Step Three: Pause and Reflect
“Human freedom involves our capacity to pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight.”
Paula decided to take a walk on her lunch break for a change. Maybe the fresh air would help clear her mind. She’d been on an emotional rollercoaster all morning—at one moment feeling irritated with her husband Ivan, and then questioning herself, feeling anxious and worried the next. She kept thinking about the conversation they’d had the night before. Well, it wasn’t exactly a conversation.
Paula had wanted to talk with Ivan about feeling disconnected from him. He’d been so consumed with his work lately that they hardly had any time together, and when they did he was distracted or too exhausted to do anything. She’d been feeling lonely in their relationship and hoped to connect with him and get back on track. But when they finally had a moment to talk, the conversation took a predictable turn, with Ivan launching into a monologue about how stressed he’d been with work and questioning why Paula didn’t seem to understand and was putting so much pressure on him.
Paula got a sinking feeling as she listened to him. She’d been down this road before. Whenever she tried to get through to Ivan about his work schedule and making more time for the two of them, he’d get defensive. Somehow it would get all twisted around and end up with Paula feeling guilty and apologizing for being insensitive or unreasonable.
The more Ivan talked the more frustrated Paula grew. She wanted to blurt out, “This isn’t about you! It’s about me! It’s about us! Can’t you get that?” But as she was about to voice her anger, she felt a familiar wave of anxiety come over her and stop her in her tracks. She felt afraid. Afraid of going too far. Afraid of what might happen. And then the doubts crept in. Maybe she was being unfair? Maybe she was expecting too much? He’s doing the best he can, she thought, trying to convince herself.
Ivan didn’t seem to notice Paula’s eyes begin to glaze over, nor did he sense the flame that was burning somewhere deep inside her. For that matter, neither did Paula. Not really.
Paula stepped outside, walked across the street to the park by her office, and sat down at a picnic table. She took a sandwich out of her lunch bag, started to unwrap it, and then put it down. She felt too unsettled to eat. She turned to look at the trees in the distance and thought again about Ivan. I’m always there for him. Why aren’t my needs important? Why can’t he put his work aside once in a while and make time for us? Her face grew warm and her jaw tightened as she thought to herself, Is that so much to ask?
Feeling a sense of certainty and a flash of determination, Paula vowed that she’d try to set the record straight with Ivan when she got home from work that night, and this time hold her ground. But when she pictured his face and imagined asserting herself, her chest tightened. The sense of strength she felt just a moment ago seemed to dissolve into nothing. In an instant, she felt like a little girl, afraid that something horrible might happen if she asserted herself. Why is this so scary for me? Paula wondered as she closed her eyes, trying to stay present with her fear, to face it down and not let it get the best of her. Then to her surprise an image of her mother’s scowling face came into view. The answer suddenly became clear to her.
A Ghost from Childhood’s Past
Paula’s old wiring gets triggered in her experience with Ivan. What seems to her like insensitivity and self-involvement on his behalf incites her anger, and with that, her early conditioning kicks in. The threat alarm goes off to tell her that she’s in danger, and she responds accordingly, battening down the emotional hatches and dutifully waiting for the storm to pass. Her old internal working model reminds her that healthy anger will be met with disapproval and disdain, and Paula shoves her feelings down just as her younger self had to do to maintain a safe connection with her mother.
Had Paula recognized what was happening, that the sense of threat that she experienced was based on the past and had nothing to do with the present moment, and had she given herself some room to explore her reaction, the tangle inside of her might have had a chance to unwind. She might have freed herself up a bit from the grip of fear and found the courage to try a different response. Instead she reacted mindlessly and followed the dictates of her now outdated internal working models. But as is often the case when we’re triggered, the buzz in her nervous system persisted as her core self itched to make itself known. The old way of doing things was not sitting right with her anymore. Something needed to change.
Finally, a curtain parted to reveal what’s been going on behind the scenes. A questioning and then an inward glance exposed the underpinnings of her distress, the origins of a fear that kept her from expressing her needs, that dissuaded her from acting on her behalf lest she risk destroying her most important relationship. At least that’s what her nervous system anticipated.
In a matter of seconds, the missing pieces of a puzzle were laid before her, essential clues that could help Paula unravel the mystery of her struggle and allow her to get to a better place. Will they register for her? Will she put them together in a way that enables her to begin to leave the past behind and bring a more balanced and integrated self to her present moment experience? Or will they become a passing thought and disappear in a cloud of anxiety and distress?
Insight and Beyond
In Step Two, our focus was primarily on making room for our emotional experience. We put thinking aside and worked to stay present with our feelings—allowing for them, attending to them, and moving through them. We went on an experiential journey that helped us reconnect with estranged aspects of ourselves—the feelings, needs, and desires that had been omitted by our early attachment programming. So what do we do now?
Having reached a clearing in the forest of our feelings, we need to take time to reflect on our experience and make sense of what we discovered. We need to step back, survey the landscape, and consider what we’ve learned about our emotional dynamics. We need to take the time to understand our emotional experience, appreciate its impact on us, and listen to what it’s telling us. And we need to figure out how best to respond to our partners to move forward in our relationships.
This is the work of Step Three, “Pause and Reflect,” where self-reflection—examining, contemplating, and appreciating your experience—is the fuel that will power your continued healing and growth. This kind of self-reflection and deep-seated understanding is very different from the thinking that we worked hard to put to the side in Step Two, as what follows below makes very clear.
As you know, insight alone doesn’t get many of us very far. We can understand all too well why we do some of the problematic things we do, but that doesn’t necessarily make it any easier for us to not do them and change our behavior. This is why I’ve been so focused on the importance of being with your emotional experience. I want to help you make changes from the ground up—changes that are rooted in your emotional truth and will deepen and strengthen over time.
But experience without understanding can have limited benefits. After all, how does any of us know we’ve had an experience, let alone learn from it, if we don’t pause and take time to reflect on it?
