Authors: Emily Nagoski
This is in contrast to running away from your emotions or trying to shift your emotional center of gravity onto your partner. There are some basic rules you have to follow in order to stay over your emotional center of gravity:
Your feelings are neither more nor less important than your partner’s.
Your pain doesn’t automatically make your experience more valid, nor does your partner’s pain make your partner’s experience more valid. When we are in emotional pain, we tend to prioritize easing that pain over respecting our partner’s experience, so we have to remind ourselves that our different experiences matter equally.
Each of you is 100 percent responsible for your own feelings.
Partners in healthy relationships choose to help each other with their feelings, but it is always a choice. We “turn toward” our partner’s needs, as relationship researcher John Gottman puts it, and when our partner supports us, we express our gratitude for that choice.
There are four basic steps to the process:
1.
Name the Feeling.
“Right now I feel . . . jealous/angry/hurt/etc.” Simple, though there are usually multiple feelings involved at the same time. That’s normal.
2.
Welcome the Feeling.
Don’t run away from it, don’t judge it or shame it or get mad at it. Sit still with it, like a welcome guest.
3.
Take Responsibility for the Feeling.
If you feel fear or anger, how could the perceived threat be managed? If you feel sadness, hurt, or grief, how can you heal the loss? The question to ask yourself as you take responsibility for your feelings is:
What will help?
There won’t always be something you can actively do, apart from allowing the feeling to discharge and complete its cycle. And remember that it’s not your partner’s fault or obligation; their help is entirely voluntary and provides an opportunity for you to express gratitude for the support.
4.
Communicate the Feeling and the Need.
At last, the easiest part. “I feel x,” you say, “and I think what would help is y.” For example, “I feel threatened by the time you spend with your coworker, and I could use some kind of plan that will give me reassurance.” Or, “I still have this hurt about that time you did x, and what I need is some time to go through that emotional tunnel so I can get to the light at the end.”
Since writing the
Scientific Guide
, I’ve come to think of staying over your emotional center of gravity as the “sleepy hedgehog” model of emotion management. If you find a sleepy hedgehog in the chair you were about to sit in, you should
• give it a name
• sit peacefully with it in your lap
• figure out what it needs
• tell your partner about the need, so you can collaborate to help the hedgehog
Getting mad at the hedgehog or being afraid of it won’t help you or the hedgehog, and you certainly can’t just shove it into your partner’s lap, shouting, “
SLEEPY HEDGEHOG!
” and expect them to deal with
all its spiky quills. It’s
your
hedgehog. The calmer you are when you handle it, the less likely you are to get hurt yourself, or to hurt someone else.
Choose to Heal
A friend of mine left a bad relationship and declared (on Facebook), “I choose to hurt no longer. [Ex-partner] can’t hurt me anymore.” The second sentence is 100 percent true and cause for celebration. But the first sentence doesn’t make sense from an attachment/completing-the-cycle point of view. When you leave a bad relationship, you have all this pent-up hurt and rage and even fear locked up inside you, which must be allowed to discharge safely.
What makes more sense is, “I choose to allow the hurt to heal.” Healing always involves pain—if you break your finger, it hurts, gradually less and less until it heals. Same goes for healing emotional injury. You can’t choose for your broken heart not to hurt, any more than you can choose for a broken bone not to hurt. But you can recognize the pain as part of the healing, and you can trust your heart to heal, just as you trust your bones to heal, knowing that it will gradually hurt less and less as you recover.
survival of the social
Which brings me to an additional stress response known as “tend and befriend,” which we can think of as the marriage of stress and attachment.
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As an ultrasocial species, our survival depends not just on our individual ability to fight, run, or shut down, but also on our ability to collaborate with our tribe, so that we can protect them and they can protect us. Women may be more likely than men to access this “affiliative” stress response, dealing with potential threats by connecting affectionately with people. As always, to what extent this difference is inborn and to what extent it’s learned isn’t clear, but the differences start early, with girls
as young as eighteen months being more likely than boys to approach, rather than avoid, a parent doing scary things.
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Where stress and attachment overlap, the message of your emotional One Ring is, “I am lost!” and when you escape the lion and run to your attachment object, the message is, “I am home.” If you’ve ever found yourself checking your email obsessively when you’re stressed, or updating Twitter, or texting your partner just to say, “hey,” or calling all your friends one after the next, or, like Elle in
Legally Blonde
, running for an emergency manicure, you may have experienced the tend and befriend stress response. Both feeling taken care of and taking care of others register in your stress response as “completing the cycle.”
But in modern culture, there’s a contradiction built into the social remedies to stress. On the one hand, being around other people is often a core part of allowing our stress response to complete, particularly for women. On the other hand, we put the brakes on, self-inhibiting our stress response, in order to stay socially appropriate and not make other people uncomfortable. We hold on to our incomplete stress response in order to access the security of being with our tribe.
And, of course, this contradiction is even more pronounced for women, who are the culturally sanctioned “managers of relationships.”
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When the going gets tough in a heterosexual relationship, it often falls to the woman to rein in her own stress response, in order to create space for the man to feel his Feels. In other words, if there is stress in a relationship, cultural rules make it likely to impact the woman more than the man, and it’s likely to impact her sexual interest and response. And because she has to hold on to her stress, so that her partner can let his go, she is more likely to become stuck in her stress, while he moves through his.
