by Donna Eden
Elizabeth, at thirty-one, frequently felt rebuffed, disregarded, and unloved. While her husband demonstrated his love for her in many ways and was always trying to comfort her, she was, at these times, inconsolable. To make it worse, after these episodes she would withdraw from him further because, despite his sincere efforts, she felt he hadn’t been there for her. Self-soothing wasn’t even in her repertoire as she would ruminate on how she had been wronged and sank ever deeper into a dark hole of despair. Not only hadn’t Elizabeth learned much about self-soothing as a child, you might wonder how she managed to make it into her thirties so unskilled about helping herself feel better during times of emotional distress.
Unfortunately, this type of lapse is not particularly unusual. While many people pick up new skills for self-soothing as they mature, others face internal obstacles that prevent them from learning and using even the most obvious self-soothing skills. So rather than simply trying to teach them techniques for self-soothing, these internal obstacles also need to be addressed.
A theme in Elizabeth’s bouts of feeling unloved was that someone else always seemed to be receiving the credit and recognition that she deserved. At another level, however, she felt undeserving of the very recognition she desired and expected. This was particularly evident in her inability to accept compliments even after she had done something extremely well. Rather, she would find flaws in her actions that no one else would even notice and relentlessly beat herself up for them. Obsessing about her own flaws and sinking into her resentment of those who she felt had wronged her consumed her so completely that doing things that might make her feel better simply did not come into her mind.
Derived from the field of energy psychology, the protocol used with Elizabeth (which you will be learning in chapters 6 and 7) includes two basic steps. The first involves giving a zero-to-ten rating on the level of distress or discomfort you feel in relation to an issue you wish to change. The second is to stimulate a set of acupuncture points by tapping on them while keeping the issue active in your mind. This simple combination is proving to be extraordinarily powerful in rewiring the neural pathways that underlie a range of emotional difficulties.
Elizabeth’s initial rounds of tapping focused on the fierce judgments she would place on herself, which she had rated as being at a 10 in relation to the amount of distress she felt when thinking about them. What emerged as she continued to tap were childhood memories of longing for her father’s approval, which she never received (as she remembered it), yet when her younger brother was born, he got the praise and adoration she so desperately craved. Tapping on her pain about this started a healing process that went very deep. She was eventually able to recognize and tap on the exaggerated authority she was still giving her father to determine her sense of worth. In a subsequent session, she focused on and neutralized her emotional response to specific, recent incidents where she had judged herself harshly and was unable to accept sincere compliments about things others felt she had done well.
By the time she’d made some progress with these issues, the tapping was able to directly address self-soothing. A mental association was made by using energy techniques to link times of feeling despondent with doing activities that consoled her (e.g., “Even though there may still be times that I feel down, I know I will feel better if I sit on the porch and listen to Enya”). Not only did the episodes of struggling with her self-worth become much less intense and less frequent, but it now occurred to her when they did happen that she could take positive steps that would bring her comfort and relief. Finally, she was given instruction in four ways to “put money in the bank” so her reserves would already be stronger at times she needed self-soothing. These were simple physical or interpersonal actions that were in her control: enough sleep, enough exercise, enough physical touch, and enough emotional contact.
Learning to self-soothe had an enormous impact on Elizabeth’s marriage. She no longer would desperately look to her husband to make her feel better or rage at him when he couldn’t. By having a way to amp down to a manageable level the intensity when she was feeling bad, she was also able to let her husband help her. Now that his overtures of support could be received when they were needed, what had been a thorny obstacle to their being close to one another became a source of bonding.
Emotional Self-Management
The second skill set that grows out of your early attachment experiences is the ability to manage your emotions. More than a hundred human emotions have been identified,27 with most of them being combinations of or the social shaping of a few basic emotions found in people of all cultures, such as anger, fear, sadness, disgust, surprise, anticipation, trust, and joy.28 The English word emotion is derived from the Old French esmovoir, meaning “to excite.” While psychologists define this basic concept in numerous ways, all would agree that emotions involve arousal (“to excite”) and that they influence the way we process our thoughts and experiences.
At the most basic level, in the life of an infant, an internal event (such as hunger or feeling cold) or an external event (such as a warm blanket or a loud sound), results in simple appraisals: “this is good” or “this is bad.” While this is the prototype for the more nuanced emotions that will come later, this basic assessment of good or bad, Daniel Siegel explains, “prepares the brain and the rest of the body for action.”29
The parents’ responses to the infant’s expressions of positively toned or negatively toned arousal lay down the neural pathways that help children learn to regulate their own nervous systems. You figured out how to manage your “states of arousal and inner processing”30 through those early interactions. If your parents’ responses to you were attuned to your internal experiences, you were likely to form a secure foundation for navigating through life with confidence about the validity of your feelings and thoughts. If your early caregivers usually failed to validate your internal experiences in their moment-to-moment exchanges with you, your foundation for trusting your feelings and thoughts as valid guides became shaky. If this lack of attunement is extreme, as in cases of abusive, emotionally disturbed, or severely neglectful parents, children are set on their journey through life with a compass that is fundamentally flawed. They may find themselves regularly pushing down the truth of their emotions and experiences, distorting them, or becoming overwhelmed by them.
