Two Against The World, Or A World Against You Two?
Every once in a while, life taps you on the shoulder and says, “Hey, babe, you’re not cursed. Your relational field is just on fire.”
Being gifted, we frequently overlook the simple stuff. We look for bigger meanings.
Like my messy sister reminded me crystal clean once: “Kate. Stop trying to make it more than it is. Maybe there’s no lesson. Maybe there’s no deeper, underlying flaw. Maybe it’s just failure. Move on.”
We don’t have a good failure tolerance out of the box, now, do we?
That’s a muscle we train over time.
For a long time, my husband was convinced I was sabotaging him. Not in a mustache-twirling, dramatic-villain way. In the everyday, domestic warfare way that married people know too well: weird blowups, cold shoulders, timing that feels too precise to be coincidence.
Rejection wound? Triggered. Old family of origin stuff? Bubbling up like a cauldron.
We were more aware than most, back then, but in the way that most of us are today—our bandwidth for processing was scarce when we needed it most. He was a defense attorney back then, usually carrying the biggest, gnarliest cases in town. Retained, appointed, high-stakes, the stuff that can make or break someone’s future. I had a demanding, visible corporate job that required two hours of daily commuting and frequent travel. We lived in a small town—as outsiders—where with some early encouragement, he had grown big dreams he wouldn’t have been able to swing in a bigger market.
I bit my lip and hunkered down. We were also in the trenches with little kids and absolutely zero village. No aunties dropping by. No nearby grandparents. No, “Hey, can I just swing by and grab your toddlers for three hours while you shower and remember your own name?” Even the local “mom’s clubs” met during the work week, business hours, making me wonder if I was the last working mom standing. (Obviously not, but boyyyyy was I alone with it in the early years.)
It was the Great Parenting Relay Race. We did it for fifteen years or so. One of us would sprint, baton in hand, the other would collapse for exactly 3.7 minutes, and then—ding!—back up again. In that chaos, my husband started to notice something:
Every time he was gearing up for a big court day—trial, nasty preliminary exam, complex brief due—the two of us would have a spectacular fight 1–3 days beforehand.
Not a small bicker. I’m talking blowout. Raised voices, slammed doors, the whole highlight reel.
And what we were fighting about? Not anything proportionate. Not an affair. Not financial ruin. Not some huge betrayal.
It was always…small things that somehow exploded out of nowhere. Dishes. Bedtime. Some dumb comment. A misunderstood look. The way one of us breathed wrong in the kitchen. We were young (well, he was always 11.75 years older), stressed, and marinating in every gendered script available, so of course we threw the standard accusations at each other:
“You don’t respect how hard I work.”
“You don’t see how much I carry.”
“You’re always picking a fight at the worst possible time.”
“You’re dumping all the invisible labor on me.”
“You’re impossible to please.”
“Is this the example you want for your sons?”
No, it wasn’t PMS.
No, he wasn’t secretly scheming to dump everything on me so I’d finally collapse. (Sure as hell felt like it.)
No, I wasn’t sitting at home going, “How can I emotionally kneecap this man before trial?”
But after this cycle ran a dozen times, he became convinced—in his head—that I was intentionally sabotaging him. So he did what smart, scared people do when they think they’re under attack: he went secretive. The brightest among us trust their own minds…..completely.
He stopped sharing his court schedule.
Left his planner at the office.
Pulled his business movements in tight, like a cloak.
At the time, I was bewildered. And, being young and under-resourced myself, my mind did what minds do:
“Why so secretive? Is he cheating? Is something else going on?”
(For the record: he wasn’t. The secretary remained unshtupped.)
And here’s the kicker: Even with all his secrecy, the pattern did… not... stop.
We still ended up in massive fights in the days before his biggest court days. Finally, one day, exasperated, he raged at me about it.
And what came out—underneath all the yelling: “Every single time I’ve got something big coming, you go off and blow everything up.”
Except… that’s not what was actually happening on my side of the mountain.
Ever hear of an “exploding doormat?” I learned that from Martha Beck. And I was one. At home, anyway. I was an angel everywhere else.