Reflecting on our experience has numerous benefits. By stepping back and looking at what got activated inside of us and thoughtfully considering what we’ve discovered, that reflection helps us reintegrate core feelings, needs, and desires back into our emotional repertoire, back in other words into our sense of self. We come to see more precisely how the internal working models of our past have controlled our present relationship experience and constricted our range of options. We’re better able to recognize emotionally vulnerable spots inside us that make us susceptible to getting triggered. Then we come to understand more clearly what’s been thwarting our development and relationship success.
As we clear away the static caused by our old wiring, reflection helps to shift and expand our point of view, enabling us to see ourselves, our partners, and our relationship dynamics more objectively. By finding the courage to be present with ourselves, accepting and reclaiming the feelings, needs, and desires that we had been avoiding, we gain access to a wellspring of information.
Reflection helps us further appreciate and understand our core emotional experience and more clearly hear the wisdom that comes from being in touch with our true self. We can then consider a more informed course of action, one that aligns with our intentions and values and helps us get to a better place in our relationships.
Reflecting on our experience also furthers our emotional healing. As we reintegrate previously disowned aspects of ourselves, new feelings can arise in the process. For instance, we may grieve for the self that wasn’t allowed to be, for all the time we’ve been held back from realizing our full potential. We may feel angry on our own behalf that our early conditioning kept us from having the kind of relationships we might have had. In addition, we may feel compassion for ourselves; we may feel a sense of accomplishment or pride for having done something that we’d previously avoided; and we may feel energized or excited about evolving and being able to do things differently.
As psychologist Diana Fosha explains, all of these feelings are signs that we’re healing, that we’re transforming, that we’re moving through our emotional experience toward health and wholeness.31 We’re honoring the truth of our experience, and in the doing, more fully integrating our newfound emotional capacities. We’re liberating ourselves from the constraints of our early programming.32 Our sense of self deepens, and the story of our life expands and becomes more coherent.
On a neurobiological level, when we reflect on our emotional experience, when we think about it and attempt to make sense of it, we engage in a process that links together different parts of our brain and enables emotionally rich knowledge to be organized, consolidated, and integrated into our memory system. In the process, our once rigid and restrictive, internal working models get revised and become more flexible. New information gets imported into our neural networks, and the negative feelings, beliefs, and perceptions of our early learning begin to lose their emotional charge. The reins loosen up to permit a wider range of emotional and behavioral options, thus freeing us up to be able to bring our full and best self to our relationships. Our attachment programming shifts in the direction of earned security and supports us in our development.
But downloading these important updates takes intention, time, and attention. If we don’t make a point of stopping to really take in our experience, we won’t reap all the benefits our hard work has earned us. As psychologist Rick Hanson points out, by reflecting on what we’ve learned—holding our felt sense of it in our awareness and focusing on it—we give the power of neuroplasticity a chance to do its thing.33 We assure that the updates our experiences have generated get downloaded into our neural programming. In short, we use our mind to change our brain.
I’d say that’s worth taking a moment or two to reflect, don’t you think? After all, what good is an update if it doesn’t get downloaded?
Thoughtfully considering the key lessons of our experience while remaining emotionally connected to ourselves both deepens our understanding and maximizes our learning. It gives rise to insight that is not cerebral but one that is firmly rooted in and borne out of our felt experience; the kind of bottom-up insight that can provide a sturdy platform upon which we can take the next step in our relationships toward something better. That’s a horse of a different color. That’s what we want.
Reflecting on our experience is not unique to Step Three. We make use of reflective skills all throughout the four-step process. When we step back and observe our experience, we are reflecting. We’re engaging our prefrontal cortex to help us take a look at and make sense of our experience. Moreover, the participatory-observational stance that is essential to our whole four-step process makes active use of different brain regions as we shift back and forth between experiencing and observing. In this step, we’re going to lean a bit more heavily on the reflection side of things. Simply put, having had an experience, you’re now going to reflect on it.
When we’re working the four steps in real time in our relationships, the amount of time we take to reflect on our experience and figure out how best to respond to our partners may be brief. For instance, we note that we’ve been triggered, recognize what’s at play for us, and respond from a mindful place. At other times, we may need longer. We might need some space to go inside of ourselves and attend to our inner wounds before we can engage with our partners from a more centered, adult place.
The truth is, reflecting on what we learn about ourselves is not a finite process. Rather, it’s one that can keep unfolding over time. After all, we’re not just reflecting on an isolated moment in time, we’re reflecting on how we’ve been put together, how we’ve been affected by our early experiences in life, and everything that came up for us in the process.
It’s a bit like going on a trip to a foreign country. We leave the safety of our usual routine and familiar surroundings and venture into a new and different world. It’s a bit unsettling at first, but it’s also stimulating and exciting. While we’re there, we have experiences that leave a lasting impression on us that linger in our mind long after we return home. We recall moments from our trip and the feelings they engendered come back to us. We think about what we discovered while we were there and what we discovered about ourselves. Over time, we realize more and more how our experiences changed us and changed the way we see the world.
That’s how it goes in this step. That’s precisely what we want.
So what can you do to get your reflective juices flowing? Staying close to your emotional experience, you put your mindfulness cap on, so to speak, and consider what you’ve discovered about yourself and what you’ve learned. You can ask yourself questions to help make sense of your experience and deepen your understanding. Then you put together the pieces into a narrative that helps to tell your story.
The View from Here
You’ve been on a journey of self-discovery. By recognizing that you’ve been triggered and going inside yourself to attend to what is coming up emotionally, you’ve made contact with a deeper part of yourself, one that you might have not realized was close at hand. Now as you survey the landscape of your experience, everything seems different. Foreground and background have shifted. Things may feel a little wonky and you may feel a little wobbly. That’s to be expected. In a way, the dust hasn’t fully settled yet. But mindful self-reflection can help you find your footing, and the Triangle of Experience can serve as a guide as you put the pieces together.
