“Strife is better than loneliness.”
—Irish proverb
“The tongue is a small part of the body, but it makes great boasts. Consider what a great forest is set on fire by a small spark.”
—James 3:5
For all of us, the person we love most in the world, the one who can send us soaring joyfully into space, is also the person who can send us crashing back to earth. All it takes is a slight turning away of the head or a flip, careless remark. There is no closeness without this sensitivity. If our connection with our mate is safe and strong, we can deal with these moments of sensitivity. Indeed, we can use them to bring our partner even closer. But when we don’t feel safe and connected, these moments are like a spark in a tinder forest. They set fire to the whole relationship.
This is what has happened in the first three minutes of an explosive session with Jim and Pam, a long-married couple who were experiencing a serious downswing in their relationship, though they still noted each other’s appealing qualities. Jim had told me several times in previous sessions that Pam’s golden hair and blue eyes “entranced” him, and Pam often observed that he was a good husband and father and even a “little bit” handsome himself.
The session starts innocently enough, with Pam saying she and Jim had a pleasant week together and that she had decided to try to comfort Jim more whenever she saw that he was feeling stressed by his work. She also says that she would really like him to be able to tell her when he needed emotional support. Jim snorts, rolls his eyes, and swivels his chair away from his wife. At that moment, I swear I could feel a hot wind rush through my office.
Pam blasts: “What on earth do you mean by that, that ridiculous expression? I have tried a lot harder to be supportive in this relationship than you have. Here I am offering to support you, but you would rather act superior, as always.” “Look at you ranting away,” Jim fires back. “I will never come to you for support. And the reason is right here. You would just berate me. You have done that for years. It’s the reason we are in this mess to begin with.”
I try to calm them down, but they are shouting so loudly that they don’t hear me. They finally stop when I say that it seems a little sad that this interaction started out with Pam being positive and offering an image of being loving. Pam then bursts into tears and Jim closes his eyes and sighs. “This is what always happens with us,” Jim says, and he is right. And this is where they can start to change what always happens. Change starts with seeing the pattern, with focusing on the game rather than the ball.
We get stuck in three basic patterns—I call them the Demon Dialogues—when we cannot connect safely with our partner. Find the Bad Guy is a dead-end pattern of mutual blame that effectively keeps a couple miles apart, blocking reengagement and the creation of a safe haven. Couples dance at arm’s length. That’s what Jim and Pam are doing when they fall into blaming each other for their distressed relationship. Many couples lapse into this pattern for short periods, but it is difficult to maintain over time. For most, Find the Bad Guy is the brief prelude to the most common and entrapping dance of distress. Marriage researchers have labeled this next dance demand-withdraw or criticize-defend. I call it the Protest Polka because I see it as a reaction to or, more accurately, a protest against the loss of the sense of secure attachment that we all need in a relationship. The third dance is Freeze and Flee, or as we sometimes call it in EFT, withdraw-withdraw. This usually happens after the Protest Polka has been going on for a while in a relationship, when dancers feel so hopeless that they begin to give up and put their own emotions and needs in the deep freeze, leaving only numbness and distance. Both people step back to escape hurt and despair. In dance terms, suddenly no one is on the floor; both partners are sitting out. This is the most dangerous dance of all.
All of us get caught in any one or all of these negative interactions at some point in our love relationships. For some these are brief, though risky, dances in otherwise secure connections. For others, less securely connected, they become habitual responses. After a while, all it takes is a hint of negativity from a lover to set off a Demon Dialogue. Eventually the toxic patterns can become so ingrained and permanent that they totally undermine the relationship, blocking all attempts at repair and reconnection.
We have only two ways of protecting ourselves and holding on to our connections with those we love when we do not feel safe and responded to. One route is to avoid engagement, that is, to try to numb our emotions, to shut down and deny our attachment needs. The other is to listen to our anxiety and fight for recognition and response. People of faith will recognize this in their connection with God, the one who is loved most of all. When we are disappointed in life or feel distant from God, we often deal with our emotions in the same ways. In prayer, we can rail against God, begging or even demanding that He respond to us, or we can try to turn away and dismiss our need for His grace.
In our human relationships, which strategy we adopt when we feel disconnected—becoming demanding and critical or withdrawing and shutting down—partly reflects our natural temperament, but mostly it is dictated by the lessons we learn in the key attachment relationships of our past and present. Moreover, because we learn with every new relationship, our strategy is not fixed. We can be critical in one relationship, and withdraw in another.
If I had not intervened with Jim and Pam during the session, they would probably have raced through all three Demon Dialogues; collapsed, exhausted, alienated, and hopeless; and then returned to the dialogue that they knew best. Inevitably, they would have made damning judgments about their relationship, judgments that would cloud future interactions and eat away at their trust in each other. Each time they do this and cannot find a way through into safe connection, the relationship becomes more and more tenuous. As it is, all we have done in the session is slow things down a little. Jim and Pam suggest that I fix the problem. Of course, to each of them, that means fix the other partner. The respite lasts for only thirty seconds before they launch again into Find the Bad Guy.
The purpose of Find the Bad Guy is self-protection, but the main move is mutual attack, accusation, or blame. The Bible tells us that Adam and Eve reacted just this way after eating from the tree in the Garden of Eden. The starting cue for this pattern of responses is that we are hurt by or feel vulnerable to our partner and become suddenly out of control. Emotional safety is lost. When we are alarmed, we use anything that promises to give us back this control. We can do this by defining our partner in a negative way, by shining a black light on him or her. We can attack in reactive anger or as a preemptive strike.
Find the Bad Guy could just as easily be called It’s Not Me, It’s You. When we feel cornered and flooded with fear, we tend to see and go with the obvious. I can see and I can feel what you just did to me. It’s much harder to see the impact of my responses on you. We concentrate on each step and how “you just stepped on me,” not the whole dance. After a while, the steps and pattern become automatic.
