We need our partner to be a safe haven and also a true witness to our pain, to assure us we are not to blame for what happened and that we are not weak for being helpless and overwhelmed. A secure love relationship acts as a protective shield when we face monsters and dragons and helps us heal after the dragon has gone.
At the end of therapy, Doug decides to contact all the guys who were with him in Vietnam, even though he worries that they will remember him as a “hard-nosed tyrant.” He says, “In the end, the real problem is that you have seen the dark side, the thing that we are all afraid of, and your world is different from everyone else’s. You are on the outside. By yourself. A few people might throw you a line, now and then.” He turns to Pauline. “But, my love, you just came right in. You wanted me with all my monsters. With you, I belong again.”
Out of pain can come strength and a deeper sense of connection — if we can learn to use the power of love. “Someday, after mastering winds, waves, tides and gravity, we shall harness the energy of love, and for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire,” wrote the French Christian mystic and writer Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. This “fire” is not the one that burns and terrifies, but the one that gives light and warmth. It is love that can change not just our relationships, but our world.
Ultimate Connection — Love as the Final Frontier
��And did you get what you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
Beloved on the Earth.”
— Raymond Carver
Learning how to nurture the bonds of love is an urgent task. Loving connection provides the dependable web of intimacy that allows us to cope with life and to live life well. And that is what gives our life its meaning. For most of us, on our deathbeds, it is the quality of our connection with our precious ones that will matter most.
Instinctively, we know that those who grasp the imperatives of attachment live better lives. Yet our culture encourages us to compete rather than connect. Even though we are programmed by millions of years of evolution to relentlessly seek out belonging and intimate connection, we persist in defining healthy people as those who do not need others. This is especially dangerous at a time when our sense of community is daily being eroded by an endless preoccupation with getting more done in less time and filling our lives with more and more goods.
We are building a culture of separateness that is at odds with our biology. We know, as Thomas Lewis and his colleagues state so well in their book A General Theory of Love, that if we “feed and clothe a human infant but deprive him of emotional contact he will die.” But we have been taught to believe that adults are a different animal. How ever did we get here?
Psychiatrist Jonathan Shay in his book on the trauma of combat, Odysseus in America, reminds us that there are “two momentous human universals”: that we are all born helpless and dependent, and that we are all mortal and we know it. The only healthy way to deal with this vulnerability is to reach out and hold each other. Then, calmed and strengthened, we can walk out into the world.
The attachment perspective recognizes that our need for emotional connection with others is absolute. Thousands of studies in developmental psychology with mother and child, research on adult bonding, and the investigations of modern neuroscience confirm that when we are in close relationships, we are truly interdependent. We are not like separate little planets revolving around each other.
This healthy dependence is the essence of romantic love. The bodies of lovers are linked in a “neural duet.” One person sends out signals that alter the hormone levels, cardiovascular function, body rhythms, and even immune system of the other. In loving connection, the cuddle hormone oxytocin floods lovers’ bodies, bringing a calm joy and the sense that everything is right with the world. Our bodies are set up for this kind of connection.
Even our identity is a kind of duet with those closest to us. A loving relationship expands our sense of who we are and our confidence in ourselves. You wouldn’t be reading this book had I not found a way to plug into my husband’s belief that I could write it, and my ability to hold on to his reassuring words kept me writing rather than walking away. Our loved ones do indeed come into our hearts and minds, and when they do, they transform us.
The quality of the love we receive puts us on a certain track. Assess how safely connected to Mom one-year-olds are when put in the Strange Situation, and you can predict how socially competent these children will be in elementary school and how close their friendships will be in adolescence, according to Jeff Simpson of the University of Minnesota. A secure connection to Mom and the closeness of these early friendships also forecast the quality of these individuals’ love relationships at age twenty-five. We are our relationship history.
HOW DOES LOVE WORK?
To achieve a lasting loving bond, we have to be able to tune in to our deepest needs and longings and translate them into clear signals that help our lovers respond to us. We have to be able to accept love and to reciprocate. Above all, we have to recognize and accept the primal code of attachment rather than attempting to dismiss and bypass it. In many love relationships, attachment needs and fears are hidden agendas, directing the action but never being acknowledged. It is time to acknowledge these agendas so that we can actively shape the love we so badly need.
To shape love, we have to be open and responsive, emotionally as well as physically. We can see what love encompasses in studies of the fluffy little titi monkey conducted by Bill Mason and Sally Mendoza of the University of California. Females nurse their babies but don’t offer any other maternal responses. They do not groom or touch their infants. The true nurturer is the male, who assumes 80 percent of the infant care. It’s the male who holds and carries the baby, who is emotionally engaged and is the safe haven. Baby titis don’t seem to mind at all when the mother is removed from the family for a while, but when the father is taken away, the infants’ levels of the stress hormone cortisol soar.