In general, the primary players in your emotional experience are the three corners of the Triangle: your defenses, anxieties, and core emotional experiences. By working the steps so far, the light of mindful awareness has helped to illuminate all three of them. What do you see now that you didn’t see before? What was going on inside of you that you weren’t aware of? How do you understand what happened for you? These are some of the reflective questions you can ask yourself to help you make sense of your experience.
They’re the same questions I asked Paula, whom you met at the beginning of the chapter. Paula told me about the experience she had with her husband and what she later discovered about herself by leaning into her distress and being open to what her fear had to tell her. Together we did the work of disentangling her feelings, first attending to the scared child inside of her, and then giving her anger, which was at the root of her distress, some room to be felt, moved through, and reclaimed. We then stopped to reflect on Paula’s process and what she’d learned through the work she was doing. As we looked back on the interaction she had with her husband and what happened for her emotionally, I asked Paula a reflective question, “What do you see now, that you didn’t see before?
Paula sat quietly for a moment, thinking, and then said, “Well I see now that I got triggered when Ivan and I were talking. It made me angry when he was going on about himself and wasn’t hearing me. But I’m seeing now just how much my anger kind of freaks me out and how hard it is for me to accept it. I mean, I get worried that something bad might happen if I push for what I want. I feel guilty, like I’m asking for too much, and then I start to question myself. Even though I know on some level I’m not being unreasonable, in the moment I get anxious and drop it. Or at least I try to. But my anger doesn’t really go away. I still feel frustrated about the whole thing. I still want something different for us. I just end up feeling resentful.”
In this simple response, Paula captures so much. She just described her Triangle-based relationship with her feelings. When her anger starts to emerge along with her desire to assert herself (the “feelings” corner of the Triangle), it’s scary to her and she gets anxious (the “anxiety” corner). In response to her distress, she tries to make the feelings go away. She feels conflicted, questions herself, rationalizes Ivan’s behavior, and then tries to let it go (the “defense” corner).
That’s the whole Triangle in a nutshell. Paula’s just had an up close and personal experience with it. But by observing her emotional process instead of being at one with it, she’s able to see what’s been going on for her. What was once unconscious is now in her awareness. She gets it now. Her anger and her associated needs to be seen, heard, valued, and respected feel threatening to her based on old internal working models, and they cause a defensive chain reaction that tamps down her emotional response and leaves her feeling fraught and unsettled. Essential aspects of her core emotional experience and herself get omitted.
But why? What’s so scary about asserting herself with her husband? Why is it so hard for her to honor her needs and stay the course? Given the work that Paula’s been doing to be mindful of her inner experience, the answers to those questions are becoming apparent. Paula can see that her fearful response toward her anger doesn’t just come out of nowhere. She now gets that her early experience in life has something to do with it. But we need to make this piece explicit. We need to make sure that her nervous system really understands that the threat no longer exists. We want the past to recede a bit so that Paula can get some distance from it, hear her core self, and feel more firmly rooted in the present. So we crank the reflective camera lens back to enable us to take in a wider perspective. One that includes the details and implications of Paula’s past.
“How do you understand your response?” I asked her. “Specifically, why do you think your anger feels scary to you? Why do you feel conflicted about expressing yourself and asserting your needs with Ivan?”
This is what Paula answered:
“Well, I always knew that my mother was hard to deal with when I was younger, but I guess I didn’t realize how much my experience with her affected me. She was like a ball of anxiety when I was a kid, always nervous and worried. Anything could set her off. She’d go from zero to sixty in a heartbeat, fly off the handle for no reason, and could be kind of mean at times. We’d get in these giant arguments about something so trivial. I just couldn’t understand why she was so mad, why she was yelling. I’d try to calm her down, but there was no getting through to her. No having a conversation.
“Eventually she’d just leave in a huff, go to her room and slam the door or something. She’d ignore me for a while and then act like nothing happened. No apology. No, ‘I’m sorry I lost it.’ No taking responsibility on her part. It made me so angry. I just wanted my feelings validated. But I’d end up feeling bad and guilty like it was my fault, and, the next thing you know, I’d be apologizing and trying to console her. It was so frustrating and confusing and basically had me walking on eggshells pretty much all of the time she was around. I just did whatever I could do to not to set her off. I just tried to be perfect and stay on her good side.
“I can see now how that made me feel insecure and afraid to trust my own feelings and ask for what I really want. It’s so hard for me to let others know when I’m upset. It’s like it’s in my DNA to not say what’s wrong with me, to force myself to smile and be okay, to act like I’m fine. I still struggle with that. Even though I’m an adult, I can still feel like a child, afraid of speaking up, anxious that I’ve done something wrong, that I’ve upset someone, afraid that people are mad at me or don’t like me.
“It’s especially like that with Ivan. Telling him that I’m upset is really hard. The other night was a perfect example. I felt anxious just at the thought of talking with him about how I was feeling, and then when I did and he reacted badly. I got triggered. I felt angry and wanted to assert myself, but I was scared. It’s like there’s a little girl inside of me afraid of what’s going to happen if I do. Like the sky is going to fall, and I’ll be all alone. And somehow, I end up feeling guilty and apologizing, like I’m a bad person or have done something wrong. Even though I haven’t. It’s just like what would happen with my mother. No wonder I cave.”
Wow! Paula is really understanding how her early experience in life has affected her. The buzz in her nervous system traces back in time to when, as a child, she had to contend with her mother’s anxiety and reactivity. How was she to make sense of her mother’s outbursts? What did she think or feel when her mother withdrew? Paula’s child mind assumed, as children naturally do, that her mother’s behavior had something to do with her. She equated her mother’s negative reactions with the threat of rejection and abandonment. To maintain some connection with her mother, she learned to suppress her true feelings, especially her anger.
