A study by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago found that relationship dissatisfaction is on the rise. More people are struggling to keep love alive than ever before.
But why? After all, few if any of us enter into a relationship with the intention of letting it fail. We all do our best to keep love alive, keep the fires of desire burning. Yet something somewhere is going wrong. Revealing what that is and offering solutions is the subject of my book Loving Like You Mean It. In that work, I explain how at the core of our struggles is a fear of being emotionally present and authentic in our relationships. In short, many of us are afraid of being ourselves.
The root of this fear can often be traced back to the first few years of our lives. That’s when the wiring that informs us about how to be and, equally important, how NOT to be in the world is established in our brains. It’s a critical period in which the brain develops at an astonishing rate. Our early relational experiences with our parents and caregivers and all the lessons we learn play a significant role in determining how our brain is shaped and formed – how it is wired. Every initial experience lays down a trail between nerve cells in the brain.
During this time, the experiences that shape our brain are largely based on the emotion that arises during interactions with the important people in our life – our caregivers. They profoundly affect the workings of our brains and, consequently, how we experience our feelings.
If our caregivers favorably respond to our emotional expression – in an accepting , validating, and encouraging way, then we come to associate our feelings with a positive sense of being. However, if our emotions are responded to in a way that causes us to feel anxious or afraid, they become linked in our memory with a sense of danger.
Either way, the more a particular interaction is repeated during childhood, the stronger these associations and neural pathways become. These powerful lessons about emotion and connection are stored in the parts of our memory that are outside our awareness, operating on an unconscious level and influencing our behavior without us even knowing it. Eventually, these patterns become so deeply etched into the landscape of our brain, they form the automatic route on which signals travel.
How our wiring affects our relationships
Our adult brains are still operating on wiring that was established in these early years of our lives. For many of us, this wiring has become outdated and is no longer applicable to the way we live today. As a result, many of us are navigating the world of adult relationships emotionally ill-equipped and conditioned to react in ways that might have been useful at one time, but now thwart real connection.
For instance, when certain feelings, needs, or desires arise in our present-day relationships, we react defensively as though we’re in real danger. We do everything we can to achieve some sense of safety and respond in ways that cover-up what we truly feel inside.
We take the lessons we learned in our early experiences into adulthood. If being our authentic self was deemed threatening in some way early in life, now, whenever we feel certain things, our brain sends off a signal that says danger is looming. But, unbeknownst to our nervous system, the fear we have around our emotions is an old fear based in the past, not the present. While the fear is very much experienced in the here and now, our response and subsequent behavior is the result of archaic wiring, our early response patterns burned into our brain’s circuitry.
How this sort of conditioning manifests itself depends on the nature of our early experiences. Typically, those of us whose wiring causes us to feel more anxious may respond negatively when things get tough in our adult relationships. For instance, we may blame, criticize, get demanding, or completely shut down instead of openly sharing how we feel or asking for what we need. Or we get entangled in repeated patterns with our partners that tread over and over the same old ground. Our wiring causes us to fear taking the risk of sharing our hurt or fear. Our anger feels dangerous and must be hidden, directness is avoided at all costs, for fear that our partners will move away, just like we feared our caregivers would do when we were younger if we showed emotion. Or we fail to express the fullness of the love we have for our partners in our hearts, and then can’t understand why they complain about feeling frustrated, alone and unsure of our love. As a result, we end up feeling resentful, disinterested, or depressed and alone.
Instead of loving like we really mean it, we move ahead on autopilot at the mercy of our old brain wiring.
So what can we do?
The good news is that although our early experiences shape us, we don’t have to remain prisoners of our past. Our brains can change and grow. We can actually rework our past programming and create new pathways that override what’s already there. We can upgrade our wiring so that fear no longer needs to be entangled with the fibers of our feelings.
How? The key lies in having new experiences with our emotions. Allowing ourselves to be more fully present with our feelings and eventually come to experience and express them free from fear. As with any fear, the more we avoid what we’re afraid of, the less opportunity we have to face and overcome it. In order to change, we need to make a concerted effort to travel in a different direction. We need to practice emotional mindfulness.
Allowing yourself to be present with your feelings forms the bedrock of emotional mindfulness. To change our relationships for the better, we must find the courage to open up and be fully present with ourselves and in our relationships. As renowned relationship expert John Gottman suggests:
“The better a couple is at understanding, honoring and working with their feelings, the more likely it is that their relationship will be successful and endure.”
The power of emotional mindfulness
Being emotionally present infuses our relationships with energy and vitality. It increases our sexual desire. Empathy and compassion grow. Our partners feel important, valued and loved.
What’s keeping most of us from this desired state, from feeling close to our partners and them to us, is that old wiring in our brains. Rewiring isn’t something that will happen overnight. Reworking pathways that are deeply engrained in your brain takes time. But it can be done. And, with practice, it’s something my 4-step approach can help you to do.
This approach is discussed in great detail in both of my books. But here’s a brief overview of the steps you need to take to break free from your old wiring and revitalize your relationship:
Step 1: Recognize and Name – identify when that old wiring has been activated
Step 2: Stop, Drop and Stay – pause and make room to turn your attention inward and be with what’s happening inside of you without being reactive.
Step 3: Pause and Reflect – get access to the wisdom that comes with being in touch with your core self and choose a course of action that’s more aligned with your intentions and values
Step 4: Mindfully Relate – learn how to manage the anxiety that comes with opening up in a new and different way. And express your truth in a manner that will maximise the likelihood of you being heard and received.
By following these steps, your brain will create new pathways that enable you to improve your relationship in so many ways. The steps will show you how to maintain your emotional balance when engaging with your partner, and how to make better use of your innate capacity for empathy and compassion to deepen your connection. So that new wiring can bring fresh vitality and understanding to your relationship, enabling you both to love like you mean it.