Even with practice, couples won’t always be able to do this; the heat may be too high at certain times. Normally, when my husband misses my signaling for connection, I can step back and reflect on our interaction. I am still balanced and can choose how to respond. But sometimes, I become so raw and vulnerable that the universe instantly narrows down into what feels like a life-and-death struggle. I react harshly to create some sense of control, to limit my helplessness. All my husband sees is my hostility. When I’m calmer, I search him out. “Hmm, can we just go back and do that again?” I ask. Then we press the mental rewind button and replay the incident.
By doing this sort of thing over and over, couples develop a fine sense of when they’re stepping onto faulty territory. They feel the ground shaking sooner, and they are able to escape it faster. They develop confidence in their ability to take charge of moments of disconnection and so shape their most precious relationship. It will take a while, though, before most couples develop the abbreviated, almost shorthand, de-escalation language of Auntie Doris and Uncle Sid.
RECOGNIZING YOUR IMPACT ON YOUR PARTNER
Kerrie and Sal provide a detailed example of the ins and outs of the de-escalation process. An upwardly mobile, cool-looking couple who have been married for twenty years, they agree only on that the last four have been “hell.” They’re continually getting into a negative spiral over the fact that Kerrie, busy with a new career after years of being a stay-at-home mom, is coming to bed much later than Sal. They have tried negotiating about this but deals get made and broken.
They have been sniping at each other for about ten minutes in my office. I ask if this sniping is the usual way they relate to each other. Kerrie, a tall, elegant woman dressed all in red, including her Italian leather briefcase, told me incisively, “No. Usually I just stay real calm. I prefer politeness. And I go off into my head when he does his aggressive thing. But just recently I have felt more and more cornered, so I just come out swinging to get him to back off for a while.” I suggest that the mutual attack cycle I was seeing was then maybe a minor deviation from a pattern of Kerrie holding back emotionally and Sal trying to get some sense of control and engage his wife more. They agree.
Sal, an articulate corporate lawyer with a touch of gray at his temples, launches into a diatribe about how deprived he is in this marriage. He is offered no affection, attention, or sex. He is not listened to. He is mad, and he is entitled to be mad. Kerrie raises her eyes to heaven, crosses her legs, and begins to wave her red-high-heel-clad foot up and down. I point out how the pattern is occurring right here. He is getting mad and demanding attention. She is giving “You can’t get to me” signals.
Kerrie breaks the tension here, openly laughing as she recognizes her own strategy. Sal then offers a few insights into how Kerrie’s upbringing has damaged her ability to be empathetic and some advice about how she can address that. Kerrie of course hears only that she is the problem and must work to fix her deficiencies. The tension returns.
We talk a little about attachment and love and how our primal programming dictates that when Sal feels disconnected, he will aggressively reach for Kerrie, and she, seeing only his anger, will defensively withdraw to try to calm herself and the relationship. This basic “It’s not your inadequacies, it’s how we are wired” message seems to help a lot.
This couple’s pattern of “You will listen/You can’t make me” has been in place throughout their marriage but became more powerful and toxic once Kerrie started her successful career as a real estate broker. Each began to fit their fights, rifts, and everyday hurts into the pattern. In an intellectual sense they understand that this pattern now runs their relationship and that they both end up being, as Sal puts it, “victims of the emotional spin cycle.”
But it is clear that Kerrie sees Sal through a narrow prism of distrust. She does not really understand the impact her distancing has on him in the here and now and how it pulls him into their cycle. She doesn’t truly see how she unwittingly shapes his response to her.
At one point she turns to him and asks sharply, “So why is it that you get so pushy then? Okay, so there is this wired-in need for contact and I can be kind of cool, that is my style. But I have been a pretty good wife to you. Don’t you think so?” Sal nods solemnly, staring at the floor. “But like this morning, you just launched into this thing about how busy I am, how I didn’t come to bed till late last night. This is a real issue with us. It comes up all the time. If I don’t go to bed with you or come later than you want, you go ballistic. There is something I don’t get here. It’s like nothing matters except what you want in that moment, even if we have had time together during the day.”
