What happened after your Find the Bad Guy fight? How did you feel about yourself, your partner, the connection between you? Were you able to go back and talk about the fight and console each other? If not, how did you deal with the loss of safety between you? What do you think might have happened if you had said, “We are starting to label each other, to prove the other one is the bad one here. We are just going to get hurt more if we get stuck in this dance. Let’s not get caught in an attack-attack dance with each other. Maybe we can talk about what happened without it being anyone’s fault”?
DEMON DIALOGUE 2 — THE PROTEST POLKA
This is the most widespread and ensnaring dance in relationships. Studies by psychologist John Gottman of the University of Washington, Seattle, indicate that many of the couples who fall into this pattern early in marriage do not make it to their fifth anniversary. Others are mired in it indefinitely. This “forever” quality makes sense because the main moves of the Protest Polka create a stable loop, each move calling forth and reinforcing the next. One partner reaches out, albeit in a negative way, and the other steps back, and the pattern repeats. The dance also goes on forever because the emotions and needs behind the dance are the most powerful on this planet. Attachment relationships are the only ties on Earth where any response is better than none. When we get no emotional response from a loved one, we are wired to protest. The Protest Polka is all about trying to get a response, a response that connects and reassures.
Couples have a difficult time recognizing this pattern, however. Unlike the obvious attack-attack pattern of Find the Bad Guy, the Protest Polka is more subtle. One partner is demanding, actively protesting the disconnection; the other is withdrawing, quietly protesting the implied criticism. Dissatisfied partners, missing each other’s signal, often complain of a fuzzy “communication problem” or “constant tension.”
Let’s take a look at how couples do the Protest Polka:
I ask Mia and Ken, the young couple sitting in my office, “What seems to be the problem? You have told me that you love each other and want to be together. You have been together for six years. What is it that you would like to change about your relationship?”
Mia, small, dark, and intense, stares at her husband, Ken, a tall handsome man who is still and silent, seemingly mesmerized by the rug at his feet. She purses her lips together and sighs. Then she looks at me, gestures toward him, and hisses, “This is the problem, right here. He never talks, and I get sick of it! I just get enraged at his silence. I am the one carrying the burden of this relationship. I ‘do’ it all, and I do more and more. And if I didn’t . . .” She throws up her hands in a gesture of resignation. Ken exhales deeply and looks at the wall. I like it when the picture is so clear and the polka is so easy to grasp.
This instant snapshot of their relationship tells me each partner’s basic position in the dance of distress. Mia is hammering on the door, protesting her sense of separateness, while Ken holds the door firmly shut. Mia tells me that she has left Ken twice, but relented when he called and begged her to return. Ken says that he just doesn’t understand what is going on, but he feels pretty hopeless about their situation. He tells me that in his mind he has decided that it is either his fault — perhaps he was never meant to be married — or it’s just that Mia and he don’t fit together. Either way, he isn’t sure there is any real point in coming to see me. They have tried counseling before.
I ask if they fight, and Ken says that they hardly ever have a real fight. They do not get caught in Find the Bad Guy. But then there are the times when Mia says she is leaving, and Ken says, “Fine.” These moments feel pretty bad. And, he tells me, she does try to “coach” him. As he says this, he winces and laughs.
Mia and Ken then tell me a story. If you ask most couples, they can tell you of a seminal incident, a small moment that captures the essential nature of the connection between them. If these moments are good, they bring them up on anniversaries or in tender moments. If they are bad, they puzzle over them, trying to figure out what the moment says about their relationship.
KEN: I think a lot about pleasing her. I do want her to be happy with me. But it just doesn’t work. She really wanted to go to a dance. So I agreed. But then it just all fell apart when we got there.
MIA: It fell apart because you wouldn’t dance! First you wouldn’t come out onto the floor and then when you did, you just stood there.
SUE: And what did you do, Mia?
MIA: I got him on the floor and moved him around. I tried to show him how to dance!
KEN: [Shaking his head.] You actually bent down and started moving my legs. So I blew up and left the floor.
