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292: It's Not about the Dishes with Shane Birkel

Welcome back to The Couples Therapist Couch! This podcast is about the practice of Couples Therapy. Each week, Shane Birkel interviews an expert in the field of Couples Therapy to explore all about the world of relationships and how to be an amazing therapist.

In this solo episode, Shane talks why it’s not about the dishes. Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and your other favorite podcast spots, and watch it on YouTube – follow and leave a 5-star review.

  • Episode Summary & Player
  • Show Notes
  • The Couples Therapist Couch Summary
  • Transcript

The Couples Therapist Couch 292: It's Not about the Dishes with Shane Birkel

This episode is brought to you by Alma. Visit https://helloalma.com/dg/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=paid&utm_campaign=privatepractice to learn more

Sign up for the June 2026 Cohort of Shane’s Certified Couples Intensive Training (CIT): https://cit.shanebirkel.com/

Get the Couples Therapy 101 course: https://www.couplestherapistcouch.com/

Join the Couples Therapist Inner Circle: https://www.couplestherapistcouch.com/inner-circle-new 

In this solo episode, Shane talks why it’s not about the dishes. Hear why most of our emotional reactions aren’t about what’s happening right now, how to recognize carried emotions vs. present emotions, a modern look at our survival strategies, whether to do family of origin work with your clients, and why emotions often come up in financial conversations.

 Here's a small sample of what you'll hear in this episode:

  • Where do our emotional reactions come from?
  • What happens if a child loses the love & caring of a parent?
  • Is every human worthy of love?
  • How does shame relate to this?
  • Should you do family of origin work with your clients?

Show Notes

 

What is The Couples Therapist Couch?

This podcast is about the practice of Couples Therapy. Many of the episodes are interviews with leaders in the field of Relationships. The show is meant to help Therapists and Coaches learn how to help people to deepen their connection, but in the process it explores what is most needed for each of us to love, heal, and grow. Each week, Shane Birkel interviews an expert in the field of Couples Therapy to explore all about the world of relationships and how to be an amazing therapist.

Learn more about the Couples Therapy 101 course: https://www.couplestherapistcouch.com/

Find out more about the Couples Therapist Inner Circle: https://www.couplestherapistcouch.com/inner-circle-new

Transcript

Please note: this transcript is not 100% accurate.

00:00
what's happening to you right now. It is real and it's also connected to something much older.

00:11
to The Couples Therapist Couch, the podcast for couples therapists, marriage counselors, and relationship coaches to explore the practice of couples therapy. And now, your host, Shane Birkel.

00:27
Hey everybody. Welcome back to The Couples Therapist Couch. This is Shane Birkel and this is the podcast that's all about the practice of couples therapy. Thank you so much for tuning in. I'm a licensed marriage and family therapist and the goal of this podcast is to help you learn how to more effectively work with couples and possibly even learn how to have a better relationship. The episode this week is brought to you by Alma. They make it easy to get credentialed with major insurance plans at enhanced reimbursement rates.

00:56
Alma handles all of the paperwork and guarantees payment within two weeks. Visit HelloAlma.com or click on the link in the show notes to learn more. Today I'm going to talk about something that's incredibly important for us as human beings and specifically for relationships. Most of the emotional reactions that show up for us as humans and in couples therapy are not actually about what's happening right now at that moment.

01:26
about what happened a long time ago. The fight about the dishes isn't really about the dishes. People are usually somewhat conscious of this, but often we're not conscious of it at all. The shutdown when a partner expresses frustration isn't really about what's going on in that moment. The anxiety that spins and spins without resolution isn't about a specific deadline at work or something that can actually happen to fix a problem. What we're dealing with

01:56
underneath almost every stuck pattern in couples therapy is carried emotions. Feelings that belong to another time and place that have followed people into their present day relationships. There are a lot of times these things get embedded into our nervous system in a way that we continue to live with them long after we've gone through the experiences. And one of the things that's really important to understand is that there's a difference between present day emotions

02:26
as you're experiencing them as an adult and carried emotions.

02:32
that are about things that happened to you a long time ago. The present-day emotions are healthy and functional. They're feelings that arise in response to what's actually happening right now and motivate us toward appropriate action. If you think about evolution, these are things, emotions evolve to help keep us safe or help us respond to what was going on in the situation. If you're facing something dangerous, your body moves into fear.

03:02
that fear is useful. helps you respond. Sometimes it's fight or flight and you can do something to protect yourself or to protect other people. In modern life, present-day emotions serve this function. If there's a fire, then you become full of fear and you run out of the building or you run into the building to save other people and help other people.

