Taming your Whoosh
The most essential skill to having healthier relationships.
Transcript
In previous episodes of this podcast, I've talked about how to let your partner or loved one, feel their feels without you taking them on. I've also talked about how important it is to have compassion. When someone you love is having a hard time and how this can help create a secure functioning relationships. But boundaries in compassion are only going to get you so far. What I want you to really be able to do is to be open and vulnerable with each other, to repair easily from conflict, using skilled communication and cherish each other. And chances are, you want that too. Maybe you even have had the underlying insights. You need to have the right philosophy about what's supposed to be happening in your relationships, but then something happens with your partner and things go off and suddenly you're fighting and maybe you don't even know what you're fighting about, but it's blowing up all over the place.
And you're left feeling helpless and frustrated and confused. And it all, all happened so fast. You didn't even know what either of you were doing, and it's not where you wanted to go. You love your partner. You don't wanna fight you trust them. But all of a sudden you were feeling terrified and overwhelmed. What happened a lot of times, what happened is that probably one or both of you got triggered. Now, when I use the word triggered, I'm not talking about a PTSD related trauma response, although that can be a part of what's happening as I'll talk about a little later, but for the purposes of this discussion, when I'm talking about being triggered, I'm talking about something happening to you that elicits an automatic response from your nervous system known as the fight or flight or acute stress response. A lot of what I'm going to share with you in this episode comes straight from the work of neurobiologists.
And from one of my teachers, Terry Reel of the relational life Institute and his mentor at PML this work addresses this problem. A lot of times we know what to do. We know how we'd like to act or how we'd like to feel or how we prefer to respond. But in the heat of the moment, we are not able to reach for the things we know we need to do or desperately want to do. Instead, we default to old patterns and we just end up feeling totally stuck in them. Learning new relationship skills can be great. And having big insights about myths around monogamy and scarcity of love and all these things can be hugely transformational, but you will also struggle if you don't address your old patterns that have gotten you to where you are now. So I read this meme the other day, and I'm going to read it to you. It starts with the quote, quote unquote, although we can't always choose what happens to us, we can choose how we want to respond. And then it says, this statement is false. Being trauma-informed doesn't mean that all existing and long standing theories of human behavior are accurate fight-flight and freeze behaviors are unconsciously reflexive. We need to stop perpetuating the myth that we are always in conscious control of our actions. It hurts and shames children and adults.
I read this meme and I was like I, you kind of have the right idea, but quite it's true and not true children. Now, children and adults aren't are not the same people. First of all, children do not physically have a fully formed prefrontal cortex. So they don't even have the brain structure that adults have. So they are more reactive and less in control actions than adults. However, I still teach my kids that they're responsible for choosing how to respond, and you wanna know why this is how they learn and grow that prefrontal cortex and learn how to use it properly. If I told my kids, they weren't responsible for their behavior, they would or grow into functional adults. This is so different from shaming. Someone though, and shame is, is as Brene Brown talks extensively about shame. Shame does not get you where you need to go.
And so if ever you are hearing something shaming coming from me about your fight or flight response, when it comes online, please understand there is no shame in your fight or flight response, but here's the thing. If you're an adult and I truly hope you are, if you're listening to this podcast, then you do have a fully formed prefrontal cortex. You probably also have a lot of ingrained trigger responses that happen. What feels like automatically. It's not your fault that those things are there, those triggers, but if you want to be able to have a functional, healthy relationship, you do have to get those under control. You do have to get to a place where you can choose how you wanna respond instead of feeling out of control. Because here's the thing. If you're just completely out of control of your reactions and your responses, then what are the strategies that you have at your disposal?
You don't have good strategies. And I'll talk about those in a minute, but so it's both, and yes, these unconscious behaviors come out. Sometimes that can feel out of your control and they are also not out of your control, but you do have to train yourself in a different way. I am saying this to you, even if you are a trauma survivor trauma survivor, I'm saying this to you, even if you are a trauma survivor, which the odds are honestly. So, so high, that if you're listening to this podcast that you are for reasons I don't wanna speculate about too much right now, the polyamory community has a very high percentage of trauma survivors. And also if I'm being really plain about what I think, at least in America, it's a pretty traumatic place to grow up in, in general, especially if you're a woman or if you're or if you're a person of color trauma is just part of your life.
So many of our cultural norms that get perpetuated even by the most well-meaning of people, the most well-meaning of parents can end up traumatizing us as children and causing us to develop these trigger responses. They're also known coping strategies or adaptations. We practice those over and over and over again as children, until they become automatic to us as adults, they are what comes out of us. When we get triggered they're are survival mode. We all have limited ability to control. What happens when we are in that state, neurobiologically speaking, our body gets like taken over the part of the brain where it operates is deep, and the pathways move faster than our prefrontal cortex, which is the part that governs things like critical thinking and intentionality. And, and this is a good thing. Okay? If you're in a life or death situation, you don't have time to dither around.
