~ Maulana Jalalu’d din Rumi
Steel is forged under intense heat and great force. In a similar fashion, a relationship can be strengthened by enduring a time of heightened emotional intensity and duress. Or adversity can be the death knell for a couple. Dave and Pamela were a couple for whom the disclosure of Dave’s infidelity did not annihilate their marriage, but indeed strengthened it.
But it took a long time.
Betrayal is a human story as old as time. But it is one thing to read about infidelity in the newspaper, or to watch a performance of Macbeth or Rashomon; it is quite another to find oneself suddenly center-stage in one’s own drama.
A client recently described it this way:
We were the Twin Towers, my husband and I - strong, successful, indestructible. Then when I learned of his string of infidelities, it took just three minutes. Three short minutes and everything I had ever known about my husband, everything I had every believed about him, about us and about our twenty years of marriage together, lay in a crumpled heap on the ground. Demolished.
Life can, at times, seem like a high-wire act. Each of us is up there doing our own thing when wham, something happens that knocks us off balance: we are passed over for a promotion, our child is diagnosed with leukemia, the basement floods, our spouse is in an automobile accident.
Life happens.
In the inevitable fall that follows, in the best of worlds, we land upon a web of connection. Connection with friends and family, but most importantly with our spouse. It is what catches and cushions us in those unavoidable falls. (Read more…)
This is how a husband recently described his marriage to me:
It hadn’t started that way with his wife of 22 years. Theirs had been an electrifying romance. High school sweethearts, two striking individuals, both with razor-sharp minds and wicked senses of humor: everyone around them had concurred, they seemed made for one another.
So what happened? (Read more…)
Ok, this is where we don’t want our relationships to go.
One of the startling results of John Gottman’s research is the ability to predict divorce, with a greater than 90% accuracy, from viewing a single 15-minute video clip of a couple discussing an area of continuing disagreement. The motivation behind John’s research was to isolate the qualities that make marriages strong. In the process, he couldn’t help but observe the factors that fracture a marriage.
Those couples who did divorce within the following four years, slid down what he came to call the Distance and Isolation Cascade. It looks like this:
Flooding → Emotional Disengagement → Parallel Lives → Loneliness → Divorce.
This piece is so critical, I cannot overstate it: simply managing diffuse physiological arousal, or flooding, well in a relationship can make a huge difference. Conversely, frequent recurring flooding is the first step on the Distance and Isolation Cascade leading to emotional disengagement, loneliness and oftentimes divorce.
Through his 35 years of extensive research with over 3000 couples, John Gottman discovered that in ailing relationships there is often heightened physiological arousal for both men and women. This can create a feeling of unmanageable stress. Diffuse Physiological Arousal, or DPA, is our body’s general alarm mechanism, inherited through evolutionary means. The purpose of DPA is to mobilize oneself so that we can effectively cope with crises or emergencies.
Whenever we perceive a threat (and this perception is instantaneous, requiring very little complex or cortical thought), a series of processes automatically happen in the body, preparing one for an emergency. Our instinctual reaction is to fight or flee. The heart races, adrenaline courses through our bloodstream, the more complicated process of reasoning shuts down, and we prepare to act – in self-defense.1
Why this is important in relationship? Thousands of years ago, it was the saber-tooth tiger that threatened us; now it’s our spouse.
If I possessed a magical powder that I could dust upon the heads of every well-intended couple seeking a closer, more harmonious, satisfying relationship, what sorcery would those particles spin?
Two things: they would first give each person the ability to live by the creed of two equally-valid, subjective realities. Secondly, they would impart the capability to catch oneself when physically flooded; to disengage, and – once calm – to eventually return and engage in effective dialogue.
Two things. That’s all. Doesn’t it sound ridiculously simple?
It is anything but.
“We’re all in the same soup,” John Gottman likes to say (www.gottman.com). It’s his way of acknowledging – even with all of his hard-earned knowledge about what makes marriages work, after 35 years of extensive and comprehensive research – that he and his wife continue to wrestle with issues and disappointments like every married couple.
Nor have I been immune to the hardship and heartbreak of relationship. My husband and I struggled for years – eighteen to be exact – to create a loving, sustainable, harmonious relationship. Despite years of giving it the best we had to give, we were unable to create a successful and life-long marriage. Not for lack of desire nor lack of effort did our marriage end. (Read more…)
