Clueless and Codependent Part 1: Wake Up From Cluelessness and Find Compassion

Are you clueless?

Does your partner say things to you like, “Why can’t you just wipe up the crumbs on the counter after you make your sandwich?” or “The more you drink, the more you check out.” Or “I can never count on you.”

With a lot of my private coaching clients, we talk about cluelessness and codependence, so I decided to create a short series.

• This blog and the corresponding podcast episode looks at cluelessness. You’ll get a habit to practice as well as a script to help you communicate more effectively with your sweetheart.
• Next week, we’ll go over codependence.
• In two weeks, we’ll talk about the negative dynamic that results when you have a combination of cluelessness and codependence in your relationship.

Symptoms of cluelessness

You might want to examine your cluelessness if:

1. Your partner regularly complains that you are clueless, oblivious, or generally checked-out.
2. You have a lot of crises: a flat tire because there’s just no tread left on the rubber, or you “suddenly” realize you need to prepare for the meeting tomorrow that’s been on your calendar for a month, or your kid calls from school, “I’m waiting. You were supposed to pick me up.”
3. Or, you might be a bit clueless if you’re human. Because we’re all clueless about something. And it’s better to wonder, “How can I wake up” rather than be the bumbling buffoon caught with your fly down after giving a speech entitled, fashion tips to impress a room.

 

Degrees of clueless

Cluelessness is a matter of degree, right?

We are all clueless about some things. The woman who got the flat tire because her tires were bald was clueless about getting new tires because her husband always handled that. Tires were never on her radar because he took care of it. Then they divorced, and her alert to tune into the state of her tires came when she got a flat. Sometimes we’re clueless because this is the first time we got a sign to tune in. That’s one side of the spectrum.

At the other end of the spectrum is a refusal to wake up because it’s a hassle. This is when your partner repeatedly asks you to clean up after making your sandwich and you keep “forgetting.” Cleaning up is such a hassle.

This sort of cluelessness is convenient because you don’t have to take responsibility for your own life.

Just know the cost of this sort of cluelessness is that you become an annoyance to those around you. You lose respect, and then no one trusts you with the key things in their life.

Because cluelessness is a thief when it comes to trust in a relationship.

When you can’t be bothered to remember to pick up your kid after soccer practice, your kid learns they can’t trust you, and your partner withdraws because you’re not reliable. You end up lonely and mystified why people no longer include you in the important moments that make up their life.

To what degree do you behave in a clueless way in your relationship?

Which category would you be most likely to remain clueless:

• Household chores: is it your perspective that your partner is always “nagging” you about tidying up, but in reality, messes just never make it onto your radar?
• Money: does your account get overdrawn regularly? Or you’re unaware of the reality of your credit card? Or maybe you just can’t be bothered to save because, “There’s never enough money!”
• Accepting your partner’s invitations to adventure: do you feel bothered by your partner’s penchant to always want to do something on the weekend when you just need some rest? But maybe lately, you’re bothered by how often your partner heads off without you, and you feel left behind.
• Tender emotions: is it hard for you to notice when your partner has hurt feelings?

How about your partner? Which of the previous categories does your partner tend to be clueless?

Sources of cluelessness

None of us wants to be clueless, right? And yet we all are. We all have blind spots.

I remember this one time, years ago, when my family was at the dinner table together and one of the kids mentioned that their school was installing and AED, which is a public heart machine that can read a person’s cardiac rhythm and shock them back into the rhythm they might need.

The kids were imagining what this would look like at a basketball game or something, and we all laughed at the “CLEAR” call outs.

My husband is an emergency room physician so, as our laughter is calming down, I thought he might have a particular interest in this. I asked him, “Have you ever used one of those heart shockers?”

Both of the kids and my husband burst out laughing. “What is it you think I do?” my husband asked.

And there it was, my utter cluelessness about my husband’s job. He’s an emergency physician! Of course he’s used those paddles and shocked people into a better heart rhythm!

But I’d married a carpenter. During the years I was falling in love with my husband, I visited him on construction sites and saw him wearing that sexy tool belt. In my mind, obviously, I had arrested his life during that era. I hadn’t updated my reality during the DECADE it took for him to change careers.

From cluelessness to understanding

It’s a funny story. And hilarious because how could I be so clueless?

And yet, it was sort of a profound moment in our marriage. Because in that moment of awareness, I actually had a more visceral understanding of what he did at work.

Going forward, I had more compassion for the kind of stress he faced at work. My husband is a truly laid-back guy, and he never seems upset. But just me knowing about the “CLEAR” paddles that he put onto patients helped me have more sensitivity for how he was feeling after a shift at the hospital.

