“Attachment interruptions are dangerous.… Like a scratched cornea, relationship ruptures deliver agony.”
—Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, and Richard Lannon, A General Theory of Love
“In Love’s service, only wounded soldiers can serve.”
—Brennan Manning, Abba’s Child: The Cry of the Heart for Intimate Belonging
We all are vulnerable in love; it goes with the territory. We are more emotionally naked with those we love and so sometimes, inevitably, we hurt each other with careless words or actions. While these occasions sting, the pain is often superficial and fleeting. But almost all of us have at least one additional exquisite sensitivity—a raw spot on our emotional skin—that is tender to the touch, easily rubbed, and deeply painful. When this raw spot gets abraded, it can bleed all over our relationship. We lose our emotional balance and plunge into Demon Dialogues.
What exactly is a raw spot? I define it as a hypersensitivity formed by moments in a person’s past or current relationships when an attachment need has been repeatedly neglected, ignored, or dismissed, resulting in a person’s feeling what I call the “2 Ds”—emotionally deprived or deserted. The 2 Ds are universal potential raw spots for lovers.
These sensitivities frequently arise from wounding relationships with significant people in our past, especially parents, who give us our basic template for loving relationships; siblings and other members of our families; and, of course, past and present lovers. For example, recently when my husband John’s eyelids began drooping while I was speaking to him, I hit the ceiling, enraged. He was tired and drowsy, but it sent me back to the days when an ex-partner would fall instantly asleep every time I tried to start a serious conversation. Dozing off was a not-so-subtle form of withdrawing, disconnecting from the relationship. This experience made me hypervigilant—sudden sleepiness signals emotional abandonment to me.
Francois, one of my clients, is highly sensitive to any hint that his wife, Nicole, might not desire him or may be developing an interest in another man. In his painful first marriage, his wife was openly unfaithful to him many times. Now he goes into total blinding panic when Nicole smiles at his accomplished friend at a party or when she is not home when he expects her to be there.
Linda complains that she really hurts when her husband, Jonathan, “holds back from telling me I look nice or that I have done a good job. It is like being instantly flooded with hurt, and then I get resentful and critical” of him. Linda traces her sensitivity back to her mom. “She refused to ever compliment me or praise me for anything and always told me that I looked unattractive,” she tells her husband. “She once said that she thought that if you praised people, they would stop striving. I hungered for that recognition from her and resented her for withholding it. And now, I guess, I long for that from you. So when I am all dressed up and I ask you how I look, and you just seem to dismiss me, it hurts. You know I need that praise, but you refuse me. At least that is how it feels. I just can’t see straight, it stings so much.”
People can have several raw spots, although usually one is paramount in terms of putting the spin in a couple’s negative cycle. Steve feels a double whammy when his wife, Mary, says she would like to have sex more often. This could be taken as a very positive request. But for Steve, her declaration is a guided missile that demolishes his sexual confidence; his amygdala, the fear center in his brain, screams “incoming,” and he hits the floor. Steve reacts to Mary by shutting down and shutting her out. “It’s like I am suddenly back in my first marriage, hearing that I am this big disappointment and getting real anxious about performing in general, but especially in bed.” An echo from his childhood also inflames this raw spot. Steve was the smallest kid in his class, and his dad constantly asked him in front of his brothers, “Am I talking to Steve or Stephanie?” That experience left him feeling that he was not “male enough for any woman.”
But raw spots are not always a reminder of past wounds; they can crop up in a current relationship, even a generally happy one, if we feel especially emotionally deprived or deserted. Raw spots can occur during big transitions or crises—such as having a child, becoming ill, or suffering the loss of a job—when the need for support from our partner is particularly intense, but it doesn’t come. They can also develop when a partner seems chronically indifferent, producing an overwhelming sense of hurt that then infuses even small issues. The failure of our loved one to respond scrapes our emotional skin raw.
Jeff and Milly had a great relationship until Jeff’s best friend got promoted to the job that Jeff had worked so hard for and Jeff fell into a depression. Instead of offering comfort and reassurance, an anxious Milly hounded him to “just snap out of it.”
