Jen Hatmaker: What We Win When We Lose It All
April 12, 2022
Glennon Doyle:
Okay, we’re going to jump right into We Can Do Hard Things today because we, today, have one of my favorite hard things doers in all the land. Her name is Jen Hatmaker and I’ll just tell you that right off the bat, because I know everyone’s going to get really excited about that.
Jen Hatmaker:
Yes, the crowd goes wild.
Glennon Doyle:
And I have known Jen for a long, long time and I’ve always loved Jen but I was thinking of about this quote from both of our friends, Elizabeth Gilbert. I just asked Abby to grab it for me like five minutes ago. And it says, “The women I love and admire for their strength and grace did not get that way because shit worked out. They got that way because shit went wrong and they handled it. They handled it a thousand different ways on a thousand different days, but they handled it. Those women are my superheroes.” That is Liz Gilbert. But today-
Jen Hatmaker:
She’s the best.
Glennon Doyle:
She’s the best. We have Jen Hatmaker, who is the New York Times best selling author of For the Love and Fierce, Free, and Full of Fire, along with 12…
Jen Hatmaker:
I don’t know.
Glennon Doyle:
… other books.
Jen Hatmaker:
I don’t know what to say.
Glennon Doyle:
12. Okay?
Jen Hatmaker:
It’s ridiculous.
Glennon Doyle:
The whole bookshelf, just of her own books. Okay. She hosts the award winning For the Love podcast, which is so freaking good, is the delighted curator of the Jen Hatmaker Book Club, and only Jen would write the delighted curator. Okay?
Jen Hatmaker:
You know, that’s my price.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes. Even her bio is so Jen and she is the leader of a tightly knit online community where she reaches millions of people each week. Jen is a co-founder of Legacy Collective, a giving organization that grants millions of dollars towards sustainable projects around the world. She is a mom to five kids, only seven less books that she’s written. Five books, 12 books.
Jen Hatmaker:
Math.
Glennon Doyle:
Thanks. And lives just outside Austin, Texas. Jen Hatmaker, welcome to We Can Do Hard Things.
Jen Hatmaker:
Hello, my darlings. I’m so happy to see you both. And Abby, just off camera. Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah, she’s right here.
Abby Wambach:
Hi Jen, I miss you.
Jen Hatmaker:
I miss you, too.
Glennon Doyle:
Sweetie, do you want to just come in here? But she just is so jealous that she’s going to stay in the frame.
Jen Hatmaker:
Yes. Abby.
Glennon Doyle:
Abby Wambach loves herself some Jen Hatmaker, which I just want to say that I think the first time Jen and Abby met was backstage at a Women of Faith conference. So what I need the world to know is that I brought my lesbian…
Jen Hatmaker:
That’s right.
Glennon Doyle:
… soccer player girlfriend.
Jen Hatmaker:
Girlfriend.
Glennon Doyle:
Girlfriend.
Jen Hatmaker:
That’s right.
Glennon Doyle:
To the most conservative, Evangelical Christian, arena event.
Jen Hatmaker:
That’s right. Arena, yes.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes. Full of Evangelical Christians. And then I stood in the front row and we held hands and kissed and waved our arms to Jesus songs. Jen, do you remember that?
Jen Hatmaker:
That’s exactly… oh, do I remember? Do I remember? I remember.
Glennon Doyle:
What were you thinking at that point? I didn’t know what was… I don’t think I really understood what I was proposing to that crowd of 40,000 people.
Jen Hatmaker:
Well, I was thinking how much I loved you and I knew about Abby and then it only takes about three and a half seconds of meeting Abby and I don’t care who you are, you fall hard. You fall hard, you fall immediately, it’s irreversible, it’s irrevocable. I got it immediately. I got you. I got y’all because of course, as you mentioned, our history deeply preceded that. We met when we were both married to men, other men. And so I immediately loved Abby and I was proud of you and I was proud of both of you. And I felt like in real time I was watching you walk into yourself and it was an honor to witness it.
Glennon Doyle:
And then a couple years later, I got to watch you walk into yourself. We have talked previously on this pod in the context of my sister and I’s divorces about how the most obnoxious question a person can ask about that horrific sacred time is, what happened?
Jen Hatmaker:
Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
Because it’s just like, I don’t know, simplification bypassing that icky curiosity. So without asking what happened, can you tell us what happened?
Jen Hatmaker:
Oh, I love it. Yeah, definitely. Also thank you for your compassion and even just discretion around what it means to tell a hard story like this. You, literally all four of us understand this. All four of us, unfortunately, understand exactly this because there’s us in the story, but there’s a person that we were married to in the story. There’s a bunch of spawn that we created in the story. There’s in-laws and parents, it’s complex. And to some degree, our connective tendrils go forever. And so it is complicated to give an accurate retelling, to say nothing of the fact that I have a certain version and it’s mine. Which means it’s not entirely right, but it’s the one I know. Even the one I’ve crafted a little, I’ve polished her up.
Jen Hatmaker:
But in short, I was married for 26 years and I got married, every time I say this, I just have a stab of horror, but I got married when I was 19 and Brandon, my ex-husband was 21. We were in college and we were in a conservative Christian college environment, which is just to say, it’s a very strange place. It’s a very strange ecosystem in and of itself. And a bunch of little babies get married there. And that seems normal. And we have real weddings. Our parents give us away like it’s a normal thing. She’s 19, she makes $4.25 at the YMCA. Go be a wife. You know what I’m saying? What the hell? What the hell are we doing?
