What’s it like to be conflicted in a relationship?

People who are conflicted are constantly thinking about the pros and cons of leaving and the pros and cons of staying. They continually question what they think and feel. As well, most of the time they are feeling pain and distress that varies from mild to severe. They try all sorts of things to improve the relationship—reasoning, convincing, pleading, buying things, going on holidays, adapting, adjusting, individual and couple counselling, etc. Some people blame their partners and some blame themselves.

When people who are conflicted, still cannot get their needs met, they often give up and resign themselves to the relationship the way it is. To endure it, they do many things to distract from the pain and sense of powerlessness. If there are children they will focus on them. Many people turn to their children and pets for love and affection because they cannot get their needs met by their spouse. They may work longer hours, go out often with friends, or spend more time doing hobbies such as sports, gardening, chess, music, video games,  and partying. They may avoid going to bed until their partner is asleep. If there is no love in the relationship they may experience grief and loss of ever finding love and happiness. They may numb the pain with affairs, gambling, drinking, and/or drugging.

 

The Pendulum Swing

Thinking about breaking up and breaking up are two different things. At one time, the pendulum swings toward breaking up. An unhappy spouse will think and rethink about breaking up and finally get to the point where action is required. To take the actions necessary to break up is very difficult. Taking action creates conflict and emotional pain. It evokes sensations of fear/terror. The pendulum swings back again which alleviates stress because the unpleasant uncomfortable sensations dissipate.

Most people are conflicted about staying in or ending their relationship at one time or another. Even people who remain married or in a relationship for the rest of their lives still go through natural developmental stages that bring into question whether or not to stay together. Couples that have developed a good working relationship usually can negotiate these times easily. Their relationship remains healthy and evolves to the next stage. However, couples who can’t develop a way to handle differences and resolve problems have a much more difficult time going through these stages. Their relationships are more likely to become unhealthy and get stuck at one stage or another. When relationships get stuck, one or both partners swing back and forth, like a pendulum, between staying and leaving.

 

PEOPLE WHO ARE CONFLICTED  SEND THEIR PARTNERS MIXED MESSAGES. Confused, their partners often get upset/angry or they only hear the part of the message they want to hear and respond accordingly.

 

The Quality of Sensations

Emotional swings evoke swings of sensations in the body. Sometimes these sensations can be uncomfortable or painful. Where do these painful sensations come from? How do they develop? Some people call sensations ‘emotional triggers’. These painful sensations come from traumatic experiences from our childhood, our adult life, and just life in general.

One thing about life is certain—there are ups and downs, good times and bad times, highs and lows, and thrills and chills. This pendulum is mostly about unpleasant experiences, but sometimes good experiences can be overwhelming.

 

Personal story:

I have always wanted to be a mother. When I was 29, I gave birth to a gorgeous big baby boy, (9 lbs,, 5 oz.). I was so happy to have a baby at last. When I was home with him, he was sleeping in his bassinet. I tiptoed to see him. He was sound asleep. I felt a wave of love rise up from my tummy and into my chest. It was so strong it scared me. Yet it felt wonderful too.

 

Decision-Making Approaches

There are different habits people develop when handling relationships. Some use logic and compare pros and cons (left brain). Other people are impulsively driven by their sensations and emotions (right brain).

 

A Logical Approach to Decision-Making—Pros and Cons

 

Story: 

A client came to see me about her intimate relationship. She had been married for 3 months. She told me how she chose her husband. She told me that she wanted a man who would never leave her. She made a checklist of attributes this man would need to have, that guaranteed he wouldn’t leave. It took her a while but she found the guy who checked off all the boxes and married him. 

As she spoke to me, she looked sad and replied, “He is a great guy but there is no chemistry between us. I don’t know what to do, because I know he will never leave me.”

She was trying to control the outcome. I pointed out to her that she was terrified of being alone but was ignoring it. She lived mostly in her logical brain and ignored and minimised the information from her sensory brain. She got the outcome she intended: she would never be alone. Adage: Be careful what you wish for—you may get it.

I worked with her to reconnect with the sensory/intuitive part of herself. During this exercise, she accessed a memory of feeling abandoned and terrified. I helped her process this unhealed trauma by accessing sensations, staying with them, and breathing through the waves. I supported her as she re-experienced the terrifying sensations of abandonment, which were driving her behaviour. It took several months.

One day I got an email from her cancelling her next appointment. She told me she had met someone. She left her husband and accepted a job in Thailand with her new boyfriend. I never heard from her again. I hope things have fallen together for her.

 

Impulsive Approach to Decision-Making—Sensory/Feelings

 

Story:

A client came to see me. She was in a rage. She had thought her marriage was fine, then recently she found out her husband had sex with an ex-coworker. She said she reacted by throwing him out of their home. She told all of her family and friends about what he had done and loudly claimed that she would never forgive him.

I worked with her about feeling blindsided and deeply hurt and ashamed. Gradually things settled down and as she healed, she started to reconsider. Her husband regretted his encounter, apologized profusely, and wanted to repair the relationship.