They had found their way through this crisis and back to being close, but the experience left Jeff hypersensitive to his wife’s reaction to any expressions of distress on his part. His sudden, seemingly irrational flashes of anger whenever he thinks Milly is unsupportive soon have her withdrawing into defensive silence and feeling like she is failing as a wife. You can predict what happens next. They get into their Demon Dialogue.
Helen was devastated when she found herself being blamed by a therapist for her adolescent son’s drinking problem. During an assessment session, Sam, Helen’s generally loving husband, echoed the therapist’s viewpoint. Later, when Helen expressed her hurt, Sam got caught up in justifying his opinion, and a series of painful arguments ensued. Helen then decided to put her “foolish” hurt aside and concentrate on the good things in her marriage, and she believed that she had done this.
But suppressing significant emotions is hard to do and often ends up being toxic to relationships. Helen’s hurt begins to leak out. She pesters Sam for his opinion of her every action, and Sam, unsure of what to say, says less and less. Suddenly they are fighting about everything. Sam accuses Helen of becoming more and more like her “paranoid” mother. Helen feels more and more lost and alone.
Jeff’s and Helen’s raw spots are being rubbed, but they don’t see it. Surprisingly, many of us miss the same thing. Indeed, we don’t even recognize that we have raw spots. We are only aware of our secondary reaction to the irritation—defensively numbing out and shutting down, or reactively lashing out in anger. Withdrawal and rage are the hallmarks of Demon Dialogues, and they mask the emotions that are central to vulnerability: sadness, shame, and, most of all, fear.
If you find yourself continually stuck in a Demon Dialogue with your lover, you can bet it is being sparked by attempts to deal with the pain of a sore spot, or more likely, sore spots in both of you. And unfortunately, your raw spots almost inevitably rub against each other. Chafe one in your lover and his or her reaction often irritates one in you.
Consider Jessie and Mike, who have done nothing but fight since Jessie’s twelve-year-old daughter moved in with them. Jessie says, “Suddenly, like overnight, Mike changed from this warm tender guy to this tyrant. He gives orders, makes all these rules for my kid. He is screaming most of the time he’s home. He looks just like all the abusive men in my family. I just can’t bear someone yelling and giving orders. No one protected me, but I can protect my kid.”
Mike flips between sad protests about how much he loves his wife, even though she refuses to speak to him for days on end, and loud indignant rants about how he never wanted to become a parent to her impossible, disrespectful child. He goes up in flames when he speaks of how he had pampered Jessie for years and then found that he “doesn’t exist when this kid is around.” Mike recalls falling ill with shingles but Jessie, he says, was too preoccupied with her daughter’s issues to comfort him. Smacking each other’s raw spots has trapped them in the Protest Polka.
Tom and Brenda’s raw spots sent them into a different Demon Dialogue, Freeze and Flee. Brenda is obsessed with their new baby. Tom’s attempts to draw some attention his way irritate Brenda, and one night she blows up. She’s tired of his demands, she says, and calls him “oversexed” and “pathetic.” Tom is stricken. Although he’s a dishy-looking guy, he is quite shy and insecure with women. He’s always needed to feel desired by Brenda.
He retaliates: “Fine, fine. Obviously you are not in love with me anymore, and all your stuff with me in the last years has been a sham. I don’t need hugs from you. I don’t need to be with you. I’m going out dancing, and you can just take care of the baby.” He leaves signs around the house indicating that he’s flirting with a woman in his ballroom dance group. Brenda grew up feeling like the plain girl and has always wondered why attractive and successful Tom chose her. Terrified, she withdraws more into the baby. Tom and Brenda barely speak. Constantly protecting their raw spots completely sabotages the loving responsiveness they both long for.
Stopping these destructive dynamics depends not only on identifying and curbing the Demon Dialogues (Conversation 1) but also on finding and soothing our raw spots and helping our lover to do the same. People who have grown up in the haven of secure, loving relationships will have an easier time healing these scrapes. Their raw spots are few and not so deep. And once they understand what underlies their negative interactions with their loved one, they are more able to step out of them quickly and soothe the hurts.