03:31
If you have a deadline at work and you feel worried about that, the worry motivates you to take action and try to meet the deadline. If you say something hurtful to your partner and you feel guilty about that, then that guilt or sadness moves you to accountability. It's a healthy signal pointing towards something real. But carried emotions are different. These are feelings we absorbed in childhood. When you're growing up,

03:59
in a certain family environment or cultural environment, it's like the water you're swimming in. You have thousands and thousands of experiences that inform how you see the world, so you begin to develop beliefs about the world. These can be taken on in two different ways. One is by modeling what you see.

04:25
and one is by reacting in an opposite way to what you see. So if you grow up with an anxious parent, for example, who's constantly managing the emotional climate of the household in order to keep the peace, you might end up carrying that anxiety because that's what you saw all the time while you were growing up. Now, if you were growing up in the middle of the...

04:52
forest and there was a lot of dangerous, you know, alligators around and. Your parents weren't home ever and no one was really paying attention. There wasn't enough anxiety. There wasn't enough of your parents sort of telling you what you needed to do to keep you safe. You could also develop anxiety in that way, so you're reacting in an opposite way. When there wasn't enough anxiety present like appropriate anxiety.

05:21
then you end up taking on that anxiety because you're in an environment that's unsafe. So your nervous system, you you grow up and become an adult and your nervous system had learned a way of being day in and day out. You know, you might have a belief that the world is not a safe place. So no matter what's going on around you, no matter how safe your environment is or your relationship really is, you always feel unsafe or you have anxiety.

05:51
And this anxiety isn't helping you with anything functional. It's not helping you meet a deadline at work. It's just keeping you up at night, keeping you spinning. And your brain ends up just attaching it to present day things. Could be money, could be work, could be your marriage. And it's not really necessarily about any of those things. It's an older thing. It's carried.

06:19
And the more we can become conscious of this, the more we can be free of it. And I think that's really important. And that's a goal. And sometimes there's a lot. Sometimes the healthy emotions and the carried emotions are mixed together. So you might have legitimate. Problems with money, let's say. And that's a real issue that you have anxiety about, but you're also bringing a lot of extra feelings into it that.

06:48
make it even harder. ah sometimes it's hard to, it's not like you can just say, these emotions are carried emotions and these emotions are healthy present day emotions. I think a lot of times it's a mixture of both.

07:05
So children don't just inherit their parents' genetics, they also absorb their parents' unprocessed emotional world. So the less conscious your parents were of these things, the more they end up putting them onto the children in the situation. So the child who grows up in a household where strong emotions are dangerous, let's say dad comes home and things get really bad if the house isn't

07:34
just right where, you know, mom is depressed and the child learns to manage her feelings by being needless and wantless. The child absorbs a belief. These emotions, my emotions are a burden on other people. My feelings are a problem. What's wrong with me if I have needs? That belief is not a present day emotion. It's a carried wound and it follows that child into every relationship that they have.

08:01
Let me give you an example. I worked with a man, I'll just call him David, who grew up this way. His dad was distant and harsh. His mom was depressed. And from a very young age, David learned that the way to manage his own anxiety was to manage everyone else's feelings. Just keep things positive. He was kind of the joker in the family and to be the one to make everything okay. And he learned that his needs and wants didn't matter as long as he could

08:31
tune into what was going on around him. And by the way, there are strengths that come from this, but there are also costs to growing up in this way. When you deny your own authentic reality so completely, the time he came into therapy as an adult, his wife felt like she didn't even know who he was. He had never told her what he actually wanted or how he's feeling or what he needed because he had learned so early that

08:58
his needs and wants were a problem for other people. So that was the belief that he took away from the situation. It was an adaptation that was in some ways helpful as a child to survive and get through that situation. But in other ways, it was really damaging to his present day relationship. And that carried emotion. It's not about, it's not really about his wife. It's not about his marriage. He might...

09:27
He might make up in his mind that his wife doesn't want to hear what he wants, but it's really about that little boy who learned that this is emotional truth was too much for the people he depended on. Another important part of this is that as children we are completely dependent on our caregivers for survival, not metaphorically, literally. If you you know and.

09:55
This goes back to evolution as well. If you lose the love and approval of your parents or your society, there is a genuine danger that you won't survive. There's no plan B, especially if you're growing up 30,000 years ago in some sort of village, uh small group setting. There's nowhere else to go. If my parents don't take care of me, you don't make it.

