Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.
—Viktor Frankl
When a couple begins therapy, I ask, “What is it that is bringing you to therapy now?” Nine times out of ten the response I hear is, “We have a communication problem.” This description doesn’t really tell me much. It could mean that they yell and scream, or it could mean that they move through their home in stony silence for days on end. Author and couples therapist Dr. Anne Brennan Malec calls communication the oxygen in an intimate relationship (2015). It is the how of relational connection, captured in words, tone, and gestures. Communication problems, though real, are actually symptoms of much deeper issues at play.
By this point, you probably won’t be surprised to know that what’s most essential when it comes to healthy intimate communication is not some fancy set of skills. It’s relational self-awareness—the ability and willingness to look honestly at what tends to set you off in your intimate relationship and how you handle yourself when you feel upset. When it comes to communication, relational self-awareness grows when we ask ourselves questions like:
The quote from Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl that opens this lesson captures an essential truth about communication—there is always a space between stimulus and response. Always. The stimulus is that thing out there that feels irritating, disappointing, or infuriating—the wet towel on the bathroom floor, the text message that seems awfully snippy, or the partner who saunters in thirty minutes late with no apology. The response is our reaction—what we do about that thing out there. We have zero control over the stimulus, but we have 100 percent control over the response.
This truth is simple in concept, but it is very difficult in practice. When someone does something that feels irritating, we tend to react quickly (think road rage). When that someone is our intimate partner, with whom the stakes are so high, our response can happen in the blink of an eye, and before we know it, we have done or said something that we will soon regret and that makes a situation go from bad to awful. It’s hard work being human! We like to think of ourselves as evolved and sophisticated, yet those who dedicate their lives to the study of the human brain know that despite the brain’s amazing complexity, we can shift from sophisticated to primitive pretty darn quickly.
The part of our brain called the limbic system, also known as the emotional brain, has been critical to the survival of our species. It is expert at making rough-and-dirty, instantaneous assessments of situations in order to keep us alive. It has basically two modes: fight or flight. When describing this part of the brain, therapist and researcher Dr. Dan Siegel uses this analogy: You are walking in the woods when, out of the corner of your eye, you see something that could be a stick or could be a snake. Your emotional brain makes a split-second assessment of possible danger, your body shifts into fight-or-flight mode, and you jump out of the way. Phew! Your emotional brain made a decision before you could assess possible responses, weigh pros and cons of each, and select a next step—a process that would have proven deadly had that object you saw been a snake. So thank goodness for the emotional brain.
Simple fight or flight is lifesaving in the deep woods, but it can be love-destroying in the family room. Responding in this rough-and-dirty way to our intimate partners, by either attacking (fight) or withdrawing (flight), doesn’t promote closeness or safety. Fortunately, we have been blessed with a cerebral cortex, also known as the new mammalian brain, and it is quite sophisticated. One part of the cerebral cortex, the prefrontal cortex, is located right behind the center of the forehead, the area spiritual teachers call the “third eye.” The prefrontal cortex, which is not fully wired up until we are twenty-five years old, can do a whole lot more than fight or flee. This part of the brain guides higher-order skills like empathy, compassion, wisdom, discernment, choice, and impulse control.
When we are processing the world through the prefrontal cortex, we are on the “high road.” When we are processing the world through the limbic system, we are on the “low road.” When faced with that infuriating stimulus, we are at risk of responding with our emotional brain in the blink of an eye, driving off the prefrontal cortex–guided high road and landing squarely on the limbic-guided low road, never even noticing the precious space between stimulus and response. The shift has happened. An openhearted, compassionate person becomes a warrior, just like that.
Careening down the low road, at the mercy of your limbic system, you are in fight-or-flight mode, desperately trying to manage uncomfortable feelings of hurt, irritation, and/or anger. Your fight-or-flight behavior is your self-protective survival strategy (Sheinkman and Fishbane 2004)—behavior that is designed to manage painful emotions. Generally speaking, there are two kinds of survival strategies—volume up and volume down (Johnson 2008). When distressed, some of us resort to turning the volume up with fight-based survival strategies, and others of us resort to turning the volume down with flight-based survival strategies. Both kinds of survival tactics attempt to keep us safe—but with troubling consequences.