For others, though, who have been traumatized or badly neglected by those they have loved or depended on, the process is longer and more arduous. Their raw spots are so large and so tender that accessing their fears and trusting in a partner’s support are huge challenges. Kal, an abuse survivor and army veteran, says, “I am just one big raw spot. I crave soothing, but lots of times if my lady really touches me, I can’t tell if it’s a caress or another cut.”
Still, we are not prisoners of the past. We can change for the better. Recent research by psychologist Joanne Davila at Stony Brook University in New York, as well as others, confirms what I see in my sessions: that we can heal even deep vulnerabilities with the help of a loving spouse. We can “earn” a basic sense of secure connection with the aid of a responsive partner who helps us deal with painful feelings. Love really does transform us. And as God is the ultimate source of love, turning to our faith can also help us deal with raw spots in a way that leads to positive connection. Reaching for God and finding reassurance in our relationship with Him offers us a path to feeling valued and special that soothes our vulnerability. When William is triggered by his wife’s apparent dismissal of his special efforts to please her, and this reminds him of the pain he felt when his parents withheld their approval from him, he turns to God in a moment of prayer. He draws strength from his faith as he is reminded how special he is in God’s eyes.
There are two signs that tell you when your raw spot or your partner’s has been hit. First, there is a sudden radical shift in the emotional tone of the conversation. You and your love were joking just a moment ago, but now one of you is upset or enraged, or, conversely, aloof or chilly. You are thrown off balance. It’s as if the game changed and no one told you. The hurt partner is sending out new signals and the other tries to make sense of the change. As Ted tells me, “We are in the car having this ordinary chat, and suddenly there is ice on the inside of the car. Like she is looking away from me out the window, her mouth in this taut line, and she is all glum as if she wishes I didn’t exist. Now where did that come from?”
Second, the reaction to a perceived offense often seems way out of proportion. Marla says, “We usually make love on Friday nights. So I was waiting for Pierre, but then I got all caught up in a call from my sister, who was upset. It was about a fifteen-minute call, I guess. Pierre came downstairs and went ballistic. We got into the usual fight. He is just being unreasonable when he does that.” No, it’s just that Marla doesn’t yet understand the logic of love and Pierre can’t quite explain his rawness to himself or his wife. He tells her, “My head says, ‘What are you getting all upset about? Just cool it.’ But I am already on the ceiling.”
These signs are all about primal attachment needs and fears suddenly coming online. They are all about our deepest and most powerful emotions suddenly taking over. To really understand our raw spots, we need to take a closer look at the deeper emotions that are key to this sensitivity and unpack them in a way that helps us deal with them. If we don’t do this, we will speed right past them into a defensive response, usually anger or numbing, that gives our partner completely the wrong message. In insecure relationships, we disguise our vulnerabilities so our partner never really sees us.
Let’s break down what happens when a raw spot gets rubbed.
1. An attachment cue grabs our attention and turns on our attachment system, our longings and fears. An attachment cue is a trigger that plugs you in emotionally. It can be a look, a phrase, a change in the emotional tone of an interaction with your partner. Attachment cues can be positive or negative, bringing up good or bad feelings. An attachment cue that irritates a raw spot sets off an “uh, oh” alarm. “Something strange, bad, or painful is approaching,” says your brain. Your alarm might go off when you hear a “critical” tone in your lover’s voice or when your partner turns away just as you ask for a hug. Marie tells her husband, Eric, “I know you are trying to be caring. And you are right. You do talk to me about my problems. And it’s fine, until you say, ‘Look’ in that tone, like I am a stupid little kid who doesn’t know anything. That is like a needle in my skin. I get that you are exasperated with me. You think I am stupid. And that hurts.” This is news to Eric; he thought they were arguing because she didn’t like any of his ideas.
2. Our body responds. People say, “My stomach churns and I hear my voice go shrill,” or “I go cold and still.” Sometimes the only way we can know how we feel is to listen to our body. Strong emotion mobilizes the body. It puts it in survival mode with lightning speed. Each emotion has a specific physiological signature. When we are afraid, blood flow increases to the legs; when we are angry, blood flow increases to the hands.
