When I was a personal trainer working with people striving toward their fitness goals, my initial focus with them was most often on form and function. Beyond those basics, I would help to motivate them to then practice their new skills daily, weekly, consistently bringing them back to the subtle messages from their bodies and minds—those things that would further inform their practice. What I knew from my own training, experience with clients, and what the experts said, that’s what works.
I certainly had clients, at times, who were looking for a quick fix, yet I don’t remember ever having clients that actually believed that simply gaining awareness of their form and function, without practice, would yield the same results—they knew they couldn’t just read a book, look at some pictures and transform their bodies. What they became aware of rather quickly, with instruction, was that to make an actual difference, they would need to be pushing their bodies through some pretty intense physical feelings—they would be strengthening not only their bodies but their ability to tolerate a variety of powerful sensations.
Relationship Training
It’s surprising, and tragic, how often I hear people working toward relationship health who are seduced by the idea that relationship habits will alter through simple awareness—that by reading the right book or article, by having some enlightening conversations with a therapist or friend, their core style of relating to their partner will magically transform.
I will grant that awareness—the didactic part of our learning—is a necessary foundation for change. Yet there is so much more.
Our Relational Design
Our style of relating to intimate partners has been designed into our minds, our bodies, our nervous systems—having been wired into us—from as early as our very first neural firings. The automatic pathways that our brain mechanisms follow in response to all sorts of human interactions is something that is related to processes that occur, most often, without our conscious awareness. These processes are immediate, unconscious, and follow well-groomed paths within our neural networks like the ruts in an old dirt road, and each time we allow them to flow without attention, those ruts become deeper and deeper, and much more difficult to alter. There’s some benefit to these processes, of course, especially when they’re related to things like…. walking, for example—the billions of functions that our brains control each and every day that we couldn’t possibly be aware of constantly. When it comes to relationship dynamics, however, those automatic processes often don’t serve our higher desires for intimacy and relational health.
Our perception of truth and reality, likewise, is so often immediately categorized by our brains and relegated to good, bad, right, wrong, etc., without our minds conscious engagement, that we have often decided something is just so, without considering the possibilities that would require a lot more work—and ultimately discomfort—for our brains. This is where Brain Training comes in.
Pragmatic/Experiential—it’s What Works
In terms of Relationship Training, we learn the what of skills through the pragmatic work, through reading and research, through dialogue and psycho-education. Then with a trained observer who can provide reflection, support, encouragement, challenge, curiosity, and coaching; we can begin to learn the form and function in our bodies and minds—coming back to those subtle sensations, messages, triggers, and automatic responses, with more awareness and more ability to make different choices when it’s most important.
We can begin to feel into the internal shifts of observing our thoughts as we engage in new relational behaviors with a person practiced in the field of our learning. As neurons begin to fire in distinctly new patterns—because that’s what happens when we practice new skills, connecting new behaviors to certain brain states—these pathways begin to carve new grooves into our neural networks. It’s like a workout for the brain. We are wiring new and healthier relationship habits into our neural networks. Yet, just as is true in the body, a single workout just makes us hurt—it doesn’t create lasting change.
Basic Neuroscience
Adaptive Neuroplasticity is a popular buzz phrase right now—and a powerful one at that. The idea that the brain is moldable and changeable in response to behaviors and Mindful Attention–both in processes and shape–challenges the long-standing idea that the brain is physiologically static. The direction that neuroscience has catapulted the realm of psychology has countered decades of the simple analytical, cognitive, and cognitive/behavioral work of our psychological heritage. It’s time that we—as practitioners of change—develop our emotional and relational fitness, strengthening neural pathways because we are choosing to develop not only awareness of our automatic responses, but to engage the most evolved parts of our brains. It’s time to build brain mass.
It’s exciting, really, that we have so much to say about how our internal worlds might respond to stimuli—those triggers that have previously caused us to feel powerless. We’re coming to grasp a power that, prior to the last decade or so, we’ve not fully understood. The idea that we can alter not only the functioning of our brains but the literal form, particularly through practices that we can engage with an intimate partner, lends to new vision of intimacy training.
On this note, I want to share a recent experience based on these exact principles—I think it might be helpful for some people who are in the process of making the implicit explicit—bringing awareness into experiential practice and noticing the subtle shifts. This is the work of transformation.
Rewire ~ relationship skills training for individuals and couples
I facilitate an adult relational skills group, called REWIRE, based on the scientifically sound approaches of Dr. Brent J. Atkinson, author of Emotional Intelligence in Couples Therapy: Advances in neurobiology and the science of intimate relationships. It’s work that gets my heart pumping and makes me want to shout from rooftops—we CAN develop the types of relationships that we dream of. Just like we CAN create fit, healthy bodies if we have the right tools. This is a right tool.
