• Did the story of Tim and Sarah make sense to you? Did it seem familiar? What part really seemed important to you, and how do you understand that?
• What messages about love/marriage did you get from your parents? Your community? Was being able to reach for and trust others seen as a strength and a resource?
• Before your present relationship, did you experience a safe, loving relationship with someone you trusted, felt close to, and could turn to if needed? Do you have an image of what this looks like in your head, a model that can help you as you create your present relationship? Think of one good time or typical moment that captures this relationship and share it with your partner.
• Did your past relationships teach you that loved ones were unreliable and that you had to be vigilant and fight to be seen and responded to? Or did you learn that depending on others is dangerous and it is best to distance yourself, to not need others and avoid closeness? These basic strategies often switch on when we feel that our lover is distant or disconnected. Which strategy did you use in past relationships, say, with your parents, when things started to go wrong?
• Can you remember a time when you really needed to know a loved one was with you? If he or she was not, what was that like for you and what did you learn from it? How did you cope? Does this have an impact on your relationships now?
• If it is hard for you to turn to and trust others, to let them close when you really need them, what do you do when life gets too big to handle or when you feel alone?
• Name two very concrete and specific things that a safe, accessible, responsive, and engaged lover in a relationship with you would do on a typical day and how those things would make you feel at that moment.
• In your present relationship, can you ask your partner, let him or her see, when you need closeness and comfort? Is this easy for you or difficult to do? Perhaps you wonder if this is a sign of weakness, or maybe it seems too risky for you. Rate your difficulty in doing this on a scale from 1 to 10. A high score means this is very difficult for you to do. Share this with your partner.
• When you feel disconnected or alone in your present relationship, are you likely to get very emotional or even anxious and push your partner to respond? Or are you more likely to shut down and try not to feel your need to connect? Can you think of a time when this happened?
• Think of a time in your relationship when questions like “Are you there for me?” were hanging in the air unanswered and you wound up getting into a fight about a mundane problem. Share this with your partner.
• Can you think of bonding moments in your relationship when one of you reaches out and the other responds in a way that makes you both feel emotionally connected and secure with each other? Share this with your partner.
Now that you have a sense of what love and the creation of positive dependency is all about, the transforming conversations in the following chapters will show you how to create this kind of bond with your partner. The first four conversations teach you how to limit negative spirals that leave you both disconnected and how to tune in to each other in a way that builds lasting emotional responsiveness. The next two conversations demonstrate how you can promote emotional bonding through forgiving injuries and sexual intimacy. The final conversation shows you how to care for your relationship on a daily basis.
PART TWO
Seven Transforming Conversations
Conversation 1: Recognizing the Demon Dialogues
“Strife is better than loneliness.”
— Irish proverb
For all of us, the person we love most in the world, the one who can send us soaring joyfully into space, is also the person who can send us crashing back to earth. All it takes is a slight turning away of the head or a flip, careless remark. There is no closeness without this sensitivity. If our connection with our mate is safe and strong, we can deal with these moments of sensitivity. Indeed, we can use them to bring our partner even closer. But when we don’t feel safe and connected, these moments are like a spark in a tinder forest. They set fire to the whole relationship.
This is what has happened in the first three minutes of an explosive session with Jim and Pam, a long-married couple who were experiencing a serious downswing in their relationship, though they still noted each other’s appealing qualities. Jim had told me several times in previous sessions that Pam’s golden hair and blue eyes “entranced” him, and Pam often observed that he was a good husband and father and even a “little bit” handsome himself.
The session starts innocently enough, with Pam saying she and Jim had a pleasant week together and that she had decided to try to comfort Jim more whenever she saw that he was feeling stressed by his work. She also says that she would really like him to be able to tell her when he needed emotional support. Jim snorts, rolls his eyes, and swivels his chair away from his wife. At that moment, I swear I could feel a hot wind rush through my office.
Pam blasts: “What the hell do you mean by that, that ridiculous expression? I have tried a lot harder to be supportive in this relationship than you have, you smug son of a bitch. Here I am offering to support you, but you would rather act superior, as always.” “Look at you ranting away,” Jim fires back. “I will never come to you for support. And the reason is right here. You would just berate me. You have done that for years. It’s the reason we are in this mess to begin with.”
I try to calm them down, but they are shouting so loudly that they don’t hear me. They finally stop when I say that it seems a little sad that this interaction started out with Pam being positive and offering an image of being loving. Pam then bursts into tears and Jim closes his eyes and sighs. “This is what always happens with us,” Jim says, and he is right. And this is where they can start to change what always happens. Change starts with seeing the pattern, with focusing on the game rather than the ball.
