by Jay Stringer
The human heart tends to calcify to one end of these relational polarities. Over the past few years, my wife’s parents courageously faced severe health concerns. The pain and anxiety on my wife’s face during the worst of these months was palpable. In response, I wanted her to “contain” her grief by directing her attention to themes in her family that she could control. This, of course, led to a number of conflicts because she knew my calcification toward containment was simultaneously a commitment to not extending care (attunement) in her time of need. Calcification protected me from feeling lost and impotent in the complexity of grief, but it also stole from me. I lost a season of tenderness with my wife.
Calcification will also occur when you prevent necessary conflict from emerging in your relationships. During my senior year of college, a friend got engaged and no one in my group of friends knew how to celebrate his engagement. We saw an enmeshed couple; we could not tell where one partner ended and the other began. Anytime my friend expressed a desire to have time to himself or with friends, his significant other would consider it selfish. His solution was to avoid conflict with her, which indirectly meant he would lose contact with his friends. Despite his friends’ raising their concerns, he continued on his enmeshed path. I talked to him years later, and he noted how torn he felt inside. He wanted the respect of his friends but feared he would never be able to get married if he did not choose to care for his fiancée’s desires at the cost of his own. Very similarly to my own calcification, my friends protected him from the inherent conflict of relationships.
The invitation in this chapter is to understand these relational polarities as holy contradictions God intends to use for our transformation. The degree to which you allow these natural tensions to exist will determine the quality and substance of your relationships. As a man calcified toward surrogate forms of containment, strength, and conflict, I am meant to grow in my ability to practice attunement, vulnerability, and repair. My friend from college is meant to grow in his ability to tolerate conflict, become wise in containment, and grow stronger in order to engage himself and others with greater integrity. You will undoubtedly encounter your lack of skill when you deploy from your calcified pole. That is okay. Your courage to persist will steadily build proficiency. In this chapter, we’ll focus on attunement and containment; we’ll focus on the other practices in the chapters that follow.
Attunement and Containment
Imagine you are the parent of a seventh-grade boy. He tells you there is a sleepover at his friend Brady’s house and he would like to go. As a parent, you might ask for more details. “Who all is going? Are Brady’s parents going to be there?” Your son looks away, knowing his petition is now doomed, and replies, “I don’t think so. I don’t know why that matters.”
Your parent radar is beeping, alerting you that these friends are likely planning to do more than just play video games. At this juncture, you are likely to feel torn. You ponder the dilemma for a moment: Seventh-grade boys with no supervision? What an awful idea! Do Brady’s parents even know about this?
At the same time, something in you reminds you that your son has had a very difficult year academically and socially. You remember that sliver of delight on his face when he told you he was invited to a party, something you know he has been waiting for all year. This situation requires a parent to practice attunement and containment.
Now imagine you receive a call from a friend who has just told you some of the difficulties he is facing in his intimate relationships and career. It is the third time you’ve heard a version of this story in six months. You want to be empathic, but you are starting to feel drained and increasingly irritated. You’ve listened, you’ve offered suggestions that he find a therapist and career coach, you’ve offered to get coffee, but it’s clear your friend is committed to recreating the problems around him. Then when he gets overwhelmed, he vents. Simultaneously, you feel cold and yet really want to see these issues get resolved in his life, even if it’s so you never have to hear about them again.
Relationships alert us to the reality that there are no simple solutions or easy fixes. Most of us, however, will not step with honor and honesty into the relational binds that unfold in front of us. Instead, we tend to keep listening with our ears but close our hearts and souls. Or we vanish from others and play busy.
In Dan Allender’s book How Children Raise Parents, he noted that every child is asking at least two core questions: (1) Am I loved? and (2) Can I get my own way?[92] As adults, we continue to ask very similar questions. The role of attunement in relationships is to tell others, “Yes, you are loved.” And the role of containment is to mature us by letting others know, “You will not always get what you want from me. I have my own limits, needs, and observations too.”
Attunement’s primary task is to recognize the face and story of the person in front of you with kindness and curiosity. The chief task of containment involves creating boundaries. Boundaries are important because when you do not feel as if you can say no to others, there is no way you can have a meaningful yes. In relationships, attunement without containment will become accommodation, and containment without attunement will become a form of dogmatism.
Think about being the parent of the seventh grader who was invited to the party. Attunement allows you to join in on your child’s delight for being invited to the party. Containment, however, might influence you to say no to a request to stay at his friend’s house without adult supervision. In the example of your friend’s experiencing perpetual relationship and career difficulties, attunement allows you to hear the pain in your friend’s voice and let him know how much you care. Containment, however, allows you to say something along the lines of “I am willing to keep talking about this, but only if part of that conversation is to explore why these dynamics might be occurring so consistently in your life. I care for this relationship and do not want it reduced to venting sessions.”