Once we get caught in a negative pattern, we expect it, watch for it, and react even faster when we think we see it coming. Of course this only reinforces the pattern. As Pam says, “I don’t even know what comes first anymore. I am waiting for his put-down. I have my gun ready. Maybe I pull the trigger when he isn’t even coming for me!” By being wary and anticipating being hurt, we close off all the ways out of this dead-end dance. We cannot relax with our partners, and we certainly cannot connect with or confide in them. The range of responses becomes more restricted, slowly deadening the relationship.
Jim puts it this way: “I don’t know what I feel in this relationship anymore. I am either numb or seething mad. I think I have lost touch with all kinds of feelings here. My emotional world has gotten smaller, tighter. I am so busy protecting myself.” This reaction is especially typical of men. Many partners, when they first come to see me, answer the question “What do you feel right now as you see your wife cry?” with a simple “Don’t know.” When we are attacking or counterattacking, we try to put our feelings aside. After a while we can’t find them at all. Without feelings as our compass in the territory of close relationships, we are effectively lost.
We begin to see the relationship as more and more unsatisfying or unsafe and our partner as uncaring or even defective. So Jim says, “I keep remembering my mother telling me that Pam just wasn’t mature enough for me and I guess, after these spats, I begin to think my mother was right. How can you have a relationship with someone who is so aggressive? It’s hopeless. It might be better for both of us to just give it up, even if it’s hard for the kids.”
People of faith may even use their religious code as a source of reproach, accusing each other of betraying the principles of their religious commitment. In heated moments, partners might find themselves chastising their loved ones with phrases like “What kind of a Christian are you, anyway?” or “How can you act like this and call yourself a Christian?” These bullets are particularly painful because they imply that one’s partner is failing not only in this relationship but in their relationship with God, too.
When partners do the Find the Bad Guy dance only occasionally and loving ways of connecting are still the norm, they can reach out to each other after they’ve cooled down. Sometimes they can see how they’ve hurt each other and apologize. They can even laugh about the “silly things” both said. I remember once screaming at my husband, John, “You big Canadian male, you,” and then bursting into laughter because that is exactly what he is! However, once the patterns we’ve talked about here become rooted and habitual, then a powerful, regenerating feedback loop is set up. The more you attack, the more dangerous you appear to me, the more I watch for your attack, the harder I hit back. And round and round we go. This negative pattern has to be shut down before a couple can build true trust and safety. The secret to stopping the dance is to recognize that no one has to be the bad guy. The accuse-accuse pattern itself is the villain here, and the partners are the victims.
Let’s look again at Jim and Pam in Find the Bad Guy and see how they can get out of this destructive pattern by using a few simple pointers and new responses.
PAM: I am just not going to sit here and listen to you tell me how impossible I am anymore. According to you, everything that ever goes wrong between us is my fault!
JIM: I never said that at all. You just exaggerate everything. You are so negative. Like the other day when my friend came over and everything was going fine, but then you turned and said…
Jim is off and sliding down what I call the Content Tube. This is where partners bring up detailed example after detailed example of each other’s failures to prove their point. The couple fight over whether these details are “true” and whose bad behavior “started this.”
To help them recognize their Demon Dialogue, I suggest that they:
• Stay in the present and focus on what is happening between them right now.
• Look at the circle of criticism that spins both of them around. There is no true “start” to a circle.
• Consider the circle, the dance, as their enemy and the consequences of not breaking the circle.
Here is what happens:
JIM: Well, I guess that’s right. We do get caught in that, both of us. But I never really saw it before. I know I get so riled up that after a while I will say anything to get at her.
SUE: Yes. The desire to win the fight and prove the other is the bad guy has such a pull. But in fact, nobody wins this one. Both lose.
PAM: I don’t want to fight like this. It kills me. And you are right, it is destroying our relationship. We are more and more on guard with each other. What does it matter who is “right” in the end? We are both more and more unhappy. I guess I keep it spinning by trying to show him he can’t put me down. I try to make him feel smaller.
SUE: Yes. And do you know what you do, Jim? [He shakes his head.] Well, just a few minutes ago, you said, “I won’t come to you, won’t trust you, because you are dangerous for me sometimes.” And then I think you accused her of being the problem, yes?
JIM: Yes, it’s like I tell her, “You can’t get me.” And then I put her down.
SUE: And after all this sniping at each other, both of you go off, more and more defeated and alone, yes?
JIM: Right. So this circle, cycle, loop, dance, whatever it is, has us stuck. I see that. But how to stop it, that is the point. The incident that we are discussing now, I never said anything to her; she did start this cycle!
SUE: [I raise my eyebrows. He stops.] Well, first you have to see the circular pattern of responses and really understand that proving the other wrong just pushes you further and further apart. The temptation to be the “winner” and to make the other admit she is at fault is just part of the trap. Then you begin to pin down this dance, as it is happening, rather than getting meaner and meaner or searching for proof in endless versions of facts or incidents. If you want to, both of you can come together to stop this enemy taking over your relationship.
JIM: [Looking at his wife.] So, right now, I don’t want to go into this attack thing. We are caught in this loop. Maybe we could call it the “Who is lousy?” loop. [They laugh.] This is killing us. So let’s try stopping it right now. You were trying to tell me that you wanted to be supportive. So why was I going on about you ranting? I want you to support me more!
PAM: Yes, I think if we can stop and say, “Hey, we are in that loop again. Let’s not keep turning up the heat and hurting each other,” then we could be better friends and maybe even a little more than that! Perhaps a little like we used to be. [She tears up.]
Pam is right here. Being able to stop the Find the Bad Guy dance is a way to be friends. But couples want much more than friendship between them. Getting this attack-attack dance under control is just the first step. We have to go on to look at other places we get stuck in love relationships. But first you can try some of the exercises below.