3. Our intellect, sitting behind our forehead in the brain’s prefrontal cortex, is a little slow. Now it catches up with our emotional brain, our amygdala, and goes looking for what all this means. This is when we check our initial perception and decide what the attachment cue is telling us about the safety of our bond. Carrie’s catastrophic conclusions roll out here on cue. She says, “When it seems like we’re getting ready to make love and you say you are tired, I get really upset. It’s like you have no desire for me. That I am just like one of your buddies. I’m just not special to you.” Her husband, Derek, says, “Can’t I just be tired?” Carrie answers, “Not when you have been flirting with me all night and setting up all kinds of expectations. Then if they are not going to work out, I need a little help dealing with that. I don’t want to just get stuck in being angry.”
4. We get set to move in a particular way, toward, away from, or against our lover. This readiness to act is wired into every emotion. Anger tells us to approach and fight. Shame tells us to withdraw and hide. Fear tells us to flee or freeze, or in real extremes to turn and attack back. Sadness primes us to grieve and let go. Hannah says about her fights with her husband, “I just want to run. I need to get away. I see his angry face and I’m gone. He says I dismiss him, but I hear his anger and my feet are moving. I just can’t stay and listen.”
All this happens in a nanosecond. Differing Christian views on his origins theory aside, look at what Charles Darwin had to say about the power of emotion and its role in the struggle for survival. Darwin wanted to see how much control he had over his emotions. He used to stand at the glass in the London Zoo where a giant adder was housed and try again and again not to leap back as the adder struck out at him. He never succeeded. His body always reacted in fear even when his conscious mind told him he was quite safe.
The relational version of this might be that in the middle of an open tender moment, I suddenly hear my partner make a critical comment. I feel my body freeze up. The registering of hurt and instant withdrawal probably took less than two-hundredths of a second (this is about the time scientists estimate it takes to register the emotion on another’s face). The tender moment is lost. Emotions tell us what matters. They orient and direct us, like an internal compass.
Can you pinpoint a time in your current relationship when you got suddenly thrown off balance, when a small response or lack of response suddenly seemed to change your sense of safety with your lover, or when you got totally caught up in reacting in a way that you knew would tie you into a Demon Dialogue? Maybe you are aware of a moment when you found yourself reacting very angrily or numbing out. Let’s go beneath that surface reaction to the deeper emotions and unpack this incident.
• What was happening in the relationship?
• What was the negative attachment cue, the trigger that created a sense of emotional disconnection, for you?
• What was your general feeling in the split second before you reacted and got mad or went numb?
• What did your partner specifically do or say that sparked this response?
For example, Anne, a young medical student who has only been with Patrick, a lawyer, for a few months, says, “It was last Thursday evening. We got really stuck. The bad feelings went on for days. It started when I was telling Patrick about my school assignments. How I was struggling. I just ended up totally freaking out. I got into that reactive anger thing that is my part of our cycle. Let’s see. I remember his voice starting to go up into that distant lecture thing he does. And then he said that he couldn’t help me if I was just going to get all obsessed and silly about it. That voice says danger for me. It turns a disagreement into some kind of crisis.”
• As you think of a moment when your own raw spot is rubbed, what happens to your body? You might feel spacey, detached, hot, breathless, tight in the chest, very small, empty, shaky, tearful, cold, on fire. Does this body awareness help you give the experience a name?
Anne says, “I just get all agitated. I react like a cat having a hissy fit. Patrick would say I just get mad. That is what he sees. But deep down, that agitated feeling is more like shaky, like scared.”
• What does your brain decide about the meaning of all this? What do you say to yourself when this happens?
Anne says, “In my head, I say to myself, ‘He is judging me.’ So I kind of get mad with him. But that’s not quite it. It’s more like ‘He’s not with me here. I have to do this all on my own.’ My need for support doesn’t matter. That is scary.”
• What do you do then? How do you move into action?
Anne says, “Oh, I yelled and shouted and told him he was a creep for not helping and that he could get lost. I didn’t need his help anyway. Then I stewed silently for a few days. Feels like I am drinking poison when I do that. It’s like I try to bypass my deeper feelings. And I decide that you can’t trust anyone anyhow. People won’t be there for you.”
• See if you can tie all these elements together by filling in the blanks below:
In this incident, the trigger for my raw feeling was __________________________. On the surface, I probably showed __________________________. But deep down, I just felt ____________________________. (Pick one of the basic negative emotions, e.g., sadness, anger, shame, fear.)
