Becoming the LoveMate YOU Want to Be

Steven Stosny (How To Improve Your Marriage Without Talking About It), writes: Everyone who enters an intimate relationship with some hope that it might last, would do well to understand this general principle:  To get what you most want from your partner, you must first become the partner you most want to be.

Hmmmmm.......interesting way to think about your relationship, right? How does that work? When relationships become challenging, we usually remain more focused on how our partner is being or behaving, rather than how we (you) are being and behaving.

Stosny points out: Two things happen when you focus too much on what you want from your partner, and  both are bad:

       1. You will likely violate your core value, as you're really saying, "I will not be the compassionate and loving person I truly am until you do what I want." (Of course, this statement assumes your core value is indeed compassionate..or loving, supportive, etc.).

       2. Your partner is likely to react negatively to your critical focus on him or her, even if you were not becoming less of the partner you want to be in reaction to him or her.

In other words, relationships fail when the parties become the partners they think their partners deserve.

So.....according to Stosny, your best chance of changing your partner's behavior is to change what he/she reacts to in you. Your partner is likely to respond in kind to your behavior, whether it is loving, compassionate, and supportive or resentful, demanding, and critical.  This doesn't mean that you shouldn't bring up matters in your relatioship that are distressful to you.  Not at all!  It's the tone of how you bring them up that often matters: compassionately(softly, giving the benefit of the doubt) versus critically or contemptuously.

Even so your partner may still not respond in a caring way.  And I also want to emphasize that when infidelity, abuse and/or addictions are involved, it is more important that the victimized partner be able to stand firm.  In these cases, the core value is self-respect. You are acting for yourself, rather than against your partner. But regardless of how your partner responds, you will feel more authentic and remain true to yourself if you behave like the partner you most want to be. To paraphrase Gandhi, you have to become the change you want to see.

So what are some of the core values you believe you have internalized and are committed to, including your own self-respect?  I will assume they stem from at least one of these:  loving, compassionate, supportive, flexible, appreciatve, respectful...    So what do you think?  Does this make sense?  Yes, like most relationship ideas or approaches, I'm sure there are exceptions and "yes-buts". Nevertheless I like the idea of thinking about what my real core values are anyway and if I am actually living them. I like the idea of being the strong, self-respecting, compassionate person I most want to be, especially when I'm disappointed or hurt or fearful. I think it works most of the time, at least it has for me in my own marriage.

Me, You and Our Emotional Brains

Jake and Miriam entered my office appearing in an upbeat mood and reported the week since I saw them last had gone pretty well.  “Great!” I thought to myself. Then I steered the conversation to reviewing how they had responded to each other in the past week to help them reinforce the more positive interactions they had practiced.

Unexpectedly, Miriam began to recount a conversation they had had when she felt Jake had talked to her in a demeaning fashion, when he wanted her opinion about something.  “I felt attacked!” she said bluntly.  “OK,” I thought, “at least she is simply stating her feelings.”  But Jake rolled his eyes, deeply sighed and exclaimed: “I can’t believe this!  What are you talking about?!” Turning to me he said: “You see what I have to put up with!” It was as though he had lit a match to his wife’s innards.  “Oh that’s good, Jake!  Blame me again! This is classic. You treat me like I’m stupid!”  And so the war begins, again.  Classic indeed.  What happened?

The amygdala took over.  The comedian Flip Wilson used to say: “The devil made me say that!” Maybe he was on to something. In recent years the revolution of neuroscience has discovered that the brain is quite complex and wired in such a way that our cerebral topography favors emotionality, not reason. We now know that the primary and oldest (500 million years) component of the human brain that conducts our emotions, both good and bad, is the amygdala, located in the limbic system.  The part of the brain that helps us think about, control and express emotions is the neocortex, developed much later (60 thousand years ago).

The gradually emerging portrait of the emotional brain gives us an illuminating window of why many couples find it so difficult to contain their reactivity in their communications.  The amygdala’s original purpose was to act as our emergency alert system, leaping into action in response to life or death threats.  This same system is still programmed early on, based on how traumatized, abandoned or lovingly protected we feel in our early childhood.  Often, partners don’t realize that their perceptions and interpretations are influenced by their histories of emotional conditioning and instead continue to insist that the other’s viewpoint is objectively “wrong.”

If the amygdala’s original purpose was to act as our emergency alert system, leaping into action in response to life or death threats, it is apt to activate with particular vigor in intimate relationships, which are so entangled in primal need. When our partner says or does something that telegraphs “This person doesn’t love me! This person is threatening and attacking me! This person is leaving me!” our amygdala scrambles blindly, frantically to the rescue.  Toxic arguments always ensue.  Partner’s bodies become flooded by brain-mediated bodily changes, including a quickened heart rate and release of stress hormones.  John Gottman (Why Marriages Succeed or Fail) says these bodily reactions are always correlated with specific kinds of conflict behaviors: criticism, contempt, defensiveness and stonewalling—all of which predict later divorce.

So the amygdala deems a situation to be an emotional emergency and lights up the entire brain and body with bio-emotional fireworks before the neo-cortex ever gets into the act.  It is precisely these kinds of volatile, felt-crisis situations that need to be non-judgmentally addressed in couples counseling. So from the neuroscience perspective, one of my roles as a marriage counselor, is to help each partner become aware of their automatic amygdala triggers and help them activate their prefrontal lobes, enabling the client to shift from the defensive, isolating brain circuits that generate rage and fear to the connecting, healing circuits that mediate caring and longing. In other words, my role is to help couples become aware of the emotional needs and longing that drive their perceptions and the rigid position they take during disagreements.  Indeed, awareness of one’s emotional world is a hallmark of what researchers have defined as “emotional intelligence.”  Emotional intelligence involves knowing and managing one’s emotions, recognizing emotions in others and using these abilities skillfully in relationships to stay connected, rather than alienated.

For a more thorough reading of recent discoveries about the “emotional brain” and how we can actively change our brains and relationships, I highly recommend Mindsight, by Daniel Siegel.  Also, The Neuroscience of Human Relationships, by Louis Cozolino.     Jim Covington