These questions and reflections can help you think about how you and your mate move in the dance when both of you get caught in fight-to-win mode. You can ponder them, write them down, read them aloud, and, of course, share them with your partner.
Most of us are good at blaming. As far back as the Garden of Eden, Adam blames Eve and Eve blames Adam. Both of them tell God, “It’s not my fault. The other one is the bad guy.” More recently, Frank McCourt in his book Teacher Man noted how easy it is to get kids to write if you let them pen excuse notes explaining why they have not done their homework; they are brilliantly inventive in blaming others for their own inaction. So, think of a time when you clearly were at fault in creating a minor problem.
For example, I went to a friend’s house for a dinner party and dropped the entrée on the kitchen floor while trying to help. Now think of your actions in your situation and four different ways you could have made someone else the bad guy. (But the dish was heavy and she had not told me!) Find out how good you are at it. Imagine three ways a companion might respond negatively to your remarks. What would have happened then? Do you get into a loop?
Now see if you can remember a similar incident with your spouse. What did you use to “win” the fight and prove your innocence? How did you accuse your partner? What are your usual comebacks when you feel cornered?
Can you sketch out the circle of hostile criticism and labeling that trapped you both? How did each of you begin to define the other? How did each of you wound and enrage the other? Was there a “winner”? (Probably not!)
What happened after your Find the Bad Guy fight? How did you feel about yourself, your partner, the connection between you? Were you able to go back and talk about the fight and console each other? If not, how did you deal with the loss of safety between you? What do you think might have happened if you had said, “We are starting to label each other, to prove the other one is the bad one here. We are just going to get hurt more if we get stuck in this dance. Let’s not get caught in an attack-attack dance with each other. Maybe we can talk about what happened without it being anyone’s fault.”
This is the most widespread and ensnaring dance in relationships. Studies by psychologist John Gottman of the University of Washington, Seattle, indicate that many of the couples who fall into this pattern early in marriage do not make it to their fifth anniversary. Others are mired in it indefinitely. This “forever” quality makes sense because the main moves of the Protest Polka create a stable loop, each move calling forth and reinforcing the next. One partner reaches out, albeit in a negative way, and the other steps back, and the pattern repeats. The dance also goes on forever because the emotions and needs behind the dance are the most powerful on this planet. Attachment relationships are the only ties on earth where any response is better than none. When we get no emotional response from a loved one, we are wired to protest. The Protest Polka is all about trying to get a response, a response that connects and reassures.
Couples have a difficult time recognizing this pattern, however. Unlike the obvious attack-attack pattern of Find the Bad Guy, the Protest Polka is more subtle. One partner is demanding, actively protesting the disconnection; the other is withdrawing, quietly protesting the implied criticism. Dissatisfied partners, missing each other’s signals, often complain of a fuzzy “communication problem” or “constant tension.”
Let’s take a look at how couples do the Protest Polka.
I ask Eva and Chuck, the young couple sitting in my office, “What seems to be the problem? You have told me that you love each other and want to be together. You have been together for six years. What is it that you would like to change about your relationship?”
Eva, small, blond, and intense, stares at her husband, Chuck, a tall handsome man who is still and silent, seemingly mesmerized by the rug at his feet. She lets out a big sigh. Then she looks at me, gestures toward him, and hisses, “This is the problem, right here. He never talks, and I get sick of it! I just get enraged at his silence. I am the one carrying the burden of this relationship. I ‘do’ it all, and I do more and more. And if I didn’t…” She throws up her hands in a gesture of resignation. Chuck exhales deeply and looks at the wall. I like it when the picture is so clear and the polka is so easy to grasp.
This instant snapshot of their relationship tells me each partner’s basic position in the dance of distress. Eva is hammering on the door, protesting her sense of separateness, while Chuck holds the door firmly shut. Eva tells me that she has left Chuck twice, but relented when he called and begged her to return. Chuck says that he just doesn’t understand what is going on, but he feels pretty hopeless about their situation. He tells me that in his mind he has decided that it is either his fault—perhaps he was never meant to be married—or it’s just that Eva and he don’t fit together. Either way, he isn’t sure there is any real point in coming to see me. They have tried counseling before.
I ask if they fight, and Chuck says that they hardly ever have a real fight. They do not get caught in Find the Bad Guy. But then there are the times when Eva says she is leaving, and Chuck says, “Fine.” These moments feel pretty bad. And, he tells me, she does try to “coach” him. As he says this, he winces and laughs.
Eva and Chuck then tell me a story. If you ask most couples, they can tell you of a seminal incident, a small moment that captures the essential nature of the connection between them. If these moments are good, they bring them up on anniversaries or in tender moments. If they are bad, they puzzle over them, trying to figure out what the moment says about their relationship.
CHUCK: I think a lot about pleasing her. I do want her to be happy with me. But it just doesn’t work. She really wants everything to be perfect when we go to church on Sunday. So I try. I help with getting the kids cleaned up and all. But then it just all falls apart anyway. Somehow it’s never perfect enough. And the house has to be perfectly clean before we leave, too. Like that time a few months ago when, by the time we got to church, we weren’t even speaking to each other!
EVA: We weren’t speaking because you don’t listen—you were out cleaning the garage when I needed help. Who cares about the garage?
SUE: And what did you do, Eva?
EVA: I went out to the garage and yelled at him to get back in the house and make himself useful. We were going to be late for church.
CHUCK: [Shaking his head.] I just needed to get away from your constant badgering. Maybe clear my head before we went to church.
EVA: Yeah. And if I hadn’t gone out there to yell at you, you would have stayed there hiding in the garage, leaving me by myself to handle everything alone. Like last month when I gave up and just took the kids and went to church by myself. If I don’t make you do it, nothing will happen. And that is the same for the whole relationship. If I don’t make it happen, nothing will happen. [She turns to me.] He just doesn’t take his part.
