Fighting for Connection - Creating a Secure Marriage
Want a close connected and secure relationship? Maybe you feel like something's not quite right in your relationship, even though there are a lot of good things. You and your partner love each other, but there are moments that hurt. It's normal for all relationships to experience conflict or worry. The difference between the couples that remain close and the couples that drift apart is their ability to work through conflict and moments of worry and insecurity within the relationship.
Listen in to discover new ways to stay close and connected even through the toughest moments life throws at you.. Learn how to deal with your patterns of conflict and make your connection stronger. Simply listen, learn, make changes, and see positive transformations in your relationship.
Brett Nikula is an LMFT and Relationship coach that works with couples that want to stay together, that really care about each other, learn to communicate in a way that reduces the pain in the relationship and increases the connection.
Fighting for Connection - Creating a Secure Marriage
Processing Down
Ever wondered why your partner's opinions can make or break your day? On this episode of the Fighting for Connection podcast, we unravel the profound influence of emotions on relationships. I openly share my own vulnerabilities so that we can dissect how our partner's viewpoints can dramatically affect our emotional well-being and how miscommunications often ignite conflict cycles. You'll discover the onion-like layers of "cover emotions" like anger and frustration, and how unmasking these can help couples move past negative patterns to foster a deeper, more secure connection.
We dive into how these cover emotions can conceal deeper feelings of inadequacy, and why understanding these layers can transform our communication and our relationships. Learn effective ways to voice your true feelings, fears, and desires, and touch on the vulnerability that comes with it—along with its potential rewards. To round off, we share practical tips for managing emotions. Prioritize your emotional health and discover how these insights can enhance all your relationships, from friendships to marriages.
Episode number 89, processing Down. Hello and welcome to the Fighting for Connection podcast. I'm Brett Nicola, a husband, father and fun lover. Listen in as I share stories, tips and inspiration that will move you toward the connection that you want in your relationship. All right, welcome back to the Fighting for Connection podcast.
Speaker 1:Today school is out for my kiddos, so it's a pretty exciting day. I was able to go up to the school there where my kids go to, and got to have a little picnic with them for the last day. Enjoyed that, and now back here at the office to get some things done. Today I don't see any clients. I've found that I work better on like some of the work on the business kind of stuff If I structure my days in a way where I'm seeing clients one day, so I see clients four days a week and then one day a week. I've set aside time where I can just really focus on building and creating the value within the business that I want to deliver to my clients, and so that's what today is for me. I get to spend my time thinking about how to serve all of you, and there's really some exciting things that I'm working on that I hope to have collected and gathered in a way that I can share with all of you guys. But know this that the goal, what I'm excited about, is that we are going to be able to serve all of you in a much better way, I believe, in a deeper way, in a more effective way than the ways that we're doing it now. So it's all coming shortly and when we're ready to share that with all of you guys, it will come, but until then, we're just going to continue with this podcast. I will continue to share with you some of the things that I really see affecting relationships, improving relationships, helping you understand your relationship in a way that allows for you to navigate through it, so that you can create the secure bond that you long for in your relationship, so that you can have the best relationship possible.
Speaker 1:One of the things that I want to talk with you about is around processing emotion, and why I think that this is so important is within relationships. We look so deeply into how our spouse thinks about us, how our spouse sees us, and put a lot of value on their opinion, which I think makes sense. But the problem with that is that if we have so much weight on how they're responding to us, their opinion of us. There's so much room for miscommunication there and oftentimes, if we get the sense that they're not happy with us, we get the sense that they're not interested in us. If we get the sense that they don't care about us, we have strong emotions that come up and prevent us from caring for them in the way that we want to. Why I feel like it's so important that we learn how to process our emotion in different ways is so that we can care less about our spouse caring about us, and that allows for us to care more about them.
Speaker 1:When I look at conflict in a relationship, I always look at that conflict through the lens of the conflict cycle which I've talked on here extensively about. When there's conflict in a relationship, I'm always looking for it through the feeling of it right. Almost everybody I've ever talked to knows that feeling like that tightness in our chest, the pit in our stomach, the anxiety that we feel when something feels off in our relationship. When our partner says something, when our partner does something, when maybe we just for some reason have this feeling of disconnect, this feeling of loneliness, of abandonment, of rejection. There's that feeling that shows up within our body and that's really the primary way that I identify if we are in a cycle. The other component to that is that we're not receiving the response that we're looking for from our partner. Right, and typically we have that feeling, we try to address it and our partner responds in a way that makes that feeling worse or amplifies that feeling, or we find ourselves escalating as a couple and that's really kind of the signs and symptoms that we're in a conflict cycle and it looks different for every couple. You know some couples their conflict cycle is very loud and we're able to see it from the outside. Some spouses from the outside you'd never know that they were in conflict, but yet the tension is like so thick between those two that they're not enjoying themselves at all. And maybe, again, from an outside perspective, no one would ever know you could be in their home, they could have this kind of conflict cycle raging between them, but it's so silent you'll never hear it. And those couples, oftentimes they just kind of slowly, silently drift apart.