You just have to stay alive. So you have, your body has to react faster than your brain can think. And that's really important, but it's not the thing you want to have online when you're trying to work through a difficult conversation with a partner. So there are many parts of this names for this part of you, Terry Reel, my teacher calls this part of you, your adaptive child, because it is generally created in childhood. And it is a series of adaptations that child you made to navigate a world that is run by adults, because this part of you is focused on survival. It's not really interested in nuance or compassion or any slower processes it's in right or wrong, black and white thinking. It's perfectionistic, it's rigid, it's harsh, it's certain. And it's tight. This part of you by the way, often writes your first drafts which can sometimes be very good and very important.
So I don't want you to say that this part of you is bad. But this part of you, isn't the only part of you. This isn't the real you, just because it's your first response. You have that first response as part of you, but you also have another part of you to draw from which is something Terry, real calls, second consciousness, or your functional adult, other people might call it their highest and best self. That part of you is nuanced, realistic, collaborative, forgiving shades of gray, flexible, humble, and yielding. It is where we get the things like grace, magnanimity compassion. It is where we do our personal growth. It is. We create good apologies. It's where we connect to our spirit. It's where artistic and creativity come from. It's the intentional part of us, rather than the reactive part of us. This part of us lives in a totally different part of our brain than the adaptive child.
It lives in that prefrontal cortex and that part of our brain and the functions that come out of it that create our functional adult are slow. They are also very resource intensive. They require a lot of calories. They, they burn a lot of calories and they also get tired and so they need rest. So this is why we're more likely to get triggered and go into that more reactive state when we're tired, when we're hungry, when we're lonely, when we're low on our resources, it makes a lot of sense that the part of your brain that's wired for survival works fast and doesn't need a lot of resources and will take control of you. And the part of your brain that is wired for connection and compassion works slower. As I said that the problem is that when that part of you, that's wired for survival comes online and takes you over at a moment where you need to be wired for connection.
The, the problem is worse. If that part of you that works slower, it has to also over ride your first reaction all the time. It's even harder. If you don't have a lot of practice overriding your first reaction, because you've been stuck on survival mode for so long, or if you've just been avoiding your triggers or asking your partner to take emotional responsibility for them by like walking on eggshells around you, this is just keeping a part of you that needs to be strong in a brittle state. And in fact, to go back to PTSD studies, people who have studied PTSD and trauma and triggers around those have said that avoiding triggers, avoidance behaviors actually increase the trigger response. So if you, and all of the treatment for PTSD is around learning how to how to manage a trigger when it happens, how to be triggered and not be reactive to it.
And I'm gonna go into that, but I'm this part up. Cuz I can't remember the name of what it was called, but it's oh desensitization. So you desensitize that part of your brain, that's reactive. Some tactics that people use that aren't, that, that aren't desensitization that aren't practicing overriding your triggers to date. Instead, some folks avoid triggers and some practices that I see in polyamorous relationships include, guess what? Y'all rules and agreements. This is why I said in the last week's episode, that if you're starting out non-monogamy, if you're creating a lot of rules and agreements, as a way of managing things, you might be using it to manage this part of yourselves. And you're setting yourself up to fail. If you do that, the reason is that rules and agreements are basically laws that you're creating together in your relationship.
And if you're making laws from a reactive place to avoid triggers from coming out out of a fear of what would happen, if an agreement or rule was broken and something bad happened, and you don't have any plans for how to handle it, then you are letting that adaptive child part of you run your relationship. And it means when the ruler agreement is broken or isn't working out underneath to be adjusted, it's gonna be a big fight or a blow up or feel like a big betrayal because you can't deal the adult part of yourself. Can't come online and I'll talk more about agreements and rules and boundaries and limits and requests and preferences. In another episode, I'm really excited to share that with you. But for now this is why I say agreements aren't this magical panacea that people make them out to be.
They don't really create safety. What creates safety is learning how to create secure connections with people and learning how and part of that here is learning how to manage your triggers. So what, what happens here? What, another thing that can happen. Another strategy that I don't like is few, have two people who are just avoiding ever triggering each other and never confronting anything. This actually usually will make for a very stable relationship. It's a very I've I've seen like long-standing relationships, marriages that have lasted, you know, decades upon decades who just avoid ever confronting anything with each other and who avoid trigger each other. But that relationship is generally not very connected or, or passionate because you're, you're deadening and numbing your emotions. You are not approaching difficult conversations. Instead you are just avoiding, avoiding, avoiding, and, and you can't avoid someone you love and feel connected to them.
