by Donna Eden
In our relationship, Donna is most likely to be the one who feels the responses she is receiving are not on the mark. At such times, she may say to David what she would like to hear, such as (Donna speaking): “Donna, I so appreciate how you take care of requests that come in to both of us. I sometimes find out that you have handled requests without me even knowing about them. And you handle them so gracefully, even when we can’t accommodate them. You really protect my time and space that way. It is a very loving gift you give to me.” David, often oblivious to the whole matter, may only manage to utter back a wimpy reply like, “Yeah, what you said!” As we were writing the last sentence, with David poking fun at himself, Donna commented, “But I treasure the look of recognition and empathy on your face!” And more often, when David recognizes the truth of Donna’s words, he is likely to restate it in his own words, in a way that touches us both. At a minimum, Donna’s overture tunes him in to a whole new slice of the relationship and Donna isn’t having to sit on her resentment about how oblivious David has been.
High-Band It
Another technique we’ve been using in our own relationship for more than thirty years is to invoke the phrase “High-band it” to invite each other to lift the discussion to a “higher band” of energy. Like the Appreciation Sandwich, it is a simple technique that can quickly improve the energies between you and your partner. At any moment, you can be placing a more positive interpretation on the circumstances in your life or a more negative one. Each tends to be self-fulfilling. High-banding means that positive perceptions become the lens through which events are viewed. You place the most favorable interpretations possible on the situation, however much of a stretch it may seem in the moment. When one of us sees the other spiraling down in the stresses of daily life, the other will gently and with compassion say, “Let’s high-band this one.” We’ve each learned that when the other offers this invitation, we are at a choice point.
Often, that simple reminder can create a shift from being immersed in the emotional misery of the moment to becoming aware that our interpretation of the situation is bringing us down as much as the situation itself. Simply remembering that this is a fleeting moment and placing it in the context of all that is right will be enough to lift you from the “low-band” path to the high band. Talk about this concept and try it. If you can’t get there, if your negativity is too strong to let you high-band it, use one or more of the energy exercises (here) and then give it another try. One more caveat. Take care not to use this as a way of criticizing or blaming: “Would you please HIGH-BAND IT, dammit!” Repeatedly for us, a compassionate and loving “Let’s high-band it, David” can be a marvelous gift. Combining it with an offer for a Spinal Flush (here) is the lover’s meow.
How to Instantly Stop an Argument
The most vulnerable moment in couple communication is generally the point where you (or your partner) are becoming flooded with anger and are sure you are right and your partner is wrong. When we go into our energetic stress response mode, the first thing lost is our ability to respond to the situation creatively and the next is any sense that a higher path is possible. If you are the one who is becoming flooded, there is a quick two-step process you can do at this point that may instantly bring you back into attunement and connection.
The first step is an energy technique; the second step refocuses your mind. Immediately take a deep breath. Place one hand on your belly just beneath your navel. Place the base of the palm of your other hand above your nose between your eyebrows with your fingers facing up and resting easily as far as they reach toward the top of your head. Take another deep breath and ask yourself to find the fear that is beneath the anger or blame. The physical posture has several advantages. First of all, it shifts your attention from the disharmony to your body. It also energetically connects three chakras: the second chakra, beneath your navel, is the chakra of creativity; the sixth chakra, between your eyebrows, is the chakra of higher perception (known as the “third eye” in yoga practice); and the seventh chakra is the chakra of higher purpose. The posture is called the Three Chakra Hook-Up. The hand on your head also stimulates reflex points that keep the blood from leaving your brain for the fight/flight/freeze response. So you are immediately interrupting the stress response and at the same time bringing creativity to your faculties of higher perceptions and higher purpose.
But you don’t stop there. Now that you have shifted your focus from the disagreement to your body and brought the energies in your body into a more favorable state, you are able to ask yourself a vital question: “What is the fear in me that is driving this anger or blame?” Gay and Kathlyn Hendricks—who have been teaching couples about “conscious loving”11 since the early 1980s and are high up among the couples who coach couples whom we most admire—point out that beneath anger and blame is usually fear. You may be afraid that your partner is doing something that will make your life harder, is blaming or judging you, is never going to change a behavior that is hard for you to tolerate, is losing interest in you, or is going to leave you. One of Gay and Kathlyn’s favorite techniques, which helps couples instantly shift from argument to connection, is to ask them to go beneath the anger, find the fear that is driving it, and state it. For instance, “Every night you sink into the TV and every night I feel angry about it. Deep down I’m afraid you are getting bored with me.” Saying what you are afraid of connects you with your partner at a more vulnerable level and shifts you out of a confrontational space. Doing the energy posture first makes you more likely to be able to tune into the underlying fear with self-compassion. Your partner’s compassion will, in turn, be beckoned. Try it. It works!
