Unfortunately, today’s media pigeonholes the partner with the “lower” sex drive as dysfunctional. Couples seek out therapy wanting to “fix” the person with the “lower” drive.
But the idea of “fixing” can actually further that person’s sense of feeling like a non-sexual person.
Mismatched Desire
What if I told you that when it comes to mismatched desire, no one needs to be “fixed”?
Let me break down the latest research on understanding libido to help you better understand your personal sex drive and that of your partner.
What We Used to Believe 📖
For many decades, we thought that you needed desire to have sex.
The model looked something like this:
Desire → Arousal → Climax → Rest
Desire leads to arousal, which leads to climax. Then the body returns to a state of rest.
So, according to this model, if you don’t have desire, you can’t become aroused, yadayadayada…
And thanks to the pioneering work and research of Emily Nagoski, Ph.D. who wrote the book Come As You Are, we now have research that helps us better understand how desires differ and why.
As I break this down for you, think about how desire shows up for you.
Think about your partner.
Think about the areas that you feel stuck, hurt, confused and frustrated with desire and sex.
What We Believe Now 🧠
Nagoski’s work shows us that there isn’t just one kind of desire. It’s not a situation where you either have it or you don’t. Desire varies from men to women and it varies within gender as well.
In her research, she identified 3 types of desire: Spontaneous, Responsive and Contextual.
Let’s look at each one and see which applies to you.
Three Types of Sexual Desire ⭐️
Spontaneous desire means that desire shows up instantaneously.
Seventy-five percent of men experience spontaneous desire, 25% of men don’t.
Only 15% of women experience instant desire, whereas 85% of women don’t.
Look at those statistics again. They’re important.
In this description, spontaneous = instant. Sex is merely mentioned or initiated, and desire instantly shows up, ready to go.
Responsive Desire means exactly how it sounds.
This refers to desire that grows in response to some form of stimulation.
When something sexy happens, desire grows. Five percent of men and 30% of women experience responsive desire.
So, if you don’t necessarily initiate sex or think much about it, but tend to respond to your partner’s advances, you may have responsive desire.
Contextual Desire means that sexual desire is dependent on the circumstances and the environment.
Even if you feel stimulated, if the circumstances and the environment don’t work for you, your desire cannot fully show up.
This might help explain why you lack desire when the kids are sleeping in the next room, you had a hard day at work or you feel tired.
For you, context is everything.
Nagoski found that most people, regardless of gender, fall within a blend of responsive and contextual desire, but for some, desire can feel spontaneous, even though it may not be.
They may not realize that the other factors all fell into place in order for their desire to show up “instantaneously”.
Sexual Desire and You 💫
We typically love sharing this information in our couples therapy sessions because it generates so many A-HA! reactions.
Finally, couples can begin to make sense of their experience and better understand each other.
Information like this helps the “lower desire” partner remember that they are capable of desire, lust and erotic expression.
It also helps the “spontaneous” desire partner depersonalize the perceived lack of desire in that partner.
It makes room for us to consider that there is no “right” or “wrong” way to experience desire.
It’s just different for everybody.
So often, as we’ve evolved from being pre-adolescents to teens to adults, we didn’t get the right information about sex.
No one really taught us. We grew into our adult bodies and entered adult romantic relationships lacking critical information!
One of the joys of being a relationship and sex therapist is that we get to set the record straight.
You’re never too old and it’s never too late to get solid, clear, accurate sex education.So which types of desire do you and your partner experience?
Love starts with you. ❤️
Unfortunately, many couples experience divorce before they actually formally divorce.
Divorce is often the result of a silent separation that happens over many years. It creeps in slowly and quietly. No specific trauma required.
In fact, it can happen when couples don’t practice the most fundamental aspects of loving:
Intimacy – genuine care for the welfare of the other, mutually sharing thoughts and feelings, being supportive, practicing empathy
Passion – demonstrating attraction, desire and physical connection through affection and sexual exchanges
Commitment – attending to the relationship in a conscious, mindful way on a consistent basis
It all comes back to this article where we learned about Sternberg’s Triangular Theory of Love.
Are You in a Spiritual Divorce?