Jen Hatmaker:
So I started really young. I was never really an adult a single day in my life without a man. I went straight from my dad to a boy. So we built a whole life, a whole life. We grew up together essentially. And we had three kids and then we adopted two more. Ben and Remy are our youngest, they’re Ethiopian and we adopted them when they were five and eight and built this entire Hatmaker ethos. And then in 2020, just after the pandemic started, so that was already, we were just already all flailing around and we started the divorce process. And for us, it wasn’t a slow burn. It wasn’t a mutual… we are devolving or disconnecting or we’ve been working and working and we can’t get these things resolved. It wasn’t like that. It was overnight, it was shock and awe. It was one day you know something, and the next day, you know something different. And there isn’t recovery from it.
Jen Hatmaker:
A lot of people wanted to know because marriage and family has been the center spoke of my wheel for a very long time. And so I know people were like, I don’t understand why this… we’re not now watching a fight for this recovery. Or we’re not now seeing Jen and Brandon just go to the mat to resolve this or to repair it. And the truth is sometimes that’s not an option and that was not an option for us. And so just like that, just like that it was over. And then there’s some shit that goes on, but it was over. That was the day it was over. When I put the marker in the ground, it’s July 11th, 2020, a bunch of stuff and then we actually filed, and then we actually got divorced. But that was the day. That was the day that I was on my own in the world.
Jen Hatmaker:
I didn’t know how to be a grownup. I certainly didn’t know how to single parent. I didn’t know anything. I had never had a single moment to myself as an adult woman. And so it was scary, it was shocking, it was humiliating. And there was just a minute there I can’t honestly hardly remember it. I was just in such a fog of trauma and grief and fear.
Amanda Doyle:
Jen, as you know, Glennon likes to celebrate your transformation in the world as the Jenaissance?
Jen Hatmaker:
That’s right. She’s branded it. And it’s really lovely.
Glennon Doyle:
You don’t know my excitement-
Jen Hatmaker:
Glennon, Glennon, I don’t know if you’ve ever watched in my social feeds every time you say that word, everybody piles on underneath it. And they’re like, I’m going to borrow that. And I am now in the Lynnaissance. And now I’m in the Jenaissance and I’m like, listen, borrow it from her. She’s offered it to our community. Take it everyone.
Glennon Doyle:
It’s a gift and I wish you could see every time, which is maybe 20 times, I’ve written Jenaissance under your things? I have to Google how do you spell Renaissance every time. And then I have to write it out. And then I have to, every time.
Amanda Doyle:
So tricky.
Jen Hatmaker:
It’s one of those words.
Glennon Doyle:
That’s how much I love you.
Jen Hatmaker:
Right now, I feel like if you paid me a million dollars to spell Renaissance, I would get it wrong.
Glennon Doyle:
Nope, it’s impossible even if you’ve done it many times, even if you’ve added the Jen, it’s yeah.
Amanda Doyle:
Oh God-
Jen Hatmaker:
Anyway, I’m sorry, Amanda. I interrupted you.
Amanda Doyle:
No, there is not an apology for the Jenaissance, ever. And so she’s describing this first, the pain then the waiting then the rising. And I think when I went through my divorce, when you say a stake in the ground and you say, okay, that was July 11th. And at first I always thought the pain was right when I knew I was getting divorced. And that started the floodgate of pain. But after I realized, no, the pain actually started well before then. I just couldn’t either see it or recognize it in myself. But there was a part of me that was grieving things in my marriage before I even knew I was grieving the loss of my marriage. So do you looking back, are you able to see where the pain was there for you before the implosion of your marriage? What were you grieving before you knew you were grieving?
Jen Hatmaker:
That’s such a good question. By the way, please enjoy the train. You will hear it.
Glennon Doyle:
I like it, I feel like it might be an analogy.
Jen Hatmaker:
Numerous. It can’t be helped or stopped.
Abby Wambach:
Choo, choo jets come through.
Jen Hatmaker:
I mean, okay. Okay, happy. I love this question and I think it’s an important one because in my now experience, and then what has opened up the floodgates inside my community that I lead, I think this is ubiquitous. I think women who are losing their marriages can get just a little ways out from it. And when they’re finally able or willing to be honest, they can go backward and say, I knew. Or I thought I knew, or I knew something. I don’t know if you remember this Glennon, but so July 11th, 2020. But I had your book in hand before it came out, I had the advanced copy, this was January of that year. So we’re six months before anything… before I knew anything that was important for me to know.
Jen Hatmaker:
I read a very specific sentence in Untamed and it was essentially, I can’t remember it exactly,. But it was something like you gave a litany of things that might possibly be going on in our lives that were really hard to say. They were embarrassing or they were hard or they were sad or they were shocking. And they were carrying these things around, but we were not saying them out loud. And one of my things was embedded right in the middle of the list. And I had your book open and I just, very quietly, I closed it and I set it down and I sat there quietly for about one minute. And I picked up my phone and I texted you. And I said, something’s wrong in my marriage. I didn’t understand it at the time because I was only feeling the symptoms but I felt them. I felt them, sure as shit, I felt them.
Jen Hatmaker:
I was feeling the symptoms and so I was trying to diagnose the problem and I was partially right. I was half right. And I said, something’s wrong, nobody knows. I don’t know how to talk about this. I don’t know what to do. I’m trying so hard to fix it and I can’t fix it. I can’t get it all back in and I just need somebody to know it. And you immediately texted back because, when I’ll never get a text back from you if I text you something silly. It’s like I never sent you a message. It’s like you don’t have a phone. But if I send you something important, if I send you something serious, you’re Johnny on the spot. And you know what, I received this, okay? And I actually respect it.
Jen Hatmaker:
And you texted me back right away because I had given you what I think the problem was, which you have some history with and you began work shopping it with me and what it looks like in a marriage and how I’m not alone in this. And a lot of women are biting their fingernails off in their marriages, but they don’t know what to do. And so to your question, Amanda, I did know, and I wish I would’ve been more courageous. And honestly, I wish I just could have been more honest, even inside my own marriage. I cannot imagine some of the suffering and sorrow that I maybe could have avoided if I would’ve just told the truth.
Jen Hatmaker:
Number one to myself. That’s that was the first person I lied to because I just didn’t want to believe any of it. 26 years. My parents have been married for 50 years. My in-laws have been married for 50 years. I’m like, we’re going the distance, man. We have five kids, damn, this just… no. Not us, right? And so I just kept thinking, I can fix this. We’re going to right the ship somehow. But if I’d have been more honest and I think if I would’ve been more honest with him and said, we both see this thing that’s happening. What can and should we do? I don’t know what would’ve happened. At this point it’s speculation.
Jen Hatmaker:
But I did, I want you to know that I told him, way after the fact after I’d hit the bottom of the ocean and just drug myself back up to the surface and we were able to speak and talk and be a little bit more honest and tender with each other than just radical disintegration. I’m like, I wasn’t telling the truth to us and I wish I would have, and this was broken and I just wouldn’t admit it. So if I wouldn’t admit it, I couldn’t address it and I wouldn’t let you address it because that made it true. And so we’ve had that good healing conversation since, but it’s true. It’s hard to admit, it’s lonely. No one’s in your marriage except you. Something about parenting for example, you get to reach sideways for that. We have each other in that. And for some reason that feels easier to bring our community up. But in marriage it is you and it’s that person. And so when things are so, so broken, it’s scary and it’s isolating and that’s the easiest place, at least for me, to lie to myself about what’s real.
Glennon Doyle:
Jen, you are so beautiful. I mean just the way you tell your story and the way you honor the other people in the story, but also tell the truth.
Amanda Doyle:
I think that was just a service to so many people-
Glennon Doyle:
Yes, that’s what I was just thinking.
Amanda Doyle:
… because we are in our marriages, but we are often just us in our marriages. And so it isn’t even-
Glennon Doyle:
You’re not even with the partner. A lot of people… we’re not even with our partner we’re just all… there’s two-
Amanda Doyle:
And we don’t know where our partner is because if you don’t say the thing, because what happens after you say the thing? That’s why we don’t say the thing. Because what are you going to do, find out you’re right? Who the hell wants to find out they’re right about that thing? And, it’s not working, but it’s working right? You are still married until you say the thing,
Jen Hatmaker:
That’s it. And if you’re like me, this glass half full hope springs eternal type, we’re just about to fix this. It’s just out of reach. There’s some sort of trickery or formula we just haven’t quite discovered. And then we’re just going to be like back, he’ll be back in his own body and mind, we’ll be back in this relational space and we’ll look back on this and be like, oh, that little bit was rough. And so I think there’s also just this hope maybe that we hang onto because the truth is even when divorce is literally the best thing, when it gives you back to yourself, when it returns you to your highest space and delivers you to the second half of your life, whole and healthy and good. And your partner for that matter, even then divorce is traumatizing.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes, it is.
Jen Hatmaker:
It just tears some things apart that we’ve spent our adult life building and putting together. And it affects so many people. The rollout of the centrifugal rings of affectation are still going on frankly, a year and a half later. And so I think we know that and just wanting to avoid that level of just disconnection in all of our family structures makes us just go, well, you know what? I don’t know. We’re still paying our bills, our kids are in school, nobody’s dropped out yet. I don’t know. I created a version of our marriage in my own mind and convinced myself it was enough.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. Same.
Jen Hatmaker:
And that wasn’t fair to either one of us. It really wasn’t. And so I don’t know, not many people were saying this out loud, which is why Glennon, when I was reading this in Untamed, I’m like, God, do I have permission for this? Do we get to say out loud that even this long time heralded marriage, much admired, much written about, much respected, do I get to say this is fragmenting? And I am lost and he is lost and we are lost and we can’t find our way back to each other? And that was, I think for me, the beginning of the end, probably in a good way, really. I can say that now. I can’t believe I could ever say that, but I mean it now.
Glennon Doyle:
I’m thinking about hope when you’re saying this and it’s interesting, this idea of hope. It’s sometimes I think our Christian version of hope fucks us up because the Buddhist version of hope is like, don’t have it, basically. Abandon all hope who enter here. But it’s like hope can distract you from the truth. It keeps you from accepting what is, and hope is a beautiful thing when it carries you through the truth.
