Neuroscientists discovered mirror neurons by accident in 1992 when a researcher who was mapping a monkey’s brain and eating an ice cream cone noticed that the monkey’s brain lit up as if he were eating the cone! The neurons allow us to read intentions and emotions, to bring another inside us. Neuroscientists, borrowing from physics, now speak of reverberating states of empathic resonance. This sounds very abstract. What it means for lovers is that there is a tangible power in actually looking at each other. It helps us be emotionally present and pick up on our partner’s nonverbal cues. This creates a level of engagement and empathy that is lost in a less direct conversation. Mirror neurons allow us to see emotion expressed by another and feel this emotion within our own body. It is scientific validation for the attachment concept that authentic connection is about “feeling felt.”
At the beginning of their sessions, Charlie and Kyoko did not resonate. They hardly looked at each other, and they seemed to speak a different language. During their Hold Me Tight conversation, however, as the corners of Charlie’s mouth turned down and his eyelids drooped, Kyoko’s eyelids also began to droop. As he laughed, she smiled. His emotional song became a duet. This kind of responsiveness seems to be at the core of empathic emotion, where we literally feel for and with another and therefore naturally act more lovingly.
This is surely the same kind of engagement of mind, body, and emotion that happy lovers feel when they make love or that a mother and baby feel when they gaze, touch, and coo. They are moving in emotional synchrony, without conscious thought or spoken word. There is calmness and joy.
Mirror neurons aren’t the entire explanation. A substantial number of recent studies add to our understanding of the neurochemical basis of attachment. This research shows that in moments of responsive emotional engagement, our brains are flooded with oxytocin. Dubbed the “cuddle hormone,” oxytocin, which is produced only by mammals, is associated with states of contented bliss. It seems to create a cascade of pleasure, comfort, and calm.
Researchers discovered the power of oxytocin when they compared the mating habits of two different kinds of prairie voles. In one species, males and females are monogamous, rear their young together, and form lifelong bonds; in the other, males and females take the one-night-stand approach and leave offspring to fend for themselves. The faithful rodents, it turns out, produce oxytocin; their promiscuous cousins do not. However, when scientists gave monogamous voles a chemical that counteracts oxytocin, these little animals had sex but didn’t bond with their partners. And when researchers gave the same rodents extra oxytocin, they bonded tightly, whether they mated or not.
In humans, oxytocin is released when we are in proximity to or physical contact with an attachment figure, especially during moments of heightened emotion, such as orgasm and breast-feeding. Kerstin Uvnas-Moberg, a Swedish neuroendocrinologist, discovered that merely thinking about loved ones can trigger a rush of oxytocin. Oxytocin also reduces the release of stress hormones like cortisol.
Preliminary studies indicate that giving humans oxytocin increases the tendency to trust and interact with others. These findings help explain my observation that once distressed partners learn to hold each other tight, they continue reaching out to each other, trying to create these transforming and satisfying moments again and again. I believe that A.R.E. interactions turn on this neurochemical love potion honed by millions of years of evolution. Oxytocin seems to be nature’s way of promoting attachment.
PLAY AND PRACTICE
Read over the description of Charlie and Kyoko taking the leap into secure connection again.
On your own, focus on a past secure relationship with a lover, a parent, or a close friend. Imagine that person is in front of you now. What would you tell him or her is your deepest attachment need? How do you think he or she would have answered?
Now consider a past relationship where you did not feel securely connected. What was it that you really needed from this person? Try to express this in two simple sentences. How would he or she have replied?
Now move on to your relationship with your current partner. Think about what you most need in order to feel secure and loved. Write it down. Then begin this conversation for real with your partner.
Here is a list of some of the phrases partners use in this conversation. If it helps you, you can simply check the one that most fits for you and show it to your partner.
I need to feel, to sense that:
• I am special to you and that you really value our relationship. I need that reassurance that I am number one with you and that nothing is more important to you than us.
• I am wanted by you, as a partner and a lover, that making me happy is important to you.
• I am loved and accepted, with my failings and imperfections. I can’t be perfect for you.
• I am needed. You want me close.
• I am safe because you care about my feelings, hurts, and needs.
• I can count on you to be there for me, to not leave me alone when I need you the most.
• I will be heard and respected. Please don’t dismiss me or leap into thinking the worst of me. Give me a chance to learn how to be with you.
• I can count on you to hear me and to put everything else aside.
• I can ask you to hold me and to understand that just asking is very hard for me.
If this is too hard to do, take a smaller step and talk about how difficult it is to explicitly formulate and state your needs. Tell your partner if there is some way he or she can help you with this. This dialogue contains the key emotional drama of our lives, so sometimes we need to edge up to it slowly.
If you are the partner who is listening and you find yourself unsure as to how to respond or too anxious to respond, just share this. Being present is the secret here, rather than responding in any set way. Confirming that you have heard your partner’s message, that you appreciate that he or she is sharing with you, and that you want to be responsive is a positive first step. Then you can explore how you might begin to meet your lover’s needs.