In her book, Learning to Love Yourself, author Sharon Wegscheider-Cruse offers the following symptoms as signs that you may be in a spiritual divorce:
Habitual sadness in the couple – low energy
Mutual sentiments of boredom and emptiness
Indifference to each other’s problems or dreams
Frequent coldness or avoidance in sexual encounters
Lack of small courtesies and politeness
Climate of mutual distrust
More confidence in someone outside the relationship than with each other
Communication routine and superficial
Frequent feelings of being alone or misunderstood
Insults and sarcasm and a discomfort with healthy anger
Much avoidance and littleconfrontation
Overbusy and chaotic social or professional life
Loss of capacity for play and joy
An atmosphere of the “violence of silence” in the home
Notice how many behaviors from this list tie right back to the Triangular Theory of Love.
Passivity, Disengagement and Loss of Interest
What stands out to me in the spiritual divorce is not so much what’s done but what’s not done. This list reflects a couple that has lost interest in each other, who engage passively, lack meaningful dialogue or experiences, live parallel lives, avoid each other and feel lonely even though they share a life together.
In modern love, it’s easy for this to happen, even to couples that were once incredibly close.
Modern-day couples live with unprecedented demands, especially in today’s climate of managing life during a global pandemic along with our charged political climate.
Even in moments where you might feel like you can relax, these issues sit beneath the surface. They’re with you on every shopping trip, school drop-off, family event, work engagement and social media feed.
It’s hard for our bodies and minds to drop into real relaxation. It’s hard to have the energy to be interested in your partner’s day. Life feels hard right now.
If You Find Yourself in a Spiritual Divorce
If you’ve read the list above and can check many of the statements, please don’t panic. You can find your way back to a more connected, loving relationship. It’s not too late.
Here’s a great exercise to try with your partner.
Time Machine
Set aside an hour on a Friday or Saturday night
Make tea or cocktails with a snack
Start to go back in time and remember when you first met
Talk about that day/night
Who approached who?
What attracted you to each other?
What was your first date like? First kiss?
What felt fun and light back then?
What individual hobbies were you into?
How did you like to spend your time as a couple?
As you go back in time, notice how it feels to remember. What do you miss?
What are the qualities that you want to bring back to your life now?
What matters to you most?
How can you make some changes?
What are you both willing to commit to?
Hug often as the night unfolds
You Can Reset and Restart
Finding your groove again as a couple doesn’t always have to require grand gestures. You don’t have to take a vacation somewhere to find each other, although vacations are certainly nice.
Sometimes, a few meaningful conversations can get the ball rolling. But talk isn’t enough.
You have to follow through with action.
What actions can you put into place (remember, small and meaningful go a long way) to start to bridge a divide that might have been growing between you?
What behaviors are you willing to shift to prevent a spiritual divorce?
Have you ever worried about falling “out of love”?
Partners will tell us, “I’m just not ‘in love’ anymore”.
In love. Out of love.
Do these phrases simplify our complex human experience? Do they influence our perspective of love to be all or nothing? You either feel it or you don’t, and by the way, it’s temporary…?
Current research tells us that a predictor for divorce is not infidelity, lack of romance, financial stress, or co-parenting differences.
It’s a lack of love.
Yes, life happens. But conflict between partners arises when they decrease their emotional expression and intimacy, positive regard for each other and demonstrations of caring. Couples can live in that love-less state for years.
Research from the Gottman Institute shows us that on average, couples will wait at least five years before they reach out to a relationship therapist for help.
In the words of playwright Jean Giraudoux, “If two people who love each other let a single instant wedge itself between them, it grows – it becomes a month, a year, a century; it becomes too late.”
So what does it take for a couple to achieve and sustain love for the long haul?
Lucky for us, research shows us specific ways we can make our love sustainable.
“In Love” vs. “Loving”
On our website, we refer to, what most couples call “in love”, as, “the honeymoon phase” of your relationship.
It refers to a common experience during the early dating process where you may have felt lots of excitement about your partner. Sex may have happened often and felt passionate.
In the book, A General Theory of Love, authors, Lewis, Amini and Lannon, distinguish between the honeymoon experience of being “in love” and the experience of “loving”.
