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.