Jen Hatmaker:
Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
And you match the with hope. But when you use hope as a spiritual bypass to what is actually happening in front of you, that’s what it screws us over.
Jen Hatmaker:
That is the truest thing because you’re hoping in an invention. It’s not true. It’s made up. I made up a story about what was actually happening and I made up a story about what could happen. And neither one of them were ever going to be true. Ever, ever. I just wrote myself a little script and went, well that is sweet. That is lovely. I like that story.
Glennon Doyle:
Super hard when you’re also a writer. When you also create narratives, you’re like, I can do this. I can make this a love story. I mean, I think about that all the time. Did I live Love Warrior and then write it? Because I don’t think so. I think I wrote Love Warrior and then hoped that I would live into that version of the redemption story.
Jen Hatmaker:
That’s so real.
Glennon Doyle:
I think I am my own self help author. Dangerous freaking territory.
Jen Hatmaker:
Totally. Oh my gosh, me too. By the time we got to July 2020, I had told so many lovely stories about my own marriage, which were partially true.
Glennon Doyle:
Right, absolutely.
Jen Hatmaker:
And partially was enough for me. I was okay with partial. I’m like, I will fill in the gaps on partial with my best friends, with my parents, with my siblings, with my kids, with my work, with the women in my community, with my friends that we work alongside of each other. That will be enough for me. And so my marriage can be partial and I can still be a happy human lady. The shitty thing about that is, it’s a little true. It’s not really true, I’m not really happy, but I could run those traps.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes and nobody could really prove-
Jen Hatmaker:
Women like us can.
Glennon Doyle:
Nobody can really prove that it’s not true. If I were under a lie detector test, I could still pass. There’s part of this that feels true enough to be true.
Jen Hatmaker:
That’s the problem. But what I’m learning, what I’m discovering right now is at least for me having been married my entire adult life, I just didn’t know what I didn’t know. And so what I’m discovering is that, oh, that was really partial. Now I was in a slow pot of boiling water. So that partial space, it just crept up on me. Where all of a sudden, if you would have dropped me into that scenario from 10 years previous, I’d been like, oh shit, what has happened here? Something has derailed, but because it was a slow coming, I talked myself into that being a fulfilling life day by day, right? Month by month, year by year. And as things continue to fall off, I would backfill them with other healthy relationships or spaces.
Jen Hatmaker:
And I just kept the balance like this, just enough. Just enough. I had the capacity to do that forever. But what I’m experiencing right now in genuine wholeness and completeness, just in and of myself, in my own soul and my own life, I’m stunned that I would’ve chosen to live that way for the rest of my life. And I am now grateful. I’m really grateful to be here. Did I want to get here the way I got here? God, no. And I don’t wish that on anybody and my heart for women who have been in a super similar path is just endless now. But am I sorry that I’m here? I’m not, I’m really not. I feel like I am… this is me. I feel me. I feel me living. I feel me alive. I feel me leading without editing and without constantly having to shape shift around somebody else and without having to keep the thing afloat and I wouldn’t trade it.
Glennon Doyle:
There she is.
Amanda Doyle:
There she is. You said shape shift. And what do you mean by shape shift? Because I also heard another conversation with you and Jamie Wright and Kristen Howardton. They’re your dear friends and they knew know you as you, and then they knew you as wife and you just said shape shift. And they said you were a human spotlight and a cleanup crew-
Glennon Doyle:
As a wife.
Amanda Doyle:
As a wife. Can you talk about those things, that you can look back and see yourself as different in that role than as you were as you?
Glennon Doyle:
And what does it mean to be a human spotlight and a cleanup crew? And just so you know, sister and I talked about this for an hour in terms of our own previous… it just makes so much sense to me and I feel like people are going to get it in their own ways.
Jen Hatmaker:
I’d like to hear both of your thoughts on that, too. That was really hard to hear from my friends and I heard it earlier. I heard it before we were divorced and I was shocked. I was shocked because I didn’t know that there were two versions of me. I didn’t realize it. And I certainly didn’t know it was observable. I felt like I was running a pretty clean operation. You know what I mean?
Jen Hatmaker:
Because it was my job to keep our best foot forward as a couple. And I did it. I thought I was doing it. I thought I was doing it.
Glennon Doyle:
You did do it. You did do it.
Jen Hatmaker:
And I thought that when things were dipping and wobbling and going off the rails that I was course correcting quickly enough, outward facing, so that was either like, oh, well that was silly or we could shrug that off, like that was a weird day, that was a strange conversation. Those girls were with me in January, right before I texted you Glennon, January of 2020. And that’s when they told me that. We were all together with all couples for four days. And they very bravely, and I commend all friends who love us enough to come to us and say hard things. I commend them. I can’t imagine how hard that was for them to say to me because I didn’t ask for their opinion. It’s not like I said, did you guys see me absolutely shrink or no?
Jen Hatmaker:
Did I just go real small? Did my light snuff out or was I normal? I didn’t give them any rope. They just came to me and said, we just need to tell you something that we’re seeing. And I was defensive because I was embarrassed because I’m so strong everywhere in my life. I’m powerful. Everywhere in my life, in every role except that one. And I just didn’t know that anybody saw it. I thought it was internal. I thought I was just going to carry that inside me and partially make it work forever.
