The Mechanics of Self-Protection
In the last couple of weeks I have felt deeply triggered.
During the holidays, the importance of our relationships and our community are magnified. This time of year envelops us with a warm aura of connection, intensifying our need for a sense of belonging. For a few days, I was reminded that despite being in a relationship, and having a network of loving and supportive friends, I am still alone.
I love and need to be alone. It is when I have the desire and need for connection with another, but have no choice in the matter, that the rubber meets the road. And it did during the Christmas week, triggered by circumstances beyond my control, throwing me into a sea of loneliness and fear.
Loneliness is a rich experience. There is the loneliness while in solitude, and the loneliness while in a relationship. The former I experience as the need to be in the presence of a loving and kind human, one among the closest people in my life whom I love and trust. Their presence is like a flame that warms my soul on a cold winter night. The latter – as I have noticed recently – is a movement of self-protection.
I am a rare bird, and I don’t write this with pride or self-importance; I just notice an idiosyncratic way of being that prevents me from moving past an issue until I have resolved it internally. (I have been told that this is an inability to compartmentalize.) Yesterday I saw that I was retreating emotionally from the person I am with, and I took time away to investigate the cause.
In my experience, problems in relationships often start with the perception that something undesirable is happening to me – coming from outside of me –, namely caused by my counterpart. “She is doing something” that is causing my undesirable experience. And that is how this investigation began.
I noticed myself getting needy, internally pointing the finger, needing reassurance of her love. I saw that she hadn’t done anything different, but somehow, I had felt a change (real or imagined) in her behavior. Since I am always suspicious of my own unconscious programming, I turned the external trigger into a mirror and started looking at myself instead. This is the breakdown of the steps as the inquiry unfolded:
1. I recognized that I was suffering and I took the time to investigate what was happening.
2. I noticed feeling increasingly needy. By needy, I mean that I started expecting her behavior to actively demonstrate that she still loved and cared for me. Needy didn’t feel like a real need for something, but instead, more like a passive-aggressive and entitled, silent demand.
3. I recognized that she hadn’t done anything palpably different, or even “wrong,” so I questioned my own behavior and I continued questioning my experience.
4. I noticed the looping mental nature of the distress (all taking place within, not acting out any of it): first being afraid, then accusing, then demanding “proof of love,” then resenting not getting it.
5. I kept investigating the discomfort, and “took an elevator” down from my head into the full experience in the body, which created space and made me feel less cornered by the suffering.
6. Now, with an embodied awareness of the whole experience – no longer stuck in the mental loop of accusations –, I felt an irresistible flood of sadness gush into my chest, and I started crying. I stayed with the tears and the sadness for as long as they kept running.
I was now noticing why I had been suffering: having decided that she had been distant (and fearing the threat of potential abandonment), I had closed off my heart as a preemptive, self-protective move. The pain had nothing to do with something she had been doing, but instead, with having cut off the connection to my own heart.
What was hurting was my resisting my own love for her! It is as though I had been choking myself while asking her to give me more air to breathe. As I relaxed and allowed myself to grieve what was probably very old sadness, I was no longer frozen in the mental loop of victimhood and accusation.
I now resisted nