Take The Stress Out Of CONFLICT

Ways to understand relationship dynamics and conflict, and how you can recover. Relationship are major cause for unhappiness, or a reason for comforting eat.

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Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:07

Hi, this is Shelley Treacher from the Binge and Overeating Recovery Podcast. Today I'm going to be talking about relationship dynamics and conflict, but first I have a question. I'm scared that if I start to feel I won't stop. How can I start to feel without having a nervous breakdown? This is a great question because I know a lot of people worry about this. So I have four tips to offer today. Start by asking yourself how you feel about simple things like the weather. How do you feel when your skin is affected by the first chill of autumn? What's it like to be the first one up in the morning? Or what do you experience when you look at that rose bush near your house? Practice this phase for as long as you need to. This really is good grounding in working out what your response actually is to things. Then, in the context of relationship as we've been talking about lately, progress to asking yourself how you feel in response to other people's requests of you. Think about what it is that you really want to be doing and why. Then, when you're ready to progress to a deeper level of feeling, choose someone you know you will feel safe with to feel it and express that. 2. If you're not sure where to start, start with noticing the physical sensations of the experience of feeling, rather than the emotion or the content of what you're thinking about or the story. 3. That too can be overwhelming for some, in which case focus only on your muscles or your strength. Push a wall or squeeze something in your hand. Feel your energy. Or use a grounding technique like literally feeling your feet on the ground, or imagining that your feet have roots like a tree. Or any of the self-soothing techniques that I've talked about. And then finally, it's the fear of feeling that overwhelms us, so acceptance is key. If you can accept that you feel the way you do, the power can be taken right out of it. This includes the fear of feeling a feeling. All feelings are acceptable. So let's get on with talking about clashes and conflict in relationship, which of course may be another reason why somebody might comfort eat. I know I can eat when I'm angry because I've had a disagreement with somebody, so I know that some of you must feel this too. I'm gonna start by going back to Alan Shaw to explain some of the neuroscience behind some of this. Shaw says that we align our brain states with those of others. Ideally, a mother would regulate the child's state. Fetal development is actually where the focus of neuroscience is going at the moment, because the brain is developing in utero. This is all about how the mother responds to stress and how the mother's dysregulated state is transmitted to the child. After birth, the father, or anyone else, can pass their state to the baby. With trauma, or a mother who doesn't regulate the state of their child, the child's brain is simply not efficient at imprinting the brain's circuits that allow the child to regulate. This can block them from developing. What this means is that stress won't be dealt with very well later in life. This person may become vulnerable to stress because they simply just didn't get the chance to build the circuits in the brain that help them to self-regulate. This disturbance, or lack of a parent emotionally regulating your state, also dysregulates the connection people have emotionally with each other. It damages the ability to stay in the present and also the ability to separate emotionally from others. So conflict in relationship will be complicated for the person who cannot self-regulate and who feels a dysregulated connection with others. Rupture is common in relationship even for the secure. How we attempt to repair is the predictor of whether we will come through conflict happily and feel connected again or not. With insecure attachment, or a childhood where your needs were not really attended to well enough, there has often been no interactive repair after difficulty in relationship. So you just don't learn how to deal with conflict. But not only that, Shaw says that the baby absorbs the mother's defense to trauma and also defends against it. So if the mother is angrily in denial about how she feels, the baby will feel that. But the baby will also try to defend against it. This means that here you're predisposed to doing this in your life, in any stressful or conflict situation. To defend against stress, to push it away as if it's not happening. And to add further to the difficulty in dealing with conflict, as we talked about last week, with childhood difficulty, you create and participate in seeing hostility and provoke reactions from others which reinforce your childhood experience. As mentioned last week, commonly people assume that they're being judged or expect not to be liked if this is what they felt when they were growing up. Studies have shown that children evoke from their friends and school teachers exactly the way they learned in the first 12 months. The teachers or the other children's responses reinforce this belief. This is true of secure or insecure. So if we don't have repair or regulation through modeling, or if we receive stress responses, we become insecure or repeat defensive patterns in relationship. This lays down the pattern for how we deal with conflict. What I'm about to describe is how this might look and what's behind many of the conflicts that couples have. See if you can recognize this. When we become worried about whether someone cares for us, we become hyper-vigilant. What happens to the other person is that they feel criticized. They feel accused of not being good enough or caring enough. So they pull away. This seems like proof to the one who was worried about being cared for in the first place that this person doesn't care. So both are in defense, pulling and pushing away and hurting. It's a lack of ability to co-regulate with another. If you have any experience of abandonment, it literally feels like being cut off from safety. This sends out signals to the other person's nervous system, remember I said that last time, which push away. Literally, your nervous system sends a cue saying, I'm not safe to be around you, which the other person may respond to with feeling criticized. So for there to be any change to this system, we need to understand what we're doing. And just recognizing that any of this is happening to you is the key to changing. I want to tell you what one of my clients said about this dynamic today. He said, having a relationship is a catalyst for getting over myself. I love this quote and I really agree with it. It really makes sense. Where getting over yourself is learning to understand what your defenses are and how that stops you from being connected. Our nervous systems are invited into connection when we're open. How we repair a rupture in relationship is by learning to tolerate and express how we feel, rather than blaming, pretending