They note that being “in love” conjures up the memory of the energy and excitement of a couple’s first meeting and early courtship. In that phase, two people achieve instant attraction and passionate sex, often while barely knowing each other.
They also highlight that our culture values an “in love” status. Books, magazines, movies and media cast images of being “in love” without acknowledging the work involved to maintain that high state of arousal.
The authors show us that the “in love” state shown in the media is merely an entry point to the long-term experience of “loving”… if one chooses.
Further, they explain that “loving” involves “synchronous attunement and modulation”, and requires the investment of time to really know each other. Synchronous means “in person, in real-time”. Modulation refers to adjustment and regulation.
In our take-a-pill, fast-food, high-speed internet, instant messaging culture, “in person, in real-time” experiences become less prioritized. Instant reactivity seems to supercede self-regulation and adjustment.
We expect connection and intimacy to happen quickly or through digital emoji hearts. We are not encouraged to “make time for and attune” to our partners. As the authors put it, we’re encouraged to “achieve, not attach”.
Lewis Amini and Lannon added, “If somebody must jettison a part of life, time with a mate should be last on the list…”
So we know that being “in love” captures an entry point and that loving occurs over time, in multiple, real-time, in person, interactions. It requires us to know the depths of our partners and ourselves.
But what about the sex?
Sternberg’s Triangular Theory of Love
Now that we can distinguish between being “in love” and “loving”, let’s explore how to actually achieve a “loving” state in relationships.
Some of the foundational work that we do in couples and sex therapy is based upon the research of Robert Sternberg. As a psychologist and social scientist, Sternberg gave us the model of the Triangular Theory of Love.
It is based on the image of a triangle and each corner includes one of the core components of loving relationships.
In fact, our Intimacy Breakthrough course for couples weaves these principles throughout the lesson modules, focused on strengthening your emotional, physical and sexual intimacy.
Let’s explore Sternberg’s three components and how you can apply them.
Three Components to Sternberg’s Triangular Theory of Love
Sternberg helped us understand that a relationship’s success is not based on one aspect of relating. It’s the combination of different components that make up the whole of how we love.
There may be times when one component feels stronger than another. His work helps us understand that love fluctuates. He also showed us there are different types of love shared between couples throughout the course of their relationship.
Intimacy
Sternberg placed intimacy at the top of the triangle. To Sternberg, intimacy meant the close bonds partners might share with each other. It reflects how interested they are in each other, how they show respect to each other, caring for the welfare of the other and in general, contributing to their partner’s happiness.
Consider your own relationship: How do you and your partner practice intimacy as defined above? How well do you communicate your ideas and feelings? Do you hold each other in high regard? Do you value each other? How warm do you feel around each other?
Passion
To the left of the triangle, Sternberg placed passion. He said that passion is an important component in the beginning of relationships because it reflects strong feelings of desire, attraction and love. Initially, it contributes to the motivation for loving. It combines romance, physical attraction and sex.
Consider your own relationship: How do you and your partner demonstrate romance? How special does your partner make you feel? How might you rate the quality of your sex life on a scale of 1-10, 10 being full satisfaction? How sexy and desired do you feel?
Commitment
To the right side of the triangle is commitment. Commitment refers to a couple’s decision to be together, and in the long term, to the maintenance of their love. It refers to choice. Choice is not limited to a one-time decision in the beginning. It’s a daily exercise of not only choosing your partner, but also of maintaining your love, through thick and thin.
Consider your own relationship: What do you do on a daily, weekly or monthly basis that helps you maintain the love of your relationship? Be careful not to only name the ways you manage life together. Focus on how you behaviorally show your partner that you commit to your love.
Apply This to Your Relationship
The experience of life-long loving, as shown in the Triangular Theory of Love, helps us understand that a healthy relationship cannot succeed on just any one component of the triangle. Even further, we can see that when all areas are strong, the whole is greater than the sum of it’s parts.
Naturally, as you ride the ebb and flow of your relationship, there will be times when some components feel stronger than others. There will also be times when the strength of one component will increase the strength of another. And vice versa. They’re interconnected.
Sternberg wrote that when all three components are strong, couples achieve, what he calls consummate love. In consummate love, couples feel happier together than apart, work through conflict with grace, delight in each other’s stories and enjoy a healthy sex life.
