What we need is acknowledgement
Oftentimes couples wonder why things escalate the way they do, why they end up in the conflicts they do. And oftentimes it’s some version of a lack of acknowledgment of one or the other’s experience. Someone gets hurt, they try to tell their partner looking for acknowledgement, their partner gets defensive, explains their intent, the other person doesn’t feel acknowledged so they get bigger, angrier, louder in their effort to be heard which just leaves the other person getting more defensive which leads to less acknowledgement and so the escalating spiral goes.
So how do you stop it? What does acknowledgment look like?
Sometimes I like to use this metaphor and then I’ll put it in context with a pretend couple. If you are dancing together and you step on your partners foot, it hurts. Of course you didn’t mean it. Your partner says ow, that hurt. A common response is, well I didn’t mean to hurt you, you put your foot where it wasn’t supposed to be (blame, defensiveness), so then the other person protests more that it hurts. What your partner needs is for you to say, oh, I see that I hurt you. Can you show me where? What can I do to soothe it? It’s not always relevant that you didn’t mean it (well, it would be if you did mean it!) but we’ll assume that typically no hurt is intended. It still hurts. It doesn’t really matter if it happened because your partner misstepped, or you misstepped, your partner is hurt and you can soothe that hurt by acknowledging it exists and finding out what they need for comfort and care to ease the hurt. There is no need to assign blame to anyone. To take it a step further, that may be a foot that your partner has broken in the past, so stepping on it may hurt even more than if she/he had never broken it. When our partner has a bigger reaction than what seems warranted, it’s likely there is a past wound lurking there.
So let’s imagine Casi and Joel. (A completely made up couple). Casi and Joel are sitting together at the breakfast table having a casual chat. Mid conversation, Joel’s phone rings, and without saying anything, he answers it and leaves the room. Casi feels hurt. They both have a full day and this was their time to connect, she was enjoying her time with him and was left wondering, what could have been more important in this moment than us talking. So when Joel returns, she says, why would you just cut off our conversation like that? He responds that it was an important work call that he had to take. She then says, but it could have waited or he could have at least said something before answering the phone. (Casi is getting more upset as she talks, Joel getting more defensive.) He responds, but I did come right back, I’m here now. What is the problem here? It was a quick phone call!
You can see how this can start to spiral as Casi doesn’t feel understood and Joel feels attacked and defensive. But what is really going on? Let’s further imagine that Casi has some trauma in her past of being neglected. Ignored and not cared for by her caretakers growing up? Might this momentary infraction hurt and trigger her more in this moment than if she never experienced that? Of course.
Let’s imagine a different conversation where they both approach this in a different way. The same event occurs. And when Joel returns, Casi rather than going on the offensive, shares vulnerably the feelings that came up for her. Something like, I was really enjoying our time together before we go our separate ways. It makes me feel connected to you. When the phone rang and you answered it without saying anything, it left me feeling like this time isn’t as important to you and that hurts. And Joel’s reply might sound something like, I am so sorry, you are right, I wasn’t thinking about that in the moment, I just saw it was work and answered without thinking. I can see how it made you feel that way. I love this time together.
How do you imagine that both might feel after that conversation? Casi might let her guard down because Joel has heard and understood her feelings, and she’s more likely to accept what happened for him in that moment. That is a moment of repair, and reconnection.
If this is difficult for you to do in your own relationship, and these seemingly small moments turn into big spirals, we are here to help. Contact us today.
Wishing you Love and Happiness,
Dana Vince and the Healing Hearts Counseling Team.
The surprising benefits of not knowing your partner
There’s been a lot written about how this pandemic is affecting marriages and relationships. Through all of that, one thing has stood out to me more than anything else. I have to be honest. “I think one of the things that I’ve realized is that I don’t know Will at all.” Actor Jada Pinkett Smith said of her relationship with fellow actor Will Smith on her show ‘Red Table Talk.’ They were married in 1997, and here she is saying she doesn’t know her husband. That sounded incredibly painful to me. I know how much myself, the people I work with, and just people in general, want to be known deeply by an important other.
I thought I knew where the story was going, but what she said next was not what I expected.
“I feel like there’s a layer that you get to, life gets busy and you create these stories in your head, and
then you hold onto these stories and that is your idea of your partner; that’s not who your partner is,”
she said.
I don’t think she’s saying she doesn’t know anything about her partner. They have actually been open
about some of their marriage problems and the deep, difficult conversations they’ve had in order to
work through them. If she didn’t know him before then, surely she got to know him some during that
process. What I think she is saying, is that there is a way in which our learning about our partner is never
really “over.”