In these dynamics with her mother, we see the origins of an anxious attachment style. Her mother’s unpredictability set Paula on edge, vigilantly monitoring her emotional cues so as to circumvent any potential discord. Consequently, Paula became overly sensitive to the feelings of others and less attuned to her own. Furthermore, her early experience created an internal working model in which anger, assertiveness, and independence were deemed threats to connection, and therefore had to be squelched. Accordingly, Paula unconsciously believed that anger on her own behalf was destructive and shouldn’t be expressed, that her needs were not as important as the needs of others, and that should she show her true feelings, she would risk being rejected and abandoned.
Fast-forward thirty years: Paula’s brain is still operating by the same unwritten rules; her internal working models are running the show and affecting her feelings, behaviors, and perceptions. Although she takes a risk and asks Ivan for what she needs, she’s acutely sensitive to his response. When he starts to get defensive, she understandably feels angry. But her old wiring kicks in, warns her of impending danger, and as programmed, she backs off. Instead of following the lead of her core emotions, she doubts herself, worries that something bad will happen, and feels guilty for causing problems. She feels but she doesn’t deal—just what she learned to do to be with her mother.
If Paula had been able to hear Ivan’s response without taking it personally and stay rooted in her adult self, or if she had been able to recognize where her anxiety was coming from, calm herself, hear and honor her needs, and then ask for what she wanted, they might have gotten somewhere else. But the past was unknowingly coloring her perception and depriving her of a healthier choice. She was seeing things through the eyes of her younger self, and as such, feeling threatened, powerless, and ashamed.
However, Paula is doing her emotional work; her perspective is shifting and changing. By reflecting on her emotional experience, Paula connects the dots between her past and her present. While it’s not news to her that her mother was anxious and challenging to deal with as she was growing up, she’s seeing, in real time, the effect it has had on her. She’s seeing how her early conditioning has stayed with her, and the subtle and not so subtle ways it shows up: How she’s triggered and made anxious by her anger, by her needs to be seen and valued, and by her desire to assert herself, and how she then reacts. How the unwritten rules of her internal working models prevent essential aspects of her emotional experience from being owned, fully felt, and directly expressed.
As Paula so beautifully demonstrates, spending time reflecting on and making sense of our experience takes such little effort, but has powerful effects. Let’s take a moment for you to do the same.
Find a quiet place to reflect on your experience thus far in your process. Think about an emotionally charged interaction you had with your partner, family member, or friend in which you tried to work the first two steps—recognizing getting triggered; noticing your defenses, and trying to put them aside; mindfully attending to your distress; going inside yourself and working through your emotional experience.
Recall how it went for you, what you observed, and what you discovered about yourself. Staying mindful of your emotional experience, consider these questions:
• What do you see now that you didn’t see before? What have you learned about yourself? What have you learned about your emotional dynamics?
• How do you understand why you got triggered? What do you recognize as a point of vulnerability for you that can set your early programming in motion?
• What aspects of you and your experience did not feel okay to feel, show, or share? In general, what emotions, needs, or desires feel threatening to your relationship?
• How did your past show up in your present? What early lessons, rules, and beliefs were affecting your current experience?
• In general, what aspects of your emotional experience have felt difficult for you to honor and reveal? How may you have not been honest with yourself and/or with your partner?
What was that like for you? Were you surprised by what you discovered?
Perhaps you found the questions easy to answer. Maybe some of them felt challenging. If an answer to any of the questions didn’t readily come to you, that’s okay. Being able to reflect on intense emotional experiences is a skill that can take some time to develop. Just allow the questions to linger in your mind and remain open. Bits and pieces will emerge over time, and the picture will flesh out and become clearer. Sometimes unexpectedly we have what psychologist Diana Fosha calls a “click of recognition” where some understanding about ourselves becomes apparent in a deeply felt way.34 We can see it. We can feel it. We know it to be true.
But mostly it will happen in fits and starts, so keep returning to these questions. Use them as a guide and allow for any others that naturally arise in your process. The main purpose is to make explicit what you’ve discovered about yourself and allow your awareness and learning to sink in.
As you were reflecting on your experience, did any feelings come up for you? Maybe you felt frustrated or sad as you saw more clearly how your true self had been held back or compromised. Maybe you felt badly for reacting as you had with your partner. Perhaps you felt vulnerable, a bit exposed, or unsure of what comes next. Maybe you felt relieved or hopeful that you’re growing in your understanding of yourself. Maybe you felt proud that you’re doing the work to turn things around.
These feelings are all part of your healing process. They’re a sign that you’re deeply engaged. That you’re honoring your truth and taking it in. That you care about yourself and your partner. Let the feelings come. Feel your way through them. Allow your experience to be rich. Rest assured, the work that you’re engaging in is taking you to a better, more integrated place.
Rewriting Our Stories
Let’s return to Paula so that you can get an idea of what this process can yield. The more Paula reflected on her experience, the more things made sense to her not just with Ivan, but as far back as she could remember. She saw, with clearer eyes, how her relationship with her mother affected her and shaped the ways she behaved and related with others throughout her life.
In particular, Paula realized why it had always been difficult for her to be assertive in her relationships and advocate for her own needs—healthy capacities that flow from being in touch with and able to make constructive use of anger. Despite being well-liked and having no trouble making friends, deep inside she worried that the other shoe would drop, that sooner or later someone would get mad at her and write her off.
Although Paula hadn’t thought she had a problem being angry—after all, she wasn’t immune to arguing or complaining with Ivan when she felt frustrated or upset—she was coming to see just how anxious it made her and how difficult it had been for her to trust and be direct about it. As she looked at her relationship history, she saw a repeated pattern, starting with her mother and then proceeding throughout her adult life, in which it had always been hard for her to hear, honor, and express her true feelings with her romantic partners. Worried about the possibility of things falling apart, she often second-guessed herself, let her needs take a back seat, and struggled with being able to say no or set limits. While she might complain, argue, or sulk in her efforts to express herself, ultimately it didn’t get her anywhere beneficial.
