How to Handle Relationship Distress
Your Child Brain
Your brain is programmed for survival. When you were young, survival meant maintaining a close, emotional connection to your parents or caregivers. You were mostly helpless on your own, so your brain was focused on making sure someone was going to be there to take care of you. You probably had a primary caregiver — one person who did the most to make sure you were going to be OK. That person became your primary attachment figure, and as your brain developed, it adapted to do whatever was necessary to maintain a close, emotional connection with that person.
Your Adult Brain
In an adult relationship, your partner becomes your new primary attachment figure. Your brain activates all of the emotional programming that helped you survive childhood. That programming is bad for adult relationships, but your brain doesn’t know that.
When you experience distress in your relationship, that distress has more to do with childhood attachment patterns than it does with the realities of your adult relationship. Your unpleasant feelings are real, and they are emotional flashbacks to childhood.
Your Body’s Antenna
If I walk barefoot on pavement on a hot day, I will feel pain in my feet. That pain is a warning signal, letting me know that I need to change something if I want to prevent tissue damage.
Your body uses similar signals to prevent relationship damage. When you sense a disturbance in your relationship, you probably feel some kind of pain or discomfort in your throat, chest, or stomach. For example, I feel a pain or tightness in my chest when my wife is upset at me. This pain is my body’s way alerting me that I need to pay attention to my primary emotional relationship.
When I was a child, paying attention to my primary emotional relationship was just as important as not walking on hot asphalt because my survival was at risk if I didn’t get the care I needed.
As an adult, I don’t rely on anyone else to take care of me, but my brain hasn’t adjusted to this new reality. My body responds to an upset wife the same way it responded to an upset mother four decades ago. I still get that same dull ache in my chest, and it feels like a survival-level problem.
A Note about Physical Safety
If you are in a relationship with someone who threatens you physically, it is your responsibility as an adult to do something about that. That might mean calling a friend, calling the police, or seeing support from community resources. If you have to leave your relationship to preserve your physical safety, please do that.
Feeling Safe and Being Safe
When you were a child, someone else was responsible for your emotional and physical safety. As an adult, that responsible person is you. When you try to make your partner responsible for making you feel safe, you’re inserting a parent/child dynamic into an adult relationship.
As an adult, you can be safe even if your partner is needy, angry, or withdrawn. It’s normal to not feel safe when that happens, but that feeling is not an accurate reflection of reality.
How to Handle Relationship Distress
When you feel relationship distress, ask yourself three questions:
How safe do I feel?
How safe am I?
What do I feel in my body?
The first question helps accept the fact that you don’t feel safe. The second question helps you notice the difference between how safe you feel and how safe you are. The third question brings your attention to your body, where your physical distress is telling you that you aren’t safe (even though you really are).
The best way to handle relationship distress is to focus your attention on the physical sensation that accompanies the distress. This physical sensation (usually in the throat, chest, or stomach) is your body’s way of telling you to pay more attention to your primary emotional relationship. It feels like a survival-level problem, because when you were a child it was a survival-level problem.
As an adult, your relationship is not the cause of your distress, and it will not be the solution to your distress. Your instinct tells you to take some kind of action to make the distress go away, but you’re better off just letting it stay. Your brain will interpret as a survival-level problem, but that interpretation is based on childhood vulnerability, not adult independence.
Narration, Emotion, and Sensation
The three levels of consciousness are narration, emotion, and sensation. When you focus on what you’re feeling in your body, you drop down from narration and emotion into what’s actually happening: sensation.
By focusing on sensation, you move past the stories and interpretations your mind is making up. What is most real is that you are feeling something in your body. If you had to feel that uncomfortable sensation for twenty minutes, could you do it? Could you feel it for an hour? A day? As you move through his exercise, you start to understand that the sensation itself isn’t as troubling as the interpretation you gave it.
