How To Fix Your Spouse
(This is continued from yesterday’s “How We Pass On Our Family’s Baggage.”)
If you can realize that criticizing your spouse is not about his or her faults, but actually about your heightened irritability, you’ll get a foot in the door, too. Your automatic instincts will no longer shut you out of your brain while they run the show. You will have begun to realize that what you perceive is not as simple and clear as the cause-and-effect you previously imagined.
You used to think, “My spouse is making mistakes, and that is the cause of my criticism and irritability toward her.” You used to be absolutely sure that your spouse’s actions were to blame for your criticism, and you were so certain of this that you never even dreamed of questioning yourself. But with the new perspective, you will think, “Gee, I notice how many times I’ve snapped at my spouse. I wonder what’s at the bottom of my irritability…” That shadow of a doubt, that sliver of uncertainty, is fantastic. You may even apologize to her by acknowledging your crabbiness and speculating on its probable cause.
That tiny sliver of uncertainty is so important because it derails the auto-pilot of your instinctive reactions. The fight-or-flight response never wonders: it simply reacts in a split second. If you’re wondering, it means you’re thinking. If you’re thinking, it means you’re not governed by your instincts alone. And the more you’re thinking, the more willful control you have over your behavior. This is your ticket out of the misery of the Blame Game.
If you are able to observe your mind for even just a few seconds as you’re on your way to see your mother, you’ve made the first step in changing the way you interact with her. When you actually arrive and begin to interact with her, you may fall into the same old pattern of fight-or-flight. But that split second of self-observation before you arrived is the key to change.
What we’re really doing here is changing some of your brain’s “hard wiring,” the neuronal pathways of your habitual reaction patterns. Thanks to your family’s imprinting when you were a child, the path between your primal anxiety and your fight-or-flight instinct is perhaps more deeply entrenched than you’d like.
By using the thinking part of your brain to observe your anxiety more often, you divert more signals away from the instinctive part of your brain. What used to be a well-worn path from your irritable anxiety to your fight instinct can become a less traveled road, or perhaps a “detour” that stops off in your thoughtful brain before heading to your emotional brain.
As you begin to notice your anxiety before or after a stressful event, let’s say you’ve “reduced traffic” on this path of conflict by 1%. With practice, you can even notice your anxiety during a stressful conversation, which will help you respond thoughtfully perhaps 5% more of the time.
We can’t change most of our family’s imprinting, and 5% may not sound like much, but imagine how different your life trajectory will be if you overreact to situations 5% less: over time, that’s a lot more peace of mind. You can “re-trench” your neuronal pathways to create less reactivity and a more thoughtful presence. You can take one small step in observing self, but one GIANT step in changing your relationships with people.
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David Code is an Episcopal minister, family coach, writer, and founder of The Center for Staying Married & Raising Great Kids.
