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Opening the relationship box that changes everything

In a dark corner of the house that is your relationship there is a box. It’s always been there. You don’t talk about it. You know this box contains truths and revelations. You might not know the contents of the box specifically, but you suspect that whatever is in there will either destroy or transform your relationship, and that once you let it out it will not be put back in. You leave the box in the corner.

Over the years you do your best to manage your life and your relationship in the ways that are familiar to you, in the ways you know. Every now and then the box calls to you, sometimes in dreams, maybe if you’ve had a couple drinks, and while you might fantasize about the box briefly, you always do your best to put it out of your mind again.

But a time comes in most relationships when the pain of more-of-the-same begins to tip the scale against the fear of what is in the box, or as Anais Nin poetically states – “the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom”. This is the crucible – your initiation – and there’s no going back.

Let’s face it, couples therapy is scary. It’s intimidating. It’s unknown. It is the box that you can not put a lid on once it is opened. The contents, once revealed, will demand something of you, a change, and this will not be reversed, not without consequences of its own. I have seen people try to slam the box closed with denial, dissociation, substances, and so on. But it doesn’t work, not fully, not without costs. When you stuff the contents of the box back in, it seems to bring a part of you with it, but you must contort yourself terribly to fit. Or if you close the box and escape it, it seeps out and haunts you.

So yes, couples therapy is scary. No one chooses it until they accumulate a certain combination of desperation and courage, which is what it takes to open this box that will not be closed. Fortunately, we tend not to open this box, or even to acknowledge its existence, until we have sufficient capacity to comprehend its contents. There’s a kind of grace, a perfect balance in this.

It irks me to see people – therapists, relationship experts – speak lightly of this box in the corner, as though they know its contents, as though it is a simple matter to say “Oh, that box. I know what’s in there. I have a theory that explains that box perfectly.” There is no unified theory of boxes, no guaranteed path or outcome, no box in which to put the box.

Your relationship asks tremendous things of you, and it delivers in turn, but first the contents of this box must be revealed. You will know when it is time.

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Campbell River Marriage Counselling Justice Schanfarber

Trying to grow, fix, change, understand or save your marriage? I provide couples therapy, marriage counselling, coaching and mentoring to individuals and couples on the issues that make or break relationships – Sessions by telephone/skype worldwide. Email justice@justiceschanfarber.com to request a client info package. www.JusticeSchanfarber.com

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The masks we wear – Psychological unmasking and intimacy in the time of Covid

The masks we wear - Psychological unmasking and intimacy in the time of Covid

Hiding our unattractive parts

Each of us enters a marriage or relationship wearing masks. These masks have a necessary function: they hide the less agreeable aspects of ourselves, making us more acceptable and attractive.

The masks we wear hide our lust, our depression, our insecurity, our pathologies. Sometimes they hide our strongest abilities (if these abilities have for some reason been deemed unacceptable). They cover up our true intentions and motivations, our ambitions, our addictions and compulsions. Our masks hide our pain, our doubt, sometimes our hopes and desires. They might hide either our strength or our weakness. They hide our co-dependency, our abuse (or abusiveness), our desperation, our faith in whatever it is that we truly believe in.

Perhaps most importantly, our masks hide our fantastical imaginings, the depths of our inner world, the images that indelibly mark our heart and our psyche, that which we carry but have not actively chosen.

Deceiving our partner – Deceiving ourselves

The masks we wear allow (and require) us to deceive our partner and oftentimes ourselves. Arguably this is, for better and worse, a necessary part of courtship and of life, at least for a time. Masking is ubiquitous, and it is possible – likely in fact – that you are only dimly aware of some of the masks you wear.

While masking oneself may be a requirement of beginning a relationship, unmasking ourselves is certainly necessary for maturing it. In fact, the second stage of relationship (see my video on the three stages of relationship), sometimes called the “disillusionment stage“, could accurately be called the unmasking stage, but only if we’re willing to see it through that far.