Jen Hatmaker:
And so this is what I’ve learned. What Brené taught me, Brené called me in maybe week two, week one or two after def con one and she told me some things to do. And when Brené tells you what to do, you do it, right? You don’t get to disobey. She doesn’t come in real gentle either. She comes in like a wrecking ball. There’s no hair petting. It’s not like, this is a real hard time. She’s like, I’ve got one hour. I’d like you to sit down and grab a pen. I’m-
Amanda Doyle:
You will be-
Jen Hatmaker:
… crying…
Amanda Doyle:
You will be rising strong in 15 minutes.
Jen Hatmaker:
But one of the things she told me, she gave me a list of things that I was going to do and ways that I was going to survive. Some of it had to do with my body and just, she’s like, it’s radical self care time. And this is no joke. She’s like, don’t take this lightly. But one of the things she told me, back to our point here, is to get the book Codependent No More.
Abby Wambach:
Yes, Melody Beattie?
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. We have several copies.
Abby Wambach:
We have six of them here.
Jen Hatmaker:
You all, you all, well, I’m still furious. I still-
Glennon Doyle:
When you come out as a lesbian, they make you read that book. It’s just part of the care package you get sent. Yes.
Jen Hatmaker:
Yeah. Yeah. It’s the rules of admission to the lesbian club.
Abby Wambach:
It’s actually, this is the book on what, on how to lesbian.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes. But it is codependent forevermore is what we call it.
Jen Hatmaker:
Wasn’t that book just a kick in the teeth?
Abby Wambach:
Oh, yeah.
Jen Hatmaker:
I didn’t understand codependency. I don’t know if you guys did. When I hear that word, I thought that word meant you are a needy person. You’re fragile and you don’t have the muscle memory to be independent anywhere in your life. And that’s what I thought that meant. And I’m like, well that’s not me.
Glennon Doyle:
No, because you, what the listeners need to know, if you haven’t picked it up for the last 30 minutes, Jen does not… those are words she would not have related to, fragile.
Amanda Doyle:
Jen-handle-it Hatmaker. Okay?
Jen Hatmaker:
Right. I’m like, I’m not fragile, needy.
Glennon Doyle:
Just so you know, when you describe Brenae, that is certainly how I feel about you. It’s Texas or something.
Jen Hatmaker:
Maybe it is. Maybe it is and we’re sorry.
Glennon Doyle:
Okay.
Jen Hatmaker:
The state makes us this way. You see that it’s a race to the bottom here in Texas.
Glennon Doyle:
I get it.
Jen Hatmaker:
So we’re doing the best we can, okay?
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. Okay. And you’ve got a lot of problems to solve. So the 15 minutes makes sense and rising strong quickly and yeah, yeah, yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
As a recovering person, I know a lot about codependency because of recovery. We learn a lot about it in that.
Jen Hatmaker:
Yep, totally. And that would be the backdrop to what it means to be a human spotlight and what it means to be the cleanup crew because essentially the central definition of codependency is that you just do not allow another person to sit in the consequences of his or her choices. You just won’t allow it. You don’t either. You don’t want them to feel the discomfort of it. You don’t want other people to observe what’s true, that would’ve been closer to me. You don’t want to live with a ticking time bomb. So you shape shift around somebody’s volatile personality just to steady the waters right? So that you’re just not constantly having explosions all around you. You’re basically taking on the effects of somebody else’s choices and you are crafting an environment around someone else so they don’t have to feel their own pain, their own discomfort, their own trauma, their own consequences, or even their own responsibilities.
Jen Hatmaker:
And then I was like, well shit. I took that book and I give it a little toss, right across my living room, just a little toss. And I was like, you don’t know me, you don’t know my life.
Jen Hatmaker:
I did not know I was codependent. I thought I was just being a good person, right? I thought I was just being helpful. I thought I was just being in service to another person. I did not realize how much I stunted our own growth. Not just mine, but his and ours. And had I let the chips fall where they were supposed to fall all along, who knows what we could have solved. Right? Had consequences worked their magical effect, because they do one way or another, who knows how we could have grown or what would’ve been possible for him inside his own soul and his own trauma or how we could have learned to relate to one another in healthy, mature adult ways as two whole people, not two half people trying to make one whole, right? And so that was really hard to learn.
Jen Hatmaker:
And I took that to my counselor and she was like, this is your work. She’s like, I promise you, this is not Brandon’s fault. It’s not. She’s like, these are your choices. You made these choices one by one because you preferred a steady stable environment over whatever was true. And if you don’t deal with these behaviors and responses, you will 100% walk them into your next relationship. And she’s like, you’re probably already behaving this way with your kids. I’m like, you’re mean. I’m paying you $150 an hour to not talk to me like that.
Glennon Doyle:
What have you been trained by Brené Brown or something?
Jen Hatmaker:
God, seriously. I’m like, I’m hurting. Sure enough when I decided to put that overlay over parenting, I was like, oh no. Oh nuts. And so, that’s been a lot of my personal work for the last year and a half is figuring out how to let other human people just be human people. All the way. Good, bad, hard making good choices, making terrible choices. Because they’re a person and that’s their life. And it’s not my life. And so I’m at about the 54% mark on this you guys, if you want a grade. I would still give it an F minus. But I’ve pulled up from zero so we’re going to call it progress.
