Hindsight is 2020. Part. 3
I am a rather emotional person. I love to laugh, and connecting with others is how I feel alive. Underneath those moments of living life authentically though, something bubbles in me. Earlier in my life, and still, at times, I’ve had difficulty controlling these emotions and I’ve often been criticized for being a feeler. This constant fear of whether or not I will be taken seriously because of how expressive I am is crippling.
My core belief is that I’m unlovable. We all have a core belief, that is, according to the assumptions made in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. Common core beliefs include: “I’m not good enough”, “I’m worthless”, “I’m a failure”, and “I’m incompetent”. Being the eldest daughter in a first-generation home sparked and reinforced my belief. I often felt like I had to be the caretaker, the mediator, or the problem-solver. If I didn’t meet these roles with full enthusiasm, then I would disappoint the people who sacrificed everything for me.
Throughout the years, this core belief drove the relationships I invested in, my self-concept, and the career choices I made. When I was 19, I started going to therapy and realized that my emotions, while incredibly valuable and necessary, kept me from understanding myself fully. Since I mostly reacted to things in an emotional way, I wasn’t able to learn how to build context or reference points for tolerating emotional pain in the future. Through therapy, I learned how to use Wise Mind to understand the objective facts of a situation as well as consider my emotions.
As I’ve learned to hone in my “emotion” mind and use my emotions to inform instead of dictate, there’s a constant worry that I’ll slip up. I’m fearful that I’m fooling myself into believing or deciding something that isn’t true or authentic for me.
As a result, there are a few things in my life that I’ve been certain about 1. I’m called to be a therapist, 2. My family means more to me than almost anything, 3. I married a compatible partner.
As my marriage progressed and the hurt started to build up, this last certainty came into question. It often led to emotional flooding- the state one experiences when they are emotionally overwhelmed and experiencing fight/flight/freeze.
Over the last year, I’ve been revisiting those moments of intense emotional experiences and have wondered what I would have done differently or understood differently were I to have engaged in Wise Mind more often. These are the things I’ve learned so far.
The Good
My therapist recommended that I analyze my relationship through a deconstruction exercise. This is something I often do with my clients as well. Deconstruction is a narrative therapy approach that allows us to act as detectives in our own stories. We retrace our steps in order to learn patterns of behavior that aren’t conducive to the story we want to tell or that are obstacles in our current story. So, I went back and watched the video of our proposal and our wedding video, and I organized pictures and mementos of my marriage. Being now that these images were organized and easily accessible, I offered to send them to my former partner. The initial response was positive, but then there was a shift and a negation to receive anything. At first, I was hurt. Then, I recalled the work I do with my own clients who are in the process of ending relationships and the intentional avoidance of recalling the wonderful aspects of a certain relationship.
This idea of neglecting the good things that happened is often reinforced culturally. It was so interesting to see how my loved ones would respond depending on what season of grief I was in. Whenever I was stuck on the bad, my loved ones were naturally quick to defend me and remind me what a good decision I had made. Whenever I shared the good though, they would use words like “romanticizing” and “idealizing”. The motivation behind these actions is the reduction of pain, which makes sense. Humans no like-y the pain-y. In fact, we have evolved to be creatures of extreme avoidance so that we don’t have to feel any emotional pain. Feeling bad about a breakup? Shopping trip! Want to forget about your ex? Hook up with someone else. These are common ways of handling the end of relationships and it often causes us to learn little and hurt more. You might think I’m a masochist, but I sat there and I looked through everything. Multiple times. I watched the man I thought I’d spend the rest of my life with propose to me and recite the most beautiful vows I’d ever heard. I looked through pictures of trips we’d taken and the little moments we chose to document. I laughed at the videos of the fun games or songs we’d invented. I went through the stubs of movies we’d watched, the programs of shows we’d been to, and the little mementos we collected throughout our time together. I cried A LOT. Which like, duh. Ultimately, it was good for me because while it was super painful, it allowed me to cherish the relationship and let go of the resentment and bitterness that I had accumulated over the years. I saw this person through a fresh lens and recognized that he had just as much of a story to tell as I did and that I wanted nothing but the best for him despite all the hurt I had experienced. It allowed me to recognize the hurt that I had caused as well because, yeah, I wasn’t innocent in the relationship.
It allowed me to wonder and hope for the future. Finally, it taught me that the hills we decided to die on were not that deep because what we had was very special. Sadly, we didn’t treat it as such.
The Bad
The bad came in the ways we triggered one another. Esther Perel, or as I like to refer to her, couple-and-sex-therapy-goddess-divine, talks about the vulnerability cycle often in her podcast, Where Should We Begin? If you want to get constantly punched in the gut, listen to this podcast.