I clued in to the stressors he faced. I was more gentle when he got home and wasn’t particularly chatty or energetic.

You can’t know everything about your partner’s life and that’s why a relationship is fun. You get to learn vicariously about another person’s experience on planet earth.

But not if you don’t clue in.

Why are we clueless in relationships?

Sometimes, in your relationship, you’re clueless because you haven’t been exposed to an idea, or you haven’t updated your reality, right? Not being exposed to an idea is innocent enough, but cluelessness gets more toxic when you refuse to wake up. That’s entitlement.

What if I refused to wake up to the emotional complexity of my husband’s job, and just took it for granted that he went to that hospital and paid all our bills and never recognized the personal cost to him?

My husband has the wackiest sleep schedule in the world. Not only does he work at night sometimes, he also goes to work at 6am some days. So, his body clock is forever compromised.

What if I made him feel guilty for sleeping on his “day off?” What if I said sideways things in public about how lazy my husband was? Can you see the kind of toxicity that can get sewn into a relationship when you don’t wake up?

Then I’d just be demonstrating that I think I inherently deserve what he provides, without needing to care about the cost to him to have that job.

You have to be willing to wake up

Fortunately, I’m not a person who refuses to wake up. Actually, I think one of my strongest suits is that I’m perceptive and willing to change my perspective readily. But I want you to understand how pervasive and unkind cluelessness can become.

And I want to take this moment to point out how appreciation is a fabulous counter-balance to cluelessness.

Because we all start out clueless about something, right? As kids, it’s reasonable to expect your parents to feed and clothe you. But at some point, you need to start doing your own laundry, and cleaning up after yourself.

Did your parents help you wake up to this independence? Or did they allow you to remain entitled? And therefore clueless?

Now there are some other reasons you or your partner might be clueless. Any kind of neurodiversity can appear clueless, but I’m grateful our society has evolved to see things like ADHD, spectrum disorders, or a head injury as special cases that invite more complex analysis.

Another reason for cluelessness is childhood trauma.

If you were abused as a child, one effective coping strategy is to tune out. While this coping strategy probably saved you as a child, it’s getting in the way of intimacy with your partner now, because it’s understandably hard for you to clue in. For these complexities, I’ll recommend you find a skilled therapist. Here is an online resource to help you find a therapist who can help you.

What are the reasons that might contribute to your cluelessness? How about your partner?

No matter the reason you’re clueless today, compassion and understanding yourself and your partner will help you to clue in, so that you can be present for all the intimacy your relationship has to offer.

What dynamic does cluelessness bring into your relationship?

Let’s look at how your cluelessness, no matter how you came by it, is impacting your relationship today. Because when you wake up to what your cluelessness is costing you, you’ll be more inspired to WAKE UP.

Let’s look at an example:

You never learned to do your laundry, because your mom always did that for you. Those first few months or years of the relationship with your partner when you were “playing house,” your partner thought it was romantic to do your laundry, so now here you are, 2 years in and you still don’t know how to wash your clothes.

Your partner, however, is now busy with this baby that all that romance made and she has no interest in doing your laundry. Your clothes are piling up. Your partner is complaining. But what do you do?

You feel clueless about how to wash these clothes. And your cluelessness is so embarrassing that you don’t even want to admit to yourself that you don’t know how to wash clothes. So, you double down. You ignore the clothes. And you ignore your embarrassment.

When cluelessness begins to look like entitlement

As I said, I can have some compassion for your embarrassment, and your desire to ignore, but that compassion runs thin when you make no attempt to change. It’s time to wake up.

Google has let all clueless people off the hook because now there is a YouTube video for almost every mundane thing. If you’ve never learned to wash your own clothes, here’s a tutorial. No matter what your household ignorance is, there is sure to be a friend on YouTube that will help you wake up.

But, again, YOU need to be the one to do the waking up.

Here’s another example:

Let’s apply the same lesson to finances. Your partner is complaining because you spend too much. “I’m trying to pay rent over here!” she hollers, “And you’re out there buying a BMX bike so you can go be a little boy at the bike track. I need a man in my house!”

Ouch! Right? I hear the way people talk to each other, and cluelessness inspires really mean words. Your cluelessness is so frustrating for your partner who is trying to be responsible.

This is why I feel passionate about people waking up to their cluelessness, because it can become so toxic to true intimacy.

What your cluelessness tells your partner

When you persist in your cluelessness, you are saying to your partner, “I don’t value our relationship enough to figure out my part in this dynamic.”