As his internal angst built over those big court days—the pressure, the adrenaline, the responsibility for someone’s life—he would gradually morph into the walking embodiment of a raging giga-dick.
Not because he’s a bad person. Because he didn’t have the emotional capacity or tools to metabolize that level of pressure. Over two or three weeks leading up to the big day:
He got shorter with people.
He’d lash out at tiny things.
There was zero connective tissue left in how he spoke to me.
He cut corners on family or shared responsibilities.
Everything became sharp edges and abrupt answers.
The warmth between us would quietly drain out of the room.
He was lit up like a live wire but was the last one to know it. Meanwhile, me?
I did what competent, overfunctioning women often do when the relational field starts to smoke:
Let small shit go.
Redirect the energy. (His and mine.) Prioritize. Refocus. Create gestures of repair that were invariably premature.
Give the benefit of the doubt. Choose my battles. Tell myself, “He’s under a lot of stress, just ride it out.”
Speak up softly, then back off when that didn’t land.
I did everything but have a clean, sovereign confrontation.
I swallowed a thousand tiny knives, trying to be “understanding,” until inevitably…I blew my ever-loving stack.
Have you met me?
There are two versions of me in anger. One is solid, sovereign, clean. She arrived for me in my late thirties. She can plant her feet catlike, calibrate her posture and countenance, open her mouth and deliver the crisp, clear, aligned, reality check she’s probably still processing in her mind herself…. because this one is from the body. She can belt it from the basement, vault into the air, stick the landings. (I teach leaders to do this, in the 2020s!)
As my late friend used to say, “You’re not tall, but you can rise ten feet when you need to be.” (I am told “her” eyes can be hella scary. She wears blue light glasses so as not to frighten small children.)
The other one? She can be blown off course. She has not trained her inner dragon. She hasn’t planted the stake of her beach umbrella deeply, and filled the pedestal weight with damp sand all the way. She filled it with the ping-pong balls of empty promises and the plastic life ring of survival mode, so “enough” never gets in. It compromises her roundedness and her gravitas. That umbrella sails and tumbles in light winds, triggering the alarm to rouse that untrained inner dragon. Sometimes she fires too early or too late, and sometimes she’s left the last issue’s unmetabolized, non-catalyzed, by-products (exhaust) in the pipes….leaving the field singed and stinky.
And the worst? The exploding doormat. Melted rubber. Scorched wood. Peeled paint. Sticky, smelly, impossible to scrape the evidence away at the door. Back then, when I blew, I didn’t just blow about that day. Oh, no. I opened the whole vault of historical grievances. The scary slides started clicking in:
All the unspoken times this had happened before.
All the “remember that time when…”
All the old resentment that had never actually been metabolized.
Guess what? He responded in kind. It wasn’t cute.
It wasn’t his fault….entirely.
It wasn’t my fault….entirely.
His nervous system didn’t know how to hold that much pressure without off-gassing it onto the nearest human.
My nervous system didn’t know how to interrupt the pattern early without waiting until my inner feral cat became a hungry, tired mama lioness and he looked like a snack—in all the wrong ways.
And in that dynamic, it was extremely tempting for both of us to believe: “This other person is sabotaging me.”
He thought I was attacking him right before his big days.
I thought he was withdrawing and hiding things from me for no reason.
We were both standing in a burning room, convinced the other one was playing with matches.
Our relational field was on fire, and neither of us had a hose.
The Relational Field on Fire (a brief anatomy)
This is what often sits underneath “sabotage” in our closest relationships:
Big pressure event coming.
Performance review. Launch. Trial. Book deadline. Crucial conversation. Surgery. Something that feels like it could alter your trajectory.Internal anxiety builds.
You don’t want to feel scared or out of control, so you channel it into work, logistics, or hyper-focus. On the outside, you seem “fine” or “busy.” On the inside, you’re humming like a live wire.Your relational bandwidth shrinks. Suddenly:
You have less patience.
Your tone gets clipped.
You stop tracking the other person’s humanity.