This is a three-week class, and I’ve been teaching some form of it for over a dozen years now. The positive results are consistently evident to all of the participants and powerfully affirm my work as a therapist and educator.
I often use real life life scenarios to model both the difficulty and growth of these training sessions with my clients and class participants. One of my previous co-facilitators, Robin, and I would often model tools for approaching conflict with some well-grounded principles for getting our partners to treat us well. We once demonstrated a conversation where both partners were tapping into skill. The modeling was well-received in the group and, also, a request was made that we share what a similar dialogue might look like if one partner is practicing being skillful and the other partner continues to dismiss, criticize, or respond negatively.
Of course! Because most often isn’t that the exact way things play out? Quite wisely, our group was begging the question, “But if I show up well, and my partner is still being a jerk, then what?”
The Relationship Dance
This is a common concern. Consider how often you have approached your partner with a need to discuss something difficult and you’re doing your best to be skillful and the response you get seems very unskilled—in fact, you might even feel mistreated and dismissed.
It’s easy to walk away from such interactions feeling thinking, “even when I’m skillful, it doesn’t work.” We often leave these conversations feeling resentful and disempowered. Sadly, this very reaction, no matter how “true” it feels, is a breeding ground for contempt.
…Back to the Story
Robin and I took our group’s request to heart, loosely designing a scenario where one of us (me) had developed some skill to get my partner to treat me well, even when my partner (Robin, in this instance) continued to criticize, dismiss, and blame me. And you know what? It worked! Even via role-play, it became apparent to everyone that, had this been a real life interaction, with the skills I was demonstrating, it would be incredibly difficult for anyone to continue to act in the way he was consciously TRYING to act—badly!
Then the bigger questions came: Did I feel the automatic impulses that might have made me want to react negatively, and what did I do with those? What were my internal thoughts about Robin’s behavior? How was I able to “calm my nervous system” consistently, while Robin was saying some pretty harsh things?
Real Life Happens
Just like most people I struggle with the automatic reactions that get activated in conflict. I do my best to practice adaptive habits but, WOW! I thought creating a fit body was difficult! Nothing compares to the exhaustive work of developing sound relationship skills. It’s much easier within a role-play! And, the story continues…
After our group, I continued on with my night and as synchronicity would have it, had an opportunity to practice these exact skills FOR REAL.
Now, maybe because it was so fresh in my brain and body, maybe because I’ve been immersing myself in developing these skills, I was able to consistently bring my focus back to the more advanced part of my brain—my prefrontal cortex, which resides at the forefront of the brain and is implicated in social and emotional regulation.
I was able to tolerate a bit more intensity because I’d been “training” the exact function I needed just hours before. Let’s consider the body once again: When I’ve been training a specific muscle, that muscle learns to tolerate more weight, more intensity. The same is true for structures in the brain.
That night, my partner and I engaged in a dialogue that required some regulation of emotion, some acknowledgment of deep, somewhat painful feelings between us, and a solid balance of validating my own truth while also acknowledging his legitimately different perspective—without making him wrong.
The dialogue that ensued is one I know by heart, and while the distinctive movements may look different from the outside, the dance is well rehearsed. The “dance” being the pattern of activation—mirror neurons from one person to the other engaging in a willful and well-choreographed tragedy that repeats itself over and over. For many, including myself, this is often the seductive dance of relationship.
Rewiring
Somehow, this night, I was able to feel my feet on the dance floor, feel my pelvis, my belly, my chest, all responding to conscious breathing and mindful presence. So when I approached the dialogue with skill, and then received what felt like a defensive, critical response, something happened. And this is the piece I want to dissect a bit.
Automatic, Subtle Responses that WRECK our Relationships
Most of us have had moments when we’ve approached a difficult dialogue with some skill. We’ve maybe done some work around personal development and feel better equipped to handle relationship distress. It’s a boost to the ego when we are skillful and act with integrity. And often, we don’t get what we want in return. Sound familiar?
Then What?
Here is a very common response. Our internal narrative is something like, “I’m doing my best here to stay present and he/she just can’t do it. Why do I always have to be the more mature/more skilled/more evolved person? He/she can never understand what I’m talking about.”
We usually leave those arguments not only frustrated but resentful. We further justify that the whole situation as “mostly” his/her fault. We were being skillful, and our partner clearly wasn’t.
(Familiar scenario?)
Not only do these interactions find their way into well-grooved neural pathways, we actually strengthen these habitual responses each time we mentally replay the interactions in our heads with a similar mental content or share the story with friends—that our partners are the ones to blame.
If you allow yourself to play this scenario out, I have a sense most of you know exactly where it leads, and it’s just no good. Sure, we can get some validation from venting to friends and family about how inept our partners are and about our powerlessness to create change. Then we come back home and start the same scene tomorrow—it’s a little like “relationship groundhog day.”