We get stuck in three basic patterns — I call them the Demon Dialogues — when we cannot connect safely with our partner. Find the Bad Guy is a dead-end pattern of mutual blame that effectively keeps a couple miles apart, blocking reengagement and the creation of a safe haven. Couples dance at arm’s length. That’s what Jim and Pam are doing when they fall into blaming each other for their distressed relationship. Many couples lapse into this pattern for short periods, but it is difficult to maintain over time. For most, Find the Bad Guy is the brief prelude to the most common and entrapping dance of distress. Marriage researchers have labeled this next dance Demand-Withdraw or Criticize-Defend. I call it the Protest Polka because I see it as a reaction to or, more accurately, a protest against the loss of the sense of secure attachment that we all need in a relationship. The third dance is Freeze and Flee, or as we sometimes call it in EFT, Withdraw-Withdraw. This usually happens after the Protest Polka has been going on for a while in a relationship, when dancers feel so hopeless that they begin to give up and put their own emotions and needs in the deep freeze, leaving only numbness and distance. Both people step back to escape hurt and despair. In dance terms, suddenly no one is on the floor; both partners are sitting out. This is the most dangerous dance of all.
All of us get caught in any one or all of these negative interactions at some point in our love relationships. For some these are brief, though risky, dances in otherwise secure connections. For others, less securely connected, they become habitual responses. After a while, all it takes is a hint of negativity from a lover to set off a Demon Dialogue. Eventually the toxic patterns can become so ingrained and permanent that they totally undermine the relationship, blocking all attempts at repair and reconnection.
We have only two ways of protecting ourselves and holding on to our connections with our partners when we do not feel safe and responded to. One route is to avoid engagement, that is, to try to numb our emotions, to shut down and deny our attachment needs. The other is to listen to our anxiety and fight for recognition and response.
Which strategy we adopt when we feel disconnected — becoming demandi
ng and critical or withdrawing and shutting down — partly reflects our natural temperament, but mostly it is dictated by the lessons we learn in the key attachment relationships of our past and present. Moreover, because we learn with every new relationship, our strategy is not fixed. We can be critical in one relationship, and withdraw in another.
If I had not intervened with Jim and Pam during the session, they would probably have raced through all three Demon Dialogues; collapsed, exhausted, alienated, and hopeless; and then returned to the Dialogue that they knew best. Inevitably, they would make damning judgments about their relationship, judgments that would cloud future interactions and eat away at their trust in each other. Each time they do this and cannot find a way through into safe connection, the relationship becomes more and more tenuous. As it is, all we have done in the session is slow things down a little. Jim and Pam suggest that I fix the problem. Of course, to each of them, that means fix the other partner. The respite lasts for only thirty seconds before they launch again into Find the Bad Guy.
DEMON DIALOGUE 1 — FIND THE BAD GUY
The purpose of Find the Bad Guy is self-protection, but the main move is mutual attack, accusation, or blame. The starting cue for this pattern of responses is that we are hurt by or feel vulnerable with our partner and become suddenly out of control. Emotional safety is lost. When we are alarmed, we use anything that promises to give us back this control. We can do this by defining our partner in a negative way, by shining a black light on him or her. We can attack in reactive anger or as a preemptive strike.
Find the Bad Guy could just as easily be called It’s Not Me, It’s You. When we feel cornered and flooded with fear, we tend to see and go with the obvious. I can see and I can feel what you just did to me. It’s much harder to see the impact of my responses on you. We concentrate on each step and how “you just stepped on me,” not the whole dance. After a while, the steps and pattern become automatic.
Once we get caught in a negative pattern, we expect it, watch for it, and react even faster when we think we see it coming. Of course this only reinforces the pattern. As Pam says, “I don’t even know what comes first anymore. I am waiting for his put-down. I have my gun ready. Maybe I pull the trigger when he isn’t even coming for me!” By being wary and anticipating being hurt, we close off all the ways out of this dead-end dance. We cannot relax with our partners, and we certainly cannot connect with or confide in them. The range of responses becomes more restricted, slowly deadening the relationship.
Jim puts it this way: “I don’t know what I feel in this relationship anymore. I am either numb or seething mad. I think I have lost touch with all kinds of feelings here. My emotional world has gotten smaller, tighter. I am so busy protecting myself.” This reaction is especially typical of men. Many partners, when they first come to see me, answer the question “What do you feel right now as you see your wife cry?” with a simple “Don’t know.” When we are attacking or counterattacking, we try to put our feelings aside. After a while we can’t find them at all. Without feelings as our compass in the territory of close relationships, we are effectively lost.
We begin to see the relationship as more and more unsatisfying or unsafe and our partner as uncaring or even defective. So Jim says, “I keep remembering my mother telling me that Pam just wasn’t mature enough for me and I guess, after these spats, I begin to think my mother was right. How can you have a relationship with someone who is so aggressive? It’s hopeless. It might be better for both of us to just give it up, even if it’s hard for the kids.”
When partners do the Find the Bad Guy dance only occasionally and loving ways of connecting are still the norm, they can reach out to each other after they’ve cooled down. Sometimes they can see how they’ve hurt each other and apologize. They can even laugh about the “silly things” both said. I remember once screaming at my husband, John, “You big Canadian male, you” and then bursting into laughter because that is exactly what he is! However, once the patterns we’ve talked about here become rooted and habitual, then a powerful, regenerating feedback loop is set up. The more you attack, the more dangerous you appear to me, the more I watch for your attack, the harder I hit back. And round and round we go. This negative pattern has to be shut down before a couple can build true trust and safety. The secret to stopping the dance is to recognize that no one has to be the bad guy. The accuse/ accuse pattern itself is the villain here, and the partners are the victims.