Glennon Doyle:
We’ll take it.
Jen Hatmaker:
What is your experience here with codependency inside these relationships specifically because they manifest there differently than I think they do with our work partners or with even our kids or our parents, but inside a marriage. Oh Lord, that can sink a ship.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. I have a lens, when I think about this, that it is just a question, I don’t know if this is true or not, but I found these journals. I can’t believe I’m about to admit this out loud.
Amanda Doyle:
Oh my gosh.
Glennon Doyle:
I know I found these journals from 15 years ago or something, I don’t know. And I was writing to myself, to God, I guess. But I was saying things like, dear God, please help me let Craig be the spiritual leader of my family. Please help me be less loud. Please help me be less, less, less, less. Okay, I’m sweating again every time. But yeah, that is who… I was trying to be less. And when I think about the way the cleanup crew manifests in a social thing to me is the person says something dumb ass. And you just don’t let everybody experience and him discomfort of having said something dumb ass. You jump in and go, do-da-do the dancing monkey, you try to distract everyone from what just happened. You try to put it in context real quick for everyone else. You’re like a gazebo or what is that called? At a hockey game, in the middle?
Abby Wambach:
A Zamboni?
Glennon Doyle:
A Zamboni, which is almost exactly like a gazebo.
Abby Wambach:
It’s pretty close.
Jen Hatmaker:
I mean, I tracked to be honest with you, as soon as she said hockey, I’m like, I’m there. Okay, it’s fine.
Glennon Doyle:
So you’re a gazebo, is what you are. So the cleanup crew, I see it with literally almost all of my friends and me. It’s so… the giggling, the making okay what you just said is just, it’s terrible actually. It’s so gross. But that’s… the spotlight thing is what I’m really interested in, especially with you because and what I was just writing about in my journal, it feels to me like it’s perhaps set up in patriarchal marriages, especially inside of Christian marriages or any marriage where the man is supposed to be the thing.
Glennon Doyle:
The problem is that doesn’t work because people are just people and there’s going to be somebody who’s shinier, who’s bolder, who’s probably a little bit wiser, who’s the leader. And it might be the man and it might not be the man, it might be the woman. But when the woman is as shiny and bold and wise as you are, in order to fulfill the deal you made, which was to always allow him to be, you have to become a human spotlight. You have to become dimmer and dimmer and dimmer and try to make him shine because you’ve not only broken the rules by being as successful and effervescent and beloved and admired as you are. You’ve already fucked up the whole deal you made which was to allow him to constantly be better than you.
Jen Hatmaker:
It sucks so bad because it’s so true. I internalized that narrative so deeply. I didn’t really have another one until I was a grown person with critical thinking skills. And by that point I’d already screwed it up. I’d already gone out on my own ledge. I’d already created my own world and couldn’t understand the trimmers that that was creating. And so I was trying again to fix it. I can be as powerful as I am in all these places. But when I come back over here, I need to put a lid on that shit because it’s causing some problems and I don’t get it.
Jen Hatmaker:
And also what sucks about that, about me just constantly shrinking so that we didn’t get too out of a whack here, it can’t be like this can only be like this is that that’s not even fair to him. What a shitty arrangement. Look, you’re married to a smart, wise, powerful person. Let her lead, damn. Let’s spit into our spaces correctly. We could flourish like that, literally flourish. And so even the effort to try to pony up this ethos that you don’t even have, right? To be a thing to match or supersede this, what? That’s exhausting.
Glennon Doyle:
And shameful.
Jen Hatmaker:
I’d be worn out. Shameful.
Glennon Doyle:
It’s shameful. It’s shames the dude. I can just imagine Craig in his little journal being like, dear God, help me be the leader. He didn’t want to. It shames the guy who maybe doesn’t-
Jen Hatmaker:
It does.
Abby Wambach:
It also happens in lesbian marriages. My marriage was… this is that, too. It’s-
Glennon Doyle:
Yes, you made yourself small, small, small.
Abby Wambach:
I mean, I had to make myself small to feel like that there was some balance. It was a root belief, childhood thing, too. Youngest of seven. I think what I’ve learned is that it comes down to stepping into my full humanity and loving myself fully enough. Because there was a part of me that felt like, oh yeah, I should dim my light for you. That’s what a good partner does. And really it’s just about self love. It was self hate. I was hating myself in doing that.
Jen Hatmaker:
It’s so true. And then I think what happens when we sign on to this agreement inside a marriage or any partnership where we agree with one another, I’m going to shrink so you can expand, I’ll clean up and I’ll shine the spotlight. That does create a lot of shame in both partners. It creates… it does. That’s a shameful practice. And so shame is when we make our worst choices. When I am operating out of shame, that’s my grossest self. That is when I say, and I do things that if I were looking in on that from the outside, it’d be like, Jen, behave, no, we don’t talk like that. We don’t say that we don’t posture ourselves like that. That shameful agreement made us mean and it made us punish each other.