The “knowing” about your partner can create a sense of intimacy, but in many ways the “not knowing”
can be just as important for intimacy. The “not knowing” is about the attention, openness, and curiosity
that we can maintain toward our partner. Often when people reflect on early days with their partner,
they remember that sense of sharing and learning about each other that fueled their sense of
connection with their new love.
Then, as Jada said, we get busy and caught up in our lives. We stop paying attention in the same way.
We think we “know.” In fact, the “knowing” part can get in the way because so much of what we think
we know about our partner is really a rigid story we’re telling ourselves, not the dynamic, fluid, and
sometimes messy truth. So, we engage with the story of our partner we tell ourselves, not our partner.
That’s not to say you have to try to recreate the dynamic of getting to know your partner that you went
through when you first met. Of course, you probably really do know quite a lot about your partner if
you’ve been with them a long time. But the truth is, we can never really know someone else completely.
Heck, just knowing ourselves can be pretty difficult. It also doesn’t mean you will always like what you discover. But hopefully, it’ll be real. And it’s so much easier and more intimate to deal with real.
What we can do is embrace the spirit of not knowing. We can lean into the possibility that we’ll discover
something new and unexpected with our partner. That possibility is the very doorway to intimacy, a
chance to know and be known, again and again.
Contributed by Dr. Clay Culp, Emotionally Focused Couples Therapist at Healing Hearts Counseling
How to understand anger
Anger is often seen as a bad emotion, something we shouldn’t feel or express. It has a bad rap, and understandably so. It can often scare us, push people we care about away from us, it can scare those we love, it can leave us feeling shame that we get to that point. And at times we may even feel bewildered by our own intense reactivity. Where is it coming from? Why is it there? Why does it at times feel out of control? There may also be fears if we let ourselves express it, it can and will lead to irrevocable actions.
But let’s explore what’s really happening when we are angry.
Anger can be empowering. It’s how we stand up for ourselves when we feel wronged in some way.
Anger can be a call to be heard. When we feel small, or unseen, anger becomes a protest that says, “Hear me! See me!”.
Sometimes anger can be a release of many other emotions that have been suppressed for too long. The proverbial pot boiling over.
Anger can be shame coming to life. A moment when we feel judged or seen as bad, or feel bad about ourselves and it’s being called out. Our anger is a defense to guard against our own fears of who we really are.
Anger can be a protest against disconnection. A call to a loved other to respond when it seems they are distant or don’t care. It can be a fight for the relationship, a call for change toward more love and closeness.
As we look at and understand the meaning behind the anger, we can see that it has a deeper, important purpose. It is driving us toward something if we can tune in and listen to what it’s trying to say. What need isn’t being met that anger is calling for?
If we can understand the need, what is behind the anger, we can start to calm it and direct it in a more effective way toward getting those needs met. Or maybe there is a deep wound that needs tending to and healing.
If you are finding that anger is hurting you and your relationships, counseling can help process and make sense of what is underneath.
We are here to help.
Wishing you love and happiness always,
Dana
Understanding shame
Shame. It’s a very powerful force. We all have it. But it’s hard to talk about. It’s a dark, difficult, lurking emotion. But the less we are aware of it, and the less we talk about it, the more power it has over us.
It’s easy to see when shame is triggered when you know what to look for. Here are the common responses to this trigger. Blame/projection. When someone is saying something negative about us, and somewhere inside of us we are either afraid this is true about us, or deep inside we believe it’s true, our self protective defense kicks in and we point the finger at the other person, We project our fears/beliefs back onto them and tell them they are the problem. Note: we often are not aware we are doing this. Another typical reaction is to get defensive. This is similar to the first in that it is touching on something we fear or believe is true about us so we protect ourselves by defending ourselves. We tell the other person how wrong they are. The last typical common response is that we shut down and numb out. We don’t want to feel these feelings and it’s overwhelming. Shame often makes us hide. We don’t want others to see what we fear is the truth of who we are in that shame place. All of these responses are detrimental to ourselves and our relationships. They push those close to us away. Which then reinforces feelings of shame that we are unlovable or not good enough.
No one can really make us feel something we don’t already feel.
If I know I’m intelligent and I feel secure in my competency as a person and someone tells me I’m dumb, I may not like it, but I’m not going to have a big reaction to it because I know this isn’t true. But let’s say I had a parent that put me down as a child, I struggled with school and was belittled for it. There’s a tender spot around my intelligence that includes feelings of shame. I feel not smart enough, not competent enough, and then someone tells me I’m dumb. Boy am I going to have a big emotional reaction to that that may include lashing out and blaming the other person, defending myself and telling them how wrong they are, or turning inward and shutting down. If we don’t understand where our tender spots are, our shame places, we often react while never really understanding why we react the ways that we do, and those reactions become damaging to ourselves and to our relationships.
