The 80/20 Rule

80% of the distress you experience in your adult relationship is an emotional flashback to childhood. The human brain is more optimized for survival in childhood than thriving in adult relationships. In childhood, your brain formed around whatever behavior was needed to coexist with your parents or caretakers. In adulthood, the behavioral patterns you learned are still with you, and they tend to make themselves known in adult romantic relationships. 

In childhood, it was really important for you to manage and maintain your emotional bond to a parent or caregiver, and your brain made sure you did that by making you feel really uncomfortable when that bond was less than secure. As an adult, you still feel the intense emotional distress associated with this childhood programming, but it no longer serves you because you can now take care of yourself. 

The solution is to take good care of yourself as an adult by allowing your body to feel whatever distress it needs to feel, and remembering that because you are an adult you don’t need to act on that distress. For most of us, this distress shows up as a tightness or pain in the throat, chest, or stomach area. In the early years of my marriage, I felt intense physical distress when my wife was upset at me. I felt like the only solution was to try to get her to not be upset at me, but I was wrong:  as an adult, the best solution is to learn to take care of myself in this situation, and to learn that my distress is an emotional flashback, not a well-calibrated response to what is actually happening to me as an adult. 

My marriage improved dramatically when learned to associate my emotional distress with leftover pain from childhood instead of blaming it all on my wife. The level of distress I experienced makes sense for a small, helpless child who depends on a parent for love, protection, food, and shelter. It does not make sense for a fully-grown man to feel that same level of distress in an adult relationship, but that was my experience. As I learned to care for myself well and to open my heart to the distress I felt, the distress itself gradually diminished. I still feel it, but it’s not anything like what it used to be.