Speaker 1:One of the things that we do to help couples get out of this conflict cycle is, well, that's my work. That I do here, I guess, is I teach them skills and tools. I help them understand their conflict cycle, identify their conflict cycle and then teach them you know how to get out of it. And one of the ways that I teach couples or individuals how to get out of their conflict cycle it's really to identify that cover emotion that they're experiencing Now. Cover emotions are emotions like anger, frustration, resentment, defensiveness. Those are really the main ones that we see, but they're emotions that are derived from a primary emotion. It's usually the emotion that we're most familiar with when we're in the conflict cycle. It's like right there, we're frustrated, we're angry, we're resentful, we're defensive, we're irritated, we annoyed, whatever that language is. I want us to find that Now that emotion it's likely just going to kind of boom, be there in a short amount of time, like typically we won't even recognize that anything else is happening prior to our sense of anger or frustration or resentment or whatever that feeling is.
Speaker 1:But there is Because think about it this way, like if someone else did what you know your spouse did, or said what your spouse said, or didn't do what your spouse did or didn't say what your spouse did, you wouldn't have that same emotion, right? For example, like if I want to invite somewhere. Maybe if there's like somebody that I don't really know has invited some people to dinner, for example, I wouldn't really care. It wouldn't create any sort of feelings within me. But maybe if my best friend was inviting people to dinner and I wasn't invited, all of a sudden maybe I get resentful. Why? Why am I resentful in that situation? There's something happening underneath it.
Speaker 1:Okay, typically and this is really the skill that I want to talk about today it's changing how we process our emotion. Maybe, typically, in that example where I'm resentful, what I would do is I would pull back from my friend, I would maybe stop talking to them Next time I see them. Maybe I wouldn't be very friendly with them, right, I would kind of avoid them. Those are some of the behaviors that I would begin to do from that emotion of resentment. And really what I'm doing there is I'm processing my resentment through those behaviors. It's the resentment that's coming out of me that's creating those behaviors of withdrawing, of pulling away, of maybe short or curt interactions that I might have with that friend. From that place of resentment, when we can recognize, like, okay, this is a conflict cycle and what's causing me to pull away, what's causing me to shut down, to treat my friend that way. Well, it's coming from a place of resentment. That's the feeling and that's what I want to identify.
Speaker 1:First, I want us to identify that we are feeling resentful and right now we're choosing to process it by pulling away, by pulling back, by being curt or short with that friend. So I call that processing up into the emotion. When we act that emotion out into that relationship, now the alternative is to process down into that emotion. When we act that emotion out into that relationship, now the alternative is to process down into that emotion. And when we process down into that emotion, I want us to be like, okay, I'm resentful. And when we're feeling that, like, let's just try to create as much space as we can to kind of navigate through this, it might mean that you have to like, pull away from the friendship. But you're not pulling away from the friendship from a place of resentment. You're pulling away from the friendship to try to understand what's happening.
Speaker 1:You're taking a time out, you're stepping out, you're finding a book to kind of journal, or you go on a walk or you go on a drive and you're starting to walk through this like, okay, I'm resentful, I want to pull away. I want to shut down. I want to pull away. I want to shut down. I want to treat my friend this way, but why? So now we're going down and it's like, well, there's an emotion underneath the resentment. What is that? That emotion is going to be like one of these primary emotions. I felt disrespected, I felt hurt, I felt rejected, I felt abandoned, I felt disconnected. I felt there's other emotions there. I'm sure I was trying to cover as many as I could there, but I'm sure you know, if you pause and consider it, what these emotions were Uncared for, overlooked, unheard, unseen. These are some of the feelings that I hear quite a bit.
Speaker 1:So, for me, I'm feeling resentful and it's like why did my friend not inviting me create this resentment within me? Well, I felt inadequate. Like that Maybe it would be something that I personally would experience is like why wasn't I like a good enough friend? Why doesn't he like me enough to invite me? That's that vulnerable, like down low emotion. I'm feeling this inadequacy. That's why I'm covering it with this resentment. But why do I feel inadequate here? Well, it's because I want to be wanted by my friends. That's something that is important to me. That is a longing for me, and so now what has happened here is that I have new language for my resentment, right, because so oftentimes people process up into their resentment, they act out on that emotion and they don't even really understand why. So when we process down into our emotion, right now we're getting language for it, now we're kind of understanding it, and when we go down, we can just kind of keep going deeper and deeper and deeper into it.
