Clarity On Fire

A client of mine, Erin, feels like she has the same frustrating conversation with her husband on at least a weekly basis. She’s an external processor, so after a stressful day at work, she finds it helpful to come home and talk about all the challenges she’s dealing with. For her, it’s just a way of decompressing and venting out her feelings of the day. Her husband, on the other hand, is a problem-solver. He’s logical by nature, plus his job requires him to be in solution-mode all day long. So the moment she starts talking about her problems at work, he starts offering solutions. The problem is that, when Erin’s in venting-mode, she’s not ready to talk about solutions. She just needs to release some stress without the pressure to DO anything about it just yet. So she gets frustrated by him constantly trying to “fix” the problem, and he gets frustrated that she’s not open to his solutions. Erin has tried to ask him to just listen when she’s venting, and he gives it his best effort. But because he cares about h