Sal starts into an elaborate set of points about how he is not really so demanding. Kerrie is off in some other world before he finishes his first rational sentence.
We need to change the level of dialogue here and get a little more emotional engagement. I ask him if he remembers how he feels, waiting for Kerrie to come to bed. He takes a moment and then retorts, “Oh, it’s great waiting for your wife all the time. Wondering if and when she is going to deign to turn up!” At first glance, he looks like just what he is, a man used to being in charge and having people jump to please him. But underneath the reactive anger, I hear the doubt about her “turning up” to be with him.
I ask, “What is happening to you right now as you speak about this? You sound angry, but there is a bitterness here behind the sarcasm. What does it feel like to be waiting for her, feeling that she does not care how long you wait or may not come at all?” I have pushed the down elevator button. After a long silence, he answers.
“It is bitter,” Sal admits. “That’s the word. So I turn it into straight anger. But what does it feel like to be waiting?” And suddenly his face crumples. “It’s agonizing, that is what it is.” He covers his eyes with his hand. “And I can’t handle feeling that way.”
Kerrie moves her head back in surprise. She furrows her brow in disbelief. In a soft voice, I ask Sal to help me understand the word agonizing. As he starts to speak, all traces of Sal, the terror of the courtroom, fade away. “It seems to me that I am always on the edge of Kerrie’s life,” he says. “I don’t feel important to her at all. She fits me in the cracks in her busy schedule. We used to always be close before going to sleep. But now when she doesn’t come to bed for hours, I just end up feeling pushed aside. If I try and talk about it, I just get dismissed. Lying in bed by myself, I go into feeling so unimportant. I don’t know what happened here. It wasn’t always like this. It feels like I am all by myself here.”
I pick up on the words by myself and pushed aside and his sense of loss. I remember listening to him talk in the first session about his lonely childhood, mostly spent in expensive boarding schools while his diplomat parents traveled the world. I remember him telling me that Kerrie is the only person he has ever felt close to or trusted and that finding her had opened a whole new world for him. As I reflect these thoughts and his own words back to him, I legitimize his pain. Then I ask how it feels right now to talk about these difficult feelings of being pushed aside. He continues, “It feels sad and kind of hopeless.”
I ask, “Is it like some part of you says that you have lost your place with her? You aren’t sure how important you are to Kerrie anymore?” “Yes.” Sal’s voice is very quiet. “I don’t know what to do, so I get mad and make lots of noise. That’s what I did last night.” I comment, “You are trying to get Kerrie’s attention. But you feel hopeless. It is scary for most of us when we are unsure of our connection, when we cannot get the person we love to respond to us.” “I don’t want to feel this way,” Sal adds. “But you are right. It is scary. And it’s sad. Like last night, I lay there in the dark and my mind said, ‘She is busy. She can take her time.’ And here I am, I feel like some kind of pathetic fool.” As he says this, his eyes fill with tears.
And this time when I look at Kerrie, her eyes are wide open. She has leaned forward toward her h
usband. I ask her how she is reacting to the things her husband is sharing. “I am really confused here,” she says, and turning to Sal, she asks, “Are you serious? You are. You get mad at me because you don’t feel important to me! You feel alone? I have never ever seen that in you. I have never imagined . . .” Her voice trails off for a few seconds. “I just see this belligerent man out to get me.”
We talk about how strange it is for her to hear about how her being less accessible affects him and that he now lives in a world where he misses her and is scared that he has lost his place with her. “I really understand that you would see me that way,” Sal goes on. “I do try to stay away from these feelings. It’s easier to just get angry or sarcastic, so that is what you see.”
Kerrie looks like she is struggling here. Her husband is not the man she thought he was. I cannot resist pointing out that Sal’s anger pushes Kerrie away and as she distances they both step into a spiral of insecurity and isolation.
