If we look at research, like that of psychologist Mary Main at the University of California, on adults who have an inner sense of trust and security with others, the key quality of these folks is not that they always had happy relationships with parents and caregivers in the past. It is that they can be emotionally open, lucidly describe past relationships, reflect on the good and bad experiences, and make sense of them. When I encourage partners to work on integrating their new dance into a view of what it means to love and be loved, I am encouraging them to positively reshape their unconscious blueprints for close connection with others. The new blueprint helps them to be truly present with their partner rather than fight echoes from past relationships.
In a counseling session, I might say, “I know your amygdala, the emotional part of your brain, is listening to new messages and responding differently here, but would you please also take this new information and order, tabulate, and store it in your prefrontal cortex, the reasoning part of your brain, for future reference.” New research in neuroscience tells us that I would not just be using metaphors here. Dan Siegel, a main proponent of incorporating the new findings in brain science into our understanding of relationships, reports in his book Parenting from the Inside Out that mental models are ingrained in our brains in patterns of neural firing. Neurons send messages to one another, and when messages are repeated over and over again, as Canadian psychologist Donald Hebb tells us, neurons fire together and then wire together. New experiences, if they are reflected on and assimilated, can actually reshape our brains.
Thus, Marion and Steve are busy translating new interactions into new pathways in their brains, pathways that reinforce their positive ways of seeing and engaging each other. I think all the ways of keeping your love alive described in this conversation help neurons wire together and create a neural net of hope and faith that will help a couple hold on to their connection in the future.
In the end, all of this review, ritual, and story making are simply ways of encouraging couples to continuously pay attention to their relationships. This attention is the oxygen that keeps a relationship alive and well. Psychologist Robert Karen, in his book Becoming Attached, reminds us that to have a strong and lasting love that helps lovers thrive emotionally and intellectually, we don’t need to be rich or smart or funny. We just have to “be there,” in all senses of the phrase. If we can do this, love can do more than last — it can flower again and again.
PLAY AND PRACTICE
• Are there any emerging danger points in your relationship right now, echoes of raw spots or anxieties that are just starting up? Can you pinpoint the last time you were aware of this? Your body will give you the message “Now, that doesn’t feel good,” and you will get a sudden flood of emotion. Can you name the emotion? How can your lover help you with that? What would calm and reassure you and halt a developing negative cycle? Can you share this with your lover?
• Can you identify small positive moments in your relationship? These can be very small. As long as they stir your heart and bring a smile to your lips, they count. Does your partner know about these moments? Tell him or her.
• Can you single out the key moments in your relationship, when it shifted to another level or you or your partner took the risk of becoming more open and responsive? How did this happen? What was it that you or your partner did that allowed this to happen? Sometimes we remember a first kiss, a coming together after a big fight, or a moment when our lover moved in close and gave us just what we needed.
• Do you now have rituals marking belonging, separation, or reunion? Do you consciously say hello and goodbye? See if you can list these rituals with your partner. Can you create a new daily bonding ritual that will help you move into being more open, responsive, and engaged with each other?
• Think of a problem-solving discussion that always ends up in frustration for you and your partner. See if you can write down your attachment needs and fears that are operating just under the surface during this discussion. How could you express these to your partner? What could he or she do to help you with them? If you got this help, how do you think this would affect your discussion?
• With your partner, craft the beginnings of a Resilient Relationship story. Include how you once got stuck in a Demon Dialogue and how you exited the dialogue, created an A.R.E. conversation, and renewed your sense of connection. What did you both learn from the experience? If you have a hard time building the story, discuss this with your partner and use the elements mentioned earlier in this conversation — for example, find three adjectives to describe your bond — to help you. Discussing the examples in this conversation can also help.
• Together, create a Future Love Story, a description of the relationship you intend to have in five or ten years. Decide on one thing you as an individual can do right now to bring this dream a little nearer, and share it with your partner. How can your partner help you achieve your own personal dreams?
• What one small thing might you do every day to make your lover feel that you want to “be there” with him or her? Ask your partner what impact this would have on your relationship.
You have just taken a journey through the new science of love. This science tells us that love is even more important than the sappiest love songs insist. But love is not a mystical, mysterious force that sweeps us off our feet, as those love songs suggest. It is our survival code and contains an exquisite logic that we are now able to understand. This means that a resilient, deeply satisfying love relationship is not a dream, but an attainable goal for us all. And that changes everything.
PART THREE
The Power of Hold Me Tight
Healing Traumatic Wounds — The Power of Love
“Talking with my wife is a relief from the things that happen here. . . . Like that first breath you take when you have been under water for too long.”
