Week 5: DECONDITION PATTERNS: Replace old habits with healthy new ones

So far we have set in place the beginning of positive love patterns through gratitude, positive appraisal and loving touch. We have also laid the foundation to be able to approach conflict from a place of kindness and connection, while strengthening our loving bond through appropriate listening.

Now, it’s time to roll our sleeves up and get to more challenging work. This week will look at and target the negative patterning that prevents our love from truly flourishing.

First we must take an honest appraisal of all the emotional baggage, psychological wounding, and past negative attachments that influence our way of relating. Then we can focus on undoing these patterns, repairing the source of conflict, and moving forward to greater and more resilient loving.

This Week’s Tools

Recognizing the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
Understanding Attachment Styles
Reappraising Conflict
Revising core scenes

This Week’s Theory

Our first task in deconditioning old patterns is to directly address negative behaviors. Negativity in relationships can be a lot like a tumor. Sometimes our criticism can be kind and benign: “oh you’re such a clutz sometimes, but that’s what I love about you,” or “I know how you easily forget things, so I’ll be sure to remind you of important things.” If we soften our judgemental perceptions and encompasss our responses in love, that can help cultivate connection and support mutual growth.

But a tumor can also become cancerous if left unchecked and sometimes it needs to be removed entirely. In our relationships we must be able to recognize the signs of what relationship expert John Gottman calls The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

The four horsemen are types of negative behavior that signal a relationship is in trouble. These horseman are:

Criticism – a criticism is global and expresses negative feelings or opinions about the other’s character or personality. Sometimes criticism in a relationship can become so extreme that therapists will require couples to maintain a “negative free zone” at all times.

Contempt – contempt is a sense of superiority over one’s partner. Sarcasm and cynicism can be types of contempt. So are name-calling, eye-rolling, mockery, and hostile humor. In whatever form, contempt is poisonous to a relationship because it conveys disgust.

Defensiveness – defensiveness is a refusal of taking responsibility for one’s actions, and often a way of blaming a partner.

Stonewalling- stonewalling is when a listener withdraws from an interaction by getting quiet or shutting down. Usually people stonewall as a protection against feeling psychologically and physically overwhelmed, a sensation that is known as flooding.

While the occasional horesman visit might not be the end of the world, if three or all four of them are present, there is little chance your relationship will advance without addressing them head on.

Next, in order to fully understand how we relate in the present, we must understand how the past continues to shape our present behavior.

Over the past many decades, psychologists, scientists and human development researchers have all discovered that early childhood relationships with primarily caregivers strongly affect how a person will behave and respond in our adult romantic relationships. The summary of all this research is known as attachment theory and it based on the idea that we all have attachment patterns.

Our next task in recognizing how we behave in relationships is to understand our attachment patterns: how our first “attachment bonds” solidified our relational understanding early on in life. There are four known attachment patterns: secure, avoidant, anxious, and disorganized.

Once we have a basic understanding of our attachment patterns, we must look deeper into our sources of psychological wounding, while also seeking to understand our partner’s wounding too.

This is especially important as a new relationship begins to mature and the chemical cocktail of romantic love begins to fade away, partners begin to:

Stir up each other’s repressed behaviors and feelings.
Reinjure each other’s childhood wounds.
Project their own negative traits onto each other.

Did you know that a majority of couples will quit couples’ therapy before their sixth appointment? That is largely because six appointments is the length of time it takes for unconscious issues to begin to emerge, which often triggers anxiety and fear.

To move beyond the re-injuring of old wounds and stirring up of repressed behaviors and feelings, we turn to the practice of reappraising conflict, where spouses think about a conflict in their marriage from the perspective of a neutral third party who wants the best for all involved.

Usually when we look at our relationship conflict from the perspective of a neutral third party, we see that both partners in the conflict are trying their best. Both have valid perspectives, both are correct in their own way, and both are seeking to meet their own needs. A therapist plays this role very well, and if partners in conflict are willing, they can play the role of a neutral third party too.

Lastly, rarely do couples notice their own projections and identify their own wounding. To understand the underlying principles of our defensiveness, we can learn Harville Hendrix’s 4 Principles of Relationship Criticism, and apply them to our relationship:

Principle 1: Most of your partner’s criticisms of you have some basis in reality.
Principle 2: Many of your repetitious, emotional criticisms of your partner are disguised statements of your own unmet needs.
Principle 3: Some of your repetitive, emotional criticisms of your partner may be an accurate description of a disowned part of yourself.
Principle 4: Some of your criticisms of your partner may help you identify your own lost self.

In order to move beyond our repetitive, emotional criticism of ourselves and each other, we turn to the practice known as Core Scene Revision.

As our relationship continues, we often find ourselves playing out the same arguments over and over again, seemingly with no resolution. We call these situations “Core Scenes,” and they often replay the central childhood traumas of both individuals.

In a core scene revision, we first identify what common arguments bring up the most internal emotions. Then we write out what tends to happen in the relationship. Then we re-write the scene using the same starting scenario, but finishing it a way that serves the relationship.