Creativity is the antidote when you are sensing attunement versus containment within relationships. A parent could attune to the excitement and meaning of their child’s desire but also say no, accompanying it with an offer to host the sleepover or take his friend out to the movies. Similarly, a bid to have sex with your spouse could be met with a no or “It’s just too late.” Here, attunement is needed not only for your spouse but also for yourself. The internal dialogue might sound something like I was really hoping for intimacy with my wife, but she is clearly exhausted. My desire for sex is good [self-attunement], and instead of going to porn after she goes to bed, I can unwind with her and invite her to share more with me about the most exhausting elements of her day [self-containment and other-centered attunement]. In the morning, I will reengage the conversation around sexual intimacy and find a time that works best to be with one another. Every relational dilemma we encounter is a place to practice the harmonizing of attunement and containment.
How to Attune and Contain
To practice attunement, create space for your partner and dear friends to know you and for you to know them. Apart from a mirror or a selfie, you cannot see your own face. One of the implications of this is that you need others to help you know who you are. When you allow your emotions to be seen, you will be less dependent on your need to escape them. When you attune to the needs of your significant other and dear friends and allow them to do the same, the hostility that drives so much of unwanted sexual behavior is reduced. Here are some relationally beneficial things you can do.
Share. Tell the primary people in your life about what your day or week holds. What are you excited about? What is making you anxious? Where are you feeling forgotten or upset?
Listen (part 1). Attune to your emotional life by listening to what your body is experiencing. You may notice anxiety or anger or shame. Instead of running from those feelings or immediately sharing them, attune to them. Imagine your inhales bringing comfort or power to the places of discomfort, and visualize the tension leaving your body on the exhale.
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nbsp; Ask. Ask your spouse and best friends about their lives. Those who struggle with unwanted sexual behavior have notorious difficulties in caring for others because they are extremely self-focused and they’ve rarely seen attunement modeled well. Ask those in your life what the following day or week or year holds for them and what they feel up against. Where do they seem excited? Where are they experiencing dread?
Reflect. Reflect at the end of each week where you attuned well and when you wanted to avoid.
Get creative. Practice containing your emotions through utilizing creativity. Jon Kabat-Zinn, creator of the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society, said, “You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.”[93] There are times when the stresses and futility of life will be too much to bear. One of the best ways we can practice containment is to anticipate our needs. This forces us to say yes to the things we need and no to things that will drive us deeper into stress and deprivation. Often clients I’ve worked with pursue a weekly cleaning service, hire a local company to deliver food on nights particularly busy for their families, and find regular babysitters for date nights with their partners. Creativity with containment will provide you with the buoyancy to get through difficulties and transitions.
Listen (part 2). When the psalmist wrote, “Know my anxious thoughts” (Psalm 139:23), it implied he was attuned to the reality that he had anxious thoughts. Spend five minutes every day learning to attune to and then contain your emotions. What is your body telling you? Is it angry, with a ball of fire in your chest? Is it full of adrenaline, propelling you recklessly forward? Is it sad, inviting you to find comfort? The more you know what your body is feeling, the more you will know you can contain your emotions before they get out of hand. Ponder how these experiences might be asking you to grow personally. Investing in relationships is a significant ingredient for a healthful life, but it does not negate your responsibility to care for yourself through containment.
Forecast. Where are your negative emotions likely to take you if left uncontained? Are there events on your calendar or times of day when you will be particularly tempted to engage in unwanted sexual behavior? Fortify your resolve to say no by pursuing integrity with what truly needs care or completion.
Pursue connection. When you experience difficult emotions with others, pursue connection. When we feel rejected or forgotten, we tend to withdraw or blame. Instead share what you are feeling, not what the other person did. For example, when you feel distance from a significant person in your life, set up a time in the near future to talk about it. Rather than starting out the conversation with “You always think about me last,” say, “I’ve noticed there is a shift occurring in our relationship, and I’ve wondered if you have experienced that too.”
Pursue creativity with others. Struggling with unwanted sexual behavior, you’ve learned to spend a great deal of your time alone. Being alone then becomes highly associated with pursuing unwanted sexual behavior or other distractions. Scheming for unwanted sexual behavior has undoubtedly hijacked your creative energy. Contain the most predictable times of acting out through pursuing enjoyable or productive activities with others.
BENEFITS OF ATTUNEMENT AND CONTAINMENT
By practicing attunement and containment, you learn how to give and receive care, the most significant building block of relationships. From this solid foundation of knowing and being known, you will reach new summits of intimacy with others. Few of my male clients recognize any needs they have except for sex. This puts a tremendous strain on their partners to be sexual in order to experience intimacy. The pressure men put on their partners inevitably erodes desire. How can a partner desire the very thing she is pressured to offer? Attunement and containment allow sex to become something other than the release of tension or the solo symbol of commitment. Eroticism between a couple is strengthened through being woven together with holistic passion, pleasure, and care.
[91] Harville Hendrix, Getting the Love You Want, 20th anniversary edition (New York: Holt, 2007), xxxv.