MIA: If I don’t do it, nothing will happen. And that is the same for the whole relationship. If I don’t make it happen, nothing will happen. [She turns to me.] He just doesn’t take his part.
SUE: So this is what goes wrong between the two of you and not just on the dance floor. This pattern of you wanting Ken to respond and Ken standing still, speaking so quietly that you can’t hear him. This keeps you demoralized and feeling unsafe with each other?
MIA: Right. I can never hear him. He mumbles a lot. So I was trying to get him to speak more clearly the other day. And then he won’t talk to me at all!
KEN: So I mumble sometimes. You were screaming at me in the car on the highway. As I am driving, you are telling me to enunciate my words louder and louder!
SUE: Mia, it’s kind of like you have become the dance instructor, telling Ken how to move and speak. And you do it out of fear that Ken will stay distant and there will be no dance between you. [She nods emphatically.] You keep waiting for Ken to come and connect with you and when this doesn’t happen, you feel really alone. And so you try to fix it, to teach him how to respond. But this gets rather pushy, even critical. Then Ken hears that he is blowing it — how he talks is wrong, how he dances is wrong — and he does even less?
KEN: That’s it. I freeze up is what I do. I can’t do anything right. She doesn’t even like the way I eat.
SUE: Aha. And the more you freeze up, Ken, I guess the more Mia tries to instruct you.
MIA: I get so frustrated. I prod him, I poke him, that is what I do. I prod him to get a response. Any response.
SUE: Right, so let’s track this. You prod and poke, Ken freezes and responds less and less. You shut down, Ken? [He nods.] And the more you shut down, the more Mia feels shut out and the more she pokes. It is a circle that just spins and spins and it has taken over your relationship. What is happening for you, Ken, when you “freeze up”?
KEN: I get so I am afraid to do anything, sort of paralyzed. Whatever I do will be wrong. So I do less and less. I go into a shell.
MIA: And then I feel so alone. I just try to get a rise out of him any way I can.
SUE: Right. This spiral has really taken over. One freezes up, feels paralyzed, shuts down into a shell, the other feels shut out and pokes harder and harder to get a response.
MIA: This is sad for us, for both of us. How can we stop it then, this spiral?
SUE: Well, we have pretty much set it out. These steps are like breathing for you now. You don’t even know you are taking them. You need to get real clear about how this cycle is creating a minefield in the middle of your relationship. It is making it impossible for you to feel safe together. If I was Ken here, I would mumble in case what I said was wrong. If I was Mia, I would push and prod because inside I would be pleading, “Take me to the dance. Come and be with me.”
MIA: I do feel like that. That is what I am trying to do, to reach him. But I know my calling has an edge to it. I get frustrated.
KEN: So there is nothing wrong with us that we have got caught like this then? It doesn’t mean that we just aren’t right for each other?
SUE: That’s true. Many of us get stuck like this when we can’t quite find a way to feel safe and connected with each other. The way I see it, you are so important to Mia that she cannot just wait you out or turn away. And you are
freezing up because you are so worried about doing the “wrong” thing with her, upsetting her and shaking up the relationship again. The old axiom “When in doubt, say or do nothing” is terrible advice in love relationships. The question is, can you help each other stop this “spiral”? Can you see when you are caught in it and move together to take your relationship back?
KEN: Maybe we can!
In the following sessions, Ken and Mia go over their polka again and again. They discover that their “spiral,” as they call it, occurs specifically when attachment cues come up. Protest moments occur in all marriages, but when the basic bond is secure, these events can be canceled out or even used as springboards to reinforce the relationship.
For example, in a happy marriage, Mia would still protest at moments when she felt emotionally separated from Ken, but in a lower key. Being less worried about the connection between them, she would express herself in a softer and clearer way. And Ken, in turn, would be more receptive and responsive to her protest. He would not hear her distress or disappointment as a sentence of doom for him as a lover or for their relationship, but as a sign of her need for closeness with him.
