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By the end of this episode, you'll discover where the balance lies between taking care of yourself and being there for your partner.

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Welcome to Stress Management for Highly Sensitive People, a podcast helping HSPs avoid overwhelm, eliminate stress and find true inner freedom. I'm your host, Todd Smith, a facilitator of the work of Byron Katie, a way to question and reduce stressful thoughts, and you guessed it, I'm a highly sensitive person myself.

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In this episode, you'll discover why it's easy to flip from one extreme to the other in a relationship. How to look at yourself and your relationship from a broader perspective and what true compromise feels like. This is an edition of Strategy Fridays where we think about specific things you can do to help manage stress. As a highly sensitive person. There's a kind of conundrum that we can get into as highly sensitive people. We start to learn about this trait being an hsp, and we start taking care of ourselves, maybe for the first time. And this is wonderful, but maybe our relationship starts to suffer a little bit because we go all in on self care and all out on partner care. Why is it so easy to flip from one extreme to the other in a relationship? When you've been all out on your partner, when you've been all out on others, taking care of others, being there for others, and then you haven't been there for yourself as much, there's a kind of deficit there, there's a need, there's a backlog of need inside of yourself that once you realize you have almost permission to take care of yourself, you may rush in and try to do that. And that's totally natural, totally good. And it is how balance begins. However, it can go too far, right? It's all about balance. We learn about the HSP kind of instructions, if you will, and if you follow those instructions, it's to take care of yourself. And of course, these are great instructions. I offer them all the time. Give yourself rest, don't overwhelm yourself, take, pace yourself. These are essentials for staying balanced. But if you go too far with it, and as HSPs we like to go deeply with things, you can end up going so far with self care that you lose touch with other values that are also important in your life. Life is a compromise, and this is no exception. For example, when I was younger, I lived in an ashram for many years and it was really like self care. All, all out self care. I meditated for up to eight hours a day and I did yoga and I went to bed early and all these things that were about taking care of myself, creating the conditions for me to have a nice inner experience. And it was wonderful. You know, I still have such beautiful feelings and memories from that time and. But what my mind often doesn't like to look at is that I had, I had problems. Like my relationship suffered a little bit. My, my relationship with my mother, for example, suffered quite a bit. We were more estranged during that period. And so even though it's good, and even though there's times for being all in on self care, there is a balance in life. And that's what this episode is about. So how do you look at yourself and your relationship from a broader perspective? If your vision is limited, then what you'll do is you'll focus on them first of all, probably. Or you'll focus on yourself and you will tend to flip back and forth between one or the other or get locked in on one or the other. This is because the mind is focused in a small way on one piece of the situation. But as your vision expands, if you can look at things from a broader perspective, you will see that there's another option. There's a ability to focus on instead of on them and me, you know, like your partner and yourself, there's an ability to focus on us. Something that is bigger than us as individuals, but something as kind of a team, as something larger. And so this is a new way of seeing. And if you look from a larger perspective, you'll be able to see that these opposites, which are contradictory and conflicting, can be held in a larger container. And when that's possible, when you see it from that possibility, from that point of view, it opens up the possibility of actually living a balanced life that honors all of the things that you value. I value inner care, but I also value my relationships. And so as I expand my awareness, I can see a place where I can hold both of those at the same time. If you notice imbalance in either direction, like you're going too much focused on the other person or too much focused on yourself, you will feel it. Life has a way of showing us that's what emotions are for. You'll feel this imbalance. Something's off and it's calling for your attention. So that's the invitation to check it out. Okay, have I been giving too much to my partner and not enough to myself? Then I'm going to have to make changes to come back to balance. I'm going to have to start including more, more self care. I'm Going to have to start making that as much a priority as taking care of my partner or my family. On the other hand, if you've been focused on yourself too much, then you'll feel that as an imbalance too, and you'll want to make changes to come back to balance. Which means, okay, changing the focus a little bit more towards my family, towards my partner, and making that as much a priority as taking care of myself or at least moving in that direction. The key is to look at what you value. We all have different values. And if you are have kind of