We believe that many couples can experience consummate love throughout the lifetime of their relationship but not as a constant state of existence. All relationships ebb and flow. For those couples who worry about any component of the triangle, well, there’s resources that can help greatly improve all three areas.
When couples take our Intimacy Breakthrough course for couples, they get closer to consummate love. They learn to make time for their relationship (commitment), strengthen communication, positive regard, empathy, affection (intimacy) and find their spark through sexual connection (passion).
Consider the questions above, below each component of the triangle. Check-in with yourself. Be honest.
Where can you improve on your loving? What tools do you need to help you do it?
I’ve always said relationships are your greatest vehicle for personal growth and development.
They will challenge you, excite you, and sadden you. They can make you feel high and free or stuck and afraid. They can trigger your old wounds or remind you of how deeply you feel loved or that you belong.
The complexity of your relationship experience extends beyond the person before you. It involves your own history, family of origin, past romances, traumas, and losses. It also includes any hopes, dreams, fantasies, and desires that you have created in your mind’s eye.
It’s no wonder that as we navigate our relationships, we struggle to stay present to our current experiences. Our past is often triggered, or we get stuck on how we thought things ought to be, those dreams and fantasies we hold in our minds.
Our past influences our current experiences.
So much of our past influences our current experience. And we also get attached to ideas about the future without any room for psychological flexibility. Yet, it is only in the present that we have any influence on our experience at all.
Of course, this doesn’t just apply to relationships. In our more difficult life experiences, we are masters of avoidance, distraction, defensiveness and attachment. Then we may wonder why our lives or relationships feel less than satisfying, stressful, empty, and overall less fulfilling than we’d hoped for.
To live fully, you must make room for all of your relational experiences. In this month’s article, I’m going to share some neurosystemic research that can help you understand your experiences better, plus give you tools to feel your feelings and your life more fully without staying stuck in the hard stuff.
Why Does Our Brain Do This?
Polyvagal Theory (PVT) is a modality that helps us understand the ways we move between mobilization, disconnection and engagement. It helps us see how we spend a lot of time in protection energy versus connection energy, in relationships and in life.
Developed by Stephen Porges, PVT teaches us how to better understand our autonomic nervous system and its response patterns. PVT can help you know your internal reactions and states better so that you can learn how to respond instead of react to various life circumstances, particularly those that feel like they threaten your sense of safety and connection.
Since you are neurologically wired to find connection and a sense of belonging, relationships present the greatest threat to your sense of safety.
It can simply take a tone, a look, a body gesture or a snarky comment from someone else to trigger your neurosystem into protective mode. Your protective states will either mobilize you into a fight or flight response or simply shut you down altogether in what’s known as a freeze state.
While relationships present the greatest threat to safety and connection, they also provide the most powerful vehicle to bring you toward a sense of belonging and feeling loved.
So, how do you navigate both sides of this experience, in relationships and in life?
Start By Strengthening Your Mindfulness Skills
As a species, we need our neurosystemic responses to help us survive. Stephen Porges helps us understand that our bodies experience something called neuroception, a surveillance system, if you will, that constantly scans the environment for threats.
Neuroception is cued by the environment and activates your body’s somatic responses. It sends those sensations send signals to your brain. The brain then tries to interpret those signals through perception and creates stories based on this information. This, in turn, influences how you behave or what you decide at a given moment. All of this can happen within nanoseconds, often unconsciously, outside of your awareness.
So, while it’s necessary to have neuroception, your brain may create at times stories that do not accurately represent the current moment. This can create a disservice to your relationships or your life, particularly when past experiences become triggered.
Mindfulness gives you tools to use to help you increase awareness of your internal states so that you can become more conscious of what you feel, how you feel it, and what your brain does with that information. With that awareness, you can decide how to live and respond from a conscious, intentional state of being.
4 Steps to Bring Mindfulness to Neuroception
Deb Dana, Ph.D., PVT practitioner and author of The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy, wrote about the “A, B, C and Ds of Neuroception”, which align well with mindfulness practices. I’ve broken down each component below:
A – Recognize that your autonomic response is constant; it’s always happening. It’s designed to help you assess threats and danger in order to survive. It also assesses safety and connection and exists as the undercurrent to all of your life experiences.
