Standing in Quick Sand

How many times have you found yourself in a discussion with your partner that suddenly turned sour and you don’t really know how you got there? You’ve said or done something that set them off and you are not sure how it happened, it’s just that suddenly you are standing in quick sand and sinking deeper by the second.  Now, of course, you want to dig yourself out, but everything you try just pulls you in deeper.  At this point your heart is racing, you are sweating and unsure of what to say or do.   Your partner is behaving like a wounded animal and you don’t have a clue how to fix it.  Sound familiar?

Well, it should sound familiar because we all do it.  We all have times when our communications do go as we intend and we find ourselves battling a battle that we don’t understand.  We don’t know what started it and we sure as heck don’t know how to stop it.  Sometimes divorces result from just such interactions!

All of us have our moments.  All of us have certain things that set us into a survival mode that leaves us feeling isolated, terrified, angry, hurt, or just plain depressed.  This survival mode feels personal, as if our partners deliberately intend to wound us in our most sensitive places. Momentarily our partners may lose sight of who we are and, yes, say or do something to deliberately hurt us, but unless our partner is a psychopath, they don’t go into the conversation with the intention of hurting us. So why is it we so often find ourselves in the quick sand?

Human beings are animals.  We have an old part of our brain (old in the evolutionary sense) that reacts in a primitive manner to any hint of perceived threat. We can’t really help it; our reactions are part of our brain function.  The more insecure we feel in a relationship, and the more important that relationship is to us, the more likely we are to be triggered into this primitive reactivity.  The set of behaviors triggered by our brain chemistry are pre-programmed into us from our ancestry to increase our chances of survival in the wild. 

Lauren and Stan had been married for over 20 years, yet they had never established trust.  Their “old brain” was still behaving as if their partner were a threat to them.  Lauren’s mother was depressed and her father was an angry, frustrated man who raged at and physically abused his children.  As a result, any time Stan expressed his frustration with anything that Lauren did, she accused him of being abusive.  She shamed him and withheld sex from him. She believed herself to be protecting her children. Her old brain kicked in and she went into what I now call “Self-Protector” mode.  Her attacks threw Stan into his own “Self-Protector” mode.  She would snap at him…

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