You mistake their bids for connection as demands, criticism, or interruption.
The other person starts compensating.
They hush themselves. Walk on eggshells.
Take on more. Do more. Let more slide.
Try to “support” you by becoming smaller, invisible.Resentment quietly piles up.
Their nervous system keeps a ledger your conscious mind is not reading. Then one day, it’s overdrawn.Boom. The fight erupts.
Not because they woke up and said, “How can I ruin your life before your big day?”
But because the relational field has been smoldering for weeks, and someone finally screams about the smoke because they can’t breathe.Both people misread the explosion.
“You always do this at the worst possible time.”
“You’re trying to sabotage me.”
“I can’t count on you.”
“You don’t even care how hard this is for me.”We respond by getting more secretive, more defended, more alone.
Which guarantees the pattern repeats, because nobody can help you calm a nervous system they’re not allowed to see.
Unintended Consequences Aren’t the Same as Sabotage
What my husband eventually realized—and what I had to own, too—is that neither of us was waking up plotting to destroy the other’s chances.
But intention doesn’t cancel impact. His avoidance of his own fear and pressure did torch the connective tissue between us. My avoidance of clean confrontation did guarantee that when I finally spoke, it came out as napalm.
The unintended consequence? We both ended up feeling unsafe with each other in the very moments when we most needed to be on the same team. He tried to protect himself from “sabotage” by withholding his schedule. I tried to protect myself from feeling crazy by stockpiling evidence and lighting on fire in the living room.
Both are understandable. Neither are relationally mature.
How to Tell If Your Field (Not Your Partner) Is on Fire
If any of this feels uncomfortably familiar, here are a few gentle tells:
Do big fights cluster right before your biggest days, launches, deadlines, or confrontations?
Do you secretly believe a partner, colleague, or friend is always picking the worst timing to “dump their stuff on you”?
Have you started getting more guarded or secretive, because it feels like sharing your real stress just makes things worse?
Are you often the last one to notice how sharp, cold, or checked-out you become under pressure?
Does the other person stay quiet…until they absolutely don’t?
If yes, it might not be sabotage.
It might be your nervous system trying desperately to regulate in a way that your current relational tools can’t hold yet.
What I Wish We’d Known Back Then
If I could go back to those early years of marriage and parenting, I wouldn’t whisper some perfect communication script into our ears.
I’d sit us both down and say:
“Neither of you is the villain here, but right now, your unhealed stuff is running the show.”
“This cycle is predictable. Predictable things can be mapped. Mapped things can be changed.”
“Pressure doesn’t justify cruelty, and understanding doesn’t require self-erasure.”
“You are allowed to say:
‘Hey, I can feel your stress leaking out sideways. I want to support you, but the way you’re speaking to me is not okay.’”“You are also allowed to say:
‘I have a big case/trial/launch coming. I get edgy. I don’t want to hurt you. Can we build a plan around that?’”
We didn’t have those tools yet. We built them just in time for the kids to become teenagers and turn us upside down differently. But we didn’t lose years to that, we were on to the pattern.
And that, to me, is the quiet miracle: realizing that the “sabotage” wasn’t some cursed dynamic destined to repeat for eternity. It was a pattern that belonged to us—two humans doing their best with heavy loads and thin support.
The unintended consequence of not knowing how to handle our own nervous systems? Again we lit our relational field on fire and then blamed each other for the smoke. If you see yourself in this, here’s your invitation:
Before you decide someone is sabotaging you, pause and ask:
What pressure am I under right now?
How is that pressure leaking out into my tone, timing, or presence?
Where am I avoiding an honest, clean conversation because I don’t want to upset the apple cart?
What would it look like to treat my relational field as something I’m responsible for tending—not just surviving?
Sometimes the “enemy” is not your partner, or your friend, or your team. Sometimes it’s the unspoken, unexamined pattern running between you. And that? That you can change. But make the effort. It doesn’t do itself. If you’re lucky enough, your partner is just as interested in solving the problem as you are. They just can’t do it alone (and neither can you).