Jen Hatmaker:
And we did that in different ways. I think he would say this, Brandon punished me with aggression and dominance and anger which has a catastrophic effect on me. Just the way that I’m built. That is already, take out the context, that’s going to make me freeze. I freeze like that. And then I punish him with withdrawal and withholding. And so I will just go dormant. I won’t respond to this. I won’t engage you. I won’t even try to make this better. I’m just absent. Jen has left the building. And so we just got in this circular pattern of aggression and withdrawal and we just couldn’t find each other anymore.
Jen Hatmaker:
I’ve had so much resentment around this. So much. I was buried in resentment for ways that I was choosing to respond, my choices, right? At any point I had the tools, I had the resources, I instructed other women, how to do better in that scenario. To do as I say, not as I do, community. And I just couldn’t access it. Now, my counselors help me identify shame when it’s coming in. It’s not a life sentence, responding out of shame. We are not stuck in that. That is not a prison that we have to stay in.
Jen Hatmaker:
It is work to learn how to identify shame, how it feels in our bodies, what it actually does to me physically, where my thoughts start going when I’m in a shame spiral and I can grab that by the tail. I’m learning to grab that by the tail and say, oh, this is instruction. My body is instructing me right now that I am getting pushed into a shame space. And so let’s take a minute. Let’s take a beat. Let’s get in front of this. Let’s talk about what’s true here. What’s not true, because shame is always constructed on something that’s not true, right? Some sort of lie. Whether it’s fear based or reality based or both. Something in here is not true and it’s not going to serve me. And so let me take a deep breath. Let me go put my feet in the grass. Let me drink some water. And let me pause before I start to respond out of this space and regret it tomorrow morning.
Jen Hatmaker:
And so that’s hard work. I’m also medium at that, but I think that’s what happens in our marriages when we continue to shame each other by either shrinking or expanding, when that was really never how we were meant to fill a room.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah.
Abby Wambach:
That’s beautiful.
Glennon Doyle:
When I think about women who have good friends, I think that you, to me, are an example of one of the people in my life who values, who puts the energy in, the depth and the realness and the family of friendship that you have created in your life is freaking beautiful. Here’s my question. Why in the hell don’t… why do we share everything with our friends except for the marriage shit? Because did you share your… you didn’t because they had to come to you.
Jen Hatmaker:
Only half. Only half.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah, okay.
Jen Hatmaker:
I did half. I did the half-
Glennon Doyle:
So what would you share and then tell me, why do we do this? Why do we leave each other alone?
Jen Hatmaker:
Why? Why do we? Why do we? Because we’re so good at getting down into the dark tunnels with each other. We’re so good at it. I know this experientially when I am capsized by something in parenting or in work or in a relationship with my parents, my friends are excavators coming down to get me and grabbing you by the… I know that this is our magic, that this is the power of women in relationship with each other.
Jen Hatmaker:
The marriage piece, it’s so interesting for me to look back on year prior and go, hm, I did pull my friends in at about the 50% mark and the parts that I shared were the parts that were palatable. The ones that felt like I could garner compassion from my friends, not just for myself, but for Brandon. I didn’t want him to be non redeemable in my friend’s eyes.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes.
Jen Hatmaker:
And I needed to keep him above board enough so that we could eventually hit that elusive recovery phase that I was waiting to happen and that everybody could still love him and love us. And so I think had I been more honest, which I was after, it was so hard to say some things that had been real and true. And just… of course, how is it met? With nothing but open arms. Nothing. Nothing. It’s not a disconnector. It’s a connector. I’ve discovered this in my own community of women online that I lead because I just… you guys are like this, too. I don’t know. There’s not a second version of me. Do you know what I mean? I wish there was. That would make things so much easier on everyone.
Glennon Doyle:
For real.
Jen Hatmaker:
I just only know how to be mostly this one me. And so I didn’t know how to suffer privately. I didn’t know what else to do except for just live my life the way it was really going in the public eye. And I was like, well, let’s just see how this goes. I don’t know what this is going to mean for me having talked ad nauseum about marriage since Facebook existed. Shit. God.
Glennon Doyle:
What could go wrong? What could go wrong?
Jen Hatmaker:
Everyone’s going to love this. But what was interesting was to find out, as always God, we know this, how many times do we have to preach this before we believe it? Which was what it actually became, that level of vulnerability of raw, unprotected, exposed pain that I just said out loud and put in front of my community, what it was, was an invitation for connection. And it’s exactly what it became.
Jen Hatmaker:
And something happened in my community over the last year and a half. I mean, it just experienced depth that we’ve really never had together because this is not rare. It’s not. People are hurting and they’re hurting specifically inside of their marriages. And my story is not new. It is old and boring. Please, men, can we get a new story? This one’s so boring. Make a new one.
Glennon Doyle:
They all want to be so cliche. Really?
Jen Hatmaker:
God, what else could there have been? You know what I mean?
Glennon Doyle:
God.
Jen Hatmaker:
Some sort of different shock and awe. I don’t know.
Glennon Doyle:
Be more creative. I love that whole thing where we protect our people from the version of the truth because we are afraid they won’t be able to take our people back. It’s that thing I say to my people, I would like to be friends with you, but I already told my sister what you did. So I can’t. So we’re done. Forever.
Jen Hatmaker:
Sorry, yeah, we’re done.
