While the thoughts for this post have been percolating around my head, I am not sure if I've already mentioned some of the key ideas that I'll focus on. But I figure even if I have, I am a person who can reread a book multiple times and learn brand new things every time, so I don't see repetition (within reason) as a bad thing.
A quote I came across in the last year has stuck with me:
I think back on the growth I've experienced over the past three years, especially, and can see how this is true.
Back in the fall of 2020, David and I were at a pretty low point in our relationship. We had 18 years of entrenched patterns and they were not serving us. We had met with a marriage counselor and gotten a very little bit of utility from that, but it hadn't scratched the surface of these longstanding issues. David had had the opportunity through his job to do some coaching with a skilled executive coach, and that had opened some space within him to see patterns he had and how they were not serving him. This was really positive for him, but I think may have made the issues in our relationship even more apparent to him. Honestly, I don't know all that much about how he was feeling about any of it because our number one issue that affected everything was our inability to communicate on the things that really mattered in our lives. I dreaded conversations with him, because they all seemed to end the same way. I would end up shutting down and feeling like I was to blame for everything and that he was an asshole, and he'd end up upset that we couldn't make any progress on anything (and probably other feelings that again, I didn't know about). I don't remember the exact words he said one day that fall, but I do remember exactly where I was standing and how I felt. The gist of what he said was that he couldn't keep doing this and I needed to figure out my shit so we could actually collaborate on life and have productive discussions. As you can probably imagine, this exchange shook me. Hard. I don't know if he intended it to feel like a threat of divorce, but it very much registered in my nervous system as one.
I didn't know what to do. If I'd have known what to do to, I'd definitely already be doing it. I decided that I needed a therapist. I had tried several weeks previous to find one and had collected recommendations and sent emails, but hadn't lined anything up. (Part of my communication challenges included really hating to make phone calls.) I pulled out the info for a therapist I'd emailed and actually made the phone call and set things up to start next week.
At the first appointment she asked why I was starting therapy, and I told her it was because I needed to figure out how to communicate with my husband so we wouldn't get divorced. I was very anxious about starting therapy, because if my problem was talking to people about important issues, how was I going to talk about important issues with a therapist? And whenever I would try to talk about these things, I'd cry (which I hated) and eventually shut down. So I was not feeling like this was going to be a great fit, but I didn't know what else to do.
After a session or two, she gave me her diagnosis, which she said wasn't really all that important except for the fact that the insurance required it. The diagnosis was social anxiety. Huh. I didn't really see it, to be honest. I felt like I was mainly just very introverted. She said social anxiety can manifest very differently for different people. An example she gave me that stuck with me is that there could be a bartender who chatted easily with people their entire shift, but then was unable to have conversations with their partner about their relationship. After that diagnosis, I did some reading, and one thing about social anxiety jumped out to me: the role that the fear of judgment/scrutiny plays. Oh yes. That definitely tracked. It was difficult to have these conversations with David because I was so afraid of being scrutinized or judged and being found wanting. Ugh.
As you might expect, a lot of what I learned about in therapy is applicable to anyone who deals with anxiety, no matter the variety. It requires doing the things that made me anxious. I had to lay new pathways that could demonstrate to my system that even if conversations were hard and I felt anxious, they weren't actually dangerous. That's how I would be able to diminish the anxiety around the issues enough to do what I wanted to do.
Well, that sucked. But I was both desperate and committed to figuring this out, so I did it. We started scheduling times to talk about things, as it made a big difference for me to be able to prepare emotionally and not feel like I was going to get ambushed by a conversation that would send me reeling emotionally, which could then derail me for the next few hours at least. And I very very much felt anxious during these conversations. My therapist taught me to notice where the anxiety would show up in my body, something that had never occurred to me to do before. It turned out it showed up very strongly in my throat, like a closing/constriction, and made it hard to feel like I could speak or even breathe all that well. It also showed up my chest, which also made it hard to breathe. She likened the feelings I experienced during these conversations as being like hung out by my feet over the Grand Canyon in terms of the amount of vulnerability and danger I felt. That resonated. But I’d show up for the conversations. I would notice the awful closing of my throat and tightness in my chest, and I’d keep going. Sometimes I’d have to take breaks to do some deep breathing or just to compose my thoughts and calm my body, but I was committed to having these conversations because I knew that this was really the only way forward. (I actually feel those old anxious feelings again reliving those days while writing this, and it really helps me see how far I’ve come.) Over time, it did start to get easier.
Sometime during that time period, we discovered and decided to buy Jennifer Finlayson-Fife’s Strengthening Your Marriage class. We didn’t want to do marriage counseling again, but we did need some more help. This course was HUGELY helpful in helping us see the ways we were each making it hard to be in relationship with each other. Jennifer uses a framework of “Losing Relational Strategies,” which include things like Unbridled Self-Expression, One-Up/One-Down, costly accommodation, entitlement, overt and covert punishment, and others. Identifying which strategies David and I each used and where we’d learned them was really powerful. Now we had some points at which to stop and notice what we were doing. “Oh, I can tell I’m going into a one-up position on this, seeing myself as better than him, okay, I know that’s not honest or in line with my higher self.” She also focused on the importance of self-soothing. It is not productive to expect your partner to manage your emotions when you’ve done nothing to get yourself to a reasonable place where you can see and think clearly. We went on to attend one of her couple’s retreats and that was also very impactful. Being able to spend 6 days immersed in this stuff without distraction helped a lot of our issues come to the surface and gave us space to see them differently. We also subscribed to her podcast where she discusses situations with real couples. All of this helped us have a better framework for navigating the challenges of being in a relationship with another person and also a framework to grow ourselves into a more authentic version of ourselves with greater integrity and awareness. I highly recommend checking out her resources.
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