In an insecure relationship, however, the Protest Polka speeds up and gets more intense. It eventually creates such havoc that partners cannot resolve problems or communicate clearly about anything. Then disconnection and distress infuse more and more of the relationship. It’s important to note, however, that no relationship is entirely suffused with the destructive pattern I talk about here. There are still moments of closeness. But they do not occur frequently enough or with sufficient strength to counter the harm caused by the Protest Polka. Or the type of closeness isn’t the one a partner craves. For instance, men with a tendency to withdraw from confrontations do initiate sexual intimacy in the bedroom, but for most women sexual relations are not enough to fulfill their attachment needs.
For years, therapists have misguidedly viewed this pattern in terms of disputes and power struggles and have attempted to resolve it by teaching problem-solving skills. This is a little like offering Kleenex as the cure for viral pneumonia. It ignores the “hot” attachment issues that underlie the pattern. Rather than conflict or control, the issue, from an attachment perspective, is emotional distance. It is no accident that Ken is “stonewalling,” as his wooden lack of response is called in the research literature, and that this sparks off rage and aggression in his wife. An aggressive response seems to be wired into primates when a loved one on whom an individual depends acts as if the individual does not exist. An infant human or monkey will attack a stonewalling mother, in a desperate attempt to obtain recognition. If no response occurs, “deadly” isolation, loss, and helplessness follow.
What we have seen above is just one instance of the Protest Polka. Not every distancing, defensive partner talks of “freezing” like Ken does. But I’ve found that pursuing and distancing partners each tend to use characteristic expressions when describing their experiences. Let’s listen in; you may hear some of your own patterns and moves here.
Partners who follow in Mia’s steps often use these statements:
• “I have a broken heart. I could weep forever. Sometimes I feel like I am dying in this relationship.”
• “These days he is always busy, somewhere else. Even when he is home, he is on the computer or watching TV. We seem to live on separate planets. I am shut out.”
• “Sometimes I think that I am lonelier in this relationship than I was when I lived by myself. It seemed easier to be by myself than living like this, together but separate.”
• “I needed him so much during that time, and he was just so distant. It was as if he didn’t care. My feelings didn’t matter to him. He just dismissed them.”
• “We are roommates. We never seem to be close anymore.”
• “I get mad, sure I do. He just doesn’t seem to care, so I smack him, sure I do. I’m just trying to get a response from him, any response.”
• “I am just not sure I matter to him. It’s like he doesn’t see me. I don’t know how to reach him.”
• “If I didn’t push and push we would never be close. It would never happen.”
Examining these statements closely reveals a wealth of attachment themes: feeling unimportant to or not valued by a partner; experiencing separateness in terms of life and death; feeling excluded and alone; feeling abandoned at a time of need or being unable to depend on a partner; longing for emotional connection and feeling anger at a partner’s lack of responsiveness; experiencing the lover as a friend or a roommate.
When these partners are encouraged to focus on the negative dance and describe just their own moves, instead of their partner’s mistakes or faults, they often use the following verbs: push, pull, slap, attack, criticize, complain, pressure, blow up, yell, provoke, try to get close, and manage. Sometimes it is hard to see how your feet move in the dance. At those times, when we are caught in the pattern of pursuit and protest, most of us talk simply of being frustrated, enraged, or upset, and this is what our partner sees. But it is only the first, most superficial, layer of what is going on in the polka.
Partners who follow in Ken’s footsteps usually speak this way:
• “I can never get it right with her, so I just give up. It all seems hopeless.”
• “I feel numb. Don’t know how I feel. So I just freeze up and space out.”
• “I get that I am flawed somehow. I am a failure as a husband. Somehow that just paralyzes me.”
• “I shut down and wait for her to calm down. I try to keep everything calm, not rock the boat. That is my way of taking care of the relationship. Don’t rock the boat.”
• “I go into my shell where it’s safe. I go behind my wall. I try to shut the door on all her angry comments. I am the prisoner in the dock and she is the judge.”