In my office, more emotionally distant partners sometimes tell me, “I do all kinds of things to show I care. I mow the lawn, bring in a good salary, solve problems, and I don’t play around. Why is it that, in the end, these things don’t seem to matter, and all that counts with my wife is that we don’t ‘talk about emotional stuff and cuddle’?” I tell them, “Because that’s just the way we are made. We need someone to pay real attention, to hold us tight, to come very close sometimes and respond to us in an emotional way that moves us, connects with us. Nothing compares with that. You need that, too. Have you forgotten?” Connection is sweet, holding is deeply calming and satisfying, whether we are receiving or giving. Most of us love to hold a baby. It feels so good, just as it feels good to hold our lover.
But is attachment and bonding the whole ball of wax? Adult love also involves sexuality and caretaking. Attachment is the bottom line, the scaffold on which these other elements are built. The interconnections are obvious. Sexuality is best when there is safe connection. The risk that is essential to eroticism does not come from constant superficial novelty, but from the ability to stay open to your partner in the moment.
Caretaking and pragmatic support come naturally when we feel close and connected. “When you love, you wish to do things for,” Ernest Hemingway wrote. “You wish to sacrifice for. You wish to serve.” We know from research that secure partners are more sensitive to each other’s needs for care.
Rose and Bill, a grad-school couple, fought about everything, but especially emotional connection and pragmatic supportiveness. Even at the conclusion of therapy, after they’ve made considerable progress, they get into a fight about the fact that he doesn’t keep the pediatrician’s number on his cell phone although she has asked him to do just that. When the baby gets ill, she can’t use his phone to call the doctor. They finally find a way to step out of the argument. “When I can’t find that number, I get scare
d,” Rose says to Bill. “I need you to listen when I ask for stuff like that.” Bill now offers support. “I hear you,” he says. “It’s like you are saying to me, ‘Do you have my back?’ You need to depend on me here. And you are a great mother to our kids. I have put the number on my phone and ordered you your own cell phone so this won’t happen again. Maybe there are other ways I can support you here?” In a later session, Rose tells Bill that she no longer resents taking care of the kids in the evenings when he needs to study. Now that she feels closer to him, she actually enjoys bringing him coffee and listening to how he is doing with his courses. Being able to create a more secure bond frees up our attention so that we can tune in to and actively support our loved one.
In a romantic relationship, secure attachment, sexuality, and supportiveness all come together. Partners create a positive loop of closeness, responsiveness, caring, and desire. In his first counseling session, Charlie solemnly announced that he had hired a divorce lawyer. Now, a few months later, he tells me as his wife, Sharon, nods happily in agreement, “We are a lot closer. I don’t think we have ever been this close. Somehow I just don’t get so uptight and jealous anymore. I trust her. I can tell her when I need her help to set my mind at ease, and she can turn to me, too. We feel closer in bed. Sex is so much easier. I think we both feel desired and that we can ask for what we want. When we feel close like this, I like taking care of her. I like helping when her back hurts. I went and found her a little heating pad. And she is helping me to stop smoking. This is like a whole new relationship here.”
But making love work is also accepting that, even when it’s good, it is always a work in progress. Just when you get it right, one of you changes! Ursula Le Guin, the novelist, reminds us that love “does not sit there like a stone. It has to be made like bread, remade all the time, made new.” The intention behind EFT is to offer couples a way to do just that.
Twenty years of research tells us that we have helped many different kinds of couples “make” their love, newlyweds and long-married folks, gays and straights, the basically happy and the seriously distressed, traditional and unconventional, highly educated and blue-collar, reticent and effusive. We have found that EFT not only helps heal relationships, it creates relationships that heal. Partners who are depressed and anxious benefit enormously from the experience of supportive connection that a more loving relationship offers.
If I had to summarize the lessons I’ve learned from all these couples, they would look like this:
• Our need for others to come close when we call — to offer us safe haven — is absolute.
• Emotional starvation is a reality. Feeling emotionally deserted, rejected, or abandoned sparks physical and emotional pain and panic.
• There are very few ways to cope with our pain when our primary needs for connection are not met.
• Emotional balance, calm, and vibrant joy are the rewards of love. Sentimental infatuation is the booby prize.
• There is no perfect performance in love or sex. Obsession with performance is a dead end. It is emotional presence that matters.
• In relationships there is no simple cause and effect, no straight lines, only circles that partners create together. We pull each other into loops and spirals of connection and disconnection.
• Emotion tells us exactly what we need, if we can listen to it and use it as a guide.
• We all hit the panic button at times. We lose our balance and slip into anxious controlling or numbing and avoiding modes. The secret is to not stay in these positions. It’s too hard for your lover to meet you there.
• Key moments of bonding, when one person reaches for another and the other responds, take courage but they are magical and transforming.