— Joel Buchannan, U.S. soldier in Iraq, Washington Post Magazine, February 12, 2006
Whenever a few people band together and tell each other stories to try and understand their world, there are always monsters, dragons, and ghosts. They go by many names, the Wild Witch of the North, the Four-Headed Dragon, the Angel of Death. The beasts reflect our sense of just how dangerous and unpredictable life can be. When these monsters appear, we have but one saving recourse — the support and comfort of others. Even when things seem hopeless, there is solace and strength in connection. In his song “Goodnight Saigon,” Billy Joel sings as a soldier in Vietnam. The chorus goes, “And we would all go down together.” And the song ends up sounding like an affirmation rather than a dirge. Soldiers joined by bonds of comradeship and love will face demons that, if confronted alone, would have them running the other way.
My childhood, pagan in the pub but Catholic in the classroom, was pretty safe. Still, there were dreams of Purgatory and a crazy-eyed demon, who looked a lot like Sister Theresa, my headmistress, calling me to account for crimes like stealing Tiffany Amos’s ruler and gleefully walloping her with it when no one was looking. I used to pray to all the saints, my own personal team of saviors. They were garbed in blue and white, and every one of them looked exactly like my little English granny. My legion of grannies never failed to swoop down and rescue me!
When life gets dangerous and unpredictable, we know how much we need the help of others in meeting the challenge fate has delivered. And after the fight, when we are sore or injured, and any façade of rugged self-sufficiency that we have managed to hold on to has crumbled, our need for others who care moves front and center. The quality of our central relationships affects how we face and heal from trauma, and as everything moves in a circle, trauma has an impact on our relationships with the people we love.
The word trauma comes from a Latin word meaning to wound. The old idea in psychology was that only a few of us faced true trauma in our lives. But we are now starting to realize that traumatic stress is almost as common as depression. More than 12 percent of U.S. women in a recent large s
urvey reported having significant post-traumatic stress at some point in their lives.
Trauma is any terrifying event that instantly changes the world as we know it, leaving us helpless and emotionally overwhelmed. We’ve already talked about relationship traumas caused, albeit unwittingly, by lovers in Conversation 5, Forgiving Injuries. Now we’re addressing even more severe wounds inflicted by people and events outside of our love relationships. Over the years, my colleagues and I have seen survivors of childhood abuse, victims of rape or assault, parents who have suffered the loss of a child, and men and women who have faced brutal illness or horrendous accidents. We have also seen police officers distressed by the death of buddies, firefighters devastated by their inability to save all those who are in peril, and soldiers haunted by the echoes of battle.
If you have a responsive love partner, you have a secure base in the chaos. If you are emotionally alone, you are in free fall. Having someone you can rely on for connection and support makes healing from trauma easier. Chris Fraley and his colleagues at the University of Illinois found evidence of this in their study of 9/11 survivors who were in or near the World Trade Center. Eighteen months later, those who avoided depending on others were struggling with more flashbacks, hyper-irritability, and depression compared with those who felt securely attached to loved ones. In fact, the securely attached survivors, reported their friends and relatives, appeared to be even better adjusted after the attack than they were before. They seemed to have been able to rise above the situation and actually grow from it.
If we cannot successfully connect with others, our struggles to cope with trauma become less effective, and our main resource, our love relationship, often begins to sink under its weight. On the other hand, facing the monster with a loved one beside us gives us the best shot at finding our strength and resilience. And standing together strengthens the bond with our partners.
LOCKING UP FEELINGS
Even if on some instinctual level we know that we need love to heal the wounds of trauma, it is not always easy to open up and seek that caring.
Often, to survive in a moment of danger, we have to freeze our feelings and simply act. This is particularly true for those who step into harm’s way in their everyday jobs. A New York firefighter tells me, “When we are going to a fire, especially if it’s a big one, I’m pumped. We are screaming through the streets on our way to saving people. We know how to do it. In the fire, you just act. There is no room for fear or doubt. And even if you feel it, you just push it aside.”
The problem comes afterward. It is sometimes hard for us to acknowledge that we are wounded. We think this makes us smaller or less admirable as human beings. Many of us keep those fears and doubts locked up inside, believing that letting ourselves feel is a sign of weakness that will undermine our strength when the monster returns. Some of us think that shutting down and keeping the monster isolated, in a box, is the only way to protect our home life. Soldiers talk about a code of silence and how they have to bury their deployment experiences to protect not just themselves, but their loved ones. They are encouraged to do so. An army chaplain told me, “We tell the soldiers, ‘Don’t tell your wives about your bad experiences, it will only scare and hurt them.’ And we tell the wives, ‘Don’t ask questions about battle. It will only bring those painful times back for your husbands.’ ”
But monsters don’t stay in boxes. They get out. Such events forever alter how we see the world and how we see ourselves. Trauma shatters our assumptions that the world is just and life is predictable. After such experiences, the way we are with our lovers and the emotional signals we send them will be different. We are changed by the heat of the dragon’s breath.