Let’s look again at Jim and Pam in Find the Bad Guy and see how they can get out of this destructive pattern by using a few simple pointers and new responses.
PAM: I am just not going to sit here and listen to you tell me how impossible I am anymore. According to you, everything that ever goes wrong between us is my fault!
JIM: I never said that at all. You just exaggerate everything. You are so negative. Like the other day when my friend came over and everything was going fine, but then you turned and said . . .
Jim is off and sliding down what I call the Content Tube. This is where partners bring up detailed example after detailed example of each other’s failures to prove their point. The couple fight over whether these details are “true” and whose bad behavior “started this.”
To help them recognize their Demon Dialogue, I suggest that they:
• Stay in the present and focus on what is happening between them right now.
• Look at the circle of criticism that spins both of them around. There is no true “start” to a circle.
• Consider the circle, the dance, as their enemy and the consequences of not breaking the circle.
Here is what happens:
JIM: Well, I guess that’s right. We do get caught in that, both of us. But I never really saw it before. I know I get so riled up that after a while I will say anything to get at her.
SUE: Yes. The desire to win the fight and prove the other is the bad guy has such a pull. But in fact, nobody wins this one. Both lose.
PAM: I don’t want to fight like this. It kills me. And you are right, it is destroying our relationship. We are more and more on guard with each other. What does it matter who is “right” in the end? We are both more and more unhappy. I guess I keep it spinning by trying to show him he can’t put me down. I try to make him feel smaller.
SUE: Yes. And do you know what you do, Jim? [He shakes his head.] Well, just a few minutes ago, you said, “I won’t come to you, won’t trust you, because you are dangerous for me sometimes.” And then I think you accused her of being the problem, yes?
JIM: Yes, it’s like I tell her, “You can’t get me.” And then I put her down.
SUE: And after all this sniping at each other, both of you go off, more and more defeated and alone, yes?
JIM: Right. So this circle, cycle, loop, dance, whatever it is, has us stuck. I see that. But how to stop it, that is the point. The incident that we are discussing now, I never said anything to her, she did start this cycle!
SUE: [I raise my eyebrows. He stops.] Well, first you have to see the circular pattern of responses and really understand that proving the other wrong just pushes you further and further apart. The temptation to be the “winner” and to make the other admit she is at fault is just part of the trap. Then you begin to pin down this dance, as it is happening, rather than getting meaner and meaner or searching for proof in endless versions of facts or incidents. If you want to, both of you can come together to stop this enemy taking over your relationship.
JIM: [Looking at his wife.] So, right now, I don’t want to go into this attack thing. We are caught in this loop. Maybe we could call it the “Who is lousy?” loop. [They laugh.] This is killing us. So let’s try stopping it right now. You were trying to tell me that you wanted to be supportive. So why was I going on about you ranting? I want you to support me more!
PAM: Yes, I think if we can stop and say, “Hey, we are in that loop again. Let’s not keep turning up the heat and hurting each other,” then we could be better friends a
nd maybe even a little more than that! Perhaps a little like we used to be. [She tears up.]
Pam is right here. Being able to stop the Find the Bad Guy dance is a way to be friends. But couples want much more than friendship between them. Getting this attack-attack dance under control is just the first step. We have to go on to look at other places we get stuck in love relationships. But first you can try some of the exercises below.
PLAY AND PRACTICE
These questions and reflections can help you think about how you and your mate move in the dance when both of you get caught in fight-to-win mode. You can ponder them, write them down, read them aloud, and, of course, share them with your partner.
Most of us are good at blaming. As far back as the Garden of Eden, Adam blames Eve and Eve blames Adam. Both of them tell God, “It’s not my fault. The other one is the Bad Guy.” More recently, Frank McCourt in his book Teacher Man noted how easy it is to get kids to write if you let them pen excuse notes explaining why they have not done their homework; they are brilliantly inventive in blaming others for their own inaction. So, think of a time when you clearly were at fault in creating a minor problem.
For example, I went to a friend’s house for a dinner party and dropped the entrée on the kitchen floor while trying to help. Now think of your actions in your situation and four different ways you could have made someone else the bad guy. (But the dish was heavy and she had not told me!) Find out how good you are at it. Imagine three ways a companion might respond negatively to your remarks. What would have happened then? Do you get into a loop?
Now see if you can remember a similar incident with your spouse. What did you use to “win” the fight and prove your innocence? How did you accuse your partner? What are your usual comebacks when you feel cornered?
Can you sketch out the circle of hostile criticism and labeling that trapped you both? How did each of you begin to define the other? How did each of you wound and enrage the other? Was there a “winner”? (Probably not!)
Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love Page 6