Cluelessness is seductive because of its powerful ability to stay asleep. To ignore the problem. Your partner yells at you…there’s a moment of pain as you take the bullets…then, comes the sweet relief of falling back to sleep to dream in your land of continuous cluelessness.

Meanwhile.

Meanwhile, your partner, who CAN’T afford to fall asleep and forget to pay the bills, or pick up the kid from daycare is losing respect for you moment by moment, day by day…which turns into a life of alienation, separation, and divorce.

How is cluelessness—your own or your partner’s—impacting your relationship today?

If you want to hear more about this topic, listen to my podcast episode about making the invisible visible.

How do you WAKE UP from this cluelessness?

I always believe in starting with compassion. Always.

You don’t know how to handle money. It mystifies you. You try to save and, for an entire month you take your lunch to work instead of buying it. And you actually get ahead! You have a couple hundred dollars saved and you’re feeling some positive feedback and maybe you actually begin to enjoy taking your lunch, because you can see the results.

And then, WHAM! the washing machine breaks and suddenly all that money you were saving for that bike goes up in smoke.

You were trying! You were saving! And then all that money disappeared on a stupid thing like a washing machine! What a waste. And, now, because it feels so futile to save, and you feel so lousy, you go out and put that bike on a credit card. You ride hard all afternoon because LIFE IS HARD, MAN! And you’re sick of it. And you just need some relief.

Relief is one of the primary reasons we remain clueless

Life IS hard. Who wants to wake up to that? So we check out.

If you want to stop this cycle, I invite you to notice the hard. Notice the lousy way you feel when all the money you tried to save has to go to a lousy washing machine. That totally sucks.

Stay with me here. Feel that lousy feeling. Notice where you feel it in your body. Notice how you get just a little sweaty on the back of your neck, or you feel explosive, like you want to pound on something. Where is this feeling in your body?

Stay with this feeling.

Cluelessness comes when we don’t stay

Cluelessness is about escaping the reality we don’t want to feel.

That’s understandable, right? It sucks to feel lousy. So you want to run out and buy the bike and ride it HARD until all this pent up frustration disappears. Ignoring is a good payoff, right?

But how long does ignoring work?

This is the essence of waking up to your cluelessness. It’s a recognition of the emotion—that wretched feeling—you’re trying to avoid by checking out. And noticing you can’t keep that feeling at bay forever.

Why is it so tempting to check out?

Even your biology contributes to you staying asleep and clueless. When your body faces a fear—or the anticipation of any uncomfortable emotion—your amygdala—that reptilian part of your brain—sends an alert: PAIN COMING!

And you go into fight, flight, freeze mode.

You fight those dreadful financial responsibilities by fighting them, “I’ll show you! I can buy a bike! You can’t tell ME what to do!”

Or you fly away, “I gotta get outta here! I’m gonna go RIDE!”

Or you freeze. You shut down all the circuits that make connections to that deep sense of responsibility because it’s too painful to feel.

Compassion is the cure

Here’s the kindest way to wake up from your persistent cluelessness: compassion for yourself.

If you’re going to face all those adulting consequences that really suck, please, please offer yourself some compassion.

Because that is Big Work. To actually face those adulting consequences rather than run from them? Wow! That’s you truly growing as a human. And growth and change are HARD.

So be tender with yourself.

It’s difficult to have compassion for yourself

I hear you. You’re pushing back on me, “Rebecca! If I’m tender with myself, I’m never gonna change.” Every single one of my clients says this to me. And to every single client I say, be tender with yourself anyway.

Here’s what you’re likely to say to yourself when you pull out the credit card, buy the BMX bike and ride hard to run from all your problems: “You’re such an imbecile. You can’t even handle the simplest thing in life like saving enough money to pay for a broken washing machine. You’re such a loser.”

I ask you, sincerely, does talking to yourself this way inspire you to CHANGE?

The process will be easier if you can be kind to yourself

I’ve heard people just like you say these terrible things to themselves. They beat themselves up so hard even I will say, “No wonder you want to check out and run away!”

So I invite them, and I invite you now to talk with yourself differently. Try saying this, “Oh. Ouch. I did all that work of making my lunch and what happens to the money? It gets spent on something as UNFUN as a washing machine. There is absolutely nothing better about my life today than yesterday when I have to fix a washing machine. This is such a boring way to spend money. It’s really hard being a grown up because the expenditure of money is so BORING.”