Early caregivers not only validate or fail to validate the child’s internal experiences, they also model for the child how to respond when others express their emotions. A parent whose internal state is dominated by fear or anger simultaneously evokes fear or anger in the child and also, through reinforcement, teaches the child specific ways of responding to fear or anger. A girl may take it upon herself to give a fearful mother the support she herself really needs from that mother, or try to make herself invisible in the presence of an angry father. These patterns tend to carry over into her adult relationships even when they no longer fit.
Individual childhood experiences involving trauma, severe loss, or other emotionally intense experiences, if they are not adequately processed, can also lead to patterns of emotional response that are not appropriate to the current situation. In Parenting from the Inside Out, Siegel and Mary Hartzell identify two basic types of responses to emotionally challenging situations: the “high road” and the “low road.”31 The high road is dominated by advanced brain structures that came later in evolution and sit “higher,” toward the top of the head, in the cerebral cortex. The low road is dominated by brain structures that sit below the cerebral cortex, including the amygdala, and that govern automatic behaviors such as the fight/flight/freeze response. When you are on the “high road,” your responses are well considered, flexible, and appropriate to the situation. When you are overly stressed or in a situation that otherwise triggers you into the “low road” state of mind, which includes being trapped in your Energetic Stress Style, you may be flooded by intense emotions such as fear, sadness, or rage, leading t
o “knee-jerk reactions instead of thoughtful responses.”32
We have all experienced “low road” behaviors from both sides—we’ve received them and we’ve acted them out. Unresolved childhood issues make us more susceptible to these storms of difficult feelings and inappropriate actions. When “low road” responses occur, and particularly when they repeat themselves, notice what triggers them. If you can’t identify the triggers, your partner probably can. You can then use the energy psychology approach presented in chapters 6 and 7 to defuse these emotional triggers.
Sometimes, however, this requires more than just focusing on the trigger. You saw how, in order to learn self-soothing, Elizabeth had to first overcome emotional obstacles rooted in earlier experiences. A seminar on self-soothing wasn’t going to be very useful to her until these interfering issues had been resolved. Learning how to manage intense emotions also often requires a focus on unresolved issues from the past. Fortunately, as you work with the behaviors you want to change, earlier experiences that are at their root often come into your awareness, making them accessible for healing using the energy psychology protocol you will be learning.
For example, a successful medical technology executive named Raul would become furious when younger associates disagreed with him, even if the disagreements were trivial. While in most situations he had a very sweet disposition, this pattern was also carrying into his marriage and his relationship with his children. It was clear to him that his outbursts were hurtful to everyone, including himself, but he was failing to prevent them despite his resolve to do so. Tapping on recent incidents and imagined situations that might trigger him lowered the intensity he felt to a degree, but it could be no match for these deeply ingrained behaviors until their roots were being addressed.
Raul’s father, a physician, was very stern with his three sons and imposed his will on them with criticism and rage. Raul was chagrined to realize that he had, in terms of those traits, become a carbon copy of his father. Imprints from such emotional models do not change easily, but over several energy psychology sessions, significant shifts occurred. The tapping focused on images of his enraged father, the feelings they brought up in him, and the thoughts and conclusions he came to as a result of these experiences. Each childhood experience involving anger that he could recall was addressed using the tapping. With these earlier experiences revisited and emotionally reworked, the triggers in his current life were easily brought down to zero on the zero-to-ten scale, and he found himself able to stay on the “high road” when these same triggers presented themselves. The neural pathways maintaining the old pattern had shifted, and managing his anger was now rarely a problem (yes, we are trying to get you excited for the energy psychology instructions in the following chapter).
Repairing Ruptures
To thrive, we need both intimate contact and alone time. Most ongoing relationships provide ample opportunity for both. They are composed of an unending series of separations and reconnections, part of the ebb and flow of daily life. If your parents gave you space for solitude and were then available when you needed connection again, you are already practiced in the dance of coming and going. More challenging for everyone, however, are separations that are experienced not just as a temporary time apart but as a rupture.
With children as well as adults, the consequences of a rupture depend more on whether, how, and how quickly the rupture is repaired than on its nature. How to repair the unavoidable ruptures that occurred as you were growing up was modeled (and in other ways taught to you) by your parents. In some families, ruptures are ignored as much as possible. You are supposed to “get over it” and just go on. In others, resentments are built and harbored. These strategies tend to echo into the person’s adult relationships.