The other thing is that you just end up giving over yourself to a lot of volatility. You just have one or both of your partners exploding at random times. And if you don't know how to repair, then, then you just feel radically unstable. These relationships don't tend to last, but some of them do some of them, you, you can get a pair of people. One person's very volatile and one person's very placating and that can just create this really mad cycle of blowups and then not very good repairs and emotional management and then blowups. And it's just a, it's a bad cycle. And that cycle can obviously become abusive and traumatic. Another thing that's not so great is if you're just feeling like you're walking around on eggshells with each other, it's painful, intense. Maybe there's a lot of passive-aggressiveness. Maybe one partner is spending a lot of effort, just sort of emotionally managing the other person or placating them a lot or fixing their feelings. I've seen these relationships to, and what happens is the couple gets worn out, resentments pile up. People don't want to be physically intimate with each other, cuz they're emotionally exhausted from being on those eggshells all the time.
And things don't get resolved. And so sort of Emily Naski describes as like relational gun just kind of gets accumulates in the pipes because things are too scary to bring up. But they're sort of there they're not completely avoided. So I want, what I want is to be able to confront issues, to be able to handle being triggered and be able to handle it powerfully with love with each other. Now remember what I said about how we are most able to heal work through our distress and reach for our better. The better parts of ourselves is in the context of a love-loving, insecure connection. And if we haven't had that for a lot of our lives, I wanna tell you you're gonna have an extra big struggle reaching for the better part of yourself, even when you do have that loving connection.
But here's the deal. I, I talked last episode about how our partner can give us, you know, that love that security to help us with that part of ourselves. But our partner can be the most loving, give us all the loving affirmation in the world. But if we do not also reach inside ourselves and tame that reactive part of ourselves, if we don't do the, of bringing our triggers under control and leaning into that second consciousness and strengthening it, our relationships will suffer. Also. No one can ever, ever, ever love us perfectly. Even as I say that you, I want you to learn to hold your partner in loving and warm regard as they struggle and not take risk responsibility for their emotions. I also say you have to own your struggle and learn to put down your fight or flight response and reach for something more evolved or you are gonna struggle.
And your partner's gonna struggle cuz you, you can't, you will wear them out eventually and I'm here to help you do it. If you're listening to this podcast and you're saying, that's me, that's me. This is the only work I want you to focus on for like the next three months. Work on getting this part of yourself under control. The good news is there's something called neuroplasticity. It means that you can change your brain for your whole life. So you might have pattern of behaving and reacting wired into you. And it may have been wired into you for two decades, three decades. This may be just the way that you feel like you are and I'm telling you, it's not. Doesn't have to be the case. You can practice and strengthen your functional adult self and make it more like your more funk to work more like that reactive part of you.
You just have to train yourself after all your adaptive child was an adaptation. You weren't born this way. You were born with tendencies. For sure everyone was born with tendencies. Everybody has genetic components to their behavior, but you ultimately were adapting to the environment that you grew up in and it was created in you unintentionally. It feels natural to you because you've been doing it for so long. And you can't remember a time when you didn't, you weren't this way, but it is no more natural than the part of yourself that you want to intentionally create. And it is no more natural than the part of yourself that wants to learn how to do any other kind of practice, whether it's yoga, meditation, prayer, dancing learning how to eat better, whatever it is that you wanna teach yourself. If you wanna learn the piano, you wanna learn another language. This is another language, it's a relational language.
And to illustrate my point, I wanna talk about one of my idols. Fred Rogers, you might know him as Mr. Rogers. if you know anything about Mr. Rogers you know, that he kind of seemed like this really simple sweet saintly guy, but the reason he was so passionate about helping children with his TV show was because he wanted to help them with emotional regulation because he knew how important that work was to him and his own wellbeing and happiness. He was very disciplined about his choices and the reason he was able to help other people manage their emotions was because he did that work on himself, everything down to the way that he talked to children, the way he interacted with others, all of that was an intentional practice that he cultivated himself. Eventually he got so good at it that he didn't have to think about it much, but Fred Rogers' wife was, is really famous for saying that she never wanted people to call her husband a Saint because it made it sound like that's just the way that he was and that nobody else could be like that.