Amanda Doyle:
I think it’s beyond that though. I think if we’re being really honest, it is about our people and about how you’re going to look at them from now on. And are we going to still be able to go on that group vacation because now you know who he is but actually, it’s about your view of me. Because as much as I can’t handle you viewing him like that, I can’t handle you viewing me as the kind of person that’s going to stay with that.
Abby Wambach:
That’s good.
Jen Hatmaker:
Yeah, totally.
Amanda Doyle:
Because the cardinal sin in our culture is someone who settles, someone who’s… so if you say this is the situation in my marriage and also I’m not leaving it, it’s like your respect for yourself has gone down. But also the respect that you perceive that they have for you feels like it goes down. And at least for me, that is hard.
Jen Hatmaker:
It’s so real. And that’s always mattered to me disproportionately, what do people think of me? This is one of my monsters to slay and it has an outsized effect on my choices or has, it has for sure. Which is something, a lovely little side gift that this public divorce gives you. Guess what? You get to fix that. That’s dead. So I think you’re right, Amanda. And what sucks about this whole thing is that what’s actually true is that when we are standing naked in front of one another, and we are just stripped bare of all of our pretenses and all of our posturing and all the ways we polish our gross stuff up and all this pretending, that is really where the magic is. That is where real connection is. That is where real community is. Ironically, that’s where real hope comes from. The real kind. It’s based in reality.
Jen Hatmaker:
And I don’t know why we run away from this so much. I really don’t. The self-preservation thing has a terrible ROI. Just terrible. It doesn’t even work. It doesn’t even work. I’d love to see us tear this down brick by brick. And I think what happens when people like us who have a lot of eyes on us, more than makes sense and more than I like frankly, I don’t think we’re necessarily built for this attention. And it has a corrosive effect anyway, whatever. That’s a different ball.
Jen Hatmaker:
I think when we can dig deep enough to stand like that in front of our communities, without defending, without justifying, without making it a little better than it really is, without anything. Just being true. It has this contagious effect. And I think it has a ripple effect through our communities that is so healthy. And it’s so good. And we start showing ourselves to one another and because every single time, I mean, God, how many times do I have to say this, there’s nothing new under the sun. Every single time. It’s a me too, me too, me too, me too. Every time. I don’t care what your thing is. I swear to God, I don’t care what it is. However weird outlier, little situation you feel like you were in, you are not, you are not, you are not. You have a weird little club that you belong to. Congratulations. You don’t want it. Me neither, but we have it.
Jen Hatmaker:
And so it’s so good for us to do this. So, I know that we are all committed to continue to live like that as often as we can because we’re also just human little people and we’ll go into our little hidy-holes and get weird. But as often as we can, I think leading with that vulnerability and truth telling is going to have far reaching effects that we’ll probably never even see.
Glennon Doyle:
It’s the commitment to say, okay, I’m okay with you admiring me a little bit less because I want you to love me.
Jen Hatmaker:
Mm. So true.
Amanda Doyle:
And it’s the only cure for loneliness, right? I mean, it doesn’t matter what your situation is in your marriage, the universal experience when you’re struggling in any way in your marriage, whether you’re admitting it or not is a profound loneliness. And then-
Jen Hatmaker:
So isolating.
Amanda Doyle:
… when you are able to hear the truth about other people’s marriages, guess what that does? Makes you feel less lonely.
Jen Hatmaker:
Yeah, it’s so real. And it takes away the shame of it, too. The deep shame that seeps into our bones. It’s a mean shame, because it’s not fair and it’s not warranted, but that connection inside shared pain, it just seeps out that shame bit by bit. And it just loses its power over you. I mean, it really does. Shame is so powerful in the dark, so powerful. It could just convince us of all sorts of things. And so to me that is an incredible antidote. It is literally a healing property to choose to not stay isolated in our own suffering, but invite people into it. That alone is 80% of it. I mean, I get 80% there just simply not being alone in it anymore. So I do believe in that. And I love the community that you build and host, which literally almost enforces this. You just… we’re not setting tables where people have to just put on their prom dress in order to sit at it. You know what I mean? It’s just a messy, sloppy mess. It is.
Glennon Doyle:
So here’s what we’re going to do. I assumed that during this 50 minutes we were going to get through the pain, the waiting, and the rising okay? Of Jen’s life. Apparently the pain, the waiting, and the rising takes longer than 50 minutes. So today I think we got to the pain. So what we’re going to do… so we’ve never done this before in the history of We Can Do Hard Things, but I’m going to beg Jen to come back and we’re going to do a part two because we must, Jen Hatmaker, talk about how you, during the waiting and in the rising, just got your shit together like I have never seen, just figured out how to do life as a whole person. You had your there she is moment, but it was you. It was there she is Jen Hatmaker.
Abby Wambach:
Jenaissance.
Glennon Doyle:
The Jenaissance part two coming.
Amanda Doyle:
American hero. An American hero.
Glennon Doyle:
A damn American hero.
Jen Hatmaker:
This is enough. That’s a lot. This is a lot right now.
Glennon Doyle:
I don’t think so. Okay, Jen, you do hard things and we love you.
Jen Hatmaker:
Same.
Glennon Doyle:
And for the Pod Squad, we will catch you back here for the next episode of We Can Do Hard Things and you won’t want to miss it because Abby and I will be having a double date with Miss Jen Hatmaker and her new boyfriend, Tyler Merritt.