With your partner, discuss which of the other couples’ stories — David and Diane’s or Phillipe and Tabitha’s — resonated most with you.
After the two of you have had your own Hold Me Tight conversation, write down the key statements each of you made. In a heterosexual couple, the female partner will probably find this task easier. Women have been shown in many studies to retain stronger and more vivid memories of emotional events than do men. This appears to be a reflection of physiological differences in the brain, not a sign of the level of involvement in the relationship. If necessary, the women can assist the men a little here.
The key statements will help the two of you further clarify your internal and external dramas and guide you in future Hold Me Tight conversations.
The Hold Me Tight conversation is a positive bonding event. It offers an antidote to moments of disengagement and negative cycles and enables you to face the world together as a team. But more than this, each time you can create these moments of emotional resonance, the bond between you grows stronger. The power of these conversations to connect and transform our relationships is clear. Such exchanges have an impact on all other aspects of relationships, as you’ll see in the following conversations.
Conversation 5: Forgiving Injuries
“Everyone says that forgiveness is a lovely idea, until they have something to forgive.”
— C. S. Lewis
Conrad and his wife, Helen, are deep into the Hold Me Tight conversation, and the air is buzzing with emotional resonance. “Let me hold you,” Conrad entreats. “Tell me what you need.” Helen turns to him and smiles as if ready to respond to his request. But suddenly her face goes blank. She stares at the floor. And then in a detached voice, she says, “And I was there, I was sitting on the stairs and I said to you, ‘The doctor thinks I probably have it. Breast cancer. I’ve been waiting all my life, knowing it was coming. My mother died of it. My grandmother, t
oo. And now it’s come for me.’ ”
Her voice changes; she sounds bewildered. “And you brushed past me as I sat there” — she touches her shoulder, as if still feeling the touch — “and you said, ‘Get yourself together. There’s no point in freaking out and getting all upset when you are not sure. Just calm down, and we can discuss what to do later.’ You went upstairs to your office and closed the door. You didn’t come down for the longest time. You left me sitting alone. You left me dying on the stairs.”
Then her voice changes again. In a cheery businesslike tone, she tells me that she and Conrad have made great progress in therapy and no longer have the terrible fights that brought them in to see me. In fact, things are so much better that there probably isn’t much more to discuss. Conrad is confused and puzzled by what has just happened. The stairway conversation occurred more than three years ago, and the doctor’s suspicions were wrong — Helen did not have breast cancer. Eager not to stir up trouble, he quickly agrees with his wife’s assessment that therapy is going fine and there is nothing to discuss.
SMALL EVENTS, BIG FALLOUT
I have seen this sort of abrupt disconnect occur before. Couples are making steady progress, tender feelings are flowing, and then . . . wham! One partner brings up an event, sometimes an apparently minor one, and it’s as if all the oxygen has been sucked from the room. All at once, warm hope is exchanged for chill despair.
How can one small incident have this kind of overwhelming power? Well, clearly it’s not a minor incident. To one partner at least, it is a grievous event.
Over the decades of research and therapy, I’ve discovered that certain incidents do more than just touch our raw spots or “hurt our feelings.” They injure us so deeply that they overturn our world. They are relationship traumas. In the dictionary a trauma is defined as a wound that plunges us into fear and helplessness, that challenges all our assumptions of predictability and control.
Traumatic wounds are especially severe, observes Judith Herman, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, when they involve a “violation of human connection.” Indeed, there is no greater trauma than to be wounded by the very people we count on to support and protect us.
Helen and Conrad have come face-to-face with a relationship trauma. Even though the stairway encounter was three years back, it has remained very much alive, nixing any possibility of Helen reaching for her husband. In fact, since the incident, Helen has been irritable and wary with Conrad, swinging from vividly recalling the incident to numbing out and avoiding closeness. Hypervigilance, flashbacks, and avoidance are the established indicators of traumatic stress. When Helen did try to discuss her feelings, Conrad minimized the incident, leaving her even more upset. So now, when Conrad asks Helen to risk with him, to put herself in his hands, she instantly remembers the time when she was totally vulnerable with him. An alarm sounds, and she refuses to go there again. I call this the “Never Again” moment. No wonder the Hold Me Tight conversation hits a dead end.
Lack of an emotionally supportive response by a loved one at a moment of threat can color a whole relationship, observe attachment researchers Jeff Simpson of the University of Minnesota and Steven Rholes of Texas A&M University. It can eclipse hundreds of smaller positive events and, in one swipe, demolish the security of a love relationship. The power of such incidents lies in the searing negative answer they offer to the eternal questions “Are you there for me when I am most in need? Do you care about my pain?”
There isn’t much room for compromise or ambiguity when we feel this kind of urgent need for our loved one’s support. The test is pass or fail. These moments can shatter all our positive assumptions about love itself and our loved one’s dependability, beginning the fall into relationship distress or further fraying an already fragile bond. Until these incidents are confronted and resolved, true accessibility and emotional engagement are out of the question.