Overall, her relationships were characterized by a chronic sense of insecurity, frustration, and unsettledness. How could it be otherwise when all along aspects of her true self had been absent from the proceedings? Reflection was shedding new light on her history and a different, more nuanced life narrative was emerging for Paula.
As you reflected on your own experience in the previous exercise, you may have noticed that a story began to emerge for you as well: the story of your past, your present, and maybe even your future. That’s understandable. In fact, as psychologist Diana Fosha explains, the emergence of our stories is a natural outgrowth of the kind of emotional work that you’ve been doing, all the healing that’s happening as you open up to, work through, and reflect on your feelings.5
As human beings, we have a strong need to make sense of our experiences, our selves, and our lives. It’s how our minds work. We want to understand why something happens, how one event relates to another, why people do the things they do, and why we are the way we are. So from an early age, we create stories to help explain, structure, and bring order to our lives. Stories that link the past, present, and future together in a way that makes sense and provides meaning.
When we put our stories into words in a way that goes beyond logic and draws on all of our senses, a coherent narrative of our lives emerges. We make sense of our early experiences and how they’ve affected us as thinking and feeling come together to weave a life story that is well integrated and rich in meaning, understanding, and emotional depth.
Turns out, that’s a good thing. As research has shown, a coherent life narrative is both a marker of a secure attachment style as well as a strong predictor of one’s capacity to have healthy relationships. What these important findings suggest is that an attuned and responsive start in life with our caregivers helps us develop the capacity to move through and make sense of our emotional experiences. Simply put, our brains can do what we need them to do. The different, specialized regions of our brains are well linked, allowing various forms of information to be processed within and between them and stored in a fully integrated way, one that both reflects and promotes our well-being. That’s a good thing.
But for those of us who didn’t have an emotionally attuned and responsive start in life, that is those of us with an insecure attachment style, our capacity to process our life experiences adaptively is impaired. The different systems of our brains lack the kind of connectivity that would allow energy and information to flow within and between them and get organized, represented, and stored in an integrated way.
In addition, rigid internal working models constrict our emotional range and exclude aspects of ourselves from our awareness. Implicit memories, and all the unprocessed material they contain, remain locked in time, unavailable for our minds to sort through, resolve, and put in their rightful places on the “over and done with” shelf of our past.
It’s impossible to make sense of our lives truly with portions of our story hidden in the shadows of our unconscious. The narrative that emerges is like a novel that has sections missing. It doesn’t hang together. It doesn’t make sense. In addition, our story can’t get beyond the surface facts when we’re cut off from our feelings. It reads like an outline, void of any substance. Nor can we string together the plot points of our lives in a logical sequence when the emotional charge of unprocessed memories disrupts our thought process and throws us off balance. We can’t formulate a coherent life narrative, nor can we be a fully integrated and emotionally whole person.
But you’re doing your part to turn that all around. The work of the last two steps enabled you to uncover hidden layers of your story, and thus of yourself. By observing, staying with, and working through your internal experience, your core feelings, needs, and desires are becoming apparent and available to you. Implicit memories that heretofore have been covertly coloring and shaping your present moment experience are becoming conscious. Essential pieces of your story are getting uncovered and made explicit. Now with mindful reflection you can integrate them with what you already know and weave it all together into a coherent life narrative. In the doing, you not only help to shift the way you see and understand yourself, you also improve the way your brain functions.
That’s right. When done well, telling our stories changes our brains. By attuning to our felt experience, as we’ve been doing in our work so far, we help to even out the neural pathways between our lower and higher brains and foster vertical integration. Top-down and bottom-up lines of connection and communication are brought into balance. Making sense of our lives facilitates right-left, side-to-side, or horizontal integration. It grows and strengthens connections between the two hemispheres of our brain by bringing together the narrator function of our left brain with the autobiographical memory storage of our right brain.
The process of mindfully reflecting on, and making sense of, our lives can help us achieve the same kind of integrated brain wiring a secure attachment experience early on in life would have afforded us. We can update our internal working models to allow for more adaptive ways of being and can move our insecure attachment style toward earned security. We can free ourselves from the prisons of our past and bring our best selves to our relationships. We can become the authors of our own lives.
In the end our life experiences, regardless of how challenging or traumatic they may have been, are not as important as whether we’ve made coherent sense of how we’ve been affected by them. That’s where freedom lies.
So what do you need to do? Similar to what you saw Paula do earlier in this section, you need to step back from your present moment experience, put the pieces together, and tell the story that brought you to this place in your life. Reflect on what your early attachment experiences were like and how they affected your development. Trace the themes that run through the events of your life and find the connections that link them together. Note the repeated relational patterns that have followed you all the way into adulthood. Take the time to make sense of your experience and put it into words.
It’s not easy to tell this tale. It takes courage. As you look back in time, you’ll start to see the ways in which your needs were not met, the ways in which you may have been neglected or mistreated, and feelings can arise in the process, feelings that you have for yourself and perhaps toward your caregivers.
But by staying open and allowing yourself to honor and move through your emotional experience, you further your healing. You integrate the truth of your life, and a new story unfolds and settles into place; one in which you can see yourself more objectively and with compassion; one that allows the past to recede and enables you to land more fully in the present; one that reflects and supports your becoming emotionally integrated and whole.
Writing can be a useful tool in helping construct a coherent life narrative. If you simply reflect on your experience without trying to put it into words, you’re liable to skip over details or avoid particular areas without even knowing it. But when you try putting pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard, the blocks or gaps in your story are more likely to become apparent. You’ll notice when the words stop, when they don’t flow. You’ll notice when you become agitated and want to get up and leave. You’ll notice when you have a hard time finding your way.
These are helpful cues. They’re alerting you to something inside that needs to be attended to in order for it to be understood and articulated, in order for the block to be worked through, or the gap to be filled in. They’re keying you in to unprocessed issues, feelings, or memories lying under the surface. They’re pointing you in the direction of work that needs to be done. In this way, writing can help you see what you might not otherwise notice.
