Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time

by Brigid Schulte

Helping couples find Their Own Private Netherlands, so to speak, is a key mission of DeGroot’s institute. Her approach includes three main elements: vision, space, and story. When she asks couples to fight the good fight, she uses a well-researched curriculum to help them see the powerful unconscious forces at work in their lives—the ideal worker, the provider father, and the ideal mother. Then in what she calls “active listening” sessions, she creates a regular and predictable space for couples ordinarily too overwhelmed to even think, so they can begin to sort through where they are and how they got there. It’s a time to pause, to step outside the swirl and examine their own work cultures, work creep, how their own histories can unthinkingly shape their expectations, and how easy it is to fall into what she calls reactive, no-win “tangos” when those unconscious forces are pulling the strings. She asks couples to talk to each other about what they really want for their life together. She asks them to start to imagine how to get across the gap between where they are and the vision of what they really want. Then she tells couples to experiment and see what happens. Over and over. Until the vision gets clearer and the path to it better lit. And when they get stuck, when change seems impossible, like MomsRising, she, too, has a bank of stories, and connects couples, families, businesses, and leaders who are striving to remake their lives on the third path to those who already...