James Cordova

so that I can understand where my partner is coming from.

I can understand where the other person is coming from with absolute compassion and empathy.

But that doesn't mean I have to give up where I'm coming from and what matters to me.

So it is a well-rounded compassion, one that involves compassion both for myself and my own wants and needs, as well as genuine compassion for my partner and my partner's wants and needs.

No, absolutely not.

The way that I think about this is the things that are unacceptable are the things that actually diminish us as a person.

So if changing in this way, if accepting this from my partner makes my world smaller, makes me more constricted in my sense of identity or self, then that is too high a price to pay for connection.

There seems to be oftentimes a fundamental difference between partners in terms of our need for interdependence, interconnection, and our need for independence.

And we all need a little bit of both.

And the botany metaphor that we use is some people are more like cactuses and some people are more like ferns.

So some people are more like desert plants and some people are more like rainforest plants.

And in this metaphor, humidity, water, rainfall is attention, time together, and all those things that are dimensions of interconnectedness.

And so for some of us who are more like ferns and this was this was what's true in the couple that you're asking about so in that relationship The wife was more of a fern and really thrived on lots of time together lots of verbal and physical affection and the husband was into a lot of independent activities really into his work and

really into independent hobbies like carpentry and cycling, that, you know, sort of exercise kinds of things.

And they would have, you know, terrible fights about her calling him selfish and him calling her clingy.

And this was the tight knot that they came into therapy with.

As we discover this in our work together, oh, what's happening here is you've got a cactus and fern pattern happening in your relationship.

You're more like a cactus, you're more like a fern.

And when you try to make the cactus happy,

the fern just drying up and dying.