How our brains work when we’re together, and stressed.
It seems more and more important to look at the powerful role our brains play when communicating, loving and arguing with your partner.
Partners can so easily get ‘hooked’ into repetitive arguments, then experiencing the exhaustive struggle of the familiar ‘dance’. This ‘dance’ culminates in the painful, unfulfilling finale you may well be familiar with and feel resigned to. The worst bit of all this? Knowing it’s only a matter of time before it all starts again.
Our current COVID-19 situation might be adding unwelcome fuel to the fire, but in our hearts, we know this is just another layer of difficulty, not the source of the problem.
Why does this unwelcome compulsive ‘dance’ keep going when, in our logical thoughts and reflections, we see how fruitless and pointless these cycles are.
Let’s reflect on the writing of Mona Dekoven Fishbane, an American therapist and author of ‘Loving with the Brain in Mind’ (Norton), to help us find some answers.
Fishbane notes that we live in a time where we feel we are entitled to our rights being met, but are often not too eager to exercise the corresponding responsibilities entailed in balancing communication in intimate relationships (xxii-xxiii). It is a shared responsibility within the couple communication to develop the skills needed to understand each other more deeply.
We could say that the most successful and content relationships are those where both recognize the importance of the ‘collaborative alliance’, this sense of remaining curious to the thoughts and experiences of our partners, understanding the need to be mindful that we face the world and its problems together.
In effective relationships partners are aware of the value of constantly focusing on the qualities of love, tolerance, kindness, appreciation and generosity. Never have we needed these values more.
So how does it happen so quickly that we suddenly find to ourselves eyeballing our partners from across the kitchen, a sense of heated tension rising, feeling a sense of injustice, unheard and misunderstood?
We know oh so well that icy stares and clamped jaws take us in the opposite direction from all the values we most want to aspire to. What’s happening? What’s actually making it so difficult to get out of this place?
Fishbane suggests that ‘couples in distress activate each other in mutually destructive ways…both feeling defeated, not knowing how to get through to the other’. This place of frustration then leads to ‘power struggles, each trying to convince the other of the rightness of his or her position’.
At the end of these distressing episodes both partners end up feeling ‘dis-connected and discouraged’ (5). Further, Fishbane also confirms that many couples caught up in these negative cycles often don’t repair well after the conflict, so laying the ground straight away for the next exhausting round to take place.
Neurobiology helps us understand the dynamics of this blame game by reflecting ‘old brain’ skills that have helped us survive past dangers.
Now, we might not think our kitchen is a dangerous environment, but the heightened signals (eyeballing) coming through to the amygdala, the ‘old brain’ system, says otherwise. Hostility is what the amygdala immediately senses and our fight, flight or freeze responses are enacted.
Once that alarm is rung, the logical ‘thinking’ part of our brain, the frontal cortex, slows right down; if we need to run for our lives, we don’t want to be sitting around thinking about it. So when two people are shouting, two amygdales are activated and alarms are going off left right and center in both partners.
Our challenge is to try and understand the role our brains and hormones play and stand outside the ‘dance of the amygdala’s’ to grasp the dance steps happening, slow things down and aim to keep the front of brains engaged.
Our aim is to try and move ourselves back into our slower less reactive state, to help us remain calm, focusing on our breath, relaxing the body and, importantly, knowing that our bodily expressions and behaviors are directly impacting our partners. When one system calms, so does the other. It’s how nature intends it; once we know we’re safe, things are ok, our partner is back in communication, in connection, we can move forward.
Why is the idea of ‘liminal space’ useful to think about when it comes to the nature and course of therapy?
What prompts us to first think about, and then move into counselling or therapy?
Everyone has their own ‘moment’ when things shift gear and change. It might be sudden, gradual or constantly deferred, but eventually, if it’s important enough, the threshold is stepped over…. but then what happens? Where do we go?
Often clients experience immediate relief that a safe space has been found to air and describe the tangle of painful issues that bring most people to therapy, but I know we must often get a little lost before the clearer path forward can be found.
Essentially, we could say that the therapeutic conversation is, at its heart, about the nature and process of change.