SUE: So this is what goes wrong between the two of you and not just on Sundays. This pattern of you wanting Chuck to respond and Chuck getting quiet and disappearing. This kind of way of relating keeps you demoralized and feeling unsafe with each other.
EVA: Right. And, I can never hear him. He mumbles a lot. So I was trying to get him to speak more clearly the other day. And then he won’t talk to me at all!
CHUCK: So I mumble sometimes. You were screaming at me in the car on the highway. As I am driving, you are telling me to enunciate my words louder and louder!
SUE: Eva, it’s kind of like you have become the dance instructor, telling Chuck how to move and speak. And you do it out of fear that he will stay distant and there will be no dance between you. No help with the family, and no connection. [Eva nods emphatically.] You keep waiting for Chuck to come and connect with you and respond when you need support, and when this doesn’t happen, you feel really alone. And so you try to fix it, to teach him how to respond. But this gets rather pushy, even critical. Then Chuck hears that he is blowing it—how he talks is wrong, how he cleans the house is wrong—and he does even less.
CHUCK: That’s it. I freeze up is what I do. I can’t do anything right. She doesn’t even like the way I eat.
SUE: Aha. And the more you freeze up, I guess the more Eva tries to instruct you.
EVA: I get so frustrated. I prod him, I poke him, that is what I do. I prod him to get a response. Any response.
SUE: Right, so let’s track this. You prod and poke, Chuck freezes and responds less and less. You shut down, Chuck? [He nods.] And the more you shut down, the more Eva feels shut out and the more she pokes. It is a circle that just spins and spins and it has taken over your relationship. What is happening for you, Chuck, when you “freeze up”?
CHUCK: I get so that I am afraid to do anything, sort of paralyzed. Whatever I do will be wrong. So I do less and less. I go into a shell.
EVA: And then I feel so alone. I just try to get a rise out of him any way I can.
SUE: Right. This spiral has really taken over. One freezes up, feels paralyzed, shuts down into a shell, the other feels shut out and pokes harder and harder to get a response.
EVA: This is sad for us, for both of us. How can we stop it then, this spiral?
SUE: Well, we have pretty much set it out. These steps are like breathing for you now. You don’t even know you are taking them. You need to get real clear about how this cycle is creating a minefield in the middle of your relationship. It is making it impossible for you to feel safe together. If I was Chuck here, I would mumble in case what I said was wrong. If I was Eva, I would push and prod because inside I would be pleading, “Listen to what I need, come and help, come and talk to me. Come and be with me.”
EVA: I do feel like that. That is what I am trying to do, to reach him. But I know my calling has an edge to it. I get frustrated.
SUE: That’s true. Many of us get stuck like this when we can’t quite find a way to feel safe and connected with each other. The way I see it, you are so important to Eva that she cannot just wait you out or turn away. And you are freezing up because you are so worried about doing the “wrong” thing with her, upsetting her and shaking up the relationship again. The old axiom “When in doubt, say or do nothing” is terrible advice in love relationships. The question is, can you help each other stop this “spiral”? Can you see when you are caught in it and move together to take your relationship back?
CHUCK: Maybe we can!
In the following sessions, Chuck and Eva go over their polka again and again. They discover that their “spiral,” as they call it, occurs specifically when attachment cues come up, when Eva needs help in a task or wants to connect and when Chuck hears that he is failing and disappointing her. Protest moments occur in all marriages, but when the basic bond is secure, these events can be canceled out or even used as springboards to reinforce the relationship.
For example, in a happy marriage, Eva would still protest at moments when she felt emotionally separated from Chuck, but in a lower key. Being less worried about the connection between them, she would express herself in a softer and clearer way. And Chuck, in turn, would be more receptive and responsive to her appeals. He would not hear her distress or disappointment as a sentence of doom for him as a lover or for their relationship, but as a sign of her need for support and closeness with him.
In an insecure relationship, however, the Protest Polka speeds up and gets more intense. It eventually creates such havoc that partners cannot resolve problems or communicate clearly about anything. Then disconnection and distress infuse more and more of the relationship. It’s important to note, however, that no relationship is entirely suffused with the destructive pattern I talk about here. There are still moments of closeness. But they do not occur frequently enough or with sufficient strength to counter the harm caused by the Protest Polka. Or the type of closeness isn’t the one a partner craves. For instance, men with a tendency to withdraw from confrontations do initiate sexual intimacy in the bedroom, but for most women arousal is linked to emotional connection and sexual relations are not enough to fulfill their attachment needs.
For years, therapists have misguidedly viewed this pattern in terms of disputes and power struggles and have attempted to resolve it by teaching problem-solving skills. This is a little like offering Kleenex as the cure for viral pneumonia. It ignores the “hot” attachment issues that underlie the pattern. Rather than conflict or control, the issue, from an attachment perspective, is emotional distance. It is no accident that Chuck is “stonewalling,” as his wooden lack of response is called in the research literature, and that this sparks off rage and aggression in his wife. An aggressive response seems to be wired into primates when a loved one on whom an individual depends acts as if the individual does not exist. An infant human or monkey will attack a stonewalling mother, in a desperate attempt to obtain recognition. If no response occurs, “deadly” isolation, loss, and helplessness follow.
What we have seen above is just one instance of the Protest Polka. Not every distancing, defensive partner talks of “freezing” like Chuck does. But I’ve found that pursuing and distancing partners each tend to use characteristic expressions when describing their experiences. Let’s listen in; you may hear some of your own patterns and moves here.
Partners who follow in Eva’s steps often use these statements:
• “I have a broken heart. I could weep forever. Sometimes I feel like I am dying in this relationship.”
• “These days he is always busy, somewhere else. Even when he is home, he is on the computer or watching TV. We seem to live on separate planets. I am shut out.”
• “Sometimes I think that I am lonelier in this relationship than I was when I lived by myself. It seemed easier to be by myself than living like this, together but separate.”