A Canadian peacekeeper in Africa who had to stand and watch women and children be massacred finds, on returning home, that he cannot embrace his wife or kids. His children appear to have the faces of those who died. He is too confused and ashamed to tell his wife this. He is locked down and locked in. His wife expresses her frustration that he “has never come home.” He is not emotionally present, she complains. She cannot “find” him.
A soldier recently returned from Iraq and convalescing at home after serious surgery is swamped by inexplicable rage when his wife steps out to go shopping. He tells her he will never trust her again; their relationship is over. She is totally confused and then despairing. Her confusion changes when he finally tells her about the injury he received in the field, an injury he had downplayed with his family. Lying on a gurney covered in blood, most of it not his own, he was offered last rites and then left alone. Suddenly she understands how he might be “injured” by her sudden absence. She also understands his refusal to take pain medication when he further confides that he believes his pain is a just punishment for his “mistakes” while on mission.
We need to be able to thaw out our feelings and share them with our lovers. This means that our loved ones, for a moment, also have to see the dragon’s face. This is the only way that they can really understand our pain and need, hold us tight, and help us heal. The Canadian peacekeeper and the soldier wounded in Iraq did what you have learned to do in this book. With support from their partners, they allowed themselves to touch and share their emotional worlds. They did not share all the details of their ordeals, but they learned to express the core of their pain and struggle to their loved ones.
These couples were able to look at how the husband’s experience changed him, what he needed to heal, and how he could best ask his spouse for connection and comfort. The wives were able to share how difficult the deployment time had been for them and how desperate they felt when their partners were so distant and angry on their return. When we work with soldiers and their spouses, we see them both as warriors; one battled in a foreign field, the other fought on the home front.
Whether we explicitly share what has happened to us or not, trauma is always a couple issue. Partners feel the sting and stress as they watch their lovers cope with their wounds, and they also grieve their changed relationships. Marcie, whose husband is a firefighter, tells me, “After that big fire where four of his buddies died, I started having nightmares. They would always start with me getting a phone call, or a police officer coming to the door. And I would know that Hal was dead. I would wake up in a sweat and just hold on to his back in the bed. I’d cry silently so as not to wake him. I knew he was having a real hard time with what had happened. It helped a lot when we started to open up and talk about it. He told me he was hurting, but he still loved being a firefighter. Then I got to tell him how hard it is sometimes to be a firefighter’s wife.”
Carol, who was in a massive car accident two years ago and is still in chronic pain and disabled, becomes very impatient when her partner, Laura, silently weeps but will not talk about her feelings. Carol accuses her of being cold. Finally, in a quiet voice, Laura is able to admit, “Okay, I am lost. I cannot deal with all the medical appointments, lawyers, different diagnoses, and trying to take care of the kids on my own. And I am so stressed out that I find myself resenting you for getting hurt. How can I tell you that I hurt too when you are in such pain? And that when you get irritable, all I can do is leave the scene so as not to explode and hurt you more. Maybe I need you to acknowledge that this didn’t just happen to you. It happened to us. That accident changed my life forever. I need recognition too.”
TURNING TO A LOVED ONE
How does a sense of secure attachment help us cope with trauma?
Dan and Mavis had been sent to see me by doctors worried that their frequent arguments would impede Dan’s recovery from the terrible stroke he had suffered three years earlier. The consequences of his illness were severe. Dan, forty-six, had lost his career, and the couple had almost lost their home. Unable to speak for a year after the stroke, Dan could now talk, but only very slowly, and he walked with difficulty. Halfway through the session, I realize that this couple doesn’t need any help from me at all. They have each other! They are affectionate and responsive, and
Mavis glows with pride when she describes how Dan has begun a new business by making beautiful furniture. I ask how they coped with his stroke. “Oh, we just held each other and cried for about two months,” Mavis says. “Everyone wanted us to make concrete plans, but we just needed to grieve together. There was so much loss.”
Mavis and Dan are helping each other heal by giving each other a safe place to mourn. Both were initially overwhelmed, but together they have been able to come to terms with their loss. Dan talks about how Mavis has always reassured him that she will be there for him and that she believes in his strength and his ability to find a way through it all. “You are a haven and a comfort for Dan and a source of confidence and hope, and that has helped him move forward, step by step,” I observe.
Mavis ruefully admits that she was not always kind and caring. Sometimes she, like Dan, got frustrated and irritable. “I lost it with him one day and blurted out that he just had to try harder to walk because I just couldn’t take care of everything. And he just refused to look at me or try to talk to me for a whole day.” Dan smiles and adds, “So in the evening, I told her that I was all gimpy and pretty useless to her and she was so lovely that she could always find another man. But she just said that she was stuck on me, even if I was real gimpy.”
Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love Page 21