Instinctively we all resist change, fear uncertainty and often try desperately to keep things both as they are AND somehow manage palatable change at the same time.
Much of sessional talking and thinking contemplates the nature of what appropriate and appreciative change means. We discuss openly how we can best manage ourselves and our lives while we explore and imagine the changes we want to make. It is in these very times that we experience ourselves within the ‘liminal space’.
Liminal spaces are strange, exciting and disorientating spaces. These are the moments when we experience a shift in position, get that feeling that we now 'know' something differently, that we've had an aware experience of learning. These are the ‘in-between’, liminal moments. How we manage to ‘hang’ or ‘float’ in this space, how we attempt to sit and experience what might bubble through the cracks, demands trust, courage and tenacity.
It is in these lived moments, often experienced as somewhat disorientating, that we truly gain a sense of evolving and maturing; if we can accept increasing degrees of awareness within the liminal space, we have some powerful rewards ahead for ourselves.
The rewards we potentially gain from this learning are; less fear when we meet future uncertainty and the ability to process loss without panicking. We will have growing confidence in our ability to steady ourselves, emotionally regulate ourselves and deepen our understandings of the experience of our life. This, in turn, allows us to be more available to really appreciate the nature of contentment and love within our own lives and within our relationships.
This must be an adventure worth having!
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Updated 04 may 2018C
Men, Anxiety and Erectile Problems.
Men and the messages they get about their penises
From an early age, infant boys discover the natural delights of playing with their bodies, especially their penises. Depending on the approach of parents, care givers or primary school staff, boys learn messages about touching themselves. These messages can be positive, reinforcing the feel-good factor, but also help the child to understand appropriate places and contexts to touch and when it’s best not to. However, many boys learn negative and shameful feelings about themselves, handed out by embarrassed adults with limited language at their disposal.
A child receiving their hands slapped away from themselves with words such as ‘that’s dirty’, and ‘just stop it’, won’t help build body-positive attitudes. Fast forward to teens, friends and early sex and the messages can get stronger.
Teens an beyond
Think back to how you reacted to your first images of porn, naked bodies and chat from other boys. Although naturally arousing, porn can come with many emerging interferences and problems later on in life. How so?
While I start to listen to men talk, many cite teen experiences as significant to their early negative self-critical attitudes. They feel a sense of shame about their early sexual encounters, fearing their bodies, or performance, will let them down or not meet their girl/boy friends expectations. As we start to unravel this, early patterns of constant anxious thinking about sex often emerge. What does this thinking look like?
Many men enter younger relationships or sexual encounters, and discover their bodies behave in unpredictable and unexpected ways. Sometimes erections never come, or they come and then go, or they come and disappear as soon as intercourse starts. They might ejaculate instantly or not some at all or only after a very long time.
For those men who have experienced negative or shaming messages about themselves, or teasing from others boys about their bodies or physiques, running in to these difficulties can really feel terrible. If we don’t have the cognitive and emotional tools and learning to enable us to process, handle and mature through these encounters, younger men often grow to be adult men with crushing, preoccupying anxiety. They can experience constant thoughts that rush around their heads always imagining sexual failure and embarrassment well before any date has even begun. What men discover quickly is that the very fact they know they’re worrying about their penises, erectile problems or general performance anxiety, makes this all the more likely to happen. But no matter how hard you try, those thoughts jump into your head and cause disruption and frustration.
What can help you?
Over the many years of working with men with these issues, the main areas that are most helpful are;
CBT:
Lets understand how thoughts work, how you can change your position on your thoughts and how you can take control of unhelpful thinking. The idea is to be one step ahead of unhelpful thinking, stop these in their tracks and invite calming and positive thoughts in instead. This is possible.
Masculinity, men and sex:
Taking some time to reflect on how you’ve grown to be who you are, where thoughts and beliefs have come from and re-assessing what masculinity might mean to you is worthwhile. Discovering who you actually are and what you actually want is hugely liberating. Your sexuality is your and yours to share or not. You may or may not have thoughts and experiences with using viagra or similar drugs and want to explore this. Often men have found this conversation hard to have with new partners which is understandable.
