Mia

Mia is in her early 30s. She has been married to her partner for three years. They have an eight month old child together. She has never been to counselling before.

She made an appointment and came.

I am really reactive all the time. I get annoyed if he even dares to touch me. I shout at him to go away.

Mia’s partner travels often for work. She has gone back to work full time. They need the money. When he comes home, she says she is still doing everything.

I do EVERYTHING. I work. I look after the baby. I take care of the house.

She had expected something different when the baby came. She had expected him to step up. To meet her where she was. To put in the same effort. To share the to-do list of working parents.

He didn't.

I have to be responsible for everything. If he does anything, I will just have to do it again — because it is not done right. When I have to do things again it takes time away from all the other things I have to do.

I feel my brain is a constant checklist. My brain is constantly on. I am wound up like a spring. I don’t ever get the chance to unwind.

When he comes home from working away, he criticises everything. The house is a mess. Inside and out. He acts as if I have done nothing in the days he was gone.

If he dares trying anything romantic, I just feel sick. If he tries to crack a joke, I yell at him and tell him to get out of the house.

Then he gets annoyed. Not violent. He shuts down. Or he says something irritating — an invitation to fight back. These days I do fight back. I used not to react. But now I do. Then he walks away.

I can’t get over the wall I have had to put up between us.

Mia is in the Upstairs and the Attic. Her brain is a checklist that never ends, a spring wound so tight there is no give left in it. Every task not done, or not done right, is another step up the staircase. Every criticism is another step. Every joke at the wrong moment is another. She is pressed against the top of the Attic with nowhere to go.

She knows this. That is what is remarkable about Mia. She did not arrive at counselling confused about where she was. She arrived knowing — precisely, vividly, in language so exact it needed almost no translation. She knew she was in the Attic. She knew the Attic was unsustainable. And most importantly, she knew she wanted to come down.

She just needed someone to give her the map and the vocabulary. Someone to listen who understands what life is like in their Attic.

She is in the Attic — overwhelmed, furious, brittle — and he is in his lower floors. He shuts down. He retreats to the Basement, where it is safe and predictable and nothing is required of him. And from the Cellar, he plays emotional games. Jokes. Attempts at romance. Provocative comments. An invitation to fight. In street language, he is trying to get a rise out of her. He wants to control her emotions. He lacks the ability to control his own. He does not know how to meet her where she is and so he provokes. He complains. He does not acknowledge the work load she carries when he is away and when he is home. His behaviour stirs her up. All of it effective at getting her agitated, vibrating higher and higher.

She desperately wants to come down. But she feels stuck. Way up high in her Attic.

Mia and her partner have merged their Houses Within. They live in a single House Within. Each is stuck at their own extreme, balancing the system vertically — her in the upper floors, him in the lower floors.

No one is on the Ground Floor. And the Ground Floor is where relationships have their best chance of working well.

The wall between them has been built brick by brick. One unreturned effort at a time.

When the framework was introduced, Mia recognised every floor immediately.

The Upstairs — her checklist brain, her wound-up spring. The Attic — the place she had been living, pressed against the ceiling, unable to think. The Basement — where he went when she pushed him away. The Cellar — where his attempts at ill-timed jokes came from, the romantic gestures at the wrong moment, the irritating comments designed to provoke a reaction.

She had never heard of The House Within. But she already knew every floor and how things work there. She knew intuitively that him spiralling down and her spiralling up were two halves of the one dynamic.

As she felt listened to — as she felt someone understood — she became open enough to talking about her need for things to be done right. Her need for everything to be perfect. This is commonly part of spiralling upwards — striving to achieve a success, or a perfection, or a completion that is not real. Mia knew it was not real. Gradually she opened up to what was driving her towards her Upstairs and Attic.

Mia is not alone in this. Many women will recognise the striving for perfection that brought her to the Attic. One of its deepest roots is in the experience of becoming a mother for the first time.

When women bring their new baby home, they often see the baby as helpless — and feel a powerful pull to be everything, at tremendous cost to their own emotional wellbeing. At some deeper level, they feel the baby cannot survive unless she, the mother, does everything. And does it perfectly. This is not a personality flaw. It is a response to the fear of the newest, most vulnerable person in the world depending entirely on you. New mothers need help coming down from this state. The transition from caring for yourself as an adult without children to being responsible for the youngest baby in the world is one of the most demanding emotional transitions a human being makes.

It helps when there is another woman who has had children and can say with confidence and compassion: you are doing well, and babies are more resilient than you think. But families are often scattered across geography, and grandparents are sometimes too busy — working, managing their own lives, or quietly defending their own record as parents — to offer the steady reassurance a new mother needs. A male partner who can tune into what she actually needs — not jokes, not romance, not criticism of the house — but simply to hold her, physically, emotionally, steadily, without an agenda — can make an enormous difference. That holding is what the Attic state of mind most desperately needs. And it is what Mia’s partner has not been able to give.

The checklist, the need for everything to be done right, the impossibility of letting anything be less than perfect — this was costing her both through the impact of an overrevving nervous system and the inability to think productively. The pursuit of perfection that does not exist was keeping her in the Upstairs and Attic as surely as his behaviour was. The staircase was spinning upward, step by checklist item by step.

Like plates balanced at the end of sticks, twirling faster and faster, eventually falling — she is at breaking point.

On the Ground Floor, perfection is not the goal. The goal is good enough — something good for her, good for her baby, and, when she is ready, possibly something good for the couple. That is a different standard. A reachable one. And it requires a great deal less energy than she has been expending in the Attic.

Some women in Mia’s situation stay with their partner. Some leave. The House Within does not resolve this dilemma. What it offers is something more fundamental — a way to come down from the Attic and feel she is herself again, on her own Ground Floor. A Ground Floor state of mind in which she can hold her feelings, think productively, and begin to move forward. Towards being herself more fully as a human being.

The wall between them may or may not come down. That depends on two people, and she can only control one of them.

But she can find her way off the ceiling. And from the Ground Floor, she will see her options more clearly than she ever could from the Attic.

She already knew all of this. She just needed the map.

And someone who understands their own House Within to be with her.