I blame Charles Dickens. Take Mrs. Cratchit from
A Christmas Carol.
Her son, Tiny Tim, dies, and she tells her other children that she’s crying because the color of her sewing hurts her eyes, and she “wouldn’t want to show weak eyes” to her husband. When I was little, I used to think, as Dickens wanted me to,
Mrs. Cratchit is so brave.
But now that I know about the stress response cycle, I want to yell, “Lady, your child died! It’s
not ‘weak’ to cry! And your other kids deserve to know that it’s normal to grieve!”
Being with the tribe doesn’t replace the Feels built into completing the cycle. We need to discharge the stress response, complete the cycle, before our bodies can move on. “Home” is the place—physical and emotional—where we can discharge stress without being judged or shamed or told we just need to relax or forget about it. “Home” is where we receive our partner’s “loving presence.” People who listen with a loving presence are calm, attentive, and warmly attuned to the other person. In the very best relationships, we’re allowed to experience all forms of stress—anger, fear, shutdown—and receive the loving presence of our partner sitting still and quiet through the storm.
Every culture has rules about how much of which kinds of emotion are appropriate in what circumstances. But our culture has constructed a social world where there is almost nowhere that we can connect with others while experiencing the full range of our emotional intensity. For a lot of us, there are times when we more readily share a loving presence through spiritual practice or with our pets than with our partners, who are mired in their own stress. God and your dog never judge or blame you for having Feels—but neither of them can make love with you.
Sex is an attachment behavior. When your attachment is threatened or when you and your partner share a stressor, sex can be a powerful, pleasurable way to connect in the face of the “I’m lost” signals, so that you can find your way home. Together. But this feels pleasurable only if you can give each other time and space for Feels.
If all of this sounds impossible in your relationship, don’t worry, chapter 9 will help with that.
the water of life
I am at risk/I am safe.
I am broken/I am whole.
I am lost/I am home.
As you progress through these biological processes, your mental state changes, and that, in turn, changes whether and how your brain responds to contexts as sexually relevant or to sensations as sexually pleasurable.
Stress hits the brake for about 80 percent of people, but it activates the accelerator for others—people vary. But for everyone, stress changes the context in which you experience sexual response, which changes your perception of sexual sensations.
The key to managing stress so that it doesn’t interfere with sexual pleasure is learning to complete the cycle—unlock freeze, escape the predator, conquer the enemy. Celebrate, like glitter settling in a snow globe.
Sex is an attachment behavior, reinforcing the social bond between adults. Sometimes it takes the form of passionate, joyful sex between people who are falling in love with each other. Sometimes it takes the form of desperate, grasping sex between people whose attachment is threatened. Counterintuitively, when attachment is at its most secure and stable—when your relationship is all satisfaction and no worry or “plot”—it can take a backseat in your sexual arousability.
Stress and love (in the form of attachment) can be companions to sex. Sex strengthens bonds between partners, helps each partner feel safe, cherished, and supported in a world where we are not always safe, where sometimes our only shield from chaos and terror is our chosen family.
Women tell me their stories, and I keep those stories in a mental library. One shelf in that library is overflowing: the one that holds stories of sexual violence. Like all the rest, these are awe-inspiring stories of discovery, but they are the darkest stories, revealing just how viciously indifferent the world can be to women’s sexual autonomy.
Merritt’s is one of those. The one-sentence version: She was a leader of the campus gay-straight alliance, out and proud, and he, she would later learn, bet his friends that he could “turn her.”
It’s sickening, I know. I wish no one had stories like this to tell. But it happens.
During the assault, her body went into survival mode—she froze. And until she learned about the brakes stress response, she hadn’t understood why she didn’t fight or run or kick the guy in the balls. She has struggled to trust her body ever since, and her body has struggled to operate healthfully without her trust.
When a person experiences trauma, it’s like someone snuck into the garden and ripped out all the plants she had been cultivating with such care and attention. There is rage. There is grief for the garden as it was. And there is fear that it will never grow back.
But it will grow back. That’s what gardens do.
Merritt was into the garden metaphor. She stopped me in the street one day, phone in hand, to say, “I was thinking about the garden, and I had to read you this thing my partner found!”
She read:
The water of life is here.
I’m drinking it. But I had to come
this long way to know it!
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“ ‘The water of life,’ ” she enthused. “It’s this Rumi poem about a guy who loses everything and goes on a quest and he’s like Dorothy in
The Wizard of Oz
, he had the power all along. And you know what the water of life is?”
“Tell me.” (This was nowhere near the weirdest thing anyone had ever stopped me in the street to tell me.)
She said, “Love is the water of life!”
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I think that’s right. If women’s sexuality is a garden, I think of love as the rain and stress as the sun, drawing the garden upward, nourishing and challenging at once. It wouldn’t do to have too much of either, but in the right balance, the garden thrives.
Some plants want lots of water, some want less; some gardens are shady, while others are full of bright sun all day. Olivia, with her sensitive
accelerator, has a sunny garden full of plants that delight in the sun—she’s practically a desert, with Joshua trees and blackfoot daisies thriving under a hot, cloudless sky. But even for her, too much of a good thing can cause her garden to wilt and fade. Camilla, by contrast, with her relatively insensitive accelerator, has a montane forest of broadleaf ferns and mosses that require less light and more time to grow lush.