Cultivate Positive Thoughts About Your Partner and Your Relationship
Thought and energy influence one another. Your thoughts follow your energies, but your energies also follow your thoughts. Make a list of ten qualities you deeply appreciate about your partner or your relationship. Carry it with you. At least once during your workday or another time that you are apart, stop, consult your list, select one of the qualities, and for fifteen seconds mindfully immerse yourself in it while doing the Three Chakra Hook-Up or simply placing both hands over your Heart Chakra. Savor this. Enjoy it fully. Imagine you are breathing the positive thought into every cell of your body.
• THE ENERGY DIMENSION •
Positive Thinking
When you immerse yourself in a positive thought, the energy of your aura becomes large, expansive, takes on a halo look around your head, and tends to connect with natural energies in the environment. Meanwhile, the energies of your heart and your head come into greater sync. When you repeatedly hold positive thoughts, this energy becomes more habitual—easier to access and present more of the time.
Physical Connection Stimulates Loving Energies
Caring physical touch keeps loving energies flowing between you. A simple conscious hug can initiate a shift when your energies are out of sync. Couples, even in strong relationships, tend to touch less over time, and when partners are feeling alienated from one another, hugs and other caring touches are often first to go. For most couples, even if the hugs seem forced in the beginning, they will usually have become genuine by the fourth or fifth second. Relaxing into a full-body embrace for even six seconds increases serotonin, leaving you feeling closer and less irritable, edgy, or sad.12 One thing we have done right is that even in the hard times, we hug one another. Sometimes we just hold on to one another as the upset dissipates. Daily heartfelt hugs are a wonderfully simple way to facilitate and maintain closeness (unless so much contempt has entered the relationship that prescribed hugs are not the place for you to start rebuilding).
A particularly good time for hugs is at moments of separation or reuniting. The part of us that longs to bond tends to become activated during partings and reunions, so you are, at a deep level, both more vulnerable at such times and more open to the power of a connection such as a conscious, full-bodied hug.
A deep embrace each evening can invite and dissolve the energies of fear, anxiety, shame, sadness, or resentment that may be left over from the day. Without even talking about the feelings, your body will quickly learn that in this safe haven, your vulnerabilities can be soothed in the simple enjoyment of a heart-to-heart embrace.13 Your relationship is your port within the storm.
Heaven Rushing In
In one of Donna’s favorite exercises to teach in an energy medicine class, you stand, open your arms toward the sky (best done outdoors, but you can visualize the heavens above you no matter where you are), and feel the energies come into your hands, arms, and body (see Figure 2-1). Even if you can’t quite feel them, they are there, moving into you as you hold this receptive posture. As the energies gather, you are likely to at least feel a tingling in your hands. Whatever you register, you can know that the heavens do respond when you are open. As a child of both the earth and the sky, you spontaneously receive healing energy and even information and guidance when you hold this position. Take in all you want. It is also a great technique to use when you don’t know what else to do.
When you are ready to continue, gather these energies into your hands and bring them over the center of your chest, a vortex that is known as “Heaven Rushing In.” The healing energies and guidance you have gathered rush into your body. Breathe them in.
This technique can be adapted to uplift your relationship. Begin by facing one another and with the open posture, look up toward the heavens (see Figure 2-1). As you bring your hands to your heart, make eye contact with your partner. Feel the energies you have gathered not only going into you but also building a bridge between you. Breathe into this bridge. Let it connect and enrich you both. This simple practice can be a lovely way to open or close any important encounter between the two of you.
FIGURE 2-1 Heaven Rushing In
On to Chapter 3
Understanding your own and your partner’s Energetic Stress Styles can keep you attuned in ways that head off many difficulties. When emotionally charged disagreements do arise, as they do in all relationships, what do you do? Many couples feel helpless as they watch themselves being taken onto an ugly course. Again. Is there a way to reliably turn conflicts into opportunities for deeper understanding and the affection that usually follows? Chapter 3 presents a step-by-step process for constructively engaging conflict. We call it “The Pact.”
3
When Your Energies Collide
A Pact for Setting Things Straight
Use can almost change the stamp of nature.
