Turning toward describes a critical process in our relationship where we notice and respond in the ideal way to our partner’s attempt to connect. Decades of research with tens of thousands of couples across the planet reveals that when we turn toward one another at least 86% of the time, we are infinitely more likely to maintain a mutually happy, trusting, sexually fulfilling, and long-lasting relationship. In this blog, we will explore some of the most common obstacles to turning toward your partner in our relationship, so you can begin to become aware of them and start to work to prevent them.
1. Missing a Bid for Connection When There’s Negative Emotions (with the 4 Horseman of the Apocalypse)
The 4 Horseman of the Apocalypse are 4 profoundly toxic forms of communication (criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling). When any of these are present in a relationship with some regularity, there is an over 90% chance the relationship is going to either be an unhappy one or will meet its ultimately end. Additionally, when any of these exist in our conversations, we have an over 90% of going nowhere in that conversation, meaning neither party will feel heard, listened to, and get what s/he needs. Lastly, when any of these are present in the first 3 minutes of a discussion, there is almost a 0% chance that any attempts to repair after that threshold is crossed will be futile; when any of the 4 horseman run rampant in those first 3 minutes, there’s nearly no chance of bringing them back in the stable.
Let’s now look at how this applies to turning toward.
Your wife is furious and exasperated. She says to you, “You never fill up the gas tank when you are done using my car”!
This bid for connection is coated in criticism. When any of us hear this first horseman storm in, we are very likely to feel defensive, and so we let out the third horseman: defensiveness.
You might counter, “Well, when do you ever fill up the tank when you borrow my car”!?
This illustrates how, when a bid for connection is shared with any of the 4 horseman, it’s common to miss the bid. It’s so challenging to hear and properly respond to the bid when we feel attacked and instinctually feel the need to defend ourselves first.
What Can We Do to Help Ourselves in These Tough Moments?
One of the top couples’ therapists alive, Terry Real, teaches a skill called relational jiu jitsu. When we perform relational jiu jitsu, we first take a few deep breaths in-and-out from our belly so we can try to combat our triggered, defensive response. When we feel attacked, our brains instantly kick in to protect us. The right side of our brain hijacks us, throws us into fight-flight-freeze mode, we lose oxygen to our brain, our peripheral vision shuts down, our ability to listen is compromised, we can’t be funny, we can’t be creative, and we certainly can’t have any kind of mutually productive conversation. In fact, in these moments, we vastly often feel like we are no longer friends or partners with our counterpart; we feel like we are now adversaries and adversaries aren’t normally interested in working things out like a team.
So, knowing that this is where the brain goes in triggering moments, it’s paramount you work to first take some deep belly breaths to try to keep yourself at a more emotionally stable and calm place, thereby countering the brain’s protective mechanism. This will help you to stay in more of the left side of your brain, which is mandatory to perform the next steps.
It can also help, as you’re taking your deep, belly breaths, to remind yourself of things like, “This is an opportunity for poise…growth…getting stronger as a couple…”, etc. This kind of self-talk can help you keep your eye on the prize and work to be your best self, no matter how your partner might be coming across in that moment. A good rule of thumb to help is this: “No matter what your partner does/doesn’t do, always do your best on your side of the aisle”. Doing this is the right thing to do and can often do wonders in encouraging your partner to work to be his/her best self much more often.
Now that you’ve done your deep, belly breaths and you’ve given yourself some helpful, calming, and encouraging self-talk, what’s next? Here’s where relational jiu jitsu comes in.
Relational Jiu Jitsu is all about sliding underneath the surface of a poorly delivered bid for connection to capture what’s most meaningful in the bid. Rather than fighting fire with fire, this is all about seeing the punches and maneuvering gracefully to the side of them.
Here’s an example: “You never fill up the gas tank when you are done using my car!” is a very poorly shared bid for connection, with such negative emotions of frustration, anger, annoyance, likely even sadness, and the use of criticism (the first of the four horseman). For you to perform relational jiu jitsu could mean you realize that, underneath your partner’s harsh words, she actually feels all of the above emotions and needs you to respond to them, empathize with her, apologize, and work to give her what she needs. You might say, “That’s really frustrating and annoying that I do that. I absolutely need to do a whole lot better at being thoughtful and filling up your tank when I use your car. I’m sorry. It’s not fair to you when I don’t and I want to make your life easier, not harder”.