Those whose instinct is to stay and fight employ volume-up survival strategies, ones that involve getting louder or more extreme in response to feeling upset and threatened. Volume-up survival strategies include:
In the extreme, volume-up strategies can include hitting (your partner, yourself, or something like a wall). When people yell as part of a volume-up strategy, in addition to their voice becoming louder, their words tend to become “bigger” and more severe (“you always” or “you never”). They may move from talking about this particular incident to talking about all the times they have felt disrespected, hurt, or betrayed in the relationship. Therapists sometimes call that kitchen sinking—bringing everything into the conversation, including the kitchen sink.
My client, Tess, has a black belt in volume-up survival strategies! One time, she and her boyfriend, Devon, were at a party, drinking, mingling, and dancing. They became separated at some point, and Tess couldn’t find Devon anywhere. After looking for ten minutes, she found him—on the back porch talking with a very attractive woman. Tess approached Devon and told him it was time to go. As they walked home, Tess let Devon have it. “I cannot believe you. Who the hell was that? You are way out of bounds. How could you embarrass me like that?” And on and on. Her limbic system was in the driver’s seat, and she had the volume turned way up.
In contrast, volume-down survival strategies involve getting quieter in order to cope with feeling triggered and include:
Volume-down strategies are a different way of taking yourself out of a painful moment. Perhaps you withdraw because you are hurting too badly to stay present in the face of so much pain. Perhaps you withdraw in order to hurt the other person. Your behavior communicates, “I don’t know how to tell you about my pain with words, so I will show you with my actions.”
Note that removing yourself from a painful situation in order to calm down and decide how you want to proceed is not the same as using a volume-down self-protective survival strategy. This helpful strategy is called pressing pause. More on that later.
Return for a moment to the example of Tess and Devon and imagine that rather than being prone to volume-up survival strategies, Tess is prone to volume-down survival strategies. Here’s how the walk home may have looked: As they walked, Devon reached for Tess’s hand but Tess pulled away. Devon asked Tess what was wrong, and Tess mumbled, “I’m fine. Just tired.” When they got home, Tess remained quiet, put on her PJs, and got in bed without saying good-night.
Our survival strategies tend to arise within our family context. The early classroom of the family shows us so much about how to handle the inevitable differences that emerge when lives entwine in love. Stimulus. Space. Response. Self-awareness grows when we ask ourselves questions like:
Some of us use self-protective survival strategies that mirror what we saw growing up. For others, memories of a parent who was prone to fits of rage, for example, create an urge to behave in exactly the opposite way, out of fear of becoming that parent. The desire to break the legacy is noble; however, turning 180 degrees is rarely the best option. In this case, 180 degrees from raging requires shutting down and disengaging from self and other. The consequence of tamping down emotions is steep and likely creates disconnection from self, loss of vitality, and emotional numbness. While it is certainly understandable to never want to become what you feared as a child, commit yourself to finding a shade of gray between rage and suppression. The work we are doing here will support your process.
Embracing a brave and deep way of loving yourself and others requires curiosity about what else is possible. Growing beyond fighting or fleeing takes guts. Motivation to change sometimes can be found by recalling how your parents’ use of survival strategies felt to you as a kid. Helping my clients remember how lonely they felt when their mom disappeared into her room in obvious but unspoken pain, or how frightened they felt when their dad yelled, can provide powerful motivation to claim healthier ways to handle big feelings. The key question is this: what would have been different for you if that parent had learned to honor the space between stimulus (whatever upset him or her) and response (yelling or hiding)?
When something happens and emotions come rushing in, you are at a fork in the road with multiple possibilities ahead. The first step, and it’s a huge step, is pressing pause. Pressing pause gives you the chance to remember that something beyond fighting or fleeing exists. Pausing is an adaptive time-out that allows you to claim some stillness and some time. When you pause, you commit yourself to not talking, texting, calling, or otherwise acting…yet. In your pause, you may choose to go into a separate space, especially if you and your partner were in the same room when the incident occurred. Here are some ideas to keep in mind:
If we all committed ourselves to pressing pause, the world would be a very different place. Reality shows would have to reinvent themselves. Viewers watch The Real Housewives of because volume-up self-protective survival strategies, while awful for intimate relationships, apparently make for great TV. Much of the suffering that happens in relationships, intimate and otherwise, changes and dissolves when we press pause.
