stage in the stress cycle (in danger zones) except instead of an animal, it’s an email from a journal reviewer. Our brains haven’t quite caught up to the shifts in danger we face today; it has poor discernment skills. But because we know the emotional danger we are in is not the the same danger as an animal, we may think ‘oh I can just close my laptop and go to sleep’ as though closing the laptop completes a cycle. But it doesn’t, the lizard brain is still lizard braining. It gets stuck there in this stance of protecting us and builds and builds every day. So, my very short and not as profound explanation [please read their book or listen to their podcast episode on Unlocking Us if you want more information] is the set up for the recommendation to finish the stress cycle every day. Complete the stress cycle even if the stressor will be there in your inbox in the morning.
Some ideas for completing the stress cycle: walk around the neighborhood together, 20 second hug or 6 second kiss [Gottman Institute], breathing exercises, dancing, playing, creating.
Ask your partner what could be the most helpful to them - sometimes, when we know someone really well, we take on all of these stories like ‘we should know what they need’, and we forget that they probably already know what would be the most helpful. It doesn’t need to be a guessing game. And if they don’t know in the moment, make a ‘bank’ of what has worked in the past and bring those up for suggestions if there isn’t anything that comes to mind for them when you ask. The play therapist in me would encourage you to make some sort of physical ‘bank’ of ideas (poster board, cookie jar with paper suggestions, etc) for either you or your partner to refer to, but I do understand not everyone is up for that.
Set a 10-15 minute block of time that is strictly for venting or problem solving, you can decide together if this is 10 minutes each or 15 minutes split between the two of you, etc. A shorthand I love is “are we problem solving or no?” and this can be set at the beginning or after they have had their space to figure out if brainstorming solutions or changes is helpful, or if the designated time is best spent knowing this sacred time is there to relieve stress. This provides flexibility for you both to get what you need from the other, and be there for each other too in the way that they know is most helpful. That way one person isn’t in problem solving mode when the other person really just wants to be heard.
Wishing you both daily completed stress cycles, connection, emotion identification, and a softer stress load.
Til next Sunday,
Dr. Sydney Conroy
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