When we write, we hold ourselves in a more mindful way. We stay present to ourselves, waiting patiently in the empty space until we find our next word. We listen and care about what we say. If the words don’t feel right, if they don’t ring true or capture the essence of what we’re trying to communicate, we work to find the words that do. We become more intimate with ourselves as we endeavor to connect with what’s inside us and reveal our truth.
As psychiatrist Mark Epstein points out, this way of being with ourselves is similar to how an attuned parent is with her child.6 She tunes in and listens, she supports and cares. Her presence is calming and regulating. She provides a safe environment in which the child’s true self can emerge. When we write, we nurture a secure attachment with ourselves. Perhaps then it should come as no surprise that research by psychologist James Pennebaker has shown that expressive writing calms physiological reactivity, improves our sense of well-being, and positively affects how we connect with others.7
That’s all good stuff which you can now put to use in this next exercise. If writing is just not your thing, try talking into a voice recorder and transcribing it afterward. That’s likely to have many of the same benefits.
LIFE NARRATIVE EXERCISE
Make some time to reflect on your life story. Find a quiet place, free from distractions, where you can be present to yourself. Start by thinking about your current relationship experience. Staying close to your feelings, consider what you’ve been learning about yourself and your relationship struggles. Sit with that a moment. Take a deep breath and let it out. Notice how it feels inside of you.
Then when you’re ready, whether in writing, typing, or speaking out loud, tell your story. Tell it to yourself. Tell it as though you’re conveying it to a trusted other. Someone who you really want to know what your experience was like.
Look back in time and describe what your experience growing up in your family was like. Describe what your parents were like. What your relationships with them were like. Explain why you think they behaved the way they did. Describe what you had to do to adapt and make those relationships work. Take your time and allow room for your feelings. Allow the words to arise from a deep place. Feel your way through and pause when you need to.
Moving forward in time, trace over the events of your life noting how your early conditioning in your family showed up in your other relationships. Note how it affected the ways in which you think and feel about yourself. How it shaped your beliefs. How you see and experience others. How you’ve behaved. Note the patterns or themes that run throughout your relationship history up until the present.
Give yourself lots of room to find your way. Let one thought or feeling lead to another. Notice what memories come into your awareness. Welcome them. Take time to be with them and whatever feelings they may bring. Pieces of your story are falling into place. Stay open and allow the path forward to reveal itself.
Be gentle with yourself as you allow the words to come from a deep place inside you. When feelings arise, give them plenty of room. Stay with and move through them as you’ve been learning to do. Use the breath to regulate your experience so that you can remain comfortably within your window of tolerance. Allow the story to unfold. Allow your feelings to unfold. Allow the words and feelings to come together naturally.
If the next place to go in your story doesn’t readily reveal itself, give it time. Don’t stress about it. You can always circle back and fill in the blanks as more information arises.
If the going gets hard, if it feels like too much, take a break. You don’t need to muscle your way through it. After all, it’s a long story and needs time to be told. It’s also a living, breathing story; one that will continue to expand and deepen throughout your life. As you have new experiences, new realizations and insights will emerge that can be folded into the rich tapestry you are weaving. Do the work that you can do now, and then time and time again return to your story. Continue to tell it.
Through your process, try to hold yourself with care and compassion. Tell yourself that what you’re doing is important. You’re honoring your experience. You’re furthering your healing. You’re becoming a more fully integrated person. Knowing yourself in this deeper way will enable you to find the courage to be open to knowing your partner.
Honoring Your Truth
Taking the time to reflect on your experience is likely bringing you some clarity. You’re taking in what you’ve been learning. You’re deepening your understanding of yourself. You’re growing in your awareness.
With this clearer vision comes choices. Do you continue to stay on the path you’ve been following? Do you continue to let your life experience be determined by your early conditioning? Do you continue to deny essential aspects of yourself? Or do you take a risk and try something different? Do you shake off the trappings of the past and allow your authentic self to show up? Do you give your relationships the chance for something greater?
Chances are, you want the latter. Otherwise you wouldn’t be here. You wouldn’t have come this far. But understandably, the next step in your process can feel challenging. It requires you to cross a bridge into a strange new land, one in which you allow yourself to be vulnerable and more authentic with your partner. You’ll share parts of yourself that heretofore have felt off limits. You may feel unsure and not quite certain of which way to turn, but if you listen to your feelings, they’re showing you the way.
When we are mindful of our emotions, we discover their inherent wisdom. When we pay attention to them, we find the help we need to move forward in our lives. In simple and clear messages, our core feelings provide us with essential information. They signal to us when something of importance, something that matters to us, is at stake. They tell us what we need, what we want, and what we would prefer. And they organize and motivate us to follow a course of action that will get us to a better place. As Daniel Goleman writes in his seminal book, Emotional Intelligence, “All emotions are, in essence, impulses to act, the instant plans for handling life that evolution has instilled in us.”8 Our core feelings ready us to respond, and like a compass, point us in the direction we need to take.
By listening to our feelings, we sense what we need and how we should respond. For instance, when we feel afraid in our relationships, it’s telling us that our connection with our partner is feeling threatened in some way; we need reassurance and to regain a sense of security. It prompts us to reach out to our partners and find our way back to safe connection. Sadness or hurt tells us that we’re experiencing a loss of some kind, perhaps we’re not feeling valued by our partner. It’s telling us that we want to be seen and appreciated, that we need to be treated with respect, and it’s prompting us to express our hurt to seek comfort and care.