• “I feel like nothing in this relationship. Inadequate. So I run to my computer, my job, or my hobbies. At work, I am somebody. I don’t think I am anything special to her at all.”
• “I don’t matter to her. I am way down on her list. I come somewhere after the kids, the house, and her family. Hell, even the dog comes before me! I just bring home the money. So I end up feeling somehow empty. You never know if the love will be there or not.”
• “I don’t feel that I need anyone the way she does. I am just not as needy. I was always taught that it’s weak to let yourself need someone like that, childish. So I try to handle things on my own. I just walk away.”
• “I don’t know what she is talking about. We are fine. This is what marriage is all about. You just become friends. I am not sure I know what she means by close, anyway.”
• “I try to solve the problem in concrete ways. Try to fix it. I deal with it in my head. It doesn’t work. She doesn’t want that. I don’t know what she wants.”
There are themes here, too: feeling hopeless and lacking the confidence to act; dealing with negative feelings by shutting down and numbing out; assessing oneself a failure as a partner, as inadequate; feeling judged and unaccepted by the partner; trying to cope by denying problems in the relationship and attachment needs; doing anything to avoid the partner’s rage and disapproval; using rational problem solving as a way out of emotional interactions.
When partners like Ken describe their own moves, they use the following terms: move away, shut down, get paralyzed, push the feelings away, hide out, space out, try to stay in my head, and fix things. What they usually talk about in terms of their feelings is depression, numbness, and lack of feeling, or a sense of hopelessness and failure. What their partner usually sees is simply a lack of emotional response.
Gender plays a part here, though the roles vary with culture and couple. In our society, women tend to be the caretakers of relationships. They usually pick up on distance sooner than their lovers, and they are often more in touch with their attachment needs. So their role in the dance is most often the pursuing, more blaming spouse. Men, on the othe
r hand, have been taught to suppress emotional responses and needs, and also to be problem solvers, which sets them up in the withdrawn role.
If I appeal to you for emotional connection and you respond intellectually to a problem, rather than directly to me, on an attachment level I will experience that as “no response.” This is one of the reasons that the research on social support uniformly states that people want “indirect” support, that is, emotional confirmation and caring from their partners, rather than advice. Often men say that they do not know how to respond on an emotional level. But they do! They do it when they feel safe, most often with their children. The tragedy here is that a man may be doing his best to answer his wife’s concerns by offering advice and solutions, not understanding that what she is really seeking from him is emotional engagement. His engagement is the solution for her.
Both men and women are inculcated with social beliefs that help ensnare them in the polka. Most destructive is the belief that a healthy, mature adult is not supposed to need emotional connection and so is not entitled to this kind of caring. Clients tell me, “I cannot just tell him that I am feeling small and need his arms around me. I’m not a kid,” or “I can’t just ask to come first, even sometimes. I have never asked for that. I don’t feel entitled. I shouldn’t need that.” If we cannot name and accept our own attachment needs, sending clear messages to others when those needs are “hot” is impossible. Ambiguous messages are what keep the polka going. It is so much easier to say, “Why aren’t you more talkative? Don’t you have anything to say to me?” than to open up and ask that our need for loving connection be met.
The Protest Polka is danced not just by lovers, but by parents and children and brothers and sisters, indeed by anyone with close emotional ties to another. Sometimes it is easier for us to see ourselves performing it with our siblings or our kids than with our spouse. Is it that the vulnerability is less obvious? I ask myself why my adolescent son, sighing and dismissing my comments about his being late, sends me over the edge into critical blaming, even when we have a loving bond between us. The answer is easy. Suddenly I hear a message that vibrates with attachment meanings. He rolls his eyes at me. His tone is contemptuous. I hear that my concerns or comments do not matter to him. I am irrelevant. So I turn up the music and I criticize him. He retreats and dismisses me again. We are off. The polka music plays on. But suddenly I recognize the music. So I step to the side and invite him to look at the dance. “Wait a minute. What is happening here? We are getting caught up in a silly fight and we are both getting hurt.” This is the first step in stopping the polka: recognize the music.
Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love Page 7