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Fight or Flight = Bad Communication

Once your nervous system gets escalated and moves into fight/flight/freeze response, it’s next to impossible to have a useful discussion. And for many of us, we don’t even know when that response has been triggered in ourselves let alone in our partner. So we continue trying to communicate with little success. This state of nervous system arousal causes us to perceive almost everything in our world as a possible threat to our survival – we tend to see everyone and everything as a possible enemy. You both may still be engaging with words, but at the core all you can focus really on is self-protection – its pretty hard to be curious when your nervous system thinks you are under attack. Our hearts are closed. Our prefrontal cortex – related to empathy, is disengaged. Our systems become focused on fear and self-protection, not love and connection.

Because nervous system arousal can happen so quickly an important aspect of improving communication is to become more aware of when your nervous system has escalated into fight/ flight/freeze.

Here are some of the signs that the nervous system is in fight/flight/freeze:

  • We experience an adrenaline, noradrenaline and cortisol surge
  • Breathing rate increases.
  • Awareness intensifies and our impulses quicken.
  • We become hypervigilant, “looking for the enemy”
  • Fear becomes exaggerated and thinking becomes distorted as we see everything through the filter of possible danger.

Dr. Dan Siegel offers a nice demonstration that can help to make this brain process more concrete. Once you start recognizing some of the signs that you have moved into fight/flight/freeze you can start to experiment with ways of calming your nervous system before continuing a discussion with your partner. More on some of those strategies in the next post.

What are your Expectations?

It’s good to set our expectations high isn’t it? There are all sorts of quotes telling us to do just that:

By asking for the impossible we obtain the best possible. -Giovanni Niccolini 
High expectations are the key to everything. -Sam Walton

And yet Shakespeare said: Expectation is the root of all heartache.

So…
Having high expectations might be a good thing in terms of knowing what we want from ourselves and our partners….but these expectations can create barriers if we don’t understand what is behind them. One way to gain some insight into the root of our expectations is to take a look at our family of origin. Because our family of origin is the first relationship dynamic we experience, we can — both consciously and unconsciously  develop ideas of how we and our partners should behave. This can be especially true in relation to how conflict is managed. For example, if your family of origin dealt with conflict in ways that were volatile, scary or conflict was discouraged, you might then have difficulty knowing how to address disagreements in your present relationships in healthy and appropriate ways. Instead of learning conflict management skills in your family, you likely would have developed tools and skills for protecting or distancing yourself from these situations. In your current relationship this might appear as expecting your partner to be agreeable all the time, or feeling attacked when your partner brings up difficult topics.

You can ask yourself following questions to better understand your family of origin:

  1. What roles did your mother/father/guardian play?
  • Taking care of finances
  • Housework
  • Yardwork
  • Communicating style
  • Child rearing
  • Career
  • Activity and social planning
  1. Were men’s and women’s roles defined differently? If so, how?
  2. When you were hurt or scared, who did you run to? How did they respond to you?
  3. Were decisions discussed or did one person make the decisions?
  4. What sorts of issues caused conflict or disagreement in your family?
  5. How was conflict handled by different people in your family?
  6. How were you affected by conflict between other members of your family?
  7. Was conflict seen as safe and necessary or negative and unsafe? Explain.
  8. What emotions or feelings were not okay to express during a conflict? In general, who determined this and how?
  9. Did each family have different roles during conflict? (e.g. initiator, peacemaker) What was your role?
  10. What skills did this role teach you?
  11. How did you cope with conflict or soothe yourself when there was a conflict?

After answering those questions, take a moment to consider how these early experiences may impact your expectations in your current relationship. Are there any roles you may unconsciously be playing or expecting your partner to play? The more clearly you understand your early family dynamics, the more you can begin to choose how you respond in your current relationship… and the more you can be conscious of what roles you might be playing or expecting your partner to play. Through this clarity you can begin to dismantle another potential barrier to connecting with yourself and your partner.

Healthy Conflict = Healthy Relationships

Client: hello, my partner and I are interested in couples counselling
Me: I’m glad you guys are looking for some support – that takes courage. What’s led you to seek counselling?
Client: hmmmm it’s hard to put into words….ummmm….I guess communication….

Communication difficulties are cited by 90% of people who contact me for couples counselling. Couples know that something isn’t working and can give me lots of examples of communication going sideways. While hearing about the content of their conflicts is a starting place, in order for insight and change to occur it’s necessary to go deeper and that takes some dedicated work. How does each person view conflict? What is happening in her/his nervous system? How was conflict handled in his/her family of origin? How well can each person regulate his/her own emotions?

Conflict is a natural and needed part of building and maintaining an intimate relationship. So the goal isn’t to get rid of conflict but to help couples to find ways of engaging in and repairing conflict in order to increase feelings of safety, connection, and intimacy.  That can sometimes feel like a tall order! But luckily there are lots of amazing tools and strategies for helping people change how they communicate.

Over the next few weeks I’m going to talk about some of the tools the couples I work with have found particularly useful: Stop-Replay, Regulating your Nervous System, and Emotional Bids.