Speaker 1:Why do we have this relational longing? Why is it so important that our friends reach out to us and include us and remember us, like what's that about? And we can begin to uncover so much that, I think, really will help us make sense of our emotion. What I find is that these relational longings are really connected to us and have been connected to us throughout our whole life. Oftentimes they are some of the same longings that we've experienced in our childhood relationships with our primary caregivers, with our parents and so on.
Speaker 1:But again, we can do so much work when we begin to process down into this emotion, but then what I want us to do is, rather than act out our emotion from processing up into it, like pulling away, shutting down, being curt, being rude. What I'd like us to learn how to do, and at least have the option to do, would be to turn to this friend and say, hey, you're one of my best friends and in this situation that happened. That was hard for me because I got that sense like maybe I wasn't important to you or maybe that you didn't want me to come, and I just want to share that with you because I want to maintain the close friendship that I feel like we've had and just want to kind of clear the air on that. So now we're communicating much more clearly to that friend, like what's happening within us and maybe the process that we can hold on to is to communicate our fear, communicate our longing and to communicate how important that relationship is to us. So I'm afraid that you don't want me to come out to dinner with you and I want to have a really close relationship with you.
Speaker 1:And when this event happened, I experienced this hurt and I just want to share that with you because you're important to me, because I value our friendship. When we at least have the language, we have the possibility, we have the option to have that conversation. Now that conversation might seem like a like a stretch for you to have. It feels awkward, it feels vulnerable and there's really some nuance to it. I really believe, like we don't want to put the pressure or form like a question when we're sharing with our friends, like why don't you invite me out or I wish you would have invited me out like to try to place it back on them.
Speaker 1:Really, what I want us to do is I want us just to kind of reveal our experience right, but really owning that experience, like for some reason, this event I know you probably weren't intending it to hurt, but it did hurt for me and and it's because you're important to me and I want to have a really close relationship with you here's why it's also difficult. They might not share that reciprocal feeling and that's why this is so scary to do. But when we communicate that, it's also difficult. They might not share that reciprocal feeling and that's why this is so scary to do. But when we communicate that, it's more clear than trying to create a reciprocal close relationship by, like shutting down, pulling away, acting out, pouting. Those behaviors are actually an attempt to communicate exactly this that you're important to me, that hurt for me. I'm worried that I'm not as important to you as you are to me, and I want you to know that.
Speaker 1:But from the friend's point of view, it's so confusing. They're like why doesn't Brett like me anymore? What happened? This is confusing. What's wrong with me? Why doesn't Brett want to hang out with me? And now we're in a cycle. So if we can learn how to process down into our emotion, now we at least have the option to communicate that way if we want to. And what I would challenge you to do is to learn how to process those emotions in that way. Give it a shot, practice it. Practice it in your marriage, practice it with your friends, practice it with your children marriage. Practice it with your friends, practice it with your children and see if you have different results than when you have these cover emotions, these protective emotions.
Speaker 1:Right, we're talking about when we're angry, frustrated, resentful, defensive. Okay, it's in those moments that I want us to at least have the choice of okay, are we going to process this emotion by going up and acting it out, or are we going to process down into by going up and acting it out, or are we going to process down into it, understand it, develop language around it and decide if we want to share it at that point or not. What I found is that sometimes, when we process down into our emotion and we begin to understand it, we never have to share it. It's like, okay, I can see why I felt so resentful and I can see that I am important to this friend. I know I don't even need to share this. I can see why I felt so resentful and I can see that I am important to this friend. I don't even need to share this. I can see what happened and where I got confused and now I can kind of regulate myself.
Speaker 1:And maybe what I can do from that space is call up that friend and say, hey, you want to go out for dinner, and now we can invite them. We're not waiting for them to invite us to reassure us. It's like, hey, that person's important to me, I would like to go out to dinner with them, I'm going to invite them. Versus like pulling away because they didn't invite you and waiting for them to invite you, to kind of regulate you by processing down with that emotion. You can be like, yeah, that is important for me and I'm going to invite that person in because it's probably important for them too, and that way we can reassure the relationship ahead of time and really develop a more secure bond with that person. What we find is, when we process up into the emotion, it challenges that bond. It can oftentimes lead to a less secure bond. So that's my challenge for you this week Process down into your emotion, understand why you're having those cover emotions and see if you can figure out what you need to do so that you don't need to act out.
Speaker 1:Give yourself a time out. Go on a walk, do whatever you have to do, tie yourself down, I don't care. Figure out a different way to process that emotion, so at least you have the option to do it, should you want to have a great week. Everybody Bye-bye. Week, everybody Bye-bye. This has been the Fighting for Connection podcast. If you've enjoyed this podcast and want more content like this, check out my Connected Couples Campus, which can be found on my website, wwwpivotalapproachcom, and become the difference you need in your relationship.