To explain this best, I think I need to break down a few terms. I’m using a lot of the language from this paper on the use of the Vulnerability Cycle in Marriage Counseling. I strongly suggest you abandon this post altogether and edumicate yourselves with this concept. Anyway, a vulnerability is anything that invokes a particular sensitivity that’s derived from a past or current history. Sometimes these sensitivities are the result of past trauma, dysfunctional patterns in family, bad ish that went down in other relationships, etc. Whenever these vulnerabilities are triggered, individuals in partnerships tend to perceive vulnerability as risky and anticipate pain. Remember what I said earlier? Humans no like-y pain-y. Since emotional pain functions from memory (i.e. after engaging in physical intimacy early on in a relationship, someone hurts you so next time you wait before being physical in a relationship), once we’re triggered there’s a collapse in meaning between present and past. We think we’re protecting ourselves from acting out in what are called “survival positions”. According to Scheinkman and Fishbane (the authors of the dope research paper), “survival strategies may seem self-protective but are often counterproductive interpersonal solutions. They tend to stimulate in the other person the very behaviors that the individual is trying to avoid, unwittingly promoting self-fulfilling prophecies.”
So, let’s say Stacy and her boyfriend, Kevin just moved in with each other. Before living together, Stacy and Kevin spent most nights together watching movies, hanging out with friends, and enjoying each other’s time. After moving in together, Stacy starts to feel neglected because Kevin keeps playing Call of Duty with da boiis every night. Stacy presents complaints often and Kevin starts to feel overburdened and smothered (an emotional response to a previous history in which he felt this way). As a result, he becomes verbally aggressive whenever she brings up spending time together. In response to his aggression, Stacy retreats and feels inadequate (due to her previous experience). She recalls getting attention from previous partners by acting aloof, so she starts to go out with her friends more and spent less time with Kev. He shuts down because she’s not around and the cycle continues. Here’s a nifty pic of this super fun cycle.
Taken from The Vulnerability Cycle: Working With Impasses in Couple Therapy
As you can see. The cycle often continues because each person’s survival positions are activated and there’s little trust or understanding coming from either partner. The perceived protective behaviors can often be grouped into defensiveness, contempt, criticism, or stonewalling. These behaviors are so catastrophic for relationships that couples researcher John Gottman calls these behaviors the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Very ominous, very spoopy.
The key to breaking the vulnerability cycle is to build empathy and compassion for your partner and in doing so, you move from reacting to reflecting. As you’d expect though, this is very friggin’ hard to do by yourself. It requires you to be open to flexibility, understand your partner’s vulnerabilities, and empathize with how these triggers got reinforced in the first place. This is where we struggled. It was very difficult for my former partner to reflect due to his vulnerabilities and he had a hard time empathizing with mine. He often expressed his vulnerabilities in the midst of my complaint and in my rigidity of seeking validation before anything else, I neglected to understand how he was being activated. It would be hours if not days before we could end up breaking the cycle and by that point, so many horsemen were present that we could host our own Kentucky friggin’ Derby.
Couples therapists are just now starting to understand and incorporate the vulnerability cycle into their work. Oftentimes, therapists struggle to get out of the particular context and into the vulnerable structures. We experienced this with all but our last therapist who helped us learn about these things, and to be honest, it was the most growth I’d seen in the two of us. However, shortly after we ended our therapeutic relationship, we moved away and experienced a tough season of loss and transition and the vulnerability cycle came into play once again.
I’d become so emotionally fatigued at that point- I was constantly emotionally flooded and felt like I couldn’t work to convince him that the cycle was in motion, work myself to break out of the cycle, and deal with my grief and hurt at the same time.
The Ugly
Much of my last post detailed why I decided to end my marriage. It was very much from the space of all the hurts I experienced, but the ugly truth about relationships and most of their endings is that more than one person is responsible. Since I so often found myself in the vulnerability cycle, it was difficult to take a step back and reflect on my actions. Even if I did know how I contributed, it was hard to engage in consistent change because of the outside events in our lives- moving constantly due to issues with apartment complexes, building two businesses, trying to build community, healing from trauma, and building relationships with our respective family- made it feel like we were in a constant “pressure cooker” state.
But now that I’ve had nothing but time to reflect, there’s a lot that I’ve learned about myself and my vulnerabilities.