10:23
And that's the reality of childhood dependency. As human beings, children are dependent on their parents until, I mean, 18 in some ways. We could say that there are ways they're dependent on their children for longer. We could say there are ways they're dependent on their parents for less amounts of time maybe historically. But, you know, we'll just use 18 as a guide for what we use in modern-day society as the

10:53
entry into adulthood. So when a child learns that certain emotions make them a burden or that certain parts of themselves aren't welcome or that they need to perform in a particular way to keep their parents love and approval. The stakes couldn't feel higher. This isn't just about comfort or connection at a nervous system level. It feels like survival. If I don't get this right, I might not be OK. If they stop loving me, I might not make it.

11:20
And some authors say that humans are wired for connection. And I think the intensity, the intense feeling of this also gets wired in. And it becomes part of how the nervous system responds to perceived rejection or disapproval or disconnection from the people who matter most. think all of us can probably relate to feeling that intensity when we experience something like a breakup or

11:48
Even just asking for something you want and feeling like your partner doesn't want the same thing. So when we grow up, we become adults, we're no longer dependent on our parents for survival in the same way. We can take care of ourselves. What I often want to move people into is personal empowerment, especially as adults. There are resources and options and autonomy that children don't have.

12:15
You're no longer stuck in that situation. When you're a child, you're legitimately stuck. As an adult, you are not, but the nervous system hasn't gotten that memo. It's still operating from the original programming, still responding to a partner's frustration or withdrawal or criticism as if it's a survival threat, still feeling the same desperate energy and urgency. If this person doesn't love me,

12:42
If I can't get this right, something terrible is going to happen. And a lot of times they aren't even conscious of that. There's a layer of protection around that, which might feel more like my partner's just a jerk because if I'm externalizing that and blaming it on my partner, then I don't actually have to look at the deep fear within myself. And this is why people respond to marital conflict with either a lot of intensity,

13:12
or with a lot of avoidance. it does, you know, oftentimes it doesn't, the level of intensity doesn't match what's actually happening in the situation. So it's not exactly that they're overreacting to the present moment. They're reacting appropriately to what their nervous system believes is happening, which is something much more, much older and much more dangerous. And it explains three main strategies people develop to manage that.

13:42
terror. The first is performing, right? All of us have masks that we put on when we go out into the world. I'm going to be good. I'm going to be perfect. I'm going to be what other people need. I'm going to manage everyone else's emotions. I'm going to make sure nobody is unhappy. This is one of the strategies that children learn that uh love is... And what they learn is that love is conditional.

14:11
on behavior and that the cost of not performing is withdrawal of the love they need to survive. Another strategy is convincing themselves that they don't need others. This might resonate for a lot of people. This often happens to very functional children who don't have a hard time getting good grades, being competent in the world, and

14:40
They become needless and wantless and decide I can just deal with stuff myself. But they shut down the emotional dependency because it feels too dangerous. If I don't need you, then you can't hurt me. And I won't be at the mercy of whether you decide to love me or not. This looks like independence sometimes, but it's actually a response to a profound fear. And again, like I said before, I think there's always two sides of the coin. A lot of this can be strengths.

15:08
that are used in a healthy way for you as an adult, but there are often consequences to these things as well. Or I should say, it's very beneficial just to know yourself and to become aware of the way this is helpful in your life and the way it's not helpful in your life. So the third strategy I was gonna mention is trying to control other people's perceptions, right? Trying to manage

15:35
how you're seen, explaining, justifying, defending, making sure the other person understands you correctly so they can't withdraw their love based on misunderstanding. This is a strategy of someone whose survival felt contingent on being understood and approved of. All three of these strategies make complete sense. In childhood, they were adaptations to a genuinely threatening situation. The problem is we carry them into adulthood and into our marriages.

16:05
where they create the disconnection that they were designed to prevent. Building a private practice can be challenging. Filing all of the right paperwork is time consuming and tedious. And even after you're done, it can take months to get credentialed and start seeing clients. That's why Alma makes it easy and financially rewarding to accept insurance. When you join Alma, you can get credentialed within 45 days and access enhanced reimbursement rates with major payers.

16:34
They also handle all of the paperwork from eligibility checks to claim submissions and guarantee payment within two weeks of each appointment. Plus, when you join Alma, you'll get access to time-saving tools for intakes, scheduling, treatment plans, progress notes, and more in their included platform. Alma helps you spend less time on administrative work and more time offering great care to your clients. Visit helloalma.com or click the link in the show notes to learn more.