B – Learn to bring awareness to your autonomic responses so that you can influence your own perception of your experiences. Learn how to “be with” rather than “be in” the experience from an observer stance. This helps interrupt the pattern of living on autopilot, often driven by old patterns of being.
C – Learn to connect to yourself first with a compassionate stance. A key component to mindfulness and polyvagal theory is practicing an inner dialogue of kindness and care. You can learn how to bring safety and connection to yourself from within.
D – By interrupting the automatic, knee-jerk responses that you may have, you make room for developing and deepening curiosity about your patterns, reactions and beliefs. From a more regulated state, you can reconnect with yourself and others, make healthy changes and create a new story.
Coming Home
Vulnerability sits at the core of intimate relationships; therefore, it makes sense that relationships can often trigger our sense of safety and connection. Our autonomic nervous system constantly scans faces, bodies, tones, gestures, and more for danger, as well as for belonging.
However, if we cannot understand or regulate what’s ultimately happening within our own bodies and minds, it’s difficult to then regulate what happens in the space between ourselves and others.
Mindfulness offers us the tools to know how to come home to ourselves first, in our own bodies. It helps us strengthen attention and awareness internally and externally so that we can be with our experiences and not over-identify with any of them, good or bad.
Learning how to live in our own bodies and minds first helps us bring higher levels of consciousness to our lives and relationships.
Ultimately, it helps us disrupt patterns of automatic responses. We then establish a positive relationship with ourselves by achieving connection and safety from within. It is only then that we can make choices and behave in ways that truly support what we actually want – safety, connection, belonging, and ultimately, love.
Healthy relationships and healthy love ultimately start with a healthy you.
Initially, it’s fun to play house with your partner, maybe get married, and do all of that new relationship stuff. But once life starts to throw you curveballs, how do you respond?
Unpleasant moments, stress, or relationship conflict might trigger you, creating a disconnect between you and your partner. You may not even realize that you’re reactive, tense, stressed, fearful, and unhappy.
In order for your relationship to feel healthy and good, you, as an individual, need to attend to your own mental and physical well-being.
So, how do you reverse your own unhealthy responses to life’s unpleasant moments? How do you let go of stress so that you can be present to those you love?
How do you respond mindfully instead of reacting mindlessly?
You can learn to train your brain to respond differently to hard situations, unexpected setbacks, external stressors, health problems, body pain, relational stress, and other hard experiences.
Below, I’ll highlight for you a powerful skill set to help you combat the various ways stress can impact your health, wellness, relationships and life.
“No one can live without experiencing some degree of stress all the time. You might think that only serious disease or intense physical or mental injury can cause stress. This is false. Crossing a busy intersection, exposure to a draft, or even sheer joy are enough to activate the body’s defense mechanisms to some extent”. ~ Hans Selye
What is Mindfulness?
According to Positive Psychology, mindfulness refers to the attention that can be directed inside as well as outside of ourselves. Attention to the here and now, the present moment. Attention to what’s actually happening at the moment.
It sounds so simple but, think about how many times you feel hijacked by your own brain.
Examples include:
Distraction
Mind jumps from one thought to another
An inability to stop worrying or thinking
Judgements of self, others, experiences
Labeling experiences as negative when they don’t meet up to your expectations
Rehashing old conversations in your head or rehearsing future ones
Mindfulness is not a tool or technique, but a way of living. It helps you live in the present moment, know yourself well, understand your triggers, develop healthy coping skills, practice compassion for self and others, and develop a balanced relationship with difficult circumstances.
Being a mindful person doesn’t mean that challenges will suddenly go away; It will shift your relationship to unpleasant experiences because your perception will change.
This in turn creates more inner peace which then influences how you respond to stress, whether it’s from work, family, health or your intimate partnership.
But I Can’t Help How I Feel…
You might be thinking, “But my reactions just happen, if I’m upset, I can’t stop them. It’s just how I feel at the moment.”
Automatic thought, emotional and behavioral patterns develop through repetition. They occur outside of our conscious awareness.
For example, if you can easily type on a keyboard, you don’t really think about typing when you type. Your fingers naturally find the keys and type the letters to make the words. No thought required.