First, I had really intense expectations of myself, my partner, and marriage in general. External sources like movies, media, faith organizations, and families of origin contributed largely to these expectations. I wanted my partner to be my EVERYTHING. My best friend, my adventure partner, my passionate love, my workout buddy, my accountability partner, my therapist, my moon, the stars, my caretaker, the president, lol. It was too much. Esther Perel cautions people to not have this attitude towards their partners. She says it very plainly and I will do the same, your partner cannot be everything to you. It’s not humanly possible. According to Queen Esther, the most successful couples are those where a strong support system is present. If I’m being honest, we didn’t have a very strong support system. Even though we were very involved with a faith organization early on in our relationship, we often felt like we were very intentional with others and others were not intentional with us. We also struggled to find support in our families. So for a long time, it was just the two of us, triggering each other like crazy and going at it alone. This yielded an increase of dependence on my end and an increase in avoidance on my former partner’s end.
Allowing us to be supported by others, promotes us to have some needs met outside of a relationship as well as have an outlet for the times when the frustrations in a relationship become unbearable. This is especially true for people who experience mental health issues. My first job out of school was at a very respectable intensive outpatient program. During my time there, the organization was up for its credentialing review. The expectations for the quality of work done were already high so this added magnifying glass was the perfect trigger for my anxiety. I became depressed and anxious. It was a season of my life that I don’t really love talking about because it made me feel like an imposter. How could a therapist be struggling with their mental health? I leaned very heavily on my partner, and while I think he could have been more warm and understanding, looking back I realized that I wanted him to fix my anxiety for me. This is a common and possibly fatal mistake in relationships because while relationships aren’t always 50/50 they can’t be 100/make my life easier and I’ll be waiting here until you do.
I know now that I can take care of myself and manage my mental health. Knowing that I work to support the mental health of others means that I have to be intentional with my self-care and my support. I don’t need a partner to guide my path. I also don’t want to be guiding my partner’s path. I want to walk alongside someone, mutually interdependently supporting one another.
I also had a nasty habit of hyper-focusing on the negative and disregarding the good. This is actually a very common phenomenon. My favorite metaphor for this pattern is “negativity sticks like velcro and positivity slides like Teflon”. Because of this observable pattern, many couples experts encourage couples to practice a 5-to-1 ratio. John Gottman calls attempts for connection as bids. According to him, for each crappy interaction, you strive to engage in 5 good ones or accept 5 bids. The catch is that you have to absorb, acknowledge, and appreciate these bids. In my previous relationship, I was always anticipating the next bad 1 that I had a hard time recognizing the 5.
Now I know the significance of even the smallest of bids. Instead of working from the source of rejected bids or hurtful interactions, I hope to operate from the source of an accumulation of bids. This isn’t to say that we ignore hurtful interactions, but more to engage in releasing the small offenses and work through the hurtful interactions keeping in mind all the wonderful things that have been built in the relationship.
Another awful habit of mine was that I didn’t let sleeping dogs lie. Look at me using idioms! Seriously, I would share my grievance and then I WOULD NOT STOP TALKING. I’d keep adding reasons for why my point was valid and by the time I was done, I needed a sip of water because my throat was so dry.
Now I am practicing to be more succinct, especially when it comes to the things that hurt me. Except for like here. Because this is a blog about life and counseling and skills and tips and putting those things together in order to cultivate a stronger understanding of the meaning of life and the wonders that lie beyond the……sorry. I drifted there.
At the end of the day, I know that I’m a feeler that feels all the feelings.
I’m a dreamer and I love to see the hope and wonder in everything. I believe that people can change, that they’re inherently good, and that true deep love is attainable and real. I believe that people have the capacity to fall in love at first sight, I believe in second chances, and I believe in knowing someone so fully and deeply that they feel like a soul mate.
What’s changed, however, is that I don’t have rose-colored glasses on anymore. There’s a little jagged edge in my loving optimism. And I’m ok with that. If I hope for a knight-in-shining armor, I’m going to experience disappointment and the cycles will inevitably repeat themselves.
Truthfully, I’m hesitant in sharing this because I know some people may read this and question my credibility as a practitioner of mental health. This, however, is my core belief and my fear of being activated. My fear is that I feel too much and share too much and am altogether too much. I know though that these experiences make me a better counselor because while I don’t bring my stuff into session, I use my experiences to empathize and understand my clients better. I think that if I had allowed myself to be more comprehensively transparent with others in my personal life (i.e. sharing the good, the bad, and the ugly), I would have been able to build a better support system and many things in my life may have been different. What I do is demanding. Who I am is changing. Ultimately, life is about growing and learning and I think my clients get better clinicians every time I let myself fully experience my life and all of the sadness and joy in it.
So, despite how awful this year has been, I encourage us to reflect and learn because after all, hindsight is 2020.