It is perhaps our greatest accomplishment and potential in any relationship to unmask ourselves and reveal ourselves fully to our partner. In no small part this is because when we do, we are simultaneously revealed to ourselves. This homecoming is the shocking joy (and terror) of intimacy that some of us crave: knowing ourselves through our revelation to another, and vice versa.

Risking intimacy

The hunger for intimacy is the hunger for authenticity, for that which is most real and least unencumbered by the various deceptions, pretensions, obfuscations, and lies of the masked personae we encounter at every turn in life.

To be free of our masks and to discover that connection remains possible – that we can love and be loved for who we actually are in our entirety – is one of the greatest satisfactions of life and one of the greatest gifts that we can give ourselves and others, and yet it remains out of reach for most people. If we are unable or unwilling to witness, to confront, to “see”, and to reveal ourselves, with no guarantees, we can not experience unmasked intimacy.

Many people who do achieve this do so somewhat accidentally. They are cornered by life or their partner and the mask crumbles. Sometimes it makes a big mess. But we can also be pro-active in this regard; we can choose to confront our masked self rather than making our partner do it for us. You see, at some point your partner will feel your incongruence (and you theirs); they will become suspicious of you, sensing that what you present of yourself does not match their deeper intuitive experience of you. This creates rumblings and fractures. It can not be avoided forever, and it will kill or anaesthetize a relationship.

This unavoidable process begins once the “shine is off the apple”, it marks the end of the honeymoon stage, the end of innocence, and the beginning of your next initiation.

Want more authenticity and unmasked intimacy in your relationship? Check out my book The Re-Connection Handbook for Couples (download a free sample chapter here).

Follow me on social media for sex and relationship tips, tools, and insights – Facebook | Instagram | Twitter

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Campbell River Marriage Counselling Justice Schanfarber

Trying to grow, fix, change, understand or save your marriage? I provide couples therapy, marriage counselling, coaching and mentoring to individuals and couples on the issues that make or break relationships – Sessions by telephone/skype worldwide. Email justice@justiceschanfarber.com to request a client info package. www.JusticeSchanfarber.com

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Soothing the Beast – A simple practice for de-escalating fight or flight reactivity in couples conflict

[I recently did a Facebook Live on this topic. The video is embedded on this page, or you can click here to watch it on my facebook page. This article is written to accompany the video.]

Good conflict and bad conflict in relationships

Conflict can be necessary and valuable in relationships when it helps a couple identify differences, develop appropriate boundaries, and facilitate constructive negotiation and agreements. But there’s a particular type of conflict that only leaves couples feeling frustrated and stuck. It’s agonizing because it repeats and repeats but it never leads anywhere, accomplishes anything, or satisfies the underlying hopes or needs of the individuals involved: To feel safe, to feel understood, to feel the possibility of moving forward.

Ten years of helping couples worldwide has taught me that if you experience this kind of “conflict loop” in your relationship you are in very good company! People don’t always talk about it, but most of us have experienced this at some point.

Because this type of conflict is a result of survival mechanisms getting activated in the nervous system, I call it “fight or flight” conflict.

Fight or flight conflict almost never delivers any positive results. Over time it erodes goodwill and turns potential allies into enemies. After we look at how to identify it, I’m going to walk you through a simple practice (I call it “soothing the beast”) for de-escalating the fight or flight responses that characterize this kind of conflict.

Identifying fight or flight conflict

Fight or flight conflict can be identified by a set of observable characteristics. Once you able to identify that this is what is happening, you can apply the practice I explain below.

Characteristics of fight or flight conflict –

  • Each of you feels “triggered”, and these triggers pass back and forth between you, escalating until you can’t think clearly.
  • Fights repeat in eerily familiar patterns, but the issue is never resolved because you can’t address it without getting triggered and reactive.
  • It feels like the worst in each of you comes out.
  • Your partner feels like an enemy, not an ally.
  • You have a visceral (body) response, during or after the conflict, ie – shaking, sobbing, numbing or freezing, feeling sick to your stomach, headaches etc.

