A COMMON PATTERN
Jimmy and Jane sit on my couch looking for relationship help. She sits leaning away from him. A gap resides between them both physically and emotionally. She complains that Jimmy just doesn’t seem to care. He’s not there for her in the way that she needs him to be. She describes a typical exchange.
“Whenever I try to express my feelings to Jimmy he becomes defensive and makes it all about himself, oftentimes turning it around onto me, blaming me for being negative, harsh, and impossible to satisfy. When I call him out on making it “all about himself” he adopts an attitude of indifference and shuts me out.”
She continues to describe how the more she tries to explain to him how hurt and rejected she feels by him, the more he pulls away and walls himself off to her feelings. And the more he pulls away and walls off, the more rejected and angrier she becomes. And the cycle goes round and round.
THIS HAPPENS OFTEN IN RELATIONSHIPS
Many of the couples that find their way into my office looking for relationship help describe a similar dynamic. She tries to tell him about her feelings, and he shields himself from the negativity often turning it around by getting defensive and blaming her for nagging or being negative. The more he shields, the more she feels unheard and the harder she tries to explain, only to feel the defensiveness of her partner getting thicker and thicker.
Jane explains “He thinks I nag him.” He agrees and I think to myself “What an awful dynamic to be caught in!”
A DREADFUL CYCLE OF DEFENSIVENESS AND PAIN
I feel for both of them. I feel sorry for her that her husband doesn’t listen to her and leaves her with feelings of rejection and abandonment, and I have pity for him that he feels so attacked and blamed.
However, after hundreds of couples with relationship help I have come to see parallels in many of the couples I see, and in cases such as this one the words of Terry Real, the developer of Relational Life Therapy (RLT), ring true in my ears, “An angry woman is a woman who doesn’t feel heard.”
THINGS HAVE TO CHANGE!
Jane is most definitely angry at this point. She has been on the receiving end of Jimmy’s one-up and walled-off attitude for way too long and she’s had enough. She finally convinced him to come to couples therapy and begrudgingly, he agreed to come.
I empathize with her and validate her feelings of rejection and frustration. I tell her that it must be awful to constantly receive the message that your husband doesn’t care about you. As I speak, tears begin to emerge and she reaches for the tissues.
Jimmy is noticeably taken aback by his wife’s sudden change in tone as she softens from her stance as resentful-complainer to being more vulnerable and sympathetic. I see he is listening now in a much more engaged way as I describe to his wife what she must be feeling.
NOT A BAD GUY, A BAD DEAL!
I turn to Jimmy and I tell him, “Jimmy, what I imagine is happening here is this…and please stop me if I’m getting it wrong. It seems to me that when your wife tries to share her feelings with you, you don’t hear her pain, rather you only hear criticism, judgment, and complaints. What I make up about that is that somewhere along the line in your development you learned how to tune out, and wall off from someone’s expressions of negativity. I ask him if I’m correct. He tells me I am.
“Tell me,” I ask him, “where did you learn to do that? Was someone in your life critical of you? Did you have to endure a stressful home environment?”
He tells me that his mother was extremely critical and demanding of him and that she often compared him to other children his age or older. He divulged that at some point he learned how to drown out the criticism by retreating into his room and into his video games and into a rich fantasy life. (I would learn as the therapy progressed that these behaviors eventually lead to heavy pornography use, which emerged as an ongoing issue in their relationship.)
I thanked him for sharing and asked him how old he was when he began employing these strategies to help him self-regulate his stressed out nervous system. He shared that he was probably 10 or 11 years old. I told him “Smart kid! That little boy figured out a way to survive a difficult environment by escaping into his own little world and walling off from the negativity coming at him from his mother. Escaping from the negative emotions and feelings of shame which emerged through video games, fantasy, movies, television, and the like was a smart move!
That little boy learned to survive by being extremely independent and self-sufficient, not having to rely on anyone else to soothe his hurt feelings. “Smart kid!” I reiterated. “That little boy learned to adapt to treacherous and dangerous situations and circumstances.”