• Forgiving injuries is essential and only happens when partners can make sense of their own hurt and know that their lover connects and feels that hurt with them.
• Lasting passion is entirely possible in love. The erratic heat of infatuation is just the prelude; an attuned loving bond is the symphony.
• Neglect will kill love. Love needs attention. Knowing your attachment needs and responding to those of your lover can make a bond last until “death us do part.”
• All the clichés about love — when people feel loved they are freer, more alive, and more powerful — are truer than we ever imagined.
Knowing all this, I still have to relearn these lessons every time I lose connection with a loved one. I still have to face that nanosecond of choice: to blame, to try and grab control, to dismiss, to get revenge, to shut down and shut out, or to breathe deep and tune in to my own and my loved one’s emotions, to risk, to reach, to confide, to hold.
A WIDER CIRCLE
When lovers are united in a strong and secure bond, it does more than enhance their connection to each other. The circle of loving responsiveness widens like the ripple from a stone dropped in a pool. Being in a loving relationship augments our caring and compassion for others, in our family and in our community.
In the early research on attachment, Mary Ainsworth found that as early as three years of age, kids who are secure with their moms are more empathetic to others. When we don’t have to worry about safety with our loved ones, we naturally have more energy to give to others. We see others more positively and are more willing to emotionally engage with them. Feeling loved and secure makes us kinder and more tolerant people.
Psychologists Phil Shaver and Mario Mikulincer have shown in their studies that simply pausing and recalling times when someone cared for you instantly reduces your hostility to people who are different from you, if only for a brief period. This supports the Buddhist meditation method for enhancing compassion by thinking on how one is loved by another. Science journalist Sharon Begley, in her book on neuroscience and Buddhism, quotes the Dalai Lama as saying that Tibetans in danger usually shout “Mother” for comfort. This seems at least as useful as some of the more aggressive phrases we North Americans use!
LOVE BETWEEN LOVERS, LOVE IN FAMILIES
We have known for decades that happy families start with happy relationships between partners. When we are stressed out and constantly fighting with our partner, it spills over into our relationships with our children. It is clear beyond all doubt that conflict between parents is bad for kids. When we are frustrated and anxious, the way we discipline our kids suffers. Mostly we become harsher and more inconsistent. But it is more than just an issue of discipline. If we are struggling in an unhappy relationship, we are often off balance emotionally and find it harder to be open and really tuned in to our youngsters. Because we are not emotionally present for them, they miss out on our nurturing and guidance. Alice tells me, “I am turning into this irritable, harsh person. I am so drained by what Frank and I are going through, I just don’t have the energy for the kids. When my youngest started to cry about being scared to go to school, I shouted at him. I feel awful about this. I’ve become a harridan, and Frank is distant with everyone. We have to solve this, for everyone’s sake.”
High levels of conflict in a marriage often precipitate behavioral and emotional problems in children, including depression. But conflict is not the only factor affecting youngsters. Partners’ emotional distancing from each other also frequently leads to distancing from the kids. Psychologist Melissa Sturge-Apple of the University of Rochester confirms this is especially true of fathers and their offspring. Her studies find that when men withdraw from their wives, they also often become unavailable to their children.
If we think in positive terms, when we feel securely attached to our partner, we tend to find it easier to be good parents, to provide a safe haven and secure base for our youngsters. Our kids then learn positive ways to deal with their emotions and connect with others. There is a mountain of scientific evidence that securely attached children are happier, more socially competent, and more resilient in the face of stress. The idea that one of the best things you can do for your child is to create a loving relationship wi
th your partner is not sentimental, it’s a scientific fact.
But then therapists have been telling us for years that if we want to be really good parents, we must either have had secure, loving childhoods or counseling to deal with less than loving childhoods. My experience is that even if we have childhoods that have left us with lots of emotional difficulties and we never go to see a therapist, creating a better marriage can turn us into better parents. Psychologist Deborah Cohn from the University of Virginia agrees. She finds that moms who are anxious and insecure about closeness, if they are married to responsive men who provide them with a safe connection, are able to be positive and loving with their kids. When we love each other well, we help each other parent well.
When you have a safe connection in your relationship, you can pass that quality on, not just to your kid but to your kid’s future partners. Psychologist Rand Conger and colleagues from Iowa State University observed 193 families with adolescent children over a period of four years and found that the degree of warmth and supportiveness between parents and the quality of their parenting predicted how the children would relate to romantic partners five years later. The children of warmer and more supportive parents were warmer and more supportive with their partners, and their relationships were happier. When we love our partner well, we offer a blueprint for a loving relationship to our children and their partners.
Better relationships between love partners are not just a personal preference, they are a social good. Better love relationships mean better families. And better, more loving families mean better, more responsive communities.
Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love Page 23