Families that are effective at repairing the inevitable ruptures among their members feel safer, produce children who are happier and more emotionally secure, and meet life’s challenges with greater ease and flexibility. To repair a rupture, you first need to bring yourself from the “low road” of mental functioning back to the “high road.” Siegel and Hartzell suggest steps that will be familiar to you as elements of your STAR Pact (chapter 3), including a temporary separation (the Pact’s “Stop”), physical activity (the Pact’s “Tap” and other energy techniques), empathically stepping into the other’s experience (the Pact’s “Attune”), and finally reengaging (the Pact’s “Resolve”).33
Vern and Gloria rarely argued. Whenever they had differences, Vern would quickly tune into Gloria’s position and take it as his own. If this was not possible and a rupture between them did occur, Vern would be disheartened, certain it was his fault, and feel full of shame as he tried to grovel his way back into Gloria’s good graces. While having a spouse who is so eager to agree with you might seem desirable, it was Gloria who brought them into therapy. Although the peace and easy flow they enjoyed in their first two years together had been a relief in comparison to her other relationships, by their fourth year it was seeming to her that she was with a caricature of a real person instead of someone who brought his own feelings, thoughts, and opinions into the relationship.
Vern’s parents had minimized or made light of their differences rather than acknowledging and resolving conflicts, a workable if not ideal strategy, discussed in Chapter 1 as that of the Avoidant couple. A product of his past, Vern brought this style to his relationship with Gloria. But for Gloria, emotional engagement was a vital aspect of a relationship, and all Vern’s agreeableness only left her feeling lonely. True to form, Vern agreed to Gloria’s suggestion that they enter therapy to change his basic way of relating.
Just as you saw with Elizabeth and Raul, work that began with a stated concern quickly shifted to childhood experiences. Vern recounted the way he was witness to unspoken tension between his parents on a myriad of issues, from dinner choices to which car to buy. With little discussion, his mother’s preferences would generally carry the decision, but expressions of his father’s resentment and his mother’s guilt, which couldn’t be concealed, were prominent in Vern’s memory.
Vern used the acupuncture point tapping protocol while focusing on those memories, on his shame about not being able to do a thing about the tension in his family, and on his reluctance to introduce any tension into his marriage. While his zero-to-ten rating rapidly went down in relation to his past, it would not go below 5 as he focused on his being more forthcoming with his preferences in the marriage. He was clearly ambivalent about that objective.
As Vern explored his ambivalence, it became clear that he had dire misgivings about what would happen if he ever took a strong stand that challenged Gloria’s position on virtually any matter. One big reason for this, it turned out, was that he had no idea of how to repair a relationship rupture since he was so inexperienced with them. He imagined, instead, that it would spread like a wildfire until the marriage had been destroyed. In the safety of the therapy office, he was able to tell Gloria clearly and firmly that he felt she was being much too strict with their adolescent daughter. This triggered Gloria into a strong defensive reaction. She was proud of her parenting skills and thought her husband appreciated and fully supported them. Hearing that he didn’t shocked her and flooded her with feelings that brought her onto what we have been calling the “low road.” She was deeply hurt, felt betrayed that Vern had given her no clue, and was soon ruminating about all the other areas where he might be secretly judging her. She also let him know, with escalating volume, how absurdly wrong he was in the beliefs about child-rearing he was expressing.
It suddenly seemed as if Vern’s fears had been well taken and that if they ever got through this therapy-induced mess, he should keep his opinions to himself forever after. Gloria was completely unaware that she was fulfilling Vern’s catastrophic expectations about doing exactly what she was asking him to do. I (David) was, at that moment, reflecting on the dubious wisdom of having chosen a profession that messes with a family’
s established adaptations. But I also knew that this was an opportunity for them to have the experience of repairing a relationship rupture. I took them through the steps of the Pact. By the end, Gloria was back on the “high road” and we were all laughing about the ironies that had just played out. Vern had had the experience that even one of the worst reactions he could imagine to his having stated a disagreement had been repaired within half an hour.
During the week following the session, they had numerous deep and creative discussions about discipline for their kids and were feeling closer to one another than they had for a long time. In the next session, with Vern now having a sense that ruptures could be repaired instead of being something to be avoided at all costs, additional acupuncture point tapping dissolved his knee-jerk discomfort about stating a disagreement to Gloria. Being able to tolerate ruptures and repair them were essential skills in Vern’s ability to take a next step in the evolution of his marriage.
The three skill sets discussed in this section—self-soothing, emotional self-management, and being able to repair ruptures within an intimate partnership—are laid down in our family of origin and early interactions with our caregivers. But they are skills that we can continue to develop and refine throughout our lives. Particularly in the crucible of our intimate partnerships, we discover the shortcomings of the strategies we have brought forth from childhood. The cases described here illustrate breakdowns in these three core relationship skill sets. Each was quite challenging—but not particularly unusual. We hope this discussion has provided a context for recognizing your own strengths with these skills as well as for assessing areas where they may need attention, along with instructive models. Healthier attachment in your most intimate relationships is a reward well worth striving toward.