• “I needed him so much during that time, and he was just so distant. It was as if he didn’t care. My feelings didn’t matter to him. He just dismissed them.”
• “We are roommates. We never seem to be close anymore.”
• “I get mad, sure I do. He just doesn’t seem to care, so I smack him, sure I do. I’m just trying to get a response from him, any response.”
• “I am just not sure I matter to him. It’s like he doesn’t see me. I don’t know how to reach him.”
• “If I didn’t push and push we would never be close. It would never happen.”
Examining these statements closely reveals a wealth of attachment themes: feeling unimportant to or not valued by a partner; experiencing separateness in terms of life and death; feeling excluded and alone; feeling abandoned at a time of need or being unable to depend on a partner’s support; longing for emotional connection and feeling anger at a partner’s lack of responsiveness; experiencing the other as a friend or a roommate; and feeling the loss of the loved one as a fellow spiritual traveler and partner in Christ.
When these partners are encouraged to focus on the negative dance and describe just their own moves, instead of their partner’s mistakes or faults, they often use the following verbs: push, pull, slap, attack, criticize, complain, pressure, blow up, yell, provoke, try to get close, and manage. Sometimes it is hard to see how your feet move in the dance. At those times, when we are caught in the pattern of pursuit and protest, most of us talk simply of being frustrated, enraged, or upset, and this is what our partner sees. But it is only the first, most superficial, layer of what is going on in the polka.
Partners who follow in Chuck’s footsteps usually speak this way:
• “I can never get it right with her, so I just give up. It all seems hopeless.”
• “I feel numb. Don’t know how I feel. So I just freeze up and space out.”
• “I get that I am flawed somehow. I am a failure as a husband. Somehow that just paralyzes me.”
• “I shut down and wait for her to calm down. I try to keep everything calm, not rock the boat. That is my way of taking care of the relationship. Don’t rock the boat.”
• “I go into my shell where it’s safe. I go behind my wall.”
• “I try to shut the door on all her angry comments. I am the prisoner in the dock and she is the judge.”
• “I feel like nothing in this relationship. Inadequate. So I run to my computer, my job, or my hobbies. At work, I am somebody. I don’t think I am anything special to her at all.”
• “I don’t matter to her. I am way down on her list. I come somewhere after the kids, the house, and her family. Even the dog comes before me! I just bring home the money.”
• “I end up feeling somehow empty. You never know if the love will be there or not.”
• “I don’t feel that I need anyone the way she does. I am just not as needy. I was always taught that it’s weak to let yourself need someone like that, childish. So I try to handle things on my own. I just walk away.”
• “I don’t know what she is talking about. We are fine. This is what marriage is all about. You just become friends. I am not sure I know what she means by ‘close,’ anyway.”
• “I try to solve the problem in concrete ways. Try to fix it. I deal with it in my head. It doesn’t work. She doesn’t want that. I don’t know what she wants.”
There are themes here, too: feeling hopeless and lacking the confidence to act; dealing with negative feelings by shutting down and numbing out; assessing oneself a failure as a partner, as inadequate; feeling judged and unaccepted by the partner; trying to cope by denying problems in the relationship and attachment needs; doing anything to avoid the partner’s rage and disapproval; using rational problem solving as a way out of emotional interactions.
When partners like Chuck describe their own moves, they use the following terms: move away, shut down, get paralyzed, push the feelings away, hide out, space out, try to stay in my head, and fix things. What they usually talk about in terms of their feelings is depression, numbness, and lack of feeling, or a sense of hopelessness and failure. What their partner usually sees is simply a lack of emotional response.
Gender plays a part here, though the roles vary with culture and couple. In our society, women tend to be the caretakers of relationships. They usually pick up on distance sooner than their lovers, and they are often more in touch with their attachment needs. So their role in the dance is most often the pursuing, more blaming spouse. Men, on the other hand, have been taught to suppress emotional responses and needs, and also to be problem solvers, which sets them up to withdraw. Men of faith, in particular, often feel responsible for providing leadership in the family and keeping the family safe. They then become very focused on problem solving and very sensitive to messages that they are failing their partner in any way.
If I appeal to you for emotional connection and you respond intellectually to a problem, rather than directly to me, on an attachment level I will experience that as “no response.” This is one of the reasons that the research on social support uniformly states that people want “indirect” support, that is, emotional confirmation and caring from their partners, rather than advice. Often men say that they do not know how to respond on an emotional level. But they do! They do it when they feel safe, most often with their children. The tragedy here is that a man may be doing his best to answer his wife’s concerns by offering advice and solutions, not understanding that what she is really seeking from him is emotional engagement. This engagement is most often the solution she is seeking.
Jesus offers us examples of recognizing the emotional needs of others and responding to these needs with loving compassion. At one point He insists, putting all else aside, that the children in the temple be allowed to come to Him for a blessing (Luke 18:15–17). I see this as being about his welcoming love for children as much as about our need for a childlike faith. At another time, a blind man is calling loudly to Jesus, seeking His attention. Many people tried to quiet him but he shouted louder. Jesus stopped and responded to the man’s emotional calls. He heard this man’s need and invited him to come close. At the end of the story, this connection with Jesus results in the man being healed (Mark 10:46–52). Christ responded to emotional need with emotional presence and loving concern.
In our society, both men and women are inculcated with social beliefs that help ensnare them in the polka and make the expression and recognition of emotional needs problematic. Most destructive is the belief that a healthy, mature adult is not supposed to need emotional connection and so is not entitled to this kind of caring. Clients tell me, “I cannot just tell him that I am feeling small and need his arms around me. I’m not a kid,” or “I can’t just ask to come first, even sometimes. I have never asked for that. I don’t feel entitled. I shouldn’t need that.” If we cannot name and accept our own attachment needs, sending clear messages to others when those needs are “hot” is impossible. Ambiguous messages are what keep the polka going. It is so much easier to say, “Why aren’t you more talkative? Don’t you have anything to say to me?” than to open up and ask that our need for loving connection be met.