“The trigger is Patrick’s tone,” Anne says. “It’s a judgment I hear. Dismissal. I probably just showed anger to him, but deep down I felt scared and alone. I longed for his reassurance, that it was okay to be worried about school, to be unsure and to ask for his support. The main message I got about our relationship was that I couldn’t go to him and expect caring.”
Anne says, “I just can’t handle it when I let myself need him and tell him I need help and then he seems to refuse me. He even tells me I shouldn’t want or need that. Inside I just feel scared.”
• See if you can identify other moments when this raw spot gets rubbed.
• Is the raw spot you have described the only one for you in this relationship, or are there others? People can have more than one raw spot, but usually there is one main attachment cue that occurs in different situations.
• Think about your history. Did your raw spot arise in your relationship with your parents or your siblings, in another romantic relationship, even in your relationship with your peers as you grew up? Or is it a sensitivity that was born in your current relationship? Another way of thinking about this is to ask yourself, when you feel pain from your raw spot, are there ghosts standing behind your lover? Either way, can you pinpoint the hurtful response from a person in your past and see this as the beginning of the vulnerability?
Anne says, “My mom always told me that I’d never amount to much and that my sister was the only one who was going somewhere. I was on my own in that house. My dreams were irrelevant. When I met Patrick he seemed to believe in me. For the first time, I felt safe. But now when I perceive him as critical and dismissive when I need support, it brings up that old feeling of not being cared for. All that hurt comes alive in me again.”
• Do you think your partner sees this raw vulnerability in you? Or does he just see the reactive surface feeling or the action response?
Anne says, “Oh no! I don’t let him see that hurt place. That never occurs to me. He just sees me go berserk and gets ticked off.”
• Can you guess at one of your partner’s raw spots? Do you know exactly what you do to irritate it?
We are naturally reluctant to confront our vulnerabilities. We live in a society that says we’re supposed to be strong, to be invulnerable. Our inclination is to ignore or deny our frailty. Rather than face her sadness and longings, Carey holds on to her anger. “Otherwise I guess I’d turn into this weak, sniveling little needy person,” she observes. We fear, too, getting stuck in our own pain. Partners tell me, “If I let myself cry, maybe I won’t be able to stop. Suppose I lose control and cry forever?” Or, “If I let myself feel these things, I will only be even more hurt. The hurt will take over and be unbearable.”
We are perhaps even more reluctant to confess frailty to a lover. It will make us less attractive, we think. We recognize, too, that admitting vulnerability seems to put a powerful weapon in the hands of the person who can hurt us the most. Maybe our partner will take advantage of us. Our instinct is then to protect ourselves.
When we are the loved one, we are sometimes loath to acknowledge signs of distress in a partner, even when the signals are obvious. We are unsure what to do or feel, especially if we have no template for how to respond effectively. Some of us have never seen secure bonding in action. Or we don’t want to acknowledge or get caught up in our lover’s or, by implication, our own vulnerability. It always fascinates me that when a child cries we prioritize this signal. We respond. Our children don’t threaten us, and we accept that they are vulnerable and need us. We see them in an attachment frame. But we have been taught not to see adults this way.
The truth is, we will never create a really strong, secure connection if we do not allow our partners to know us fully or if our lovers are unwilling to know us. My client David, a high-powered executive, understands. He says, “Well, in my head, I guess I can see that always staying away from these big emotions, from my sadness and fears, kind of twists things. If I am hunkered down, avoiding every sign of upset from someone and listening for negative stuff so I can run, it does kind of limit how we connect.”
We want and need our lovers to respond to our hurt. But they can’t do that if we don’t show it. To love well requires courage—and trust. If you harbor real and substantial doubts about your lover’s good intentions (for example, if you physically fear your partner), then of course it is best not to confide, and you probably should find a therapist or even reconsider being in the relationship.
When you’re ready to share your vulnerability, start slow. There’s no need to bare your soul. Often the way to begin is to talk about the act of sharing. “It’s hard for me to share this…” is a great opening. It is easier then to go on to reveal a little of what you are sensitive about. Once you feel comfortable, you can talk more openly about the sources of the hurt.