If you’re an experienced driver, you don’t get in the car and consciously think about your next steps, like putting the key into the ignition, turning the key, putting the car into drive, stepping on the gas pedal, moving your foot to use the brake, etc. You just get into the car and drive.
Automatic patterns are not limited to behaviors. Our thoughts, emotions and reactions to unpleasant situations can also create automatic patterns, meaning that they occur repeatedly, outside of our conscious awareness and then often dictate our behavior.
Unconscious Reaction
When this occurs, we tend to unconsciously react to the situation instead of consciously responding to it. This includes difficult relational moments with our partners, kids, family, etc.
Unfortunately, automatism creates cycles that can keep you stuck in a state of negative emotions because it operates on an endless loop. It makes false stories in your mind feel like real, actual truths.
We see these negative cycles frequently in individual therapy, couples counseling and sex therapy. Problems become chronic in part because of the cyclical patterns of behavior that accompany them.
Couples will reenact them over and over and feel stuck in an endless loop of negativity. Each time they cycle through the same pattern, it reinforces their negative thoughts and feelings about their partner. This reinforcement influences perception which influences belief.
Creating Space Between Events and Reactions
As mentioned earlier, mindfulness encourages attention to your feelings, thoughts and body sensations, in the present moment. It’s a type of brain training that can help you reduce automatism and increase conscious choices and actions.
When you slow down enough to pay attention, you begin to create space between the experience of the moment and the reaction that might typically follow it. This can help you reduce impulsive behaviors, which often tend to be actions that you regret.
When you can create that space, you create greater opportunities for conscious choice. By paying attention to the here and now, you disrupt the cycle of automaticity.
The Great Pause
Call it “The Great Pause”. In that moment of pause, you get to take a breath, step back and look at what’s happening outside of you and within you. That space creates the opportunity for awareness that lets you notice your thoughts, emotions and body sensations.
The Great Pause allows you to consciously assess where you are in the moment and accept the moment for what it is. You may notice the automatic thoughts, feelings, body sensations and impulse to react. Observe it all without judgment.
Does Acceptance Equal Agreement?
Acceptance can often be confused with agreement. Let me be clear: acceptance of an unpleasant experience does not equal agreement.
Acceptance means that you accept your feelings, not that you agree with a certain event or a given situation.
Mindfulness teaches you that like it or not, unpleasant events will happen to you. You may unexpectedly get stuck in traffic, your dog will accidentally pee in the car, you might forget to go to that appointment that you spent a lot of time trying to book. Or on a bigger scale, you could be given a life threatening diagnosis or experience the death of a loved one.
Naturally, you strive to hold onto pleasant experiences as much as possible while avoiding life’s unpleasant events. You want to distance yourself from distressing events as much as humanly possible.
Because unpleasant events happen, trying to avoid them creates immediate internal conflict and stress. You attach to how you think things should be which might be different from how they actually are. This conflict only adds further distress to unpleasant experiences.
Recognizing Unpleasant Experiences
This cycle can feel dysregulating, exhausting and keep you in a constant state of suffering.
In mindfulness, acceptance means that you recognize that unpleasant experiences, thoughts and emotions will happen. You don’t fight to keep them away. You make room for all of your thoughts, feelings and experiences, both positive and negative.
As you notice and accept them, you’ll also see how all of your experiences rise and fall away. You see the temporariness of these states which helps you loosen your grip on what you want to hold onto, while also facing what might feel hard with a sense of calm.
Pleasant and unpleasant thoughts, feelings and experiences come and go.
Think about the many ways you’ve had both pleasant and unpleasant experiences with your partner. Notice how your relationship has not been static but has moved back and forth between both states.
Even if you’ve had intense conflict, chances are that at some point, that conflict faded into the background and you had a good experience together again.
Acceptance teaches us that all events, thoughts, feelings, experiences and situations ebb and flow; nothing is permanent. We need to make room for all of it.
Home Practice Exercise: Three for Three
A great brain training exercise is something I call Three for Three. Taken from positive psychology, this short breathing exercise achieves several things.