nothing's wrong, or dissociating. To start to repair, it's a good idea to regulate yourself first. You may need to calm down from fight, flight, or freeze before you can open to another or even to yourself. Then, a technique that either of you or both of you could use to come back into openness is remembering your abundance. Either yours, your own, or the abundance you have had together. You can close your eyes and you can consciously attune to the abundance of this moment for you. Right now, if you want to. I notice what happens if I close my eyes and feel into the abundance of my life. What do I feel? I feel utterly privileged that I get to talk to you about things that are really important to me. This feeling is something that no one can take away from you. It's yours. And you have it to come back to whenever you need it. I actually practice this one quite a lot. As I said, I'm in a long-distance relationship. My abundance doesn't go away when my partner doesn't respond to my call. I have learnt that what that really means is he feels overwhelmed or needs times to himself. Or he's simply busy doing something else. None of this is a threat to me. The threat is internal. How this looks in person for us is by having eye contact and some small element of touch. I know some people won't want to be touched when they're upset or angry. That's also normal. And it has to be respected. Self-regulation may still be needed or being heard by the other. And then co-regulation may involve touch of some kind. If this dynamic is showing itself in your relationship, know that it's normal, and it always takes two. We can often get lost in thinking we are the problem, but there's always something going on for both of you, because you're human. And because you chose each other. It's likely that both of your histories reflect the same difficulties you experience together. The quiet partner is usually contributing to the dynamic too. It's just that they might not have the awareness or understanding of it, because they've had all the challenges to self-regulation and connection that you had too. Like my client today said, it's a hell of a thing having a mirror. Often the people I see who are in the early stages of dating seem to expect themselves to be having so much fun and to be light and easygoing. This is a cultural thing, I think. They give themselves such a hard time for feeling anxious or worried. But you can see that if someone is afraid of being thought of badly because of early experiences, this transference is often going to kick in straight away when you meet somebody. Nonviolent communication is a really good thing to know about in any stage of conflict or relationship, and a great start for dealing with conflict or dissatisfaction in relationship. I'm going to give you two definitions of what nonviolent communication is. The first is from nonviolentcommunication.com. Nonviolent communication shows us a way of being very honest without any criticism, insults, or put downs, and without any intellectual diagnosis implying wrongness. Our survival as a species depends on our ability to recognize that our well-being and the well-being of others are in fact one and the same. And here's the definition from the CNVC, which is the Center for Nonviolent Communication. They have such a lot of good information on their website. With nonviolent communication, we learn to hear our own deeper needs and those of others. Through its emphasis on deep listening to ourselves as well as others, nonviolent communication helps us discover the depth of our own compassion. This language reveals the awareness that all human beings are only trying to honour universal values and needs every minute, every day. As I say, you can look up so much good information on CNVC on the internet, but the basic idea is to express how you feel and to listen to each other, rather than to say anything about what the other person is doing. So for example, I might say, I feel overwhelmed when you ask me all those questions, rather than I hate it when you talk too much. That's quite a big difference. I've been surprised so many times in my life by how effective this type of communication can be. It can completely turn a relationship around because it's so respectful and nourishing. Of course, it won't always be easy and it won't always go well. In fact, I think it's quite clunky when you first start learning it, especially as we get defensive. As I say, my partner and I have really been through it with this one. It took courage on both of our parts to really hear how we each feel, but I think we're getting better at it. As with much that I'm trying to tell you, bearing discomfort reaps incredible rewards. Something that might be useful to know or to add at this point is that often what we see at the heart of conflict in relationship is a deep desire for our partner or our boss to replace the love we felt we didn't have as a child. And so we get upset or angry when that doesn't happen. But a partner or a boss can't be a missing parent. It's too late. The damage has been done. But it is possible to develop that internal sense of parenting and to create open, accepting relationships. One of the things we need to learn here is to understand our response to difference and perhaps learn to accept it more in order to connect. Now let's do an exercise. This is the kind of thing that we might explore in one of my groups. I'm going to ask you to close your eyes and just breathe, just focus on your breathing for a second and come into your body. Just notice whatever physical sensations you have right now. And imagine a hand on your back from someone you love and who loves you. Know that this hand's intention is to regulate your nervous system. It's an explicit invitation to feel calmed by another person. Feel it and notice your response to this. There are no wrong responses. Today we've learned that the state our parents are in is passed on to us. That we become defended against stress if we experience it in the womb. That we project this onto others that we meet. Which acts as self-fulfilling in that we repeat this experience in life. We've learned that we attract others who reflect exactly what we have trouble with too. We've learnt that we find conflict and repair difficult if we were never taught how to do it. Learning to tolerate and express how we feel is the answer. Nonviolent communication is a great tool for repair. We've also learned that we co-regulate when we're open. Thank you so much for listening. Next week, I'm going to be giving you a bit of an update on how I'm doing with no sugar and my eating. I'm going to be talking about how to sustain a habit a little bit more. My Understand Your Eating group is well underway, I'm very happy to say. But if you want to join the next group, it won't be long before it's up again, so please do get in touch. And if you want help with finding a loving relationship and uncovering your blocks to that, I'm recruiting now for the next program that I run. And please do keep your comments and questions coming. I absolutely love to receive them, and they're so useful to other people. Thank you, I'll see you next Wednesday!