Then I invite my client and you to feel that lousy, boring feeling. Breathe. Stay with these yucky feelings. Breathe and feel how boring it feels to buy a washing machine rather than a BMX bike.

Can you feel how you want to jump away from the feeling?

Can you sense that part of you that’s tempted to exit or fight that feeling off?

Here’s where the Big Work comes in: welcome that lousy feeling. Talk to yourself, “I know. It totally sucks to be a grown up.” Breathe. Stay.

And when you truly stay with that part of you that wants to run away from responsibility or fight it off…when you truly stay, you’ll feel the feeling fade. The feeling will pass through you and you’ll emerge on the other side.

In this moment you say to your amygdala, “I didn’t die.” It sounds dramatic, right? But your amygdala is so focused on its job to keep you safe that every horrible pain that amygdala sees it sends a message: Abort! Abort! Abort!

When you STAY, you send a different message to your deepest self

You send a message of survival. Not just survival, but you begin to glimpse how thriving lives on the other side of that pain. You see your resilience. And this is the most hopeful feeling in the world.

Because that part of you that wanted to check out and remain clueless is just afraid. Afraid you’re not really up to the task of being a grown up.

You’re terrified that everyone else will be able to figure it out, but not you. You’re not worthy.

But when you STAY and feel that boring, sucky feeling pass through you and you don’t die, you are flooded with hope. And that hope is the beginning of waking up.

This is how you wake up from your cluelessness: you offer yourself gentle compassion and loving kindness.

How you can offer your clueless self some compassion right now?

How can you offer your clueless partner some compassion right now?

Here’s some scripts to help you own your cluelessness and WAKE UP

Sometimes you want to remain clueless. Because life is a big job and you want a break from adulting. That’s understandable, right?

But if you don’t want this cluelessness to harm your relationships, it helps to really own your cluelessness. This is sort of like giving yourself permission to remain checked out.

If you want to embrace your cluelessness, here’s a script for you:

• “I’m feeling overwhelmed by life. I’d love to have a pass when it comes to knowing anything about tires. Would you be willing to keep an eye on my tires and alert me when I need to go get a new set?”

Or…

• “I want to be THERE for our kids in life, and I feel completely at my max. I’m forgetting everything. I got to work yesterday and realized I had two different shoes on. Could you be on kid duty until I get through this busy season at work?”

Why is it OK to say these things to your partner? Because it’s true. Sometimes life is giving you multiple invitations to wake up and you’re exhausted by the multiple things on your plate and YOU NEED A BREAK.

That’s understandable. Just, please, communicate about that. Ask for permission to remain clueless. I have seen dozens of spouses generously grant this permission. Your partner just needs to know that YOU KNOW that you’re being clueless. That takes all the ick out of it for your partner.

But if you want to wake up and you don’t want to be clueless anymore, here’s a different script you could try:

• “I know nothing about maintaining my car. I know nothing about cars, but I want to learn to be a responsible car owner. I’m putting a repeating appointment on my calendar to visit with you about the health of my car. Would you be willing to help me learn?”

Or…

• “I want to be THERE for our kids in life, and I want them to be able to trust me and count on me. I struggle to gain momentum at work and the first half of my day is just a blur. By about 3:00 I finally gain momentum and focus and finally feel successful. I’m struggling to break away to get the kids picked up after soccer at 4 because I’m finally hitting my stride. Can I be the one to take them to school instead?”

Here’s a couple suggestions:

1. Put a repeating reminder on your calendar. When that reminder pops up, ask yourself what you’ve done to help yourself wake up.
2. Schedule a meeting with your partner. Ask them to offer you feedback—both encouraging and challenging—to help you assess if your efforts to wake up are registering with them.
3. Write “I want to wake up” in the subject line of an email and begin an exchange with your partner that sounds something like this: “I want to do better when it comes to being aware about household chores. I’m sending this email so that, if I check out again and get clueless, you can just send this email and I’ll be able to alert myself.” Make the email funny by adding goofy names to the household chores.
   • Ummmm, floors get walked on…so they like a little mopping.
   • No one wants to look at your toothpaste remainder on the side of the sink.
   • Trash doesn’t have legs and needs to be walked outside by someone who has legs.

Invite your partner to send the email any time they want. Then, when you inevitably receive the email, jump right on the task, and make fun of yourself to keep your household humorous and harmonious rather than clueless and full of conflict.

How about you?

What habit resonates with you?

How can you use this moment to wake up and follow through?

And, most importantly, how will your relationship be different if you DO wake up and clue in? Notice how that feels, because this hopeful feeling will bring you through the scary moments when you want to check out.