When I and my colleagues first started watching tapes of Hold Me Tight conversations, we thought that wounds that bleed the life out of a relationship were always betrayals. Except betrayal didn’t seem to fit exactly when we listened to injured partners probe their pain. “There have been lots of hurts and hard times in our relationship,” Francine explains to Joseph, who has had an affair with a colleague. “I can accept that you felt neglected after the twins were born and that you were sexually frustrated when you met this woman. I can even understand how your relationship with her kind of just unfolded, pulling you in. It’s not the affair itself that is the big problem for me. What I can’t get past is how you told me about it. I think about it all the time. You saw how devastated I was. I was literally on the floor. And when I was most down, what did you do? You blamed me for your affair. You listed all my bad qualities and went on and on discussing possibilities for how your life might take shape without me. It was as if I wasn’t even there. You didn’t take me into account at all. That is the piece I keep going back to. If you had ever loved me at all, then how could you do that?”
Plainly, Francine is distressed by more than Joseph’s infidelity and disloyalty. I’ve come to see that although wounded partners often do feel betrayed, they primarily feel abandoned by their mate. Their cries are usually some version of “How could you leave me in that life-and-death moment?” Partners typically suffer relationship trauma at times of intense emotional stress when attachment needs are naturally high, including the birth or miscarriage of a child, the death of a parent, the sudden loss of a job, the diagnosis and treatment of serious illness.
The mates who inflict these injuries are not being malicious or purposely insensitive. Indeed, they usually have the best of intentions. Most simply do not know how to tune in to their loved ones’ attachment needs and offer the comfort of their emotional presence. Some, too, are absorbed by attempts to contain their own anxiety. As Sam sadly tells his wife, “When I saw all that blood, I just freaked out. I didn’t even think of losing the baby. I thought you were going to die. I was going to lose you. I went into problem-solving mode. I left you alone in the back of the taxi and sat in front with the driver giving him directions to the hospital. I didn’t understand what you needed from me.”
Partners often try to handle relationship injuries by ignoring or burying them. That is a big mistake. Everyday hurts are easily dismissed and raw spots can fade away (if we stop rubbing them in Demon Dialogues), but unresolved traumas do not heal. The helplessness and fear they engender are almost indelible; they set off our survival instincts. It’s wiser, in survival terms, to be wary and discover there is no real danger than to be trusting and find out the danger is real. This wariness will limit an injured partner’s ability to risk deeper emotional engagement. And the traumas fester. The more Helen demands an apology from Conrad for leaving her on the stairs, the more Conrad offers dismissing rationalizations. That only confirms her sense of isolation and feeds her anger.
Sometimes partners do succeed in compartmentalizing traumas, but this results in a cool and distant relationship. And the barricade works only for a while. Injured feelings break out at some point when attachment needs come to the fore. Larry, a high-powered executive, had neglected his wife, Susan, for years. Since retiring, he had been trying to “court” Susan. They had improved their relationship, but in the Hold Me Tight conversation, when Larry reached for his wife’s comfort, she exploded. She told him that after his actions “in the kitchen on Morris Street,” she had resolved to never again let him close enough to hurt her.
Larry does not have any idea what Susan is talking about, but he knows that they have not lived on Morris Street for seventeen years! Susan hasn’t forgotten what happened on one hot afternoon. She had been depressed, physically ill from a car accident, and overwhelmed with caring for their three small children. Larry had come home to find her weeping on the kitchen floor. Although normally a very reserved woman, she had begged him to hold her. He had told her to pull herself together and had gone off to make phone calls. Susan tells Larry
, “That afternoon, lying there, I came to the end of weeping. I went cold. I told myself I would never make the mistake of expecting that kind of caring from you again. I would rely on my sisters. And all these years, you never even noticed! And now, suddenly, you need me and want me to open up?”
The only way out of these attachment injuries is to confront them and heal them together. Preferably immediately. This was brought home to me when my then eight-year-old son came down with acute appendicitis at a summer lake party my husband, John, and I were hosting. I dashed off to the nearest hospital with instructions to John to shut down the party and follow us. The small local hospital could not operate, and we had to make a long and anxious trip into town. By the time we got there, things looked bad. A surgeon hurried in to look at my son and announced that he had to operate “now.” I called my husband again, and he was still at the lake! Two hours later, as I was watching my son being wheeled into intensive care, my husband came waltzing breezily down the corridor. I ignited. He was horrified that I had been so scared and felt so alone. He tolerated my anger and distress, explained why he was late, and reassured me. Still, I needed to be very sure that he understood my hurt. We went over the incident quite a few times in the following weeks before this injury was fully healed.
For Conrad and Helen, the healing process begins in my office when he reveals that after he left her on the stairs, he had wept for an hour. He had thought that allowing his own fear and impotence to show would be letting her down. Until now, he has hidden his shame, while vainly trying to persuade his wife that she does not hurt.
Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love Page 15