But she stated emphatically that he worked very hard to become who he was. He had bad days, just like everybody else training your reactive part of yourself is like any physical discipline. And the brain is just like the muscles and tendons and joints in your body. Once you start shifting how you behave and repeat those shifts, you will start to notice a change. Just like if you start practicing yoga, you'll notice that your body starts to feel better right away. Did you know that the physical practice of yoga is created to stretch and strengthen the body so that it would be easier to sit quietly in meditation and just like starting yoga as you start to work on bringing your triggered self under better regulation, you're just gonna feel better, even if you're doing it badly, even if you allow, isn't perfect. Even if you can't hold the poses for very long, the first step is changing.
The first step to changing the first step to changing is really to identify the behaviors that you are engaging in when you're in fight or flight, you need to understand who your adoptive child is and how they operate when you're under stress. You need to, in order to do that, you have to notice what's happening. I help people figure this out in my coaching practice, but basically here fight or flight is just two parts of what is really like a five part thing. So here are the five parts. So these are different ways in which you will, your reactive self, your adaptive child will, will respond,uwill react the, the, the stress month that will be created. So the first one, the first reaction is fight. Fight is pretty simple. Fight is, fighting back, getting defensive counter, attacking criticism. You know, unbridled self-expression is another way that Terry Reel describes it, which is just sort of like verbal dire.
You don't really control what comes out of your mouth and you just go on and on that is fight. I am the first to admit that I, I will sometimes reach for fight in my worst moments. I'm pretty good at not doing that anymore, but in my, my younger self was definitely a fight fighter. Then there's, there's light. And in this case, what it looks like relationally is you withdraw, you withdraw into your shell. You close off, you get cold. This is also where passive-aggressiveness comes in that is fleeing. And you can be right next to somebody and be completely gone. And nothing that person is going to do or say is gonna sink in with you so you can be shut down, but right there. So that is fleeing and freezing is if you are just so overwhelmed that you can't even respond at all, you can't flee, you can't fight.
You can't react in any kind of way. And some people also in this kind of freezing state they'll disassociate. So they will just completely separate from where they are. And so that's freezing. That's just an inability to do anything. And then there's fix. So I talked about fix in my boundaries practice podcast. So in fix, you try to solve the problem. You make suggestions, directives, agreements, new rules, tell your partner how they can do things differently or how they're doing it wrong, or how you both are doing it wrong. This can also showing show up as you know, arguing your partner out of their feeling is by trying to explain everything, you try to figure out who's to blame who's right and wrong. You try to apply the scientific method to figuring out the problem. And that is fixing. And I wanna be clear that it's not, I'm not saying never fix a problem.
I'm saying that when it is coming out of your fight or flight or fix, it's very different than when it's coming out of your functional adult self, your fight or flight self fixing is, oh my God, I gotta fix this right now. I gotta solve this. I gotta stop this feeling. I gotta stop this from happening. Your functional adult is again, slow, more deliberate, more collaborative. Then the last one of the fight-flight-freeze fix is fawn. So what fawning looks like is, are you overly placating when your partner's upset? Do you love to bomb them or profusely apologize or take all the responsibility even when you don't feel it and let down your boundaries and give in et cetera, that's fawning and fawning is especially a common response for trauma survivors. So if people have been in an abusive relationship or have an abusive childhood, fawning can show up a lot to, and it can also show up in people who just have a low self-esteem, who've been socialized to be told their, their needs and wants aren't worth very much, and that they aren't worth very much.
It's really important to understand what your strategy is. And you might, don't more than one of these, but if you figure out what you are, fight flight, freeze fun, or maybe some combination thereof, identify what your reaction is, what and what your strategies are. That'll help you stop doing it. But probably for a little bit, what you're gonna have to do first is you're just gonna have to notice what your strategy is because for so, so long, you've just been doing it without thinking, or you've been thinking, this is just how I am. If you say this to me, then I'm gonna react this way. And that's just the way it is and I can't change it. So just don't do the thing that's gonna cause the reaction that is not okay, guys, you, if you are having these kinds of especially fight reactions or fix actions, but even the withdrawal, even the placating, all of these things, if you're having these kinds of things, and you're just telling your partner that they have to tiptoe around your triggers, that's not, that's not a functional adult relationship.
That's not gonna create security. And that's asking a lot of another person, who's just a human being like you, who has their own triggers and their own fight or flight responses. And they're, and it can't be, you both have to work on them. So and if you've been doing it for so, so long without thinking, and then wondering why your relationships, aren't where they wanna be. You will have to spend some time investigating and noticing. Now here's the tricky part. What I've seen when someone notice their pattern, whatever it is, fight-flight free fix fine, is that they, then they then decide they wanna change it. But what they change it to is another trigger response. So if somebody is more inclined to placate, and they've realized that that is devaluing them and, destroying them as a person, if they see if they discover their people pleaser, then their next response might be to instead fight.