All of our core feelings operate this way (see Figure 29). All of them provide us with helpful guidance and give us an idea of how best to navigate our experiences with our partners, how to make our relationships better, and how to love. As couples therapist Sue Johnson explains, “Learning to love and be loved is, in effect, about learning to tune in to our emotions so that we know what we need from a partner and expressing those desires openly.”10
Throughout Paula’s story you may have noticed glimmers of her truth. It showed up when she felt distance in her relationship with her husband and wanted to address it. It was there when she leaned in and tried to talk with him. It was in the anger she felt when her needs weren’t being heard, valued, or respected, either by Ivan or by her mother when she was a little girl. And it was there when she felt motivated to make another attempt to express her feelings and needs to her husband and to find a productive way forward. On some level, she heard it, but her old wiring kept her from trusting and honoring it.
When we’re in a reactive state our core emotional experience gets distorted, and we can’t hear our truth. But by cultivating the capacity to be present with ourselves, we can move through our feelings and find it. We can do the work to calm ourselves, shift into a receptive state, and connect with it.
When we drop inside ourselves and stay with our emotional experience, allowing our core feelings the time and space they need, we can sense our truth. We can also feel it and get what psychologist Eugene Gendlin called a “felt sense.”11 Our body, or the emotional and physical sensations that we experience, key us into it. They let us know whether the choice we’re considering feels wrong or right for us; whether the action we’re thinking of taking is in line with our best self, the self we want to be. When we get ourselves back to a more emotionally centered place, we can hear it more clearly. Something inside of us clicks into place—we feel a shift, and we see the path before us.
As psychologist Diana Fosha explains, by connecting with our emotional truth, we align with our “essential self, our core self, the self that has been there all along waiting,” and we think to ourselves—this is me.12 We’re then able to respond from a deeper, wiser place inside of us.
Let’s take some time to practice clarifying and connecting with your truth.
WHAT’S MY TRUTH?
Take a moment to ground yourself. Settle in and find your center. Then recall a recent experience with your partner in which you felt triggered. If you’re not currently partnered, you might use an experience that you had in a past relationship, or one with a family member or friend. Try to look at it from a distance. What was going on for you? What caused you to get triggered? Recall the experience and watch it unfold. See it all the way through to completion. Let yourself land on the other side of it.
Looking back on that experience, what emotions were coming up for you? Beneath your defenses and distress, what were you feeling?
Perhaps, in hindsight, the feelings may already be clear to you. If not, that’s okay. Drop inside yourself and try to sense into them. Hang in the open space and see what materializes. Maybe you were feeling afraid, hurt, angry, or ashamed. These tend to be the feelings that get our old wiring activated. Or maybe you feel something else. Consider the different feelings and see what rings true to you. When you sense the truth of your experience, you’ll likely notice a shift of the energy in your body. Take a moment to sit with this awareness. Breathe it in. Let it be deeply felt.
Staying close to your felt experience, ask yourself then: What are my feelings telling me? What are they telling me I need? What do I want? What am I feeling motivated to do? Allow the answers to come from within you, from your feelings, not from your head. Take some time to be with what emerges.
Notice how that feels. Sense whether the answers ring true to you. If anxiety or nervousness starts to creep back into the picture, name it to tame it. Recognize that it comes from an old place. It’s an echo of your childhood, an experience that you already have lived through and is long over with. Tell yourself that your feelings matter and you are free to feel them now, unlike when you were a child. They’re important for you to listen to and take seriously. It’s okay for you to honor your truth. Nothing terrible comes from owning your truth.
What Truly Matters?
Once we sense our truth, we need to make good use of it. We need to lean forward and begin to put our feelings into words. We need to open up with our partners.
If the prospect of relating with your partner from an authentic place makes you feel anxious—and I’m guessing that it does—I understand. I really do. I remember what it was like for me when I started to push myself to be more emotionally honest in my relationships. Just the thought of doing so, of letting my partner, family members, or friends know when I felt afraid, hurt, or angry, made me nervous. It still can at times, though far less so. But—and this might sound odd—that’s actually a good sign. Our anxiety is telling us that we’re attempting to do something out of the ordinary. That we’re approaching something that we typically avoid. That we’re about to venture outside of the confines of our internal working models so that we can more fully inhabit the present moment. We’re taking a risk and anything that feels risky can make us nervous.
It’s also a sign that our relationships matter to us.
Deep inside, all of us want to have loving connections. All of us want to have successful relationships that are mutually satisfying. That’s what has motivated us to do all the work that we’ve been doing thus far in our process. But anxiety and fear can keep us from taking that next step and trying something new with our partners. Getting in touch with our relationship values can help give us the nudge we need to move forward.
What do I mean by values? Simply put, I’m talking about what matters to you. Not what you think should matter, not what others seem to think should matter, but what truly matters to you.
Think about it, deep down inside, what do you want for yourself? What do you want for your relationship? What kind of partner do you want to be? These are important questions. But if we’re honest with ourselves, chances are we haven’t given them much thought. While our relationships are the most important things to us in our lives, how much time have we actually spent thinking about how we want them to be?
In general, we think a lot more about what we don’t want in a relationship. But that can actually be a good starting point.
Over the years, when I would visit with my parents, who have been married for over fifty years, I would witness for the umpteenth time the tension that could easily flare between them; harsh tone that they could sometimes take with each other, and how defensive they could sometimes be. A classic example of what happens when two people—one with an avoidant attachment style, the other with an anxious attachment style—remain trapped by their early programming and never find a way to earned security. The experience was both disturbing and sobering for me. I saw firsthand how I might have ended up had I not found the help I needed to begin to address and alter my early conditioning. In a painful way, being around them helped to clarify and strengthen a personal value of mine which is to be someone who treats their partner with kindness and respect, and to be someone who is able to express himself in a sensitive and caring way.
While these particular values of mine might seem like standard operating procedure to some, they haven’t always been easy for me to uphold. Growing up in a family where bickering between my parents was a frequent occurrence did not exactly wire my brain to support an even, steady, and mindful communication style. Suffice it to say, cultivating such a way of being has been a work in progress for me. I’ve had to take an honest look at myself and recognize that some of the styles of interacting that I acquired early on in life needed work. In turn, I’ve had to develop and continue to practice the skills of emotional mindfulness.