Relationships and sex:
Thinking about how sex is initiated, expressed and explored in your relationship/s is vital as many individuals do want some kind of relationship at some point in their lives. Most often men who suffer from erectile issues find initialing sex challenging and following, and falling ever deeper into the eroticism and arousal with their partners, almost impossible. This is because of the anxious thoughts can don’t seem to quiet. Many men also struggle to sustain contact and communication with their partners as and when erectile problems occur.
Tasks to do at home:
Psychosexual therapists use variations of ‘homework’ style exercises to enable men to increase their confidence around the losing, and then re-gaining of their erections. In my experience the right tasks for you will result in growing confidence, and this confidence coupled with knowledge about how your mind works will markedly make things better. Knowing your story regarding how you’ve grown to be who you are and discovering further language to discuss your thoughts will also create positive moves forward. Men can and do change their lives around with the right help.
Do get in touch to find out more:
‘Not Again!’… Why do arguments spiral out of control so quickly?
Arguing, rowing, disagreements…call them what you like, but all create fracture, rupture and sheer exhaustion for many couples who come to see me. Why is it so hard to slow down and change the inevitable outcome of ‘yet another row’? Knowing what lies ahead, how come it seems so challenging to try and approach difficulties differently? The essential truth is that, if nothing different happens in the way you think and talk, the same inevitable outcome will reliably be there.
After the meltdown the night before, we resolve the next day to handle this better, try and be kinder, make some progress somehow. But sadly, the next argument usually and dependably seems to repeat the whole traumatizing event again. Things just seems to roll out of our control ending up in a familiar state of impasse, disconnection and upset.
Why does this happen and what can be done?
Usually the initial impetus to argue about anything starts from a place of feeling misunderstood and/or misheard. Even from a young age, experiencing not being fully understood creates huge disturbance in us. This can quickly lead to frustration. Once we feel fearful, distant and anxious we have already entered a part of our brains concerned with safety and reactivity. The journey into this tense and reactive state instantly tunes down the thinking rational cognitive side of our brains…our brain doesn’t want us to ‘think about to much’ if we might be in danger. So what’s this got to do with arguing? What does this mean? Basically when we argue our ‘old brains’, our ‘fight or flight’ areas are being over stimulated allowing adrenalin and cortisol to be released and rush round our bodies. We then find ourselves even more tense and edgy, just where we don’t want to be when approaching the next tricky conversation with our partners. What I’m saying is that diffusing fighting needs different strategies rather then simply hoping it will get better and resolving to be nicer.
Identifying that it’s usually the same fight or argument is common; either the subject is cyclical or the actual way discussions move is repetitive in nature. The constancy of this erodes and shakes the very foundations of relationships, leaving partners fearful, preoccupied and at work and constantly turning over events and conversation in their heads.
So how might counselling work to resolve this?
Firstly we will make the situation safe for both partners. We may need a set structure of agreements to get this started, but both partners will construct a way forward which both are happy with. This can then be implemented as needed. It’s like constructing a joint path away from conflict towards a more mediated conversation.
Secondly we will tackle our personal responsibilities here. As mentioned before, we need to learn how to understand what is happening in our minds and bodies, calm our systems and self-regulate ourselves. We can learn how to do this by some mindful inquiry, awareness of breath and moving from a place of ‘fight/flight’, back into a rational and calm mind. There are always two players in any one argument. Understanding how and why arguments started and escalated, while using the skills you’ll learn will also help you remain in your calm brain. Naming the goals you have together will also help you keep the future in mind. This is your relationship, life and future. What is it you most want? Keeping this in mind can also help diffuse rising tensions
Our third approach is to start acquiring the skills we need to mediate and manage discussion more thoughtfully and productively. I use certain structures that enable a slower, warmer and more connected way of communicating to be learned and practiced. These skills increase trust and openness while lessening defensiveness and disengagement.
This really can be done and so many couples I’ve worked with over the years have changed their whole relationships by evolving new and positive ways to communicate. This can happen in a matter of just a few sessions. If you have a positive desire to see change and move in to a better relationship and quality of life, do get in touch.
I look forward to hearing from you soon.