A few caveats: your response doesn’t always need to be this elaborative and specific. A lot of the time, relational jiu jitsu can be as simple as, “It seems like you’re really angry and I get it. I do make that mistake and I will be more thoughtful next time”.
Additionally, validation does not equal agreeing; just because you are saying you understand and hear what another person is thinking, feeling, and needing does not mean you personally see it in the same way. When you empathize and do relational jiu jitsu, you are simply stepping in to the other person’s skin and giving them their reality back to them, which is so incredibly powerful and healing.
Another key caveat is if, in your relationship, the four horseman are commonly running around, and therefore many of the bids for connection are tainted with them, then you want to focus on practicing the antidotes to the 4 horseman (detailed in other blogs).
2. Missing a Bid for Connection When There’s Negative Emotions (Without the 4 Horseman of the Apocalypse)
Our culture, and many of our parents, do most of us a great disservice when it comes to education on our emotions.
For many of us, and particularly for most men, we are taught that feelings – in particular negative ones like anger, frustration, and sadness – are not valuable. Messages like “suck it up…focus on the good things…stop complaining…it’s weak to share your feelings…it’s not manly to talk about feelings”, etc. are immensely damaging ones. One key way parents can teach this incredibly sad and problematic message is through offering little or no comforting to their child, which then sends the message that, when you’re upset, you shouldn’t expect anyone there to help and that it might not even be appropriate to do so. “A child’s expression of anger was seen as a moral failing, a sign of disrespect, or even an indication of mental illness. Growing up in such an environment can teach you to compartmentalize your emotions so you become a self-reliant problem-solver who avoids ‘feelings’” (Gottman & Silver, 2015, p. 103).
In fact, as a couples’ therapist who has helped over a thousand couples, men, and women for about 15 years, I believe this misguided education on our emotions is the single largest reason people end up needing therapy.
Here’s why: our emotions all serve a purpose, help guide us throughout our lives to certain key actions, and when we ignore, dismiss, invalidate, and downplay them, on some level, we cause ourselves turmoil and pain. Whatever we resist persists. An emotion avoided today goes somewhere in our bodies and only further adds to and fuels the next set of emotions that come along. A recurrent pattern of this creates a boiling cauldron of emotional ingredients that bursts out of the pan after some time and creates an enormous mess.
How Does this All Apply to Missing Bids for Connection When There’s Negative Emotions?
If you were trained as a child that, essentially, negative emotions are bad and they are to be avoided, you will take that training into your adulthood, and therefore into your adult intimate relationships.
In the book, The Seven Principles of Making Marriage Work: A Practice Guide from the Country’s Foremost Relationship Expert, Dr. John Gottman explains, “I have worked with couples who find that having a de-stressing conversation (where two partners, at the end of the day, discussing the day’s events and validating one another) actually adds to their stress because one or both of them feel very uncomfortable listening to the other express negative emotions, even when they aren’t the target. This is a form of turning away” (Gottman & Silver, 2015, p. 103).
“After years of studying couples in the lab and working with them directly, it has become clear to me that happy couples live by the credo, ‘When you are in pain, the world stops and I listen’” (Gottman & Silver, 2015, p. 103).
So, if you were trained by your caregivers to avoid, dismiss, demean, and/or invalidate negative emotions, to be the self-reliant problem solver who compartmentalizes feelings, and who therefore doesn’t see value in looking at, expressing, or sharing feelings, then you are going to run into profound difficulty in your intimate relationships. Intimate relationships require the opposite. We know that turning toward one another at least 86% of the time is the biggest indicator of happiness, trust, and long-term relational stability. This means being there and giving each other active listening, empathy, and support much more often than not, which means we must have a strong tolerance and embracing of negative emotions and their importance in our lives.
What Can We Do to Help Ourselves in These Tough Moments?
Recognize the difficulty and motivation to improve.