This scenario quite often plays out in our intimate relationships. Our partner has the ability to hone right in on our most tender spots because they are the ones that matter the most to us, and they know us the best. This is the person we care the most about what they think, they are close enough to really hit those raw spots, and because they mean the most, they get the biggest reaction when those shame spots are triggered.
So let me illustrate a relationship example where both people are triggered by shame and how it leads to disconnect. Please note, all names and content are fictional, but it’s so common and universal, it’s not unusual to see yourself in it. I’m using some extreme examples of childhood wounds, but they don’t have to be this significant for us to have feelings of shame. Remember, we all have shame to varying degrees.
Joe had a very critical father grown up. If he got a B, his father would reprimand him and question why he never got an A. So Joe would try to perform and perform to get his father’s approval, and never felt good enough. His deepest shame fear was that he was a failure and would never be good enough. Sara was abandoned by her mother when she was very young, so she has deep feelings of shame that she is not lovable and everyone will leave. Joe and Sara are in a long term loving relationship.
Often times if Joe is not being particularly attentive to Sara because he is just distracted by a bad day at work, and he also forgets to take out the garbage. Sara’s shame is triggered, she fears she is not lovable and he doesn’t really care about her. So she launches into a critical attack telling him he never remembers to take out the garbage and all the household chores are up to her. She gets angry at him and tells him he doesn’t pull his weight and she’s tired of it. Sara doesn’t realize her shame is triggered, she is just reacting. Her reaction then triggers Joe’s shame. He starts to feel like a failure as a husband, that no matter what he does, no matter how hard he tries, he’s never going to get it right with her, he’s never going to make her happy. His reaction is then defensiveness. He tells her how she is wrong, that he does a lot around the house and she’s being ridiculous, thereby triggering her shame even more. If only they could see what’s going on. Their reactions are pushing each other away. But the shame they feel is real, it’s not their fault they have these feelings, and if only they could share that with each other.
So what do we do about this? We have to get in touch with it, acknowledge it, understand it, and have empathy for it so we can lessen it’s hold on us. Tune into those tender spots in yourself. Where do you recognize you have big reactions like this? What tends to trigger it? How do we react when it’s triggered? Having this information gives us the power to change our response so we can then love ourselves better and love those closest to us better. It takes tremendous courage to take a look at ourselves and acknowledge something so vulnerable as shame. But remember, it is part of being human. But if we can look at it and understand it with compassion, we can begin to heal it. We can begin to challenge these beliefs about ourselves that just aren’t true. Because the truth really is that we are all lovable, we are all enough, simply because we exist.
To learn more about Shame and it’s impact, Brene Brown has many amazing TED talks and books that delve deeply into this topic. Some of her books include: Daring Greatly, The Gifts of Imperfection, Rising Strong and others. And if you need support, counseling can help.
Wishing you love and happiness always,
Dana
The damage of dismissing
One of the things that happens when couples get into distress, when one partner feels attacked, they get defensive. When this defensiveness occurs, you may end up dismissing the experience your partner is trying to share with you.
I understand that if your partner comes at you in an aggressive way (i.e. angry or blaming) it can be hard to hear the message of hurt behind the attack. Keep in mind, the height of the anger is equal to the depth of the hurt. Typically when a partner is acting out with anger, they are protesting disconnection and expressing deep hurt. If you respond by defending yourself by saying something along the lines of “that’s not true…I didn’t do that…that wasn’t what I intended…you are blowing this way out of proportion”, you end up dismissing your partner’s experience, which is very real and true for them.
The best way to disarm and diffuse the conflict, is turn toward and tune into your partner. Help slow them down by getting curious about what they are feeling and why. Really listen as they talk to what meaning they are giving the situation and why it hurts. Then your partner doesn’t have to fight so hard to be heard. The more you understand, the more comfort and reassurance you can offer. Then your parter will likely soften, and you’ll have room and space to also talk about what you are feeling and experiencing. When you understand someone’s story, you can often understand their reactions, so tuning in and listening can bring closeness, rather than both of you going off into the separate corners of painful disconnection.
Thank you for reading.
Wishing you love and happiness,
Dana
P.S. For more marriage enrichment, visit www.holdmetightknoxville.com and learn about our upcoming weekend workshops for couples.
How to keep out the weeds
I pulled the following text from a lawn care website. They had a section on lawn care tips and as I read it, it reminded me of marriage.
“Contrary to popular belief, dandelions cannot be effectively prevented. They can only be controlled when they’re actively growing.The best defense against weeds is a thick carpet of grass – so thick it doesn’t give the weed seeds a chance to sprout. That’s one reason Scott’s LawnServicefocuses on improving your lawn’s turf density. And during the growing season we constantly monitor your lawn for new weeds and knock them out if they appear.”
So how do I relate this to marriage? Read More