It helps you:
Create small pockets of space in your day for self-care
Practice mindful breathing and awareness
Practice bringing attention to your inner and outer experience
Create space between yourself and external events
Practice non-judgment and acceptance
Directions: This exercise only takes three minutes to complete, three times per day.
Ask yourself, “How am I doing right now?”. Tune into the thoughts, feelings and body sensations. Notice what you might be thinking, notice what you feel emotionally and how your body feels physically. Accept where you are, no matter what the experience. Tell yourself that whatever shows up is okay.
Pay full attention to the breath. Bring your attention to the breath and follow it. You may notice the focus wander away from the breath. Gently bring it back.
Expand the attention to now include the whole body. Feel the breath move throughout the whole body. With each inhale, notice how the body expands a little. Notice how, with each exhale, it shrinks a little.
If the mind wanders or you feel distracted, notice that you feel distracted and come back to the exercise. No judgment. Not trying to reach any particular state. Just notice, accept, gently guide yourself back to your breath and body.
Practice this brain training exercise for two weeks. Notice how it feels, how you talk to yourself about the experience, and how you relate to those around you.
Conclusion
Relationships are a complex matrix of your own individual health, wellness of the other and the space where you meet each other. When you come together, you create a third entity that we call “relationship”. The quality of that relationship depends on its individual contributors.
Unpleasant experiences will happen. How you personally manage those hard moments can make all the difference in fostering a sense of safety and connection with others.
You’d be amazed at how much your partner might say to you that you don’t actually hear. You may think you hear it. You might even place bets on how well you hear them. But if I gave you a pop quiz and asked you to repeat what you heard them say, you’d probably fall short.
How can I be so sure? I see it over and over again when working with couples in therapy or relationship counseling.
When I watch a couple interact and notice all the missed messages, I initially offer some loose but more specific structure to help slow the conversation down. My goal is to help the “receiver” get the message and repeat it back so that the “giver” feels heard.
Guess what happens 99% of the time? The receiver still misses important parts.
So we go slower. Many times, I have to limit the giver to saying only one or two sentences at a time, so that the receiver can correctly reflect what they heard.
One or two sentences at a time. That’s it. When this happens, most couples feel shocked. They feel like they’ve failed a communication test.
I promise you, this is no failure. It’s an important primal, physiological response to a perceived threat. Unfortunately, this ingrained primal response also gets in the way of intimate connection.
Below, I’ll help you better understand your communication breakdown as well as give you a structure to practice that might help you make progress on your own.
What Does Responsible Loving Mean?
Responsible loving represents a conscious deliberate effort to share, hear, pay attention, and understand the other in the face of conflict.
If you’re the partner who’s upset, it means regulating yourself so that you can present your concerns from a functional, mature place.
If you’re the partner receiving the complaint, it means to listen first and respond second. Listen fully first. Respond second.
It is an active position, not a passive default.
Most people do not practice responsible loving. We may share and listen, but not with a sense of responsibility toward the task, especially in the face of conflict.
Instead, we multi-task, defend, assume or interpret, often, all happening before the other person has even finished their thought.
Responsible loving requires you to be present-centered, attentive, and aware. It is intentional, and purposeful, and holds the ultimate goal of finding connection, even amongst differences.
How Conflict Can Trigger Disconnection
Several factors play into why intimate partners struggle to hear each other. For this article, I’ll share some research from The Gottman Institute that tends to make sense to a lot of the couples that we work with.
Gottman coined the term “flooding” to represent the physiological changes that can happen when partners try to communicate with each other.
He explains that one partner can induce defensive behaviors in the other when they approach a conversation or conflict from a place of criticism, contempt, defensiveness, or stonewalling.
Once you become defensive, your physiology changes.
That means that internally, your heart rate increases, the pace of your breath changes, your pulse increases, your hands might start to sweat, and your face might begin to flush. Your body changes.
When this happens, your body has entered its natural defensive state of fight, flight, or freeze. In this state, you can no longer really hear what your partner is saying. You may think that you do, but because your physiology shifted, your body is distracted. As a result, you miss important information.
There are exercises that the giver can do to improve their delivery and decrease the possibility of inducing a defensive response. We have many articles to address this.
However, as the listener, it’s equally important to work on your own responsible listening skills to help minimize defensive responses.
Slowing down is key for both sharing concerns and receiving them.