This should open the door to your partner reciprocating and revealing his or her raw spots and their origins. Such disclosures are often met with amazement. In my sessions with distressed couples, the first time one partner really owns and voices vulnerability, the other usually responds with shocked disbelief. The mate has only seen his or her lover’s surface emotional responses, the ones that cloak and hide the deeper vulnerabilities.
Of course, simply recognizing and revealing our vulnerabilities won’t make them disappear. They’ve become built-in alarms, signaling that our emotional connection with key loved ones is in danger, and they can’t be easily turned off. This probably reflects how important attachment is to us; the data in a primary survival code aren’t removed easily.
The key emotion here is fear, fear of the loss of connection. And our nervous system, as Joseph LeDoux at the Center for Neural Science at New York University points out, favors sustaining links between fear alarms and the amygdala, the part of the brain that maintains a record of emotional events. The entire system is designed to add on information, not to allow for easy removal. If we are to avoid danger, it’s better to err on the side of false positives than false negatives. These links can be weakened, however, as you’ll learn in the next chapter.
But even just talking about one’s deepest fears and longings with a partner lifts an enormous burden. I ask David, “Do you feel more hurt or scared when you let yourself connect with those difficult feelings and talk about this stuff?” He laughs. He looks surprised. “No,” he says, “funny, that. Once I got that there was nothing wrong with me, that these feelings are wired in, it wasn’t so hard. In fact, it kind of helps to walk in there to that scary place and tie those feelings down. Once they make sense, it kind of takes the bite out of them.” As I look at him, he literally seems more balanced, more present in his own skin, than when he was busy dodging his fears and his lady’s “scary” messages. This reminds me of something my tango teacher, Francis, tells me: “When you are balanced on your feet, tuned in to yourself, then you can listen to me and move with me. Then we can move together.”
Vincent and Jane found that out, too. Vincent moves away and goes silent when things get difficult with Jane. “What can I say?” Vincent tells me. “I don’t know how I feel. I don’t know what happens when she starts to go on about how our relationship isn’t that happy. Jane wants to ‘talk it out.’ How can I talk about what I don’t know? So I blank out, keep quiet, and let her talk. But she just gets more and more upset.” We know that when our safe haven with a lover is threatened we get overwhelmed by a helpless sadness, shame about feelings of inadequacy or failure, and desperate fears of rejection, loss, and abandonment. The basic music here is panic.
As we discussed earlier, our attachment alarm system gets switched on by a sense of deprivation: we cannot gain emotional access to our loved one and so are deprived of needed attention, care, and soothing—the soothing that Harry Harlow called “contact comfort.” The second switch is a sense of desertion. This sense may emerge from feeling emotionally abandoned (“There is no answer when I call, no response. I am in need and alone”) or rejected (“I feel unwanted or criticized. I am not valued. I never come first”). Our brain responds to deprivation and desertion with intimations of helplessness.
Vincent has not been able to grasp and voice these emotions and ask for Jane’s help in allaying them, so they have become reactive “hot” raw spots that signal instant peril and call up his protective distancing.
If Vincent goes through and unpacks the elements of his raw spot emotions, what happens? He begins to focus in on what happens for him just before the habitual “blank out” response that Jane dreads so much. What is the specific cue for this “blank out”? Once he slows down and thinks a little, Vincent is able to tell me, “It’s her face, I think. I see those brows come together. I see frustration, and I know I am a dead man. And if I tune in to how I feel in my body as I talk about this, I feel jittery, like there are butterflies in my stomach, like I’m failing a test in school. When I think about what meaning this has, it’s that we are doomed. It’s hopeless. Whatever it is that she wants, I obviously don’t have it.”
Jane says, “And all that adds up to feeling what exactly?” Vincent calmly tells her, “Well, anxious is a good word.” And I notice that his face relaxes here. Even when the news isn’t good, it feels good to be able to order your inner world. Then he continues, “So if the next question is how does this feeling move me, make me act, that is easy. I just do nothing. There is no way forward that won’t make things worse. I just stay really still and wait for Jane’s frustration to go away.”
