“She says she’s not in love with me anymore.”“He barely talks to me and says the connection is lost.”
“We are on autopilot and don’t feel anything.”
“Sex doesn’t exist. I caught her watching porn.”
“He is cheating, for sure.”
Why? How? What happened? To answer that question, we have to take a step back and ask a different question: What does it mean to be vulnerable?
Or, another way of putting the same thing is: What is intimacy?
Intimacy is sharing your innermost Self.
And to be willing to do that we have to be vulnerable.
Vulnerability is really, really scary. But it’s also exhilarating. We end up sharing who we are and some very special someone GETS US.
Wow.
That is for sure the most wonderful thing on Earth.
In fact, that is truly what love is. Love for sure is giving. We love our kids and we give and we don’t expect them to get us.
But when you add this dimension of being seen, being heard, being understood, well, there are very few people on Earth who can do that with us.
But that is where we once were with the Person in our lives who we married.
Then marriage did its thing. Marriage requires work, chores, responsibilities, making the mortgage payments, seeing a kid through school.
It means that sometimes we will both be overtired at the same time and not able to give, not able to “be there” for the other person.
Sometimes our weak and lonely little kids inside of us will want something and the other person won’t even know what we’re talking about. And our sad little kids inside of us will be too young to be able to explain.
So when those kids take over us, we won’t necessarily get what we wanted or needed from our partner.
And we start to shut down. Our vulnerability goes in hiding.
This is the most normal and natural thing in the world. It’s there to protect us. That is how we Turn Off.
Later, you and your partner walk into a therapist’s office and say, “We’re not communicating.”
But you did once.
It’s not that you can’t. It’s that your protective instincts, protective parts of you, have done that as a favor because it doesn’t feel safe anymore.
Here’s where therapists get it wrong: It’s not really about teaching communication. It’s about creating safety.
Want to read that again?
>>>”It’s not really about teaching communication. It’s about creating safety.”
How To Turn Back On
To turn back on, we have to trust our partner not to hurt us again.
But that is impossible!
My husband used to say, “If you put a crowd of angels in a room together, they’d brush each other’s wings!”
So what then?
The answer is that we have two jobs to do:
1. we have to learn who we really are
2. we have to learn who our partner really is
Each person is composed of a gorgeous, shining Self and many, many protective and hurt parts. That’s just the way it is. We can’t get out of the fact that when we’ve had a rough life, there are going to be hurt parts and many protectors.
These “parts” are just moods, behaviors, and reactions. We will react to what triggers us even if we didn’t intend to. This is based on our histories. That’s just normal. So we’ve developed parts that stick up for us by being aggressive . . .
. . . and parts that soothe us by playing victim . . .
. . . and parts that get suspicious to shield us from harm . . .
And so on. Dr. Richard C. Schwartz, the founder of Internal Family Systems therapy says that depending on the level of trauma in a person’s history, we can have from 10 to 30 different parts.
So if our parts get triggered because we THINK our partner doesn’t love or care for us, we shut down.
BUT if we understand that these are only protective parts that started out doing their jobs when we were kids and that they aren’t necessarily correct, then we can soothe them and reassure them that we, our Selves, are handling things fine.
Our Selves are wise and can tell the difference between what’s real and what a part of us simply made up because it was trying to protect us.
Our Selves have that perspective, that view of the big picture, that parts don’t have.
So when we do that and our partner makes a mistake, it turns into “no big deal.”
Our partner didn’t realize we were sad? No big deal: we simply tell them.
Our partner doesn’t understand why? No big deal: we have the pleasure of explaining.
And when our partner says, “Oh, wow. I didn’t realize that,” we can allow ourselves to feel wonderful. They now understand.
So little by little as we learn not only our own parts but theirs, we start to feel safer and safer sharing who we are.
Until that day when we are safe enough to turn back on. And we do. We can. With no effort.