[92] Dan Allender, How Children Raise Parents: The Art of Listening to Your Family (Colorado Springs, CO: Waterbrook, 2005), 33.
[93] Jon Kabat-Zinn, Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life (New York: Hyperion, 1994), 32. Kabat-Zinn saw this caption on a poster showing an image of an older surfer.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
PRACTICE CONFLICT AND REPAIR IN YOUR RELATIONSHIPS
IMAGINE A THREE-YEAR-OLD in a coffee shop who has just been told he can eat only one doughnut. The child’s anger escalates after the sugar boundary is enforced. The child falls to the ground crying, and when the dad goes to pick him up, the toddler slaps him. At this point the dad takes a quick glance around the shop and sees that everyone is staring. Steeped in shame, the dad escalates his intensity and yells at his son for his behavior. He scoops his son up, and they beeline for the family car. Still screaming and kicking his little legs, the boy is placed under further lockdown in his car seat for what is sure to be a maddening ride home.
At this juncture, the scene is full of conflict. Father and son are divided against one another, and both are filled with enmity. What the son needs most is to have the relationship repaired, not further ruptured through punishment (whether physical or psychological) or stonewalling.
An attuned parent is able to reflect about the situation and talk to his three-year-old about what happened. The dad may say something like this: “I got very upset with you in the coffee shop and yelled. I’m sure it was very scary to see Daddy’s face look so mean. I am so sorry, Son. I want to treat you with kindness.” The repair begins to start, but the parent must also address the toddler’s tantrum after the boy’s body is regulated. The father might wait twenty minutes or more to remind his son about the rupture. “I know you were very upset when I said you could have only one. Doughnuts are ridiculously delicious, and I understand why you would want more. It is okay to be mad, but it is not okay to use your strong arms to hit me.”
During the course of childhood, we undergo thousands of cycles of conflict (coffee-shop situation) and repair (conversation at home afterward). This allows children to develop language for what is happening internally and interpersonally. Just as important, it gives them the knowledge that their behavior and emotions, whether angry or sad or anywhere in between, will not result in the termination of relationships. When children are not equipped to turn to healthy relationships for repair, they will eventually look outside their parents or primary caregivers for rescue. As teenagers, this rescue is often a behavior or relationship that offers a hybrid of relief and revenge for what their parents provided.
Conflict alone is not evidence of an unhealthy relationship. Quite the contrary. Those in healthy relationships are able to view conflict as a vital threshold of growth. Rather than blame one another within conflict, healthy individuals seek integrity to address their contribution to the madness before them. This is what I refer to as generative conflict.
Messy conflict, on the other hand, occurs when a couple is committed to blaming one another without any reflection on the deeper dynamics at play. In my office, one scenario I often witness with married couples is that the husband wants to connect sexually, but the wife wants to connect relationally. One spouse might say, “I would be more open to sex if you were more open to conversation,” which then tees up this next response from the other spouse: “I would be more open to conversation if you were more open to sex.”
For many couples, the conversation ends there and mild to extreme conflict ensues. The spouse who doesn’t want sex might roll over in bed, irritated by the demand on her body, and her partner rolls out of bed, angry that his desire is so rarely received. Within the next hour or day, the husband will seek out some form of dissociation, often escalating to the use of pornography. The function of pornography gives him the ability to lean on something that simultaneously allows for escape from the present messy conflict and is something that can m
ake his spouse pay.
In most marriages, messy conflict serves as a way to bring about an immature form of repair. If the husband is upset, he may increasingly withhold his emotional life. At some level, he knows that his silence will set his wife up to eventually move toward him with an invitation for sex in order to release the marital tension. As you can see, this is an example of immature repair. Sadly, immature, surrogate repair is the most common type I see in my counseling practice. If the wife does not offer to relieve the conflict, the couple will often continue to be on edge with one another. Or if messy conflict occurs for years on end, the couple will get into a battle over who wants sex and intimacy the least.[94]
In this marital scenario we just explored, conflict is not being used to grow the couple into healthy human beings (generative conflict). Instead, messy conflict is used to maintain the status quo of the sexual relationship. Rarely will the couple acknowledge that the partner who has the least desire for sex may be the healthiest. After all, why would anyone truly desire sex when the symbolic meaning is to bring catharsis to messy conflict? Instead, the one who wants more sex is seen as healthy, despite desiring a form of sex that is filled with entitlement.
For a couple to transition from messy to generative conflict and from immature to mature repair, they individually need the ability to be honest about their hostility toward one another and explore the dimensions of their own integrity that have been forfeited. In the example above, the husband will need the honesty to engage how much easier it’s been to blame his wife’s lack of desire for sex than to address how his sexual entitlement erodes intimacy. The wife will need the honesty to share how she allowed the meaning of sex to be about the release of tension because the cost of her desire to be deeply and holistically known would have been too much to bear.