The Protest Polka is danced not just by lovers, but by parents and children, brothers and sisters, indeed by anyone with close emotional ties to another. Sometimes it is easier for us to see ourselves performing it with our siblings or our kids than with our partner. Is it that the vulnerability is less obvious? I ask myself why my adolescent son, sighing and dismissing my comments about his being late, sends me over the edge into critical blaming, even when we have a loving bond between us. The answer is easy.
Suddenly I hear a message that vibrates with scary attachment meanings. He rolls his eyes at me. His tone is contemptuous. I hear that my concerns or comments do not matter to him. I am irrelevant. So I turn up the music and I criticize him. He retreats and dismisses me again. We are off. The polka music plays on. But suddenly I recognize the music. So I step to the side and invite him to look at the dance. “Wait a minute. What is happening here? We are getting caught up in a silly fight and we are both getting hurt.” This is the first step in stopping the polka: recognize the music.
What have I learned in twenty years of watching partners take back their relationships from this dance? My couples have taught me so many things.
First, they have taught me that you have to see it. The whole enchilada. You have to see the how of the dance between you and your partner and what it says about the relationship, not simply the content of the argument. You also have to see the whole dance. If you just focus on specific steps, especially the other person’s, as in “Hey, you just attacked me,” you will be lost. You have to step back and see the entire picture.
Second, both people have to grasp how the moves of each partner pull the other into the dance. Each person is trapped in the dance and unwittingly helps to trap the other. If I attack you, I pull you into defense and justification. I inadvertently make it hard for you to be open and responsive to me. If I stay aloof and apart, I leave you separate and alone and pull you into pursuing and pushing for connection.
Third, the polka is all about attachment distress. It cannot be stopped with logical problem solving or formal communication skill techniques. We have to know the nature of the dance if we are to change the key elements and return to safe connection. We have to learn to recognize calls for connection and how desperation turns into “I push, I poke, anything to get him to respond,” or “I just freeze, so as to stop hearing more and more about how flawed I am and how I have lost her already.” These patterns are universal because our needs and fears, and our responses to perceived loss and separation, are universal.
Fourth, we can know the nature of love, tune in to these moments of disconnection and the protest and distress that are the key parts of the polka. We can then learn to see the polka as the enemy, not our partner.
Fifth, partners can begin to stand together and call the enemy by name, so they can slow the music down and learn how to step to the side and create enough safety to talk about attachment emotions and needs.
When Chuck and Eva can do this, they begin to have hope for their relationship. As Chuck says, “When we start to get into that thing, you know, the spiral we talk about here, we don’t get so sucked down into it. I said to Eva yesterday, ‘We are getting stuck here. I am getting more and more distant and frozen up, and you are getting all upset. These are the times when you feel shut out, right? We don’t have to do this. Let’s stop. Come over and just let’s have a hug.’ And she did. It felt great.” I asked Chuck what it was that helped him most to defeat this polka. He replied that it helped him to realize that Eva wasn’t “the enemy” and that she was “fighting for the relationship” when the polka started, not trying to “do me in.”
Being able to recognize and accept protests about separation and exit the Protest Polka is crucial to a healthy relationship. If a safe, loving bond is to stay strong and grow, couples have to be able to repair moments of disconnection and step out of common dead-end ways of dealing with them, ways that actually exacerbate disconnection by destroying trust and safety.
Does the story of Chuck and Eva seem familiar to you? Do you recognize parts of this dance in your own relationship? Can you think of the last time this polka took over your relationship? Can you put on your attachment glasses and see past the argument about facts or problems to the struggle over the connection between the two of you? For example, was the argument really about whether to rebuild the cottage, where one partner likes to go and paint, or was it about attachment security? Perhaps the partner who is left behind is just that—left behind. Maybe one of you was really talking about the lack of secure connection and closeness between the two of you or trying to get reassurance from the other, but the conversation stayed focused on pragmatic issues.
In your present relationship, what do you tend to do when you feel disconnected or unsafe? Try to think about which person you identified with in the stories of the couples given in this chapter. You can also think of the last argument or hurtful episode in your relationship. If you pretend you are a fly on the wall reporting on the incident to the Fly Gazette, what does the dance look like and what are your main moves? Do you protest or withdraw? Do you find yourself getting critical and trying to change your lover? Or maybe you shut down and tell yourself that any longing for reassurance is risky stuff and should not be listened to. All of us do all of these things at times.
Flexibility and being able to see your own moves and their impact on others is the key here. I am encouraging you to be courageous, look hard, and identify your usual response. It’s the one that pops out before you have taken a breath. This is the response that can trap you in a vicious cycle of disconnection with the person you love best. These responses can also be different in different relationships. But for now, just think of your most significant connection and how you respond to this person at times when attachment uncertainties and issues come up.
The distancing stance is sometimes the one that is hardest for us to really grasp if we are the person doing the distancing. Perhaps your style is to retreat into yourself and try to calm yourself by shutting the world out? This can be very useful. Unless you start doing it automatically and find it harder and harder to stay open and responsive. Then this withdrawal sets you up to spin into the Protest Polka. Pretty soon, your partner will need you and feel shut out, abandoned, and excluded.
Can you think of a specific incident when withdrawing and not responding worked for you in a relationship? What happened after your withdrawal? We most often think of this strategy as preventing a fight that we fear will escalate and threaten the relationship. Now, can you think of times when moving away and shutting down did not seem to work? What happened after this withdrawal, to you and in your dance with your partner?
If you feel comfortable, see if you can share your responses to some of these questions with your partner. Are there times when the two of you get stuck in the polka? See if you can pin down each person’s moves. Can you see the whole feedback loop? Describe it very simply by filling in the blanks in the following sentence with one word.