17:04
And I wanted to talk about shame really quickly in the context of this topic because uh shame is one of the most significant and most destructive of the carried emotions. There's something important to name clearly the feeling that I am not enough. am fundamentally flawed. am unworthy of love uh is a carried emotion. It's not the truth. It is something that got learned. The truth is that

17:33
every human being, especially if you think of a baby or a small child.

17:38
Every human being is valuable and worthy and deserving of love and to be taken care of. And there's something that gets absorbed in environments where worth feels conditional, where love and approval depend on performance or where certain parts of the self weren't welcome. So that's where the shame gets developed in us as human beings in any ways that we weren't feeling valued or

18:08
nurtured as a child and.

18:14
My perspective is that every person is worthy of love simply because they exist, not because of what they achieve, not because of who approves of them, not because they got it right, simply because they are human. And we're imperfect human beings. All humans make mistakes. And that doesn't make you a bad person, as long as you have the ability to be accountable and you have good intentions in the situation.

18:39
So when someone is carrying the feeling of not being enough, that feeling isn't an accurate reflection of reality. It's a wound. It's something they learned and it can be unlearned, not quickly or easily, but over time with the right kind of support and with the right kind of compassion. And the first step is compassion for yourself. There's some reason why it makes sense that you're struggling in the particular way that you are, or you're feeling stuck in the particular way that you are.

19:09
And this is why shame is often so central to the couples therapy work, because when someone is in a state of shame, when the not enough feeling is activated, they can't turn toward their partner. They collapse inward or they become avoidant or they go on the attack. They're too busy surviving their own experience to have any room for their other persons.

19:39
And the person who caused harm and can't stay present with their partner's pain because they've collapsed into I'm the worst, I ruin everything. That's them going into their own shame instead of a healthy guilt, which would feel more like they're still making about their partner's experience. They feel bad because they hurt someone else. The partner who can't ask directly for what they need because somewhere underneath they believe they don't deserve

20:08
to have their needs met, that's also shame. The partner who fights desperately to win the argument because being wrong feels like proof of their fundamental inadequacy, that's also shame. In every case, the shame is carried. It came from somewhere and it makes sense in the context of where it was formed and it is not the truth. When you understand the carried emotions, you start to see them everywhere in the work.

20:37
of couples therapy. The partner who escalates instantly when their spouse expresses mild frustration. The reaction is wildly disproportionate to what just happened. That's a clue. Something old is being activated. The nervous system is responding to a threat that isn't actually present. The partner who shuts down completely when anything feels like criticism, who goes silent, leaves the room, becomes unavailable, that withdrawal isn't about this

21:07
moment, not entirely. It's about every moment in childhood when showing up emotionally meant getting hurt or being a burden or being dismissed. The partner who can't stop explaining and justifying and making sure the other person understands their side, that desperate need to be understood isn't about this argument entirely. It's about a child whose reality was consistently dismissed or overridden who learned that if you don't fight hard enough for your truth, it could disappear.

21:38
In each case, the present day partner is experiencing the full emotional weight of something that happened decades ago, and their partner is confused and overwhelmed because the reaction doesn't match what's actually happening. And this is one of the most important things we can uncover for a couple, that what's happening to you right now, it is real, and it's also connected to something much older. Your reaction makes complete sense, but

22:06
we have to appropriately figure out where it's coming from. And I think this helps people move into that personal empowerment. This helps people, you know, again, the first step is becoming conscious of yourself and your own stuff and your own wounding, so to speak, to be able to move into that compassion and love and valuing of yourself. When people feel that worthiness or self-esteem,

22:35
then they can show up there in their relationships in a much more healthy, respectful way. And you know, it's helpful to go into family of origin work, but you don't always need to do a deep dive into the family of origin work. Some people don't want to do that and I respect that. But sometimes just naming it even even a little bit on the surface, like there's some reason why it makes sense that you're struggling at this moment.

23:05
can be a helpful step. So you don't have to go back and excavate every part of your history. Although I do think it's helpful and sometimes that is the right move to make. And sometimes people are really open to that and see how helpful it can be. just acknowledging there's something that you went through that makes complete sense about why this is hard for you at this moment. And then we're moving away from blame and into compassion.

23:35
the pattern stops being about my partner doing something wrong or me doing something wrong and becomes about a story that's much bigger than this moment. When you do go into family of origin work, the most powerful thing you can do is helping someone make the connection between what they're carrying and where it came from. When, to go back to the example, when David sat in the session and really understood for the first time that his sense of being responsible for everyone else's feelings had started with

24:04
His depressed mother and distant harsh father. When he could see that that sweet little boy trying so hard not to be a burden, something shifted that couldn't be undone, right? When you imagine that little boy, it's much easier to move into compassion and understanding. Of course. You learn to keep those your feelings to yourself. Of course, strong emotions feel dangerous. It makes complete sense given what you grew up with.

