Relationship rescue: Shifting from part-to-part to heart-to-heart
Where does the love go during a fight?
I’m not talking about a measured discussion between partners who respect different perspectives, but where does the love go when things get heated – literally? When your stomach is churning, your brow is beading with perspiration, your face is flush with frustration, it’s hard to access the parts of you that love your partner. When resentment, blame, and shame hijack communication the entire relationship system feels in danger and the love goes right out the window. To return to intimacy, you and your partner(s) have to shift from part-to-part miscommunication to heart-to-heart understanding. Here are three tips to ensure that, when arguing with your partner(s), you’re speaking with intention and compassion, not from the parts of you that feel compelled to speak from pain.
1. Open the window
It sounds counterintuitive but, if you don’t want the love to fly out of it, open the window! Your window of tolerance is a space of optimum regulation in which slights (big or small) feel manageable. Letting yourself get pushed outside of your window of tolerance often results in intense outward expressions of dysregulated emotion or emotional shutdown. If you have a history of trauma, your window of tolerance may be very narrow. So you must expand your ability to feel emotionally safe even when it feels like your relationship is under threat. How do you do that?
2. Stay in the body
If the brain interprets threat from sensory information, so too can it interpret safety from the senses. Ground yourself and show your amygdala that you’re safe. Take a deep breath and note as much sensory information as possible – there’s a blue chair, the fan is blowing cold air, the walls are the color of beach sand and the texture is bumpy. In therapy, you can gain tools to help you stay in the body and self-regulate (e.g. breathing exercises, meditation practices, and Havening Technique). It’s often helpful to just take a beat to notice intense sensations in your body and ask them to soften long enough for you to understand what within you triggered the dysregulation in the first place.
3. Do a yoU-turn
In an argument, it’s really tempting to point out what’s been done to you rather than turn that pointing finger back to yourself. Try getting curious about what’s going on inside of you. It’s okay to acknowledge the pull to speak from a blaming part but it’s more productive to ask that part of yourself – what are you afraid of? If you imagine your angst is coming from an internal fear more than a justifiable reaction to an external threat, you’ve actually shifted yourself from a disempowered position to a much more empowering stance. You can’t change your partner(s) but you can do something about you! When you understand what your needs are, you can communicate those needs to your partner(s) from more of a heart space than a hurt space.
Keep a lookout for the next in my relationship series, which will cover healthy sex!
This article was written by Jessiline Berry AMFT, an IFS/IFIO-informed clinician who specializes in trauma recovery, including sexual vitality within sexual trauma recovery. For more information or to schedule a complimentary consultation with Jessiline, please click here.