ADAPTIVE THEN…MALADAPTIVE NOW
“However,” I told him, “there’s a saying in the RLT community that what was adaptive then, is maladaptive now.” And that his strategy of walling himself off from his wife’s expression of negativity was hurting his wife and doing damage to his relationship.
WAKING UP TO REALITY
I asked Jimmy what it was like to hear all of this? He replied that it was uncomfortable and a little overwhelming. I thanked him for having the courage to be open to hearing a new spin on what was happening internally to him whenever his wife expresseed her stress, anxiety, disappointment, frustration, anger, or hurt feelings. I reassured him that I was going to help him to learn to do it differently if he agreed to let me help him. He agreed.
I turned back to Jane and shared an insight with her that helped her to better understand her husband and what was going on with him whenever he seemed to disregard her feelings and in turn wall off.
SEEING THINGS DIFFERENTLY
I explained that Jimmy had learned, in response to growing up in an emotionally unstable environment, to be highly attuned to any expression of negativity. His radar was highly tuned in to any frequency that carried along with it any negative tone of expressed emotion. So much so, that anytime she would try to ask him to do something, or reiterate a request, or express her disappointment or frustration with something he did or didn’t do, all Jimy heard was criticism and blame and he immediately went into feeling shame.
ALLERGIC TO SHAME
I went on and explained that Jimmy was allergic to feelings of shame, given the amount of it he was exposed to as a boy, and he built up a fool-proof strategy to avoid ever having to feel shameful feelings. This strategy is called Shutting Down and/or Walling Off and withdrawing from the situation.
I elaborated. “When Jimmy hears the negativity in your voice, he immediately becomes defensive because the alternative would be to feel shame, given that shame was the result of growing up with a mother who was critical and blaming. Jimmy’s brain and nervous system interpret any bit of expressed negative emotions, especially coming from you as criticism and blame. Your negative tone indicates to Jimmy not that you are suffering or in pain, not that you need to be heard and understood, but rather that he has done something wrong and that he is bad. Jimmy’s knee jerk reaction is to be defensive.
To you, that is understandably an unsatisfying and unacceptable reaction to have when you are merely trying to get him to hear you and acknowledge your feelings, so you press harder and intensify your effort to be heard. With this, Jimmy walls off and you are left feeling rejected, abandoned, and completely misunderstood. What a dreadful pattern!”
When I inquired of Jane what it was like to hear all of that, she acknowledged that it all made sense.
RECONNECTING THE BLATENT AND JOINING THROUGH THE TRUTH
Turning back to Jimmy I offered some support and hope. “The good news here, Jimmy, is that you are a really great guy! The bad news is that you are captive to an entrenched and maladaptive pattern learned in your youth as a survival tactic to avoid your mother’s negativity that needs to change before you completely lose your wife’s patience and good will towards you resulting in the hardening of her heart.”
“What’s it like to hear that?” I asked. Jimmy replied that “It sounds serious and like I need to do something fast!”
I agreed and assured him that I could help him to get him out of this bad deal that he was caught up in if he agreed to continue with counseling and if he took my suggestions and insights.
He agreed and we shook on it.
RELATIONSHIP HELP IS AVAILABLE
Jane and Jimmy have come a long way and in just a few sessions they have learned to abandon their losing strategies of getting what they want from one another and I have helped them to implement winning strategies which have begun to change the dynamic of their relationship and has helped Jane feel more heard and understood. Jimmy no longer feels blamed and criticized whenever Jane needs to express her feelings.
I have helped many couples learn how to connect with each other more effectively and to get what they want from their partners and from their relationship.
If you find yourself in need of relationship help and are struggling to get what you want and need from your partner then I can assist you!
Visit my website or click here to schedule a free 10 minute phone or Zoom call to discuss your situation. Or call, text or email Loren Ecker LCSW at Queens Relationship Counseling LCSW, PLLC to schedule an appointment. I look forward to speaking with you soon!