She realized that she still loved and missed him. They started work to repair their relationship. One of the aspects she found the most difficult was facing her family and friends with her change of heart. She deeply regretted telling everyone about the incident. 

Because the couple worked through things together, she found a way to let go of her hurt and their relationship evolved to a healthier level. However, she found her family and friends had a harder time letting go and continued to treat him somewhat differently.

 

Relationships are Good and Bad

Relationships and marriages are rarely all bad. When they are, there is no decision about whether or not to end it, it is a matter of, if it is possible, and if so, when. In very abusive relationships it may be dangerous to leave. Research shows that in such marriages a spouse is most likely to be harmed when he or she tries to leave the relationship. Children are often at risk during this time as well. 

Relationships may be a ratio of 80/20% bad to good, 60/40% bad to good, or even 70/30% good to bad. When an unhappy spouse thinks of leaving, what comes to the foreground is the grief and loss about the good in the relationship that they have to give up. No one wants to give up the good stuff, or the comfortable and pleasant sensations! Especially the sensation of feeling safe. They fear that they may never find it again. 

They often confuse grief and loss with love. That’s when the pendulum starts to swing the other way. As people begin to think again about staying, the sensations of grief and loss dissipate. They may continue to swing toward staying and again investing themselves in the marriage. But sometimes the difficulties in the relationship come to the foreground. They feel the pain of ongoing interactions that are painful and stressful. They start to dread certain times such as coming home and spending time together. They dread special times such as; Christmas, Thanksgiving, Valentine’s Day, and anniversaries. When it gets to be more than they can stand, the pendulum starts swinging back the other way. Back and forth. 

Sometimes the pendulum goes slowly back and forth. Sometimes a particular event or interaction may trigger the pendulum to swing quickly from one side to the other.

It takes actions to change this distressful pattern—actions that invest oneself again in the relationship, and either attempt to better the relationship or tolerate it the way it is. And, it requires actions to exit.

When people take action, often their lives go into chaos. The old patterns, routines, and habits are shaken up. While shaking up a stuck relationship is required to reorganize it is extremely stressful for all involved. During this stage, many people will reconcile, not because they want the relationship, but because they want to stop the confusion, stress, fear, and emotional pain. They long for the familiar even though that is stressful too. At least they know that stress—Better the devil you know, than the devil you don’t know. The pendulum swings back again.

Couples often break up and reconcile several times before finally making the changes needed to stay together. Some people change only when the stakes are high. In a marriage break-up, the stakes can be very high. Or, before they finally break up for good.

It is very difficult to take the actions needed to stop the pendulum from swinging. There are different styles of decision-making; logical, impulsive, passive, and active. Often people making decisions will swing from one extreme to the other, sometimes for years.

 

Personal Story:

I know I did this for many years. In 1987, after 21 years of marriage, I decided I had enough. Yet, it took me until 1991 to finally act upon it.

 

Bonding Versus Love

Couples often separate and reconcile several times before they make a permanent change. Many couples separate and let go of a relationship that is full of pain and heartache. Once they have deconstructed their old relationship, they come together in a new way that works for them both. Often, an actual separation is needed to fully let go of the old ways of being with each other.

Other couples reconcile because the sensations of being alone are too painful and scary. They reconcile, but they do not change. They pick up where they left off and go through another one or two cycles of reconciliation/breakup before the final separation.   

BONDING CREATES STRONGER RELATIONSHIPS. COUPLES AND FAMILIES THAT HAVE A STRONG BOND, ARE MORE LIKELY TO SURVIVE BETTER.

People confuse love with bonding. Bonding does not equal love. Bonding occurs from spending time with each other, sharing a space/a home and their bodies as well as doing activities with another person/people and families. People bond in hate as well as love.

As I mentioned previously, few relationships are all bad. Even if there is only 10% good we still have to give up the good, as well as the bad. Often couples do not realise this, and they are not prepared for it when they separate. It is important to grieve the loss of positive caring, comfort of familiarity, and love that there is still there. People often state they love their partner like a family member but no longer have romantic/sexual feelings for their partner. 

Usually, when partners separate they miss their partners because they are bonded, but they do not realise it. They will reconcile thinking they will try again, only to discover that the relationship has run its course. Then they separate permanently.

 

Managing Versus Processing

Unhealthy people manage painful sensations by blocking, distracting, minimising, drinking/drugging, etc. This prevents emotional healing and the painful sensations accumulate requiring more personal energy. 

Healthy people breathe through the painful sensations; they breathe through the waves of the sensations which ultimately create new neural pathways that transcend the painful ones, precipitating new/different sensations.  

When you experience creating new neural pathways, through insight, dreams, or just by breathing through the sensations, new sensations are precipitated and when you feel different you act differently.

When you let go of the outcome, things can ‘fall together’ in ways they cannot when you’re trying to control it.

What are we trying to control? We are usually trying to avoid feeling painful, unpleasant, terrifying feelings. But, it is not the feelings we’re trying to avoid, it’s the difficult sensations we are trying to avoid experiencing.

