We all want to thrive in our relationships. In order to keep your relationship strong, you'll need courage. Yes, you’re likely to think, we'll need courage to face adversity together. True. But you’ll also need courage to stay in love with your spouse.
When most people imagine the future of their romance, what comes to mind is loyalty, fidelity, facing difficulties together, having fun together, enjoying sex, and feeling the contentment and safety of each other’s company.
What doesn’t usually come to mind is what will be required of you to actually fulfill your hopes and dreams. And that's courage.
Every couple experiences resentment and dissatisfaction at times. Frustrations in relationships often center around seemingly incompatible differences—feeling judged, lonely, suffocated, criticized, sexually frustrated. All too often, partners just give up.
You might resign yourself to those feelings never changing. But the solutions you sometimes agree to ("I'll try to not get so angry" or "I’ll just accept things the way they are") can go by the wayside in a flash.
In an instant, your resolve evaporates. You might react in what you later realize is an irrational way, even over seemingly little issues.
These intense reactions are often not the result of some deliberative process—you're not pausing to think, "Hmm, does that comment make me mad?"
You're just reacting. Reaction leads to reaction, and the escalation takes on a life of its own.
During courtship, we don’t get triggered so quickly and intensely. The stakes just aren’t high enough yet. When your commitment grows, your partner becomes so much more important to you.
Once you're in a committed relationship, your partner has the capacity to make you feel threatened, simply because they're now "under your skin." They now have the power to make you feel small, suffocated, or abandoned and alone. This inherent capacity to threaten and feel threatened underlies the tension which creeps up over time, and it takes a lot of bravery to knock it down.
Historical demons play a huge role in relationship behavior, and identifying them isn't an easy task.
Reacting intensely is your signal to look deeper into the sources of the conflict with your partner. These sources may not be immediately apparent to you because this is all occurring in your "lizard" brain. This primitive part of your brain is the home of your survival instincts that trigger "fight or flight" responses.
That flash that erupts when you react negatively to something has an emotional thread, and with lightening speed, dips into a pool of hurt you experienced earlier in life. This adds massive fuel to the current fire.
Cue courage, because along with those demons of the past come the discomfort and anxiety you have to work through for a solid relationship.
If, for example, you felt criticized frequently by your mom or dad, you likely have a well of painful feelings stored away, often including shame or self-doubt. If your partner criticizes you, even in a small way, you might react defensively in a split second as a way of protecting yourself from a surge of painful feelings stored away from long ago.
Your reaction is a little bit about the present and a lot more about the past. And it creates disconnection and distance in your romantic relationship.
The challenge then becomes disentangling the present from the past. This requires you to revisit your past feelings of shame, hurt, worthlessness, and self-doubt. The threatening surge of old feelings is accompanied by anxiety because you don’t want to re-experience that pain.
Anxiety is really uncomfortable. I often say, "We'll sell our souls to avoid feeling anxious." Yet you need to build a tolerance for feeling anxiety in order to discover the roots of your troubles. Then, you can make the shifts in yourself to lead the life you want and fully connect in the relationship.
How do you build a tolerance to anxiety? There are moments (milliseconds, really) you can make the most of before they slip away.
Anxiety is there when you're having intense feelings. Frequently, you're feeling angry or defensive, which can cause you to shut down and withdraw.
In these moments, ask yourself, "What else am I feeling?”"
This question will allow you, over time, to pinpoint which feelings are hiding just below the surface.
You know you’re angry or agitated or anxious, but you might identify feeling humiliated or unimportant underneath. If you follow that emotional thread back, you’ll land in an earlier time when you felt hurt, humiliated, unsure, frightened, or alone.
You will feel very uncomfortable and vulnerable. Take a deep breath, and just stay there in that feeling. Sitting with the inevitable feeling of anxiety allows you to access emotions that you can't feel when you’re shut down or just reacting.
This courage, although it doesn't always feel good, allows you to know yourself at a deeper level.
You now have the option and ability to express yourself in a way that another person can hear you.
Your partner’s ears will likely perk up when they hear you speak from that place of vulnerability.
Both of you can come to understand how your histories are influencing the present. You may be able to do or say something that hadn’t occurred to you.
You and your partner can now work together to solve whatever is troubling you. You’re on the road to building a more satisfying and constructive present.
If you're really going to thrive in your relationship, you’ll need the courage to struggle with inevitable discomfort. The cutting edge of change is always anxiety—a journey well worth the vulnerability you will encounter along the way.
Be curious about what your emotions mean and brave about what you find out. Staying in love requires it. The courage to grapple with those demons is what allows you to build an even better relationship.
Deborah Fox, M.S.W., is a couples therapist and certified sex therapist helping couples reconnect and find their way back to a passionate relationship. Visit Deborah on her website, follow her on Facebook, or if you’re in the D.C. Metro area, call her at 202-363-1740 to discuss whether she can be of help to you.
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