Furthermore, while I’m bothered by how my parents would sometimes behave with each other, and though I don’t want that for my relationship, it hasn’t been enough for me to simply acknowledge that. I’ve needed to clarify what I truly want for my relationship consciously and then commit to making it happen.
You see, when we’re not explicit about what we want for our relationships, when we don’t consciously choose the principles by which we want to live, we don’t have a strong enough rudder to help guide us, especially when the waters get rough. Our old programming gets the best of us and our actions get out of sync with what we want for ourselves. When we get clear about what our values are, when we claim them and set an intention to uphold them, they can become a source of guidance and motivation.13
For instance, I don’t particularly like exercising, but I do it more days than not. Why? Because I value my health. Both physical and emotional. Especially as I’m getting older. I know that exercising improves my physiology, bolsters my brain chemistry, and may add some years to my life. At least, I’m hoping it will. When I start to contemplate not going to the gym, which happens pretty frequently, I get an uneasy feeling inside. I think about my cholesterol levels, I think about my mood, I think about my sleep issues. I think about what matters to me, and before you know it, I’m packing my gym bag. My values motivate me to keep going.
In addition, if we’re explicit about our values and then behave in ways that are not in line with them, we know it. We feel it. We get disappointed with ourselves. We feel regretful, guilty, or ashamed. Sure it’s not pleasant to feel these feelings, but that’s their point. They’re letting us know that we’re getting off track. When we’re able to stay present to them and listen to the messages they convey, they can be helpful to us. They prop us up, get us back on our feet, and keep us moving forward.
With all this in mind, let’s take a moment to consider your relationship values and what it might be like to let them guide you.
WHO DO I WANT TO BE?14
Take some time to reflect on what is important to you in terms of your relationship. Consult your deepest sense of truth and think about how you would like to be as a partner. If there was nothing holding you back, if you could be your best self, if you were free to wear your heart on your sleeve, what would that look like? What sort of relationship would you have? Ask yourself:
• What’s important to me in my relationship?
• What kind of partner do I want to be?
• How do I want to behave in my relationship?
• How do I want to relate with my partner?
• What personal qualities do I want to cultivate?
• What sort of a relationship do I want to have?
Carefully consider each of these questions. Be honest with yourself. There are no right or wrong answers, there is only your truth. Make you answers explicit. Write them down so that you can look at them and reflect on them.
Allow yourself then to imagine what acting in line with your values would look like. Think about the last conflict that you had with your partner in which you were triggered. If your best self had been leading the way, how would it have gone? If you acted in accordance with your values, what would that have looked like? What feelings, needs, or desires might you have communicated? What might you have said or not have said? What might you have done differently?
Perhaps it’s difficult for you to imagine. You may not feel as though you have a frame of reference to draw on. But chances are if you think about it, you have had moments where your best self has been in the lead. Look back on your life and think about it. Let your mind open up to remember yourself in all your goodness. Maybe there was a moment with a friend, maybe with a family member, a coworker, or maybe even with your partner. Recall what that was like. Let yourself acknowledge and take in that you have the capacity to live by your ideals.
If it’s still hard to imagine, think about someone you know who lives by their values in a way that you admire. Think about what they’re like. Think about what qualities they possess that you appreciate. Imagine them behaving in a way you admire and notice how you feel in your body. Let yourself feel what it might be like to be them. What it might be like to have these qualities yourself. Try imagining behaving in a similar way.
By imagining acting in accordance with your values, you’re actually shifting your internal working models toward healthy relating. You’re developing a frame of reference in your mind that you can draw on when you need it. You’re setting yourself up for success.
Let’s take a look at what happened for Paula. Through reflection, she could see that her anxiety about asserting herself was rooted in her past. While this awareness didn’t necessarily free her up immediately, it helped to put things into perspective for her. She understood that the distress that she could feel in her relationship with her husband was part and parcel of having developed an anxious attachment style and not an indication that she was in any kind of danger. Instead of getting distracted by it, which had so often been the case, she began to see how her getting triggered was actually a signal that she was having a core feeling, need, or desire that she needed to pay attention to. An essential aspect of herself that at one time felt forbidden was needing some help to be brought into the light, appreciated, and shared.
It wasn’t easy at first, but slowly over time Paula found the courage to honor the truth of her emotional experience and let it guide her. She found the courage to lean in and share more of herself with Ivan. In the doing, her truth became clearer, her sense of self felt stronger, and her connection with Ivan grew more secure. That’s what she wanted for herself, and that’s what she wanted for her relationship.
You can do the same. And like Paula, you don’t have to do it all at once. That’s not a requirement, nor is it a reasonable expectation. Stretching into the fullness of your being and sharing it with others is a process. So be gentle with yourself. Start slow and take it one step at a time.
Perhaps at this point in your process, you might just acknowledge to your partner that you’re feeling activated and need a moment. Or you might acknowledge that you’re feeling vulnerable and are having a hard time expressing yourself. That you want to be present and open but are finding it challenging. Or you might try to begin to put your feelings, needs, and desires into words. To express mindfully what’s going on inside of you, what you’re feeling, what you need.
Any of these options are good. Any of them are a healthy next step. Any of them will help to move your relationship in a positive direction.
• Reflection helps us reintegrate core feelings, needs, and desires back into our emotional repertoire.
• Reflection enables emotionally rich knowledge to be organized, consolidated, and integrated into our memory system.
• Thoughtfully considering the key lessons of our experience while remaining emotionally connected to ourselves both deepens our understanding and maximizes our learning.
• A coherent life narrative is both a marker of a secure attachment style as well as a strong predictor of one’s capacity to have healthy relationships.
• Mindfully reflecting on and making sense of our lives fosters healthy neural connections in our brain.
• Reflection helps to update our internal working models and move our insecure attachment style toward earned security.
• Our core feelings provide us with essential information that helps us see how best to respond in our relationships.
• Our relationship values can be a source of guidance and motivation.