When people realise they can handle difficult feelings/sensations by breathing through them (processing them) instead of deflecting, blocking, and disconnecting from them, they can change in positive, healthy ways. They do what they want to do, and not do what they don’t want to do.

We have all experienced this kind of discomfort—starting at a new school, starting a new job, and moving into a new dwelling. At first, we experience discomfort and perhaps discombobulation. As we get used to it, we develop more and more neural pathways for the new experience, and gradually (sometimes quickly) we become comfortable with the change.

 

Personal Story:

I loved Vancouver from the first time I, age 22, set foot off the train at the Terminal Station. It was new and different but excitingly different. I welcomed it! It did not take long for me to feel “at home” in this strange, beautiful city.

 

How did we do that—feel at home?  We often have no choice about it, or we choose to make the change, so we accept the discomfort, probably by breathing through the sensations and dreams at night, knowing it will get better. This means we already know how to do it. We need to transfer this skill set to other decisions in life. Thinking about leaving a relationship or a job is one thing, and taking action to do it is another.

 

Trauma

It is usually the unpleasant sensations that cause us problems in our lives. Trauma, per se, is a problem for sure. When we go through difficult experiences and have healed from them physically and emotionally, we are wiser for having overcome the difficulties. The experience makes us emotionally stronger. It gives us a sense of agency—a sense that we are capable of taking care of ourselves (and others). Once we have faced and processed difficult sensations, we know we can handle them if they ever happen again. This creates a sense that we can do what we want to do and not do what we do not want to do.

 

Panic Attacks:  

A situation (real or imagined) in which you feel terrified, you experience sensations of fear so strong you fear you might die, have a heart attack, heartbreak, or destroy your life somehow or some way.

 

Once you have experienced a panic attack the sensations are so awful you never want to experience it again. So you try to avoid any situation, in which you might have one or even a lesser version of the sensations. This is trying to control the outcome (i.e., avoiding or stopping the feeling of terrifying dreadful sensations).

The problems stem from unhealed trauma that goes underground into our subconscious and festers there recreating variations of the original trauma. Mostly, these memories are hidden behind a protective screen of our psyche. What happens, is the person becomes developmentally and emotionally arrested at the age of the trauma. It is a survival mechanism to help our organism survive overwhelming, actual or witnessed events (e.g., a child gets scalded by hot soup on a stove, or a soldier witnessing atrocities while powerless to stop them).

 

Story:

A woman (age 35) came to see me. Her presenting problem was she wanted to have a family but she was unable to decide which man she wanted to have the family with.  She had been married for 15 years, and for 12 of those years, she’d been having an affair. She said she’d tried to leave her husband but had not been able to and she’d tried to terminate her relationship with her lover and had failed. She said, “I don’t know why I’m doing this—it’s against my standards and values. Can you help me?”

I recommended that we explore her history. When doing this, she recalled for the first time, a memory.

She was 3 years old and attending the funeral of her 5-year-old sister. Her father had accidentally run over her when he was backing out of the driveway. She was aware of two big people on either side of her as she looked across the gravesite and saw the pain on her daddy’s face. 

Somehow (I do not know how a brain can do this) this 3-year-old decided not to have children because it would be too painful if you lose them. It would not have been in a clear cognitive structure—this decision would be coded in painful difficult sensations.

Once we discovered the unhealed trauma, it helped her understand the function of her affair, what it was helping avoid made a crazy kind of sense to her. We targeted the painful sensations and healed her from the original event. 

Big changes happened. She left her husband. Went off with her lover. That didn’t work out. Then reconciled with her husband, and the last time I saw her she was 8 months pregnant with a big smile on her face.

People who are stuck in their lives usually have unhealed trauma from an earlier time.

Therapy involves recovering the memories of trauma, if possible, and revisiting and healing them. What happens is that the part of their (emotional ) psyche that has been frozen in time and place, grows emotionally older until it reaches their current chronological age. The person no longer feels like or acts like a 3-year-old.

 

What to do differently?

1. Embrace uncomfortable unpleasant sensations by breathing through them as they course in waves in your body. You will not die from them when you embrace them, although you may feel like you’re going to die.Avoid analysing or asking yourself why, who, when, what, and how—it no longer matters. It does not matter if they are real or irrational. What matters is that, in the here and now, you are feeling these difficult sensations. Just stay with them—breathe through them for as long as it takes. It may be a few minutes, hours, or days.See B’s book Let Go of the Outcome and Let Things Fall Together. Bea shares her story of how she handled a panic attack (page 1).
2. Use comforting slogans to help you through the pain/terror.

 

Personal Story: 

I remember after my divorce, when I first was on my own, sitting in my new home, that I was feeling so much psychological pain. I said to myself, “How can the world go on in its everyday way when I am in so much pain?” I know that is grandiose, but that is what I felt at that moment in time. I was ok with the break-up of my marriage, but I was in a lot of pain about the break-up of our family. This phrase helped me get through it.

 

 “This too shall pass”.

When we feel different, we behave differently. 

—Dr. Bea

 

For more information about processing emotions, see  Bea’s book “Let Go of the Outcome and Let Things Fall Together”. https://beainbalance.com/book