The Brain Workout
The shift for me came in that exact moment when I did notice something in my desire to “fight back”—to engage with the same energy I felt I was experiencing from my partner which, by the way, is referred to as negative affect reciprocity—the tendency to respond to one’s partners’ expression of negative affect with one’s own negative affect.
Here’s a little tidbit here, which many of you will grasp. I was feeling mistreated. Whether I was being mistreated or not isn’t really important. What’s important is my belief and HOW I RESPOND. That is the determining factor of my personal ability to ultimately create and maintain a healthy relationship. The problem is that we most often get caught in justifying our response due to our partner’s perceived misbehavior. Ultimately, that does little for us, or our partner’s ability to respond more positively. (More on that later.)
You may be thinking, “But it is important whether or not our partners are mistreating us. We can’t just let them off the hook!” What I’m saying does not negate this—I promise. Yet our ability to respond effectively when we’re feeling mistreated is the strongest predictor of whether or not we’ll be treated better in our futures, so let’s focus there.
I noticed something beginning to shift in me and further tuned in to my internal state—a process known as interoception—“checking in,” with my inner knowing. In that moment I realized that THAT—what I was noticing—was the somatic response that I generally have when I get activated. Here was the answer to my group’s question.
Automatic Somatic Response
The moment I felt I was doing relationship just a little bit better than my partner, here’s what happened: My breathing became shallow, my chest kind of froze, my shoulders collapsed just a little, in a defensive, protective way, and I felt a lot of energy right in the back of my throat, as if I could raise my voice and rapidly justify my perspective.
I realized that I had an opportunity to re-pattern some neural networks that have known a solid and singular path for years.
One thing to note: It is in the moments when we most need to access more advanced parts of the brain—when we most need to use new skills, that they are the least accessible to us. We need them when our brains are triggered, we’d rather throw all our skills out the window because we feel hurt or angry. Those are the EXACT moments when we need to ground ourselves in the knowledge that this is exactly how and when we have the opportunity to shift these deeply engrained neural pathways. This is similar to the moment when training a particular muscle pushes us to a physiological edge—and we have the experience of believing we can push no further. If something shifts and we push through and beyond our perceived limitations, this is when the body begins to KNOW how to transform.
The most important time for us to practice these difficult relational skills is when they are LEAST accessible to us. We can all feel “skilled” when we believe we’re being treated well. It’s when we feel we’re NOT being treated well—this is the moment of truth. These are the exact moments that will set us apart from those who continue to fail in relationship. Just as in training our bodies, it does little good for us to train with weights that don’t push us past our current ability. We have to train our bodies when we feel we are exercising not only our muscles but our focus, attention, and will.
This was one of those moments, and here’s the kicker—I noticed the automatic thought patterns as well. I heard the little voice in my head wanting to believe that my “dance partner” clearly wasn’t following my lead. I felt myself wanting to believe he was wrong and less skilled than me.
Then the jolt. Ahhh….. there it is—the wiring that I have for contempt. What a well-grooved path in my nervous system.
In that single moment of awareness, something subtle shifted internally. It was like the moment where, during a workout, pain transforms into sensation and we realize we have believed a limitation that doesn’t exist. “Ohhh…..” I thought. “This is where I normally get off track. I can make a different choice—and it’s difficult.”
The Reason it’s Called “Practice”
The work in these moments is subtle, and requires consistency. We need to keep bringing our attention and focus back to the present moment; noticing what wants to steal our attention, and bringing it back to the part of our brain that can make a different choice—the pre-frontal cortex. some might think this is too difficult and maybe even silly to focus so much on these subtle sensations. Again, just as in a physical workout, sometimes that subtle shift in form is the difference between strengthening and injuring.
This interaction—and what I was attempting to do—took a while, it wasn’t immediate and it wasn’t pretty and it was far from perfect. But it was different. Most importantly, the instant I brought attention to my inner knowing, there was a shift, not only internally, but within the system of interaction.
Similar to the role-play interaction with Robin, above, my partner simply wasn’t able to mistreat, or even seem like he was mistreating me. You see, when we believe our partners are more to blame, we make it just about impossible for them to change. In fact, our belief that they are more at fault than we are is like a kiss of death to our relationships. So when we can release the attachment to that belief, it’s like giving breath to our partner’s unique experience of interacting with us—because sometimes, that’s no joy ride either.
Learning to cultivate responsiveness in our partner, when we have long standing patterns of blaming them, is the one path out of relational dysfunction. Most often, even the discovery of this path requires a certain receptivity in us, to stretch our perception of reality—of our partners reality, as well as our own—to go beyond the paradigm of truth that we know, and develop a new way of seeing.
If you have questions or reservations about what I’ve shared here… if it’s not sitting right with you, or if it is, I’d love to hear from you.
For the Love of Your Life!
Angie