Committing yourself to just this first step is huge, and when you are able to do it, I invite you to celebrate! Growing your ability to notice you are upset and pause before responding is hard and brave work for a number of reasons. First, the stuff that sets you off is likely related to your core issues, meaning it’s old and deep. Second, taking a pause requires you to win a battle over your biology. Your emotional brain is much “older” in an evolutionary sense than your wise, flexible prefrontal cortex, so taking a pause requires a newer and more fragile part of your brain to conquer an ancient warrior. Third, woven into the very nature of feeling upset and reactive is a sort of entitlement and arrogance. When upset, we tend to believe that the situation demands an immediate response and that our first response is, in fact, the best response. Lastly, we live in a world that moves at lightning speed, so it makes sense that we tend to think that a fast response is a better response. Saying that someone can really “think on her feet” is a compliment. I think that we should instead value the ability to say, “This is important, so I want to take some time before I respond.”
Volume-up survival strategies can seem so compelling because the situation before us feels out of control, and therefore we feel out of control. We are uncomfortable, so we want to act on our environment—to do something that makes us feel “in control” again. But taking a pause opens up the possibility that, rather than being a victim of our reactivity and our environment, we can claim some real power—power over ourselves, power to choose how we want to respond (Fishbane 2013). Taking a pause is the true way to gain control. In the next lesson, we will talk about how you can choose to respond once you have gained the power of choice.
Before ending this lesson, I want to include a thought about reactive breakups. Breaking up with your partner in the midst of a painful, awful conflict is the outer edge of a volume-down self-protective survival strategy. If the pain feels too great, ending the relationship may seem like the only way to stop the hurt. However, discernment is warranted. Reactive breakups that happen in the throes of a fight-or-flight response carry hidden risks. Even as you are attempting to stop the pain, you may create additional pain. Calling it quits as a means of self-protection may make you more likely to reengage in the relationship once the strong feelings have passed, allowing the same old conflict pattern to continue: break up, make up, fight, retreat, repair, reinjure. This dance is exhausting for everyone involved. The dance perpetuates disconnection from oneself, and the dance erodes trust between partners.
Reactive flight-based breakups also tend to kick up so much dust that the deeper self-learning is lost. As the saying goes, “You bring yourself with you.” This means there is risk of repeating this same pattern in your next relationship. If and when old drama replays in a new relationship, you certainly deserve compassion, and the opportunity for learning and healing is always there. However, because self-awareness changes old patterns, it is empowering to say, “I will no longer hide from myself. Love is a classroom, and I want to access the learning housed within my pain.” It takes great courage to dive into the pain that hides beneath flight, to hold awareness for the old stories that fuel the urge to run away. Those old stories may be quite tender: I am worthless… I am incapable of loving someone… I am damaged beyond repair. These old stories, like desperately sad children, need compassion and tender loving care.
The decision to stay or leave is separate and apart from the quiet internal work of honoring the pain beneath your self-protective behavior. Although running may provide relief in the moment, if you can stay present with the pain beneath the urge to flee, you are more likely to ultimately make a choice that is empowered instead of reactive. To grow like this, you must trust that no matter what the other person is doing, saying, or being, it is always of great value to look at the aspect of yourself that is being emotionally stirred. Study your reactivity. What is the old story about yourself that needs to be brought into the light of love? From this quiet place of deep friendship with yourself, the decision to stay or go changes. Rather than a need to hang on, to escape, or to punish the other person, you can make an empowered choice based on the value of this relationship in your life.
When upset, we are prone to sprinting past the precious and precarious space between stimulus and response, yet freedom blossoms when we take ourselves into our own power.
Volume Up and Volume Down
Look back at the lists of survival strategies (in the section “In Battle”). Write down the specific ones you tend to use when you are upset. (Alternatively, download the list from http://www.newharbinger.com/35814 and circle the responses you commonly have.) When you become reactive to someone else’s words or behaviors (the stimulus), are you prone to fighting or fleeing (response)?
Take note of how you feel as you work on naming your patterns. If you feel defensive or judgmental, try to shift into a place of compassionate curiosity, knowing that, as you do, you are sowing the seeds of transformation.
The Apple and the Tree
Now refer to the same list of behaviors and, with different colored pens, write down or circle the survival strategies used by the adults in your family of origin. Reflect on the overlaps and the differences. How are your fight-or-flight behaviors similar to or different from the ones you saw the grown-ups in your home use when you were growing up? To what extent did your parents’ conflict style create the roots of your self-protective survival strategies?
Pressing Pause
Commit to the practice of pressing pause when you feel yourself starting to shift from calm and open to fight-or-flight mode. Try the ideas below and see what works best for you. (The “Guide for Moving from Reactivity to Intimacy” at http://www.newharbinger.com/35814 has a list you can keep handy when you need to strategize a helpful response).