How to Take Accountability and Stay Calm
Whether you’re the giver or receiver, slowing down is essential. This can feel hard to do when emotions run high.
Whether you’re the giver or receiver, consider what you may need to do to stay calm and tuned in during a challenging conversation.
Some steps to take include:
Approach the conversation by assuming the good in your partner first
Strive to connect more than to be right
Consider your intentions – are they healthy?
Avoid blame and shame language
Take a walk beforehand to let go of tension
Practice deep belly breathing daily
Make eye contact often when speaking with each other
Practice conscious breathing throughout the conversation
These steps will help you keep your body in a calm state, open your heart to connection and bring intentionality to your conversation.
When you create more inner peace and calm on your own, your approach to your partner and your receipt of information will naturally be more peaceful.
Achieving more inner peace does not mean that you necessarily feel good about a conflict. It does mean that you take responsibility for your own self-regulation so that you can interact from a place of calm instead of a reactive, dysregulated state.
When More Structure is Needed
It may feel silly at first to follow a script on how to talk about hard things, but let’s face it, most of us haven’t been taught how to create a peaceful resolution. Most of us have either seen our parents or caregivers fight it out, practice the silent treatment, brush problems under the rug, ignore problems or live with lots of tension.
Scripts like the one below help the giver slow down a lot and also creates lots of room for the receiver to practice responsible listening.
It’s forgiving, in that, if the receiver misses important information, there’s an opportunity for the giver to share it again.
What I appreciate most about the exercise below is that it ultimately leads a couple toward communication that includes responsible listening, empathy, compassion, shared understanding, and meaning-making.
Practice This Structured Dialogue at Home
In the exercise below, choose a subject that feels difficult to talk about.
If you are the person who has the complaint, follow the cues for “the giver” role.
Your partner will be in “the receiver”role.
Follow the prompts until you’ve completed the exercise.
Once you’ve moved through the entire structure, switch roles.
Now “the receiver” has an opportunity to respond to the complaint, using the same structured dialogue.
Phase 1: Content Reflection
(GIVER) State your concern (try to limit this to 2 sentences at a time)
(RECEIVER) Reflect back what you heard by saying:
“What I heard you say was______” (try to be exact).
Ask “Is there more?”
(GIVER) Add more if needed (Remember 2 sentences at a time)
Repeat this cycle until the stated concern is complete.
Phase 2: Emotions Reflection
(RECEIVER) Notice if the giver told you how all of this makes them feel. If not, ask them to tell you now.
Giver: Make sure to use language that reflects emotions, not thoughts. Example: This made me feel foolish, disappointed, sad, hurt, angry, unloved, etc.
Once they do, follow the next prompt below.
“I heard you say that all of this makes you feel _______. Did I get that right?”
(GIVER) Confirm or correct the information.
(RECEIVER) If incorrect, try again:
“I heard you say that all of this makes you feel _______” Did I get that right?”
If you’ve been able to complete this part, move on to the next phase.
If not, keep coming back to the prompts above until the giver feels the receiver has heard the information correctly.
Phase 3: Connect with Empathy
(RECEIVER) Think about how your partner said they felt. Now think of a time in your own life when you too might have felt that way. Think of a story that doesn’t involve your partner at all. Maybe it involves another family member or a friend. Think of the details of that story. Once you have it, take a moment to share it with the giver by saying:
“I know that feeling of __________. I felt that way too when __________.” Add as much detail to your story as possible and try to relate to the feelings stated by the giver.
Phase 4: Connect with Validation
“So, it makes sense to me that you might feel _________ because of (now restate the giver’s concern about the relationship). I understand.”
(Receiver) Remember that you don’t have to fully agree with your partner’s perspectives.
Your goal here is to really hear them, consider their thoughts and feelings, and ultimately find a way to understand where they’re coming from, even if you don’t fully agree.
(Giver) Notice how it feels to be heard and understood.
Now, consider that you will switch roles. Can you do the same for your partner’s views?
Conclusion
Loving relationships require that each partner assume responsibility for the health of the relationship. Some of that work is personal and some of it is relational. Responsible loving is a sign of maturity and ultimately leads to joy, connection, and fulfillment.