That's still not good. If you're go going from people pleasing and placating and withdrawing to instead sticking up for yourself and fighting, sticking up for yourself with love and firmness is good, but you can't do that in a triggered state. And so the kind of fighting that you're gonna be doing is going to also be damaging to your relationship. So I don't want you to go from trigger response to trigger response. What I want you to do is calm yourself down first, not develop another trigger strategy, not create an another adaptive child on a top of an adaptive child. You're an adult let's find adult ways to, to deal with the problem. The, trick is, so the practice really is the very first practice. If you get this, this will change your life. I promise you just doing this, just doing this one thing, just learning how to say I'm triggered and then stop.
Just stop, stop the trigger, whatever you reach for next. Those are things that we'll talk about later, but the first thing I want you to do, cuz you can't access real relationship skills. You can't access your higher self. That's not jealous. You can't access the higher self that's capable of dealing with Google calendar. You can't access those parts of you. The parts of you that are nuanced, the parts of you that can be understanding you can't access those. If you're triggered. So you have to stop the triggered response first. And if you're not used to doing that, if you're used to having that managed for you, if you're used to avoiding it, if you're used to saying, that's just the way that I am and like having the big fight and having it out and letting it do the damage and then trying to repair it over and over and over again and not really knowing how that is, that's not sustainable.
So what you need to do is learn how to take the triggered part of you and calm it down when it's not actually a situation of fight or flight, when it's actually that your partners just messing up or there was, there was a misunderstanding or they just stepped on one of your landmines. These things are gonna happen. You need to be able to get through it, not avoid it. So the goal here is to get centered and grounded so you can access your higher brain functions. This is the practice that I want you to strengthen. If you practice over and over again, calming down. When you get, you will get stronger, it will take less time for you to bring those higher brain functions back online. You'll be able to access them sooner. And then once you start rehearsing, not getting reactive in certain situations, you will eventually maybe just not even be triggered by them.
You'll be able to deal with them because you and your nervous system will learn that these things, when they happen, aren't actually a threat to you and you will get more practiced in your functional adult responses. So you won't have to work so hard to make them work for you. The thing you have to do first though, is get this first part. So no action that you take with someone you love. No action that comes out. No words that come outta your mouth when you're overwhelmed or flooded is going to be the best part of you. So once you've noticed you're in fight-flight-freeze, fix fine, pause and breathe. If you need to, I really encourage taking a break and I'm going to go into on a subsequent podcast how to take a responsible time out. But it's the basics of it are you need to know that you have to take a break and everyone has to agree that when you say time out that the conversation stops and you both go away to your corners for at least 20 minutes, no text messaging and no stewing.
You just have to go and breathe, go for a run, go for a walk, take a shower, do some pushups, punch a pillow, sing at the top of your lungs to, with the radio in the car, scream your head off. If there's a place you can do that without scaring people, whatever it is, you need to do something that so Emily Naski talks about this in her book burnout, and also in her book come as you are, you have to complete your stress response without hurting anybody else. So you have to go through and calm yourself down. I can't tell you how many times I've talked to somebody who keeps having the same fight over and over and over again. And I ask them, did you take a break? And they say, no, it's not enough to agree that with me, that you should take a break.
You have to take the actual break. And really that's all, that's all I want you to learn from this. All I want you to know is you're not a slave to your triggers. You can rewire yourself. It takes practice intention and support, but you have to take that break. You have to break the cycle, you, and that is how you're gonna manage your triggers. You have to confront them, not avoid them to let them happen. And then you have to stop your trigger response and you have to practice it over and over again. Now, if you have severe PTSD and your trigger response is really unsafe or you feel really unsafe and you're gonna harm someone else or yourself when you're in that triggered state, obviously in those kind of situations, or if you just have really, if, if you have some opportunities, if that, if that's what is going on for you, then this podcast isn't going to cover it.
What you really need is help with a trauma-informed professional. What I recommend highly is some kind of embodied trauma treatment, either EMDR or which is known as either EMDR or emotional freedom technique or somatic experiencing something. You would wanna find a therapist who is trained in one of these embodied techniques. That's really important. So if this is if it goes beyond taking some deep breaths and walking around the block to calm you down, or if your reactive state is so bad, then at you're doing some serious damage, you're punching a wall. You are obviously, if you are having any physical violence, you need to get some serious help. But you know, even if you're just losing your and yelling, or you have to, you know, completely withdraw into your shell and get cold and distant from your partner, these kinds of reactions are ones that I also want you to learn how to tame and get under control. Okay, I'm gonna stop now cuz this is the end and I'm running outta time.