Human beings have three distinct “operating systems”

To put this kind of conflict into context, we can think of human beings as having three distinct “operating systems.” Each of these three operating systems has their own strengths and weaknesses, and their own particular scope of concern. They are all three working in the background at any time, but usually one or another is operating in the foreground and defining your current experience.

Three human operating systems –

  1. Rational
  2. Emotional
  3. Survival

The rational OS is associated with the forebrain and is responsible for ideas and concepts, language, a sense of time, and everything we think of as “rational”.

The emotional OS is associated with the mid-brain (mammalian brain) and is responsible for forming and managing emotional bonds with others.

The survival OS is associated with the brain stem (reptilian brain) and is responsible for basic life functions and also for automatic survival reactions (fight, flight etc).

(I describe the differences in more detail with a classroom analogy in the video.)

When we can engage in conflict while still being able to retain some access to our rational and emotional operating systems we might successfully reconcile the differences or issues that are making trouble in the relationship. This is never easy to do, but the hard work can pay off. This is “good” conflict.

When the survival OS gets activated we lose access to the other two systems, and so we can not effectively consider other perspectives. We become highly reactive; a sideways glance or tone of voice can push us over the edge. We become hyper-vigilant and aggressive (or withdrawn), and our reactions are disproportionate for the situation (in hindsight). We don’t make progress in our relationship when we descend into survival mode, so we can probably agree that this is “bad” conflict.

Here’s my “soothing the beast” practice for calming the nervous system arousal that comes with the survival OS, and bringing your rational and emotional self back “online”.

Soothing the beast – A four-step practice for de-escalating fight or flight conflict

  1. One person calls “Code red” (or whatever other cue you two choose). When code red is called you both stop talking.
  2. Facing each other, take ten breaths together. This calms the nervous system and begins to build a bridge of coherence between you and your partner.
  3. Whoever called code red reports on one sensation in their body, ie: “My stomach feels tight”.
  4. The other person listens and acknowledges – “I hear your stomach feels tight” – then reports on a sensation in their own body, ie: “My face feels hot.” Repeat back and forth until your two nervous systems calm down and you can access your rational and emotional self.

Questions or comments? Leave them below.

Struggling to change conflict patterns in your relationship? Check out my book The Re-Connection Handbook for Couples (download a free sample chapter here).

Follow me on social media for sex and relationship tips, tools, and insights – Facebook | Instagram | Twitter

Like what you’re reading here?
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Campbell River Marriage Counselling Justice Schanfarber

Trying to grow, fix, change, understand or save your marriage? I provide couples therapy, marriage counselling, coaching and mentoring to individuals and couples on the issues that make or break relationships – Sessions by telephone/skype worldwide. Email justice@justiceschanfarber.com to request a client info package. www.JusticeSchanfarber.com

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Behaviour changes to improve your relationship – Three real-life examples from readers that totally hit the mark

Behaviour changes to improve your relationship

Self-awareness is great, but without changes in behaviour it doesn’t do much for a relationship. On my facebook page I recently asked “How have you changed your behaviour to improve your relationship?”

Here are three of the insightful real-life examples readers generously shared, with a few comments of my own:

“I let go of the notion that my partner must agree with me.”

“I have let go of the notion that my partner must agree with me on most issues. That has freed up a lot of energy that would otherwise have been wasted fighting over what are essentially meaningless points. I have found that my respect for her has grown, and I hope the reverse is also true.”

Finding ways to manage differences and “agree to disagree” in relationships really does free up a lot of energy, and the part about increased respect matches my observations: when couples are able to respect differences, the overall respect for each other grows.

“The sacred pause…”

“The biggest change I implemented in my behaviour is the ‘sacred pause’. This allowed me space to then look at his words/reactions with curiosity instead of reactivity.”

This is such a powerful change in behaviour, and I was curious about how it had affected interactions and outcomes in the relationship. Her answer below is a perfect example of growing out of emotional fusion and into emotional differentiation, a crucial developmental stage of relationships.