—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, HAMLET
A deep loving partnership is a bond, a collaborative alliance. This bond involves friendship and union that brings out the best in each of you. When it is broken or threatened, you are pulled into your Energetic Stress Style and may fall into fear, rage, or retreat. Sustaining a collaborative alliance, according to David Schnarch, author of Intimacy and Desire, requires you to work together for mutual benefit “even when this is difficult, anxiety-provoking, or painful.”1 More than analyzing what went wrong, it requires a willingness to align with one another in service of the relationship even when every instinct in you wants to strike out or retreat. While a successful marriage may be measured in years, the collaborative alliance ebbs and flows, able to be “made or lost in a split second.”2 Even within a strong relationship, partners aren’t able to stay in a state of collaborative alliance every moment. But the more you can maintain that state, the better your relationship will fare. Positive practices can “almost change the stamp of nature.”
Chapter 2 closed by promising you a Pact that can help you encounter relationship conflict constructively and creatively. This Pact will be able to serve as a means for repairing your collaborative alliance when it has become disrupted. It has four parts, each named for the action it requires:
Stop
Tap
Attune
Resolve
The acronym STAR will help you remember these four parts. Begin by emblazoning in your mind the first and most elusive step: Stop!
Part 1 of the STAR Pact: Stop
It can happen while you are watching TV, describing a precious event that occurred during your day, sharing a candlelight dinner, or, in the grand tradition of marital conflict, talking about money, sex, or raising the kids. Adrenaline pumps into your bloodstream, your heartbeat accelerates, and your ability to take in and process information diminishes dramatically. You lose your empathy, compassion, creativity, and sense of humor. Your defensiveness is on the rise. Your primal sensory channel takes over, and the sensory modes that usually balance it turn off. John Gottman wryly notes that when such “flooding” occurs, couples may wonder what they ever saw in one another in the first place. You feel overwhelmed by your own reactions and shocked by your partner’s. “You go into ‘systems overload,’ swamped by distress and upset. You may become extremely hostile, defensive, or withdrawn. Once you’re feeling this out of control, constructive discussion is impossible.”3
Yet stopping the discussion, even if you know it has taken a sharp downhill turn, may also seem impossible. Your partner has just assaulted your sacred bond and doesn’t care enough to apologize on the spot and begin to repair it. You’ve been insulted, blamed, or dismissed; fight, flight, or freeze hormones are surging through your arteries; you are caught in your Energetic Stress Style; and an accelerating momentum has taken on its own life. It may feel dreadful, but it is compelling. Stopping at such a moment is usually the hardest part of the Pact, which begins with an agreement to stop at the moment you are aware that defensiveness or anger toward your partner is building:
“If I recognize that a conflict is escalating, I will immediately stop and suggest we do a pre-agreed technique designed to shift our energies. If you make this suggestion, I will immediately interrupt the conversation and join you in the technique you suggest.”
This is so difficult to do because every fiber of your being is engaged in a rapidly escalating conflict. Marriage counselors know that it is critical to prevent people from reenacting the destructive, harmful confrontations that brought the couple into the office.4 Failure to do so not only erodes hope for the relationship and confidence in the therapist, it further establishes the neural pathways of threat and distrust. An effective couples therapist will intervene by providing a structure to the session that does not allow the couple to go into a negative freefall, but instead points them in a constructive direction. The purpose of the Pact is to provide that kind of structure at precisely the times it is most likely for the brain chemistry of threat and distrust to become more deeply established. It is designed to intervene during an interaction that is taking a harmful turn and to put it onto a constructive track. While it requires more determination to implement than if a couples therapist or coach is there in the room telling you to do it, your Pact is much cheaper. It is also on call 24/7.
But for the Pact to work, you need to give it the power you would give to a therapist! If a therapist whom you are paying a substantial fee interrupts your argument and suggests you instead begin to do a relaxation technique, you are likely to obey. The Pact gives you exactly this kind of instruction, and its success rests on an ironclad agreement (made between the two of you during a calm time) that you will implement it to head off a storm at the point when the weather seems to be turning. You won’t be able to create the Pact during the storm, and it will be harder to apply if you have waited until you are in full battle, though it can still be effective even in the midst of full battles—just harder to set into motion.
This first part, Stop, is, in theory, the easiest one to do—you just apply the brakes—yet it is, paradoxically, the hardest phase to initiate. As the intensity of negative emotion rises, you are caught between wishing the altercation would just go away and hearing the nastiest and most provocative words in your repertoire come out of your mouth. It
is hard to pause when you would rather righteously drive your point home. Slamming on the brakes despite your biochemistry propelling you forward is, nonetheless, the maneuver you need to establish as your default in order for the Pact to be effective. Unlike communication techniques that are often useless during the height of couples conflict, however, your Pact provides a dependable structure for shifting your agenda from pursuing the conflict to changing the energy (Part 2 of the Pact). Couples can become practiced and capable of switching to an energy technique that breaks the spell that was keeping them in a negative spiral. Changing the energy becomes a shared achievement that is in itself empowering and bonding.