So now Vincent can describe the raw spot that gets touched in him and how it sparks off his inability to respond to his partner. He feels sad, anxious, and hopeless and tries to stay still with the faint hope that the problem will go away. He tells me that his emotions are “unknown territory” for him, so it’s new for him to tune in to them. I compliment him on his courage and openness and I chat with him about the fact that his shut-down strategy works just fine in many situations. But in love relationships, it simply alarms his partner and writes the next part of the story with a negative slant. We talk about where this raw spot comes from. He remembers that he was very confident with Jane at the beginning of their love and was able to sometimes express his feelings. But through the years, they have grown apart. Their distance was exacerbated when Jane suffered a back injury that left her in such pain that she could not bear to be touched. Vincent then began to feel less confident and more and more wary of negative cues coming from Jane.
Jane responds to Vincent, “Well, until now I never saw your anxiety. Not for a minute. I just see someone who disappears on me, and then we go off into that demon thing. It’s frustrating to talk to a blank, you know.” But she is also able to tell Vincent that she is beginning to understand how it’s hard for Vincent to put his emotional world together when Jane gets so mad so fast. Jane is then able to talk about her own raw spot and how she feels that Vincent has “deserted” her for the excitement of his acting career. When Vincent tells his partner, “I may be a big shot on the set but I still get totally freaked-out by your angry messages,” he is dealing with his vulnerability in a whole new way. He is more present, more accessible.
Generally in love, sharing even negative emotions, provided they don’t get out of hand, is more useful than emotional absence. Lack of response just fires up the primal panic of the other partner. As Jane tells Vincent, “I get so I just want to strike out at you to prove that you can’t just turn me off.” Vincent and Jane are now on the elevator going down into each other’s emotional worlds. Changing the level of the conversation clarifies our own emotional responses and sends clearer messages about attachment needs to our partner. Then we offer our partner the best chance to lovingly respond to us.
Let’s take some snapshots of Jane recognizing her raw spot and how Vincent helps her in the process. Vincent asks about the cue that triggers Jane’s frustration. Jane considers, then says, “I am just waiting for it to happen now. Watching for you to ‘forget’ about our plans to spend time together.” But then Jane gets sidetracked into all kinds of details about how this “habit” of Vincent’s started. So Vincent suggests that Jane try to focus more on how she knows when this is happening. What is the cue and Jane’s first take that something is wrong?
As Jane’s eyes close for a moment, I hear the emotional down elevator begin to ding. “It’s like Vincent looks distracted. He doesn’t focus on me at all,” Jane says, tearing up. If we quietly stay with our emotions, they often just develop, like a fuzzy image gradually getting clearer. Jane continues, “So I get this lump in my throat. I feel sad, I guess. My brain says, ‘There he goes again. Off to be by himself with his book. And here I am, by myself.’ We have this lovely life, lots of things. But I’m all by myself in it.”
Vincent, who in previous sessions reacted by talking about how much he had given Jane and how Jane should be more independent anyway, is now listening attentively. I validate Jane’s loneliness and her longing for loving contact with Vincent. Jane continues to listen to her feelings, reaching for the message in her emotions. Her voice goes quiet now and she murmurs, “I guess I decide then that Vincent doesn’t need me. He is always there but just out of reach.”
Now Jane’s voice is even softer, and she turns more toward Vincent. “If I don’t get mad, I feel a little shaky. I feel shaky and sad right now. And I don’t want to look at you. I am thinking that you must just be put off by this. Your work is your real love. I try to accept that, but all this fear and sadness just turns into bitterness.” She passes her hand over her face, and suddenly there is a defiant anger where just a moment before I saw sadness and vulnerability. “I don’t want to be here. Maybe we’d be happier apart.”
Oops! A flip into anger. It’s hard to stay with our more profound feelings. But Vincent is brilliant. He sees that Jane is struggling and helps her out. “So under the frustration, you are telling me that you are shaky and sad. You want to know that it is not all work with me. Okay. I’m not good at talking about needs. I’m just learning now. But I really do need you to stop with the ‘happier apart’ bit. I’d just as soon be miserable with you, if that’s okay?” Jane collapses in laughter.
They are on their way. They are learning to deal with raw spots in a way that brings them close.
