Go through, not around. That’s one of my personal beliefs. So much so that I’ve built it into the DNA of Recharge. It’s one of our goal markers. Over the years, I’ve realized I’d rather take the direct route. And where this gets tested more than anywhere else is with other people. I know, shocking, right? People are the challenge. I’m sure you’re thinking, “no shit, tell me something I didn’t know.” I get it. There is no bigger risk and reward than people and relationships. They can hurt us. Sometimes tremendously. And genuine, deep relationships make living a unique and wonderful experience. TL;DR: people are the best and the worst.
Speaking of relationships. One of my favorite parts of owning Recharge, maybe my favorite, has nothing to do with business. It has everything to do with the conversations I have with our members. They’re honest, deep, and filled with perspectives from lives I’d otherwise never get access to. I had one of those conversations recently with Jan Carey. Aside from being a talented artist, Jan is an amazing therapist specializing in sex and relationships. Our Recharge community is full of people who do incredibly interesting things. And I love learning from them. If you’ve read or followed my work, you know how important I think psychology is. So mid-conversation, while I was peppering her with a million questions about human nature, she brought up a concept called covert contracts.
And I’ve had to double-check myself regularly to make sure I wasn’t making covert contracts.
What Is a Covert Contract?
Here’s how a covert contract works. You make a deal with someone. You’ll do something for them. In return, they’ll do something for you. Simple enough. Except for one detail. You never tell them. You draft the terms, sign both names, and file the whole thing away in your head. Then you start performing your end. And you wait.
Robert Glover coined the term in No More Mr. Nice Guy. But the pattern is older than the name. Eric Berne was mapping the same territory back in the sixties with Games People Play, those structured exchanges we run with hidden payoffs underneath. Different language, same machinery. An unspoken if-then quietly running the relationship from behind a curtain.
You’ve done this. So have I. I’ll stay late and handle the thing nobody wants to handle, and my boss will notice and reward me. I’ll plan the trip, book the dinners, carry the logistics, and my partner will see how much I do and feel lucky to have me. I’ll check on my friend every time life knocks him down, and when it’s my turn, he’ll just know. Nobody said any of it out loud. That’s the whole point. Saying it out loud would ruin it.
And that word, ruin, is where this gets interesting. Why would stating a term ruin anything?
Why We Hide the Terms
Two reasons, and both are about protection. The first is that a direct ask can be declined. If I tell you what I need, you can say no. The covert contract never gets tested, so it never gets rejected. It feels like safety. It’s actually avoidance, that is, conveniently outwardly blaming.
The second reason runs deeper. Somewhere along the way, most of us absorbed the belief that a need only counts if it’s met without being spoken. If I have to ask, it doesn’t count. “You didn’t really want to.” “I dragged it out of you.” So we don’t ask. We build elaborate silent trades instead and call the arrangement love, or loyalty, or work ethic.
The Resentment Ledger
The accounting makes it worse. Ross and Sicoly ran a study in the late seventies where they asked couples what percentage of the housework each partner did. The combined totals routinely blew past a hundred percent. Everyone remembers their own contributions vividly and everyone else’s dimly. Kahneman and Tversky would call the mechanism availability. What comes to mind easily feels true, and nothing comes to mind more easily than your own effort. Now run that bias through a covert contract. Every unspoken favor gets logged at full value in your ledger and lands at zero in theirs. They can’t see the ledger. They don’t know it exists. You are negotiating with the person. The only problem is that the negotiation is happening in your head. And that leads to the big R…
Resentment.
Resentment is almost always a contract dispute. It’s the collections notice for an invoice you never sent. When you feel that familiar burn of being owed, somewhere behind it sits a contract. And if you trace it back, you’ll usually find one signature on it. Yours. Ouch.
The cruelest part is the blowup. Because eventually the covert contract gets breached one too many times, and everything comes out at once. The other person stands there, blindsided. From where they’re standing, you just detonated over a dish in the sink or a text that came back too slow. They’re not responding to your years of quiet performance. They never saw it. They’re responding to someone who apparently keeps score. The relationship takes real damage over the breach of an agreement that one of you didn’t know existed. Both people leave that fight convinced they’re the wronged party. Both are sort of right.
(If you’re a clinician, you’ve watched this play out in the treatment room. The patient who does every exercise, hits every appointment, follows every instruction, and shows up one day furious that they still hurt. They had a contract. Compliance in exchange for a cure. Nobody said those terms out loud, and you never agreed to them. And be honest, you’ve got your own side contract running too. I’ll give you my best work, and you’ll get better and prove I’m good at this.)
Covert Contracts With Your Own Body
Here’s where it connects to the body, because with me it always does. People run covert contracts with their own physiology constantly. I ate clean all month, so my back owes me a pain-free week. I trained all winter, so my knee owes me eighteen holes without complaint. I did everything right. Right implies terms. Terms imply an agreement. And the body never signed.
The body isn’t a vending machine where inputs purchase outcomes. It’s an intelligent, adaptive system running a constant negotiation with sleep, stress, load, and history. Negotiation requires listening, not invoicing. Half of what walks through our door at Recharge isn’t a tissue problem. It’s a contract dispute between a person and their own body. One party feels betrayed. The other never agreed to anything.
Go Through, Not Around
So what’s the alternative? It’s the thing this whole piece opened with. Go through, not around. Make the contract overt. Say the terms out loud.
“I need you to check on me sometimes without me having to prompt it.”
“I’m putting in these extra hours because I want the promotion, is that actually on the table?”
“I want this knee to hold up for golf season, so what does it actually need from me?”
I won’t pretend that’s a small move. Nor does knowing it always make it easy to do. I promise you, it doesn’t. Yes, speaking from personal experience.
Stating a term hands the other person the power to decline it. You might hear no. That’s the price of a real agreement, and it’s exactly why we avoid paying it. But look at the actual trade. The overt ask risks one uncomfortable conversation. The covert contract risks the entire relationship, slowly, with interest. And there’s an upside nobody prices in. You might hear yes from someone who finally knows what you need. That beats the hell out of silently resenting them for failing a test they never knew they were taking.
Going through means saying the terms and living with the answer. Going around means filing the contract away and waiting to be disappointed on schedule.
So the next time resentment shows up, and it will, don’t start with what they did. Start with the question. What are the terms? Who wrote them? And did anyone else ever get to read them?