“It is still a new behaviour in a middle aged woman who spent her life in reactivity so I am not 100% with it yet, but when I am successful it means that I can either hear the actual words my husband says and/or notice that whatever energy or words that may have traditionally felt like an attack on my worthiness are either not about me at all or I can now respond thoughtfully to the interaction. My pattern was definitely to take any perceived slight or any negative energy and attack, even if the interaction had nothing to do with me. If there was negativity of any kind attached to my husband I did not feel safe and I attacked him verbally. It was very humbling for me the first few times I was successful at being able to separate myself from his energy.”

The third commenter had been working with the differences between self-regulation and co-regulation (such an important area of understanding and practice).

“I learned to shift into more self-regulation.”

“I found some awareness about myself in your article about self-regulation and co-regulation. I recognized that I used co-regulation as a tool to get out of my own discomfort and create enmeshment. I learned to shift into more self-regulation. I directly noticed a decline in the drama of our relationship.”

That got me wondering if they had experienced any loss in feelings of intimacy or closeness as a result of decreased drama (drama is often part of “the glue” in relationships, for better and for worse), so I asked.

“Some yes. When I became more solid in myself, the space between us became greater. The drama fed the tension, which fed the excitement. With less drama, the lack of a more solid connection showed. I did, and do, feel more intimate with my own self, a big win for me.”

Intimacy with one’s self is always a big win, and perhaps the best possible foundation for any relationship.

Changing behaviours in a relationship is always a matter of “catching yourself in the act” of unconscious, reflexive, habitual responses to stimuli and choosing something different in the moment. With practice and repetition new habits are formed.

How have you changed your behaviour to improve your relationship? Share your real-life examples in the comments or on my facebook page.

All My Best,
Justice

Struggling to change harmful behaviours in your relationship? Check out my book The Re-Connection Handbook for Couples (download a free sample chapter here).

Follow me on social media for sex and relationship tips, tools, and insights – Facebook | Instagram | Twitter

Like what you’re reading here?
You’ll love my book.
Read the first 10 pages free.

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Campbell River Marriage Counselling Justice Schanfarber

Trying to grow, fix, change, understand or save your marriage? I provide couples therapy, marriage counselling, coaching and mentoring to individuals and couples on the issues that make or break relationships – Sessions by telephone/skype worldwide. Email justice@justiceschanfarber.com to request a client info package. www.JusticeSchanfarber.com

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A grief practice for healing resentment

A grief practice for healing resentment

In a recent article about resentment in relationships I suggested that the purpose of anger is to make something change or to protect a boundary. These can both be appropriate and necessary functions of anger. But there’s a third way that anger is very commonly used, and it has terrible results.

Anger as avoidance

Anger is often used to avoid sadness or grief. This habitual and unconscious use of anger wreaks havoc on personal lives and relationships.

As I’ve claimed previously, resentment is anger that got stuck. One of the main reasons that anger gets stuck is because it never properly gives way to grief.

Grief is a natural response to loss. This loss can be anything: loss of a life, a relationship, a hope, an ideal, a personal identity, a love, a fantasy, etc. Anything and everything that we hold dear can be lost.

When we use anger to avoid feeling grief, the anger tends to get stuck because the necessary grieving never happens.

If you don’t know how to grieve, you will likely be plagued with resentment. Probably you developed a life strategy early on that displaced grieving and put anger (or maybe numbness) in grief’s proper place.

A brief story to illustrate –

Candace and Matthew were in their third or fourth telephone session with me. Married for over thirty years, Matthew’s early behaviours as a young man in the marriage (drinking, going out constantly, ignoring and neglecting Candace) became a source of resentment for Candace. Even though Matthew had “grown up” and changed his behaviour significantly for the past decade, Candace’s resentment persisted, and had come to largely define the relationship.

Matthew was tired of being resented. He readily admitted that his behaviour used to be awful, but ten years after the fact he thought he deserved some warmth and forgiveness. He had apologized and tried to make amends in every way he knew how. Frankly, he had done a pretty good job.

