What Goes Wrong?
Loss of secure emotional connection
Love between partners often starts with a strong pull of chemistry and admiration, comfort and excitement, safety and adventure. The partner feels secure, supportive, loving and available.
We all experience moments of doubt, fear and anger in close relationships. When we don't know how to heal these moments and we feel threatened that we will lose our loved one, we tend to fall back on rigid protective patterns. In our fear, we may attack our partner, or withdraw and shut the partner out. When these patterns continue to spiral, we experience greater and greater distance, insecurity, loss and fear. Negative spirals of communication destroy the sense of trust and safety.
Secondary strategies
Much of our behavior can be seen as a protest against the loss of safety and comfort. Attacking or withdrawing are strategies we use in a strong effort to get our partner to see our distress, come back to us, and make things better. If we have not learned to speak in terms of our deep needs for attachment to the other, conversations can become battles of our different protest styles, with the pursuer and the withdrawer each triggering more panic, fear and anger in the other.
Can I count on you?
“Can I count on you? Are you there for me? Will you hold me when I need you? Do I matter to you?” These essential questions are just beneath the surface of the arguments about chores, child-rearing, sex and other issues. Partners who feel safe and loved can deal with differences of opinion or emotions. If safety is not present, the arguments about practical daily events are driven by the unspoken terror of loss or unworthiness.
Unresolved Injuries
Injuries that occur—harsh words, failure to keep promises, even affairs and other betrayals—can become formidable barriers to connection. If not healed, they can poison the conversations in the relationship for decades. The rehashing of the episode, which occurs over and over again without resolution or repair, is another negative spiral, preventing connection and sidetracking love. Unresolved injuries, even when they are not spoken of, are part of the fuel that drives day-to-day arguments. Knowing how to talk about these hurts so that the deeper wounds are seen and addressed is essential to healing and rebuilding trust.
Who's to blame?
In their distress and frustration, partners come to view the other person as against them. They perceive the other as unreasonable, demanding, unavailable, critical, unalterably changed, …or may even wonder how they got together with such a person in the first place.
It is, in fact, the conversation patterns themselves that are the enemy. Couples fail to see that the way they are talking is the problem and that their secondary strategies (the ones they go to under stress) are further dividing them.
In most relationships, there is a strong desire to reconnect and to experience a deepening of love but a lack of understanding of how to do that.
It is, in fact, the conversation patterns themselves that are the enemy. Couples fail to see that the way they are talking is the problem and that their secondary strategies (the ones they go to under stress) are further dividing them.
In most relationships, there is a strong desire to reconnect and to experience a deepening of love but a lack of understanding of how to do that.