The more I _______________________, the more you ____________________________ and then the more I _______________________________, and round and round we go.
Come up with your own name for this dance and see if you each can share how it erodes the sense of safe connection in your relationship. How does it change the emotional music between you?
For example, Todd talks about how his main way of connecting is through sex. He is much more sure of himself in bed than when he is discussing feelings with his wife. He spots his main move in the polka: “I chase you for sex. But it’s not just for my own physical pleasure. It’s the way I know to be close. When you turn me down, I chase you more and ‘badger’ you for explanations. The more I do this, the more you move away and guard your space.”
His wife, Bella, replies, “Yes, and the more criticized and demanded from I feel, the more overwhelmed I get. So I turn away from you more and more. And you get more pushy and desperate, and this goes on and on. Is that it?” Todd agrees that this is the outline of the polka for them. They decide to call it the Vortex. For them the name expresses how obsessed Todd gets with his wife’s sexual availability and how obsessed she becomes with guarding her space. Todd is then able to share that he feels more and more rejected and frantic, and Bella states that she feels “frozen” and lonely in their marriage. What is it like for you and your lover to talk about your own moves in your Protest Polka?
Even if you get stuck in the Protest Polka, are there times when you can step out of it, shut it down, and move into another way of interacting? Are there times when you can risk openly asking for closeness and comfort or disclose your feelings and needs to your spouse rather than withdrawing? What is it that makes these times possible? What do you do to keep the polka at bay? See if you can figure this out together. Is there a way to help each other feel safer so that a sense of disconnection does not immediately lead into this dance? Often this comes down to recognizing the attachment signals hidden in the polka. For example, Juan found that just telling his wife, Anna, “I see that you’re really upset and need something from me but I don’t know what to do here,” was enough.
Sometimes, when a couple comes to see me, I do not hear the hostility of Find the Bad Guy or the frantic beat of the Protest Polka. I hear a deadly silence. If we think of a relationship as a dance, then here both partners are sitting out! It looks like there is nothing at stake; no one seems to be invested in the dance. Except that there is a palpable tension in the air, and pain is clear on the couple’s faces. Emotion theorists tell us that we can try to suppress our emotions but it just doesn’t work. As Freud noted, they seep out of every pore. What I see is that both partners are shut down into frozen defense and denial. Each is in self-protection mode, trying to act as if he or she does not feel and does not need.
This is the Freeze and Flee dance that frequently evolves from the Protest Polka. This is what happens when the pursuing, critical partner gives up trying to get the spouse’s attention and goes silent. If this cycle runs its course, the aggressive partner will grieve the relationship and then will detach and leave. At this point, partners typically are very polite to each other, even cooperative around pragmatic issues, but unless something is done, the love relationship is over. Sometimes the usually withdrawn partner finally tunes in to the fact that even though things look more peaceful, there is now no emotional connection of any kind, positive or negative. This partner frequently then agrees to seek out a counselor or to read books like this.
The extreme distancing of Freeze and Flee is a response to the loss of connection and the sense of helplessness concerning how to restore it. One partner will usually tell a story of pursuing the mate, protesting the lack of connection, and mourning alone. This partner describes himself or herself as now unable to feel, as frozen. The other partner is often trapped in the withdrawal that has become the default option, and attempts to deny the unfolding detachment. No one is reaching for anyone here. No one will take any risks. So there is no dance at all. If the couple doesn’t get help and this continues, a point comes when there is then no way to renew trust or revive the dying relationship. Then this Freeze and Flee cycle will finish the partnership.
Terry and Carol, they admitted to me, had never been what’s called a “close couple.” But Carol, a subdued, intellectual woman, insisted that she had tried repeatedly to talk to her husband about his “depression.” This is the way she understood their emotional estrangement. Terry, a quiet, formal man, noted that his wife had been finding fault with him for years, especially around parenting issues. They had come in to see me because they had gotten into a fight, a very rare event for them. It started when Carol picked out a pair of pants to wear to a party that Terry disliked. Terry had declared that if she wore those particular pants it meant that she did not love him and they should divorce! Then on the way to the party, Terry had told her that he was on the verge of starting an affair with a work colleague, but he assumed that this did not matter to Carol as they never had sex anyway. Carol in turn had disclosed that she was infatuated with an old friend and pointed out that Terry never touched her for affection or sex.
In our session, they talked of lives so swamped with career duties and parenting responsibilities that finding time for personal closeness and lovemaking had become harder and harder. Carol claimed that once she had recognized that they were becoming “strangers,” she had tried to “shake Terry up” so he would talk to her more. When this didn’t work, she had become very angry. Terry noted that Carol had indeed been very “judgmental” for a number of years, especially about his parenting, but then, about a year ago, she had just become distant. Carol explained that she had finally decided to “swallow” her rage and to accept that this was the way marriage was. She concluded that her husband no longer found her attractive or interesting enough to capture his attention. In response to this, Terry spoke sadly of Carol’s deep connection to their two children and told me that he somehow seemed to have lost his spouse. She was a mother but not a wife. He wondered if it was because he was simply too serious and “in his head” to be with a woman.
The real problem with the Freeze and Flee cycle is the hopelessness that colors it. Both of these partners had decided that their difficulty lay in themselves, in their innate flaws. The natural response to this is to hide, to conceal one’s unlovable self. Remember that a key part of Bowlby’s attachment perspective is that we use the eyes of those we love to reflect back to us a sense of ourselves. What other information could possibly be as relevant in our daily framing of who we are? Those we love are our mirror.