About half way through our session, while I facilitated an exercise between them, something emerged spontaneously for Candace; an insight. “Every time I make a request to Matthew, or a complaint, there’s a meanness. It’s like a poisonous barb that I attach to every interaction.”

We talked for a while about vulnerability and emotional intimacy, and Candace broke down. “I’m never vulnerable with Matthew. Or anyone. My anger is stuck in me. It’s that poisonous barb. I got hurt so badly. But I am seeing that I have never really showed Matthew my hurt. I could blame him for this, say he isn’t trustworthy, but I don’t think it’s really true. The truth is I don’t know how to express hurt feelings without attaching that, that… barb.”

The “angry barb” that Candace described had driven Matthew away, to the point of near despondency. Witnessing Candace as she felt her pain and confronted her inability to grieve was like healing balm for Matthew. For the first time, the thing that had come to define their marriage was being named, was being addressed.

Candace was sobbing. She was sobbing for all that she had lost, not just because of Matthew’s earlier behaviour, but for all that was lost through a lifetime of her disconnection to her own grief. The floodgates opened and I knew things would never be quite the same for her, or for the marriage.

In this example Candace was “ripe” for the insight she received. Her grief had been ripening beneath her anger for who knows how long, presumably for her entire life.

The move from anger to grief can’t be forced, but it can be encouraged, supported.

In service to helping you move past the resentment in your life and relationship, try this embodied grief practice.

  1. Start with feeling sensations in your body. Where do you feel resentment or anger? In your belly? Your chest? Your fists? Your face? Usually anger shows up as tightness or constriction, so let yourself feel the tightness. Stay with that sensation of tightness for a few moments. Then slowly, intentionally, soften the place in your body that is tight.
  2. Watch for any small sign of sadness. Usually a trace of it will appear. Notice how you manage the sadness, how you resist it. Maybe you tense up around it. Maybe there are words in your mind that try to manage it. Just notice.
  3. Do whatever you need to do to allow the sadness to exist. If you felt anger or resentment in your body, the sadness exists somewhere in relation to it. The sadness is beneath the anger, or above it, or within the anger, or beside. If the anger felt hot, the sadness might feel cool. Or maybe the sadness shows up as words or an image in your mind. Let it be there, follow it, nourish and encourage it. This will feel strange if you’re used to avoiding it.
  4. The sadness wants to move your body in some way. Maybe you bend forward or curl into a ball. Maybe you squish your face up and cry, or cradle yourself in some way. Notice how the sadness wants to move your body. Let it.

Work with this practice. Notice how your resentment or anger interacts with your sadness. Keep making room for your sadness; rather than repressing it, give it room to express itself. Over time your sadness may connect you to grief, to what you have lost. Let it.

At the grief level, sadness is like a rollercoaster, or like riding the rapids in a river raft. You let it take you. You are not in control of it. This loss of control is the main reason we develop an anger strategy in the first place. Part of a grief practice is submitting to being moved by feeling; this is something many people have spent their lives avoiding.

If you do this repeatedly, over time, old resentments (stuck anger) can turn to grief and move through you. If you want help, consider working with a therapist who understands this process. I’m happy to email you a client package by request.

Do you have something to say about this topic? Leave a comment below.

Struggling to reconcile resentment in your relationship? Check out my book The Re-Connection Handbook for Couples (download a free sample chapter here).

Follow me on social media for sex and relationship tips, tools, and insights – Facebook | Instagram | Twitter

Like what you’re reading here?
You’ll love my book.
Read the first 10 pages free.

The Re-connection handbook for couples - by Justice Schanfarber - web box2
Campbell River Marriage Counselling Justice Schanfarber

Trying to grow, fix, change, understand or save your marriage? I provide couples therapy, marriage counselling, coaching and mentoring to individuals and couples on the issues that make or break relationships – Sessions by telephone/skype worldwide. Email justice@justiceschanfarber.com to request a client info package. www.JusticeSchanfarber.com

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