Awareness of an area of needed improvement is the first step to change. Additionally, by letting your partner know you are aware of this struggle and are encouraged to strengthen this area, it helps him/her to be more empathetic and sensitive to you when s/he sees you trying, and perhaps struggling, to hear and validate his/her negative emotions.
Self-soothe.
We often forget we have an enormously helpful and easy-to-access tool always sitting in our toolbelt: our breath. When you experience a welling up of negative emotions, take at least a handful of deep breaths in-and-out from your belly. Breathe in for at least 3 seconds, hold your breath for at least 3 seconds, and then exhale for at least 3 seconds. As you do so, you might remind yourself, “This is an opportunity for connection, empathy, building your negative emotion tolerance muscles”, etc. This process helps counter the brain’s natural defense response (fight, flight, freeze) and thereby help bring oxygen back into the brain, keeping us in more in the left side of our brain (more of the logical, thinking, grounded part). This is not to say that our right side of our brain (emotional side) is bad. It’s simply that if we are thrown deeply into the right side of our brain to the extent where our emotions are at something like an “8-10/10”, we get flooded (meaning we do not get enough oxygen to the brain and can’t be productive with listening, problem-solving, etc.). So, in these moments, we need to work on catching the defensive brain response and self-soothing, so we can be present for our partner. If we do anything other than self-soothe in these flooded moments, we will be at a complete gridlock in our attempts to talk it out, solve problems, etc.
“Don’t just do something; just sit there”.
When I was in graduate school to become a therapist, one of the best articles we read was titled: “Don’t Just do Something; Sit There”. The central concept from the author was, as therapists, we are working with people who are suffering and we so badly want to rescue them from their pain. We learn and therefore have an immense toolbox of incredible skills and tools, many of which we know can help the person sitting across from us. With this burning desire to help someone in pain and so many tools to help, it’s tempting to want to rush in quickly to present the tools to potentially transform a client’s life. The problem, though, is that most of the time, what clients and people most need is just to feel heard, validated, and acknowledged in their pain. When we feel our pain is heard, it helps keep our pain as just pain, as opposed to if we feel we go through it alone, in which case our pain mutates into something far worse: suffering. So, a great deal of what is therapeutic for anyone is just witnessing them, showing them you get it, and conveying that you see their world. Only from this place can clients and people in general feel calmer and more empowered to even be open to potentially finding answers and solutions. This is no different than what we need to do in our intimate relationships.
For many of us, and particularly if you are a man, you likely learned as a boy, that when there’s negative emotions (frustration, sadness, anger, etc.) and/or some problem, there’s one response: solve/fix it. This kind of training is great for many contexts, such as thriving in the workplace. Once again, though, it’s the opposite of what’s needed for adult relational success. In this context, what’s required, instead, is to sit there, actively listen, and empathize deeply (turn toward). So, as your partner makes a bid for your connection (for example: wants to share with you about the terrible day she just had and just needs your full attention, empathy, and support), you will want to take a few deep breaths and remind yourself to toggle over to a different “muscle” (one that you may not have developed in childhood). The goal of this new “muscle” is to properly turn toward your partner, listen well, and show you understand what s/he is experiencing, feeling, and thinking. This “muscle” does not include offering solutions or fixes (unless your partner specifically asks for your help in that).
Want to Learn More About the Most Common Obstacles to Turning Toward Your Partner and What You Can Do About Them?
Changing beliefs and patterns you learned in childhood can be immensely difficult, especially when done alone, and especially when many of them have proven successful in many, if not most, areas of our lives for decades. At Stress Solutions, we work to make this process as easy as possible. We can teach you all about key concepts like turning toward, understandable obstacles to succeeding at it consistently, and help you learn and regularly practice building skills to drastically improve on this critical skill. That way, you can have the mutually fulfilling, exciting, sexually thrilling, close, and lifelong relationship you deserve.
Go ahead and give us a call for your free phone consultation with a therapist at Stress Solutions in San Diego, California. We are extremely passionate about assisting people like you and your partner learn about your areas of strain, identify and practice ways to overcome them, and ultimately live the life in which you are entitled!