“I really didn’t know you felt that way,” says Kerrie. “I didn’t know that my staying apart, trying to avoid all the angry exchanges . . . I never knew you were waiting for me and feeling so hurt. I didn’t know how painful that was for you. That it mattered to you so much that I come to bed. When we fight it sounds like it is all about how you want more sex.” Now her face and her voice have softened. Then in an amazed whisper she says, “I didn’t know I mattered that much to you. I just thought you wanted to be in control.”
I asked her if she could see that her distancing to avoid Sal’s anger switched on his attachment fears, touched him on a raw spot, and triggered his anger, pulling him into the spiral of distress.
“Yes, I see that,” she acknowledges. “I guess that is why he can’t just decide to stop being so angry, even when we have discussed it and how I don’t like it. I guess I’m hearing how my staying distant and busy sparks all those feelings in him. And then his anger is too much for me and I run away more. And then we are stuck.” She turns to Sal. “But I . . . I never knew you were waiting alone in the dark for me. I never got that I had that impact on you. I just didn’t see that. That you might be feeling alone in the dark.”
Kerrie and Sal are really beginning to see the power they have over each other on an emotional attachment level. They can begin to grasp how each of them triggers the other’s fears and keeps their Protest Polka going. He protests her distance. She protests his aggressive ways of trying to connect with her. Sal and Kerrie start to see, in a concrete way, how they hook each other into their negative pattern.
RECOGNIZING HOW FEAR DRIVES YOUR PARTNER
In a different session, Kerrie and Sal are revisiting another rocky moment, this time when Kerrie had asked Sal for his opinion about the dress she was planning on wearing to a family wedding where she felt very much like an outsider. Kerrie had been angling for support from him, but he missed the cue. Instead he became vaguely critical, implying that she already knew he disliked this dress and that his opinion, or what he found attractive, didn’t matter anyway. This had rapidly escalated into an argument about the quality of their sex life. Enter the old dance of Kerrie shutting down and avoiding a more and more irate Sal. But this time, knowing their cycle, they replayed the argument and picked up insights about how their mutual attachment fears keep them desperate and distant.
“Well, you did ask me about your dress,” Sal says. “ ‘Does it work?’ you asked. I gave my opinion, that’s all.” Kerrie turns her face to the window. She struggles to keep from crying. When I ask her what is happening, she turns and lunges at Sal. “Yes, I asked you. And you know it is a big issue for me, how I look in that group. I don’t feel safe there. You could have just said something supportive. But no. I get snarky comments about how I am not interested in pleasing you. I asked, didn’t I? I wanted support, not a whole bunch of criticism. What the hell do you want from me? I can’t do anything right here. This is one of these moments when I just want out of here, like ‘Beam me up, Scotty!’ And in the end it’s always all about the fact that you want more sex.” She turns her whole body away from him and stares pointedly at the opposite wall.
“You are right,” he answers in an intense clipped voice. “You did ask. But since when did my opinion really make a difference here? You will wear what you want. What I want is irrelevant. And yes, it doesn’t help that you are so cold with me in bed. But that is just part of all this. It’s not just that I want more sex.”
I invite Sal and Kerrie to pause here and press replay. What would a movie camera have seen in the last few minutes? I knew they could do this. I had seen them exit from their cycle this way only the week before. Sal smiles and leans back in his chair. Then he paints a picture of how they get stuck. “Yeah, okay. Here comes the push–step back thing again. I guess this isn’t really about the dress, is it? And it’s not even about sex.”
I love that he says this. He understands that they are missing the point — the attachment feelings and needs that drive their drama. He sees the negative spiral as it is happening. Now he needs to take a step out of his critical stance. He turns to Kerrie. “I am getting kind of pushy here, I guess. I think I am still smarting from last night. If you remember, I suggested that we cuddle a little in the study. But you were tired.” He pauses, looks down. “That happens a lot.”