As Carol and Terry felt increasingly disconnected and helpless, they had hidden from each other more and more. The basic attachment cues that we see in infants and parents and in lovers, such as prolonged gazing and physical caressing, had become first muted and then nonexistent. Terry and Carol never made eye contact during our session and noted that spontaneous touching had disappeared from their lives long ago. Being very intellectual had enabled them to rationalize their lack of sexual connection and deny, at least most of the time, the pain of not feeling desired by their spouse. Both talked about the symptoms of depression, and indeed, depression is a natural part of losing connection with a lover. Over time, the gap between them widened, and it seemed more and more risky to reach out to each other. Carol and Terry described the themes, moves, and feelings that withdrawers in the Protest Polka reveal, but they had deeper doubts about their lovability. This doubt paralyzed both of them and “froze” the protest that usually draws attention to this kind of destructive distance.
When we began to delve into their pasts, they both talked of growing up in cold, rational families where emotional distance was the norm. When each felt disconnected, they automatically withdrew and denied their needs for emotional closeness. Our past history with loved ones shapes our present relationships. In moments of disconnection when we cannot safely engage with our lover, we naturally turn to the way of coping that we adopted as a child, the way of coping that allowed us to hold on to our parent, at least in some minimal way. When we feel the “hot” emotions that warn us our connection is in trouble, we automatically try to shut them down and flee into reason and distracting activities. In this dance of distance, avoiding these emotions becomes an end in itself. As Terry explains, “If I stay cool, we never talk about feelings. I don’t want to open that Pandora’s box.”
These ways of coping with our emotions and needs become default options; they “happen” so fast that we have no sense of choosing them. But when we see how they lock us into self-defeating dances with our lovers, we can change them. They are not indelible parts of our personality, and we do not need years of therapy and insight to reshape them. Terry spoke of having an older, hostile father and a mother who was a famous politician. He looked blank when I asked him when he felt close to his mother. He said that all he remembered was watching her on the TV screen. He had no choice but to learn how to tolerate distance and numb his needs for comfort and closeness. He had learned his lesson well. But his childhood survival strategy was disastrous for his marriage. Carol, too, saw how she had begun to “wither inside” when she had “shut down” her need for touch and connection.
As with the other dances, once Terry and Carol understood the steps they were taking that isolated them from each other, they began to feel more hopeful and to reveal their feelings to each other. Carol was able to admit that she had “given up” and “built a wall” between herself and Terry to blunt her sense of rejection. She confessed that she had turned to the children to fulfill her longing for touch and connection. Terry divulged how shocked he was to hear this and how he still very much wanted his wife. They both began to uncover the impact each had on the other, and they realized that they were still important to each other. After a few new risks, and a few fights, Carol was able to tell me, “We both feel safer. Fights are hard, but they are so much better than the icy emptiness, the careful silence.” Terry observed, “This vicious cycle we have been in, I think we can beat it. We both get hurt and scared and shut each other out. But we don’t have to do that.” New beginnings start with knowing how we create the trap that we are caught in, how we have deprived ourselves of the love we need. Strong bonds grow from resolving to halt the cycles of disconnection, the dances of distress.
Does the Freeze and Flee pattern seem familiar to you? If so, where did you learn to ignore and discount your needs for emotional connection? Who taught you to do this? When do you feel most alone? Can you dare to share the answers to these questions with your partner? Learning how to take risks and initiate this kind of sharing is like taking an antidote to numbing or running away from your attachment needs. Is there any way your partner can help you with this?
Can you share with your partner one cue that sparks the distancing dance? It can be as simple as a turn of the head at a particular moment. Can you also identify exactly how you push your partner away from you or make it dangerous for him or her to come closer?
What do you tell yourself once you have emotionally withdrawn to justify separation and to discourage yourself from reaching out to your partner? Sometimes these are pronouncements about what love is and how we ought to act in love relationships that we have been taught by our parents or even our culture. Can you share these with your partner?
Can you make a list of all the things this dance has taken away from you? We usually have glimpses of emotional closeness when we first become infatuated with a person and are willing to take any risk to be by his or her side. We will remember those moments just as we remember our hopes and longings. How has this negative dance eroded them?
As a final exercise for this chapter, can you identify which of the three patterns—Find the Bad Guy, the Protest Polka, Freeze and Flee—most threatens your current love relationship? Remember that the facts of a fight (whether it’s a fight about the kids’ schedule, your sex life, your joint commitment, your spiritual life, your careers) aren’t the real issue. The real concern is always the strength and security of the emotional bond you have with your partner. It is about accessibility, responsiveness, and emotional engagement. See if you can summarize the pattern that takes over your relationship by filling in the blanks in the following statements. Then edit them into a paragraph that best fits you and your relationship. Share it with your partner.
When____________________________________________________________, I do not feel safely connected to you.
Fill in the cue that starts up the music of disconnection, e.g., when you say you are too tired for sex and we have not made love for a few weeks, when we fight about my parenting, when we don’t seem to speak for days. No big, general, abstract statements or disguised blaming is allowed here, so you can’t say things like when you are just being difficult as usual. That is cheating. Be concrete and specific.
I tend to ________________. I move this way in our dance to try to cope with difficult feelings and find a way to change our dance. (Choose an action word, a verb, e.g., complain, nag, zone out, ignore you, run, move away.)
What I then say to myself about our relationship is ___________. (Summarize the most catastrophic conclusion you can imagine, e.g., “You do not care about us,” “I am not important to you,” “I can never please you.”)
My understanding of the circular dance that makes it harder and harder for us to safely connect is that when I move in the way I described above, you seem to______________________. (Choose an action word, a verb, e.g., shut down, push me to respond.)
The more I _______________, the more you ___________________. We are then both trapped in pain and isolation. (Insert verbs that describe your own and your partner’s moves in the dance.)
Maybe we can warn each other when this dance begins. We can call it _____________. Seeing this dance is our first step out of the circle of disconnection.
Once you can identify these negative cycles and recognize that they trap both of you, you are ready to learn how to step out of them. The next conversation explores more deeply the strong emotions, particularly the attachment fears, that keep these negative dances going.