The principle of self-inventory proves valuable in navigating through marital relationships as well. We tend to resist exploring our contribution to problematic relationship patterns in our marriage. It’s more convenient to focus on our partner. We point at what they do to anger us. We complain about their irritating personality traits. We blame our problems on their behavior.
AA has a term for this. When conversation becomes focused on another person’s faults, the group redirects the emphasis back to self-inventory by saying, “You’re taking their inventory, not your own.”
Taking our partner’s inventory instead of our own neutralizes our capacity to change. It takes energy away from the only thing we can control—changing ourselves—and spends it on what we have no power to control—changing someone else.
In taking our partner’s inventory, we typically end up telling negative stories about them and how unchangeable we believe they are. We justify our position by creating elaborate defenses for our stories.
We demand they change and wait for the magical day for that to take place. We best grab a Snickers bar, because it’s going to take a while—a long, long while.
Taking their inventory and telling the negative stories keep us stuck. By avoiding our own inventory we forfeit our potential to exact change.
These negative stories often consist of assigning labels to our partner. Common labels are “selfish,” “lazy,” “stingy,” “stubborn,” and “uncaring.” Regardless of how warranted those labels may seem, they trap us in our ineffective relational patterns.
Ronald Richardson states, “Labels restrict our own ability to move in relationships, because they solidify a point of view. They keep us behaving toward others as if they are what we have labeled them.”
He continues, “Our labels limit our options. We will evaluate each encounter with them from that point of view, and usually the experience will just serve to build our case that ‘that’ is the way they are. Each incident will only further prove our set idea of them. We won’t learn anything about them with these labels in our head.”
It’s far more effective to take our own inventory. Wisdom teaches us to look at ourselves—our contribution to the relationship pattern.
Personal inventory leads us to discover the powerful truth that behavior begets behavior. We tend to be treated the way we do because we teach our partner to treat us that way. Our style—be it criticism, defensiveness, harshness, withdrawal, denial, or cowering fear—often elicits the kind of treatment our partner dishes out that we don’t like.
As we focus on changing our patterns to more effective, authentic, and self-actualized approaches, we exponentially increase our leverage in influencing change in our relationship. This is true in marriage and in all our relationships.
This follows Jesus’ teaching that we be far more concerned with the log in our own eye than we are the speck in their eye. As we concern ourselves with our own logs, everything else falls into perspective. Their specks lose their urgency and tend to take care of themselves.
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