Sal has just changed the level of the conversation in a powerful way. He turns his attention to his own reality and invites her in. Now I wait to see how Kerrie will react. Will she stay distant and unavailable, will she take this opportunity to smack him with a comment like “Oh, so you are smarting. Well, listen up, buddy . . .”? Or will she respond to his attempt to escape their usual loop of anxious pursuit and injured withdrawal?
Kerrie takes a deep breath and lets it out. She speaks softly. “Right. This is about you reaching for me and me being tired. So then you get all hurt and bitter and now this is all about how I don’t really value your opinion and didn’t come to snuggle.”
She puts the attachment story together, the plot behind the drama of the moment, identifying the emotional issue in their struggle. She continues, “I did want your advice about the dress, but you got stuck in all this anger, is that it? Hey, we have been here a thousand times before. We have gone over this. Why can’t we just stop this?”
I can’t resist pointing out that they are doing just that right now. They are seeing the bigger pattern rather than narrowing in on and reacting to the other’s negative moves. Kerrie now takes another step toward creating more safety. She leans toward Sal. “Well, I guess I am still learning about your raw spots. I can see that you might have felt that I was cold last night. I was just so exhausted. I kind of chickened out of trying to explain that to you. I knew you wanted to be close. Maybe I was scared we would get into this stuff. So I just zoned out.”
“Was it one of those times we have talked about,” Sal asks, “when you think that nothing but a two-hour hot lovemaking session will please me? One of those times when you get that feeling of pressure, that you just can’t meet my demands?”
This response just amazes me. Once they have slowed down their Demon Dialogue, the space opens up for curiosity, for reaching for the other’s reality. Sal isn’t just trying to sort out his own feelings; he is putting himself in her shoes and embracing her feelings.
Kerrie is obviously touched by this, and I notice that she reaches down and takes off her red high heels, her “snippy shoes,” as she called them. Those shoes announce to the world that she is strong and to be reckoned with. She moves her chair closer. “Yup, I did feel that pressure. And I guess I did just zone out. But we know now that that kind of moment is really loaded for you, yes? Then you go for me and I withdraw more. That is how it usually goes.”
There is a new music in the room. Each partner is looking down at their dance and naming their steps in it. But more than this, they are seeing exactly how they pull each other in. But do they really see the impact and how this cycle traps them both in isolation and fear? I comm
ent, “And that is so hard for both of you. You both end up so alone.”
“Yes,” says Sal, “then I go into that sad and scary place, I guess. That is kind of what I was trying to say in my angry comments. ‘Why was she asking my opinion, like what I say matters to her anyway?’ Once that feeling comes up . . .” He goes still and silent.
“That is when you get afraid, unsure of how important you are to Kerrie,” I point out. “And that is the way it is for all of us. That fear is just part of loving. But it’s hard to sit with and recognize, easier to just move into mad.” Kerrie is now totally focused on her husband, speaking in a quiet, matter-of-fact voice. “So that fear just kind of drives you into that dark place . . .” “Yes,” Sal answers, “and I just flip into trying to deal with it, fix it. I just get mad.”
“And then, Sal, your anger just turns on Kerrie’s own fears,” I note. “Right,” Kerrie agrees. “That’s where I go into my funk about how I cannot ever please this man. I am just not enough. The silly thing is that I like cuddling on the couch. I like our lovemaking. We both get triggered and get done in by this silly dance.”
I point out that they have just caught the demon in the dialogue and wrestled it to the ground. They have dealt with their fears in a different way, a way that soothes their anxieties, rather than puts them through the roof. But Sal has one more very important thing to say. He seems to have grown bigger in his chair, as if he suddenly finds himself on more solid ground. “We are starting to get a handle on this. If we can see where we get stuck and if we can do something about these raw places and how they are triggered, why, we might even be able to be” — he pauses and searches for the right words — “well . . . more together even,” he finishes and smiles. Kerrie laughs and reaches for his hand.
Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love Page 12