some monkish tendencies like I do, then having like focusing on and kind of more on yourself may be natural for you. That may be your actual value. And if that's it, then great. Maybe you don't care about partnerships so much, maybe you don't care about relationships as much. Then honor that, be with that. If you look at what you value, then you'll find where the balance lies for you. If you look at your value and you find that, oh, relationships also do value, also are important to me, I do value those, then you will need to include that as something that you're actively nourishing and giving attention to. So it just depends on you. If you value both yourself and your partner relationship, both will need attention and nourishment. So what is compromise? What does true compromise actually feel like? True compromise means working as a team if possible, or at least considering both your needs and the needs of your partner. That's what we've been talking about this whole time. And this means asking what your partner's needs are, researching what are your partner's needs. There may have to be some exploration, there may have to be some discussion and some learning about what is it that your partner needs, wants, would like, desires. And you may know many of these things already, but you may also not know some things. So it's a great opening for some discussion. And then the other side of this is sharing what your needs are with your partner. And the first step of that, of course, is to find out what your needs are yourself. What do you feel would bring balance in your life? What is it that you need? What are your unique needs as a highly sensitive person? What are your specific needs as an individual? What are your wants and desires? And so having both your partner's needs clear or clearer, and your own needs clearer, then you have the opportunity or the possibility of beginning to compromise. Basically, it means putting all of your cards on the table and then figuring out what to do. Like, how can we work Things so that each one gets as much of what they need as possible. And knowing that you can't get everything like this is. This is life. Life is a compromise. Even if you live by yourself alone in a cave, you can't get everything. You can't completely do the self care the way you'd perfectly love to do it. It's just, that's what life is. It's a compromise. So when you're with a partner, seeing what the main things are, putting them out on the table. I love that expression, just putting the cards on the table. We can work through this. We can kind of say, okay, this is important, this isn't so important. I'll do this. Um, this one I'm not so willing to do. Can we, can we, can we work it out? Work it out. That only happens once you're. Once you're clear what the needs actually are. Now, some relationships, it's hard to have this kind of discussion because some people don't like to do this kind of thinking and planning, and that's okay too. And you can do this within yourself, thinking about your partner without them having to actually participate. If that, if it's, if that's the case in your situation, you can learn about what your partner's needs are, learn about what your needs are. Again, put all the cards on the table, but you're just doing that within your own space. And then see if you can find a way to navigate this or compromise so that you're able to get some of your needs met and also get some of your partner's needs met. An example of this for me is that from my side, I would. I don't really like watching tv. It's not something that interests me. But I'm willing to do it in the evening for an hour with my partner and his mother. And it's just kind of our way of being kind of family time. And so that's something that I'm willing to do. And there are other things that my partner is willing to do, which is to allow me to close my door when I'm working and not be so interactive during my workday because I need to focus. And I really like to be one pointed. And so there are different ways where there's a little give and a little take and there's a little, okay, yeah, I can see that that's important to you. And I'll give up something that's kind of important to me, but I'll keep something else that is important to me. It's a give and take. So the feeling I'm left with in this episode is that compromise is about accepting and working with both my needs and the needs of my partner. In this episode we looked at why it's easy to flip from one extreme to the other in a relationship. Like focus on them, then focus on me and sometimes get lost in that. And how easy it is to almost become too, too short sighted about the HSP care that is so important. Sometimes it can be so, so much of an emphasis, especially when you first discover it, that you put all your emphasis there and it may not be as balanced as you may actually want it to be. We also looked at how to look at yourself and your relationship from a broader perspective, which is more from the position of us than just on my partner or just on myself. And we finally looked at what true compromise feels like. And it feels like teamwork. It feels like both sides are winning and we're building something bigger than either one of us individually, and we're caring for something bigger as well. So thank you for listening. It's always great to explore with you. This program comes out three times a week on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Join me next time for Breakthrough Mondays, where I share success stories and helpful insights for highly sensitive people on the path towards inner freedom.