24:32
That was never yours to carry. You know, and a lot of times people will have strong emotions at this point and they'll have a shift in their perspective. And he said something like he never thought of it that way. And the part their partner and in this case his wife was watching this, you know, the end softened a lot. The man that.

24:55
she had experienced as withholding and emotionally unavailable started to make sense and he was becoming emotional at that moment. And she had a better perspective about what he was carrying. And that doesn't forgive bad behavior. I'm certainly not saying that the partner shouldn't have good boundaries around what they perceive as hurtful, but it does make it more compassionate. And the person who

25:22
was blaming or judging before, hopefully is using better language to own their reality and to describe what's happening for them. And that's the power of working with the carried emotions. It doesn't just change the individual, it changes what's possible between two people in their relationship. And I did just want to go through the four C's again really quick because this is part of the reason why I came up with the four C's.

25:51
where consciousness is the first step. Consciousness is helping people see what they're feeling in the present moment isn't entirely about the present moment. That the intensity of the reaction is a signal that something old is being activated, that awareness alone creates just enough space to respond differently. And the curiosity is what allows the exploration to go deeper. Where did this come from?

26:18
When did I first learn to feel this way? What did I make up about myself in the world as a result? So this is really helpful. Even if you've never been to therapy and you've never talked to, you know, thought much about your family growing up, you know, when you're in an argument with your partner and you feel overwhelmed, that it's really helpful to move into that curiosity to take a step back, to take a deep breath and say, what's going on inside of me? Where is this coming from? Is there any connection?

26:48
And then the compassion is what makes it possible to hold what's discovered without shame. Of course you learn to protect yourself this way. Of course you're carrying this. It makes complete sense that self-compassion is what begins to loosen the grip of the carried emotion and the shame. And then moving into compassion for your partner who's also carrying their own stuff, who's also responding from an old wound.

27:16
And that can be really helpful to change the dynamic between two people. And then the connection becomes possible when both people can see that each of them is carrying stuff. And we're moving from something that felt very hostile or confusing or overwhelming, and we're starting to feel like it makes sense. And that there's

27:44
understanding of the hurt and the pain and the idea that people are trying to protect themselves and create safety. then you can begin more advanced stuff and it's like, is the way I'm showing up really creating the safety that I'm seeking? And we can talk more strategically about what each person might need to feel that safety and openness with each other. The thing is that when people, you know, people exist in their

28:13
healthy, wise adult self. A lot of the time in their life, you know, where they feel competent, they feel loving and compassionate of others. They feel understanding. They feel strong. And a lot of times what we're doing in couples therapy is moving people back into their healthy, wise adult self. That's the prefrontal cortex part of their brain instead of the fight or flight system.

28:43
that evolved in childhood. So a lot of what we're doing in couples therapies, helping people sort out what belongs to now and what belongs to then, right? When you help couples with this, like let's, I've seen this a lot when people try to talk about finances, for example. It's like there's all these emotions that get caught up in the conversation when the financial conversation is really just numbers on a page.

29:12
It shouldn't be an emotional type of conversation, but there's all kinds of meaning that we attach to money. far as money helps us survive, money helps us to have a roof over our head to feed our family, to support our children. So it becomes heavy and it becomes filled with meaning and emotions, which is understandable, but it's important to separate those conversations out. Are we talking about the budget for this week?

29:41
Or are we talking about deeper emotions? Either one is possible, but if you aren't conscious of what's really happening in the conversation, it just gets confusing and more overwhelming. underneath all of this is the truth that so many people have lost touch with that they are enough that they always were that their worthiness was never in question. It just got buried under everything they learned they had to be in order to survive.

30:10
And helping people return to that truth, even just a little, or even just for a moment, is some of the most meaningful work that we can do. And that's not a small thing. I think this is everything in some ways. So thank you so much. The episode this week is brought to you by Alma. They make it easy to get credentialed with major insurance plans at enhanced reimbursement rates. Alma handles all of the paperwork and guarantees payment within two weeks. Visit HelloAlma.com.

30:38
or click on the link in the show notes to learn more. And thank you again, everybody. This is Shane Birkel and this is The Couples Therapist Couch podcast. It's all about the practice of couples therapy. I hope you have a great week and we'll see you next time. Bye, everybody!

 

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