See if you can each think of a time when you shared a sense of vulnerability or a hurt feeling with your partner, and they responded in a way that helped you feel close. What was it that your partner did that really made a difference?
Now see if you can agree on a typical recent interaction where you both felt disconnected and ended up stuck for a while in a Demon Dialogue. In this situation, who turned up the emotional heat or tried to turn it down and avoid strong emotions? Come up with a phrase to describe how you usually deal with more vulnerable feelings in difficult interactions and share this with your partner. Some examples: I turn to stone, go icy, get into battle mode, run and hide.
If you habitually deal with your partner in this way, it is probably because it seemed like the only viable option for you in past love relationships. How did this way of dealing with emotion work to keep the most important relationships in your life intact? For example, did your approach help to get a loved one’s attention or make him or her less obviously rejecting or unresponsive?
In the recent interaction with your partner, did you stay with surface reactive feelings or were you eventually able to explore and share deeper feelings? Share with your partner on a scale of 1 to 10 how hard it was for you to talk about your more vulnerable emotions. How is it to talk about them right now? Is there any way that your partner can help you share more of these feelings? Don’t forget: we are all turkeys in the same emotional soup, trying to make sense of our emotional lives as they unfold, doing the best we can, and making mistakes.
When you think of this interaction where you got stuck as a couple, can you each identify the cue that had you lose your emotional balance and spin into raw insecurity? Try to report this to your partner as a fact. No blaming allowed here. Anne says, “It was that I was weeping and you were just silent.” Patrick replies, “I saw your face. The hurt on your face. I felt so bad inside. I don’t know what to do at those times.”
There are only so many colors to the hurt that comes up in raw spots. See if you can use the words and phrases below to describe to your partner the softer feelings that came up in your recent interaction. If it is too hard to speak them, you can circle them on this page and show them to your partner.
In this incident, if I listen to my most vulnerable feelings, I felt: lonely, dismissed and unimportant, frustrated and helpless, on guard and uncomfortable, scared, hurt, hopeless, helpless, intimidated, threatened, panicked, rejected, like I don’t matter, ignored, inadequate, shut out and alone, confused and lost, embarrassed, ashamed, blank, afraid, shocked, sad, forlorn, disappointed, isolated, let down, numb, humiliated, overwhelmed, small or insignificant, unwanted, vulnerable, worried.
Can you share this feeling with your partner? If this is too hard to do right now, can you instead share the worst catastrophic result of this kind of sharing that you can imagine? Can you tell your partner:
When I think of sharing my softest feelings with you here, it is hard to do. My worst fantasy is that what will happen is __________________.
Can you ask your partner how he or she feels when you share this way? How does he or she help you feel safe enough to share? What impact do you both feel this kind of sharing has on the relationship?
Can you create together a new version of that difficult interaction you began this exercise with? Can you each, in turn, describe the basic way you moved in that dance (e.g., “I shut down and avoid”), and name the surface feelings that were obvious both of you (e.g., “I felt uncomfortable and on edge, like I wanted to get away. I just felt ticked off”)?
I moved in the dance by _______________ and I felt __________________.
Now we can go a little deeper. Try to add the specific attachment cue that sparked the powerful emotions you circled in the list above. Perhaps it was something you thought you heard in your partner’s voice. Then add the feelings that you picked from the list above to this description.
When I heard/saw _________________, I just felt ___________________.
Try to stay with simple, concrete language. Big, ambiguous words or labels can scramble this kind of conversation. If you get stuck, just share that with each other and try to go back to the last place that was clear and start again.
Now we can put all these elements together.
When we get stuck in our cycle and I ___________________(use an action word, e.g., push), I feel (surface emotion). The emotional trigger for my sense of disconnection is when I see/sense/hear __________________ (the attachment cue). On a deeper level, I am feeling _____________________.
What did each of you just learn about the other person’s raw spots? You rub these raw spots simply because you love each other.
In any interaction, even if both of you are paying attention, you cannot be tuned in all the time. Signals get missed, and there will be moments when attachment vulnerability takes center stage. The secret is to recognize and deal with raw spots in ways that don’t get you into negative patterns. In the next chapter you will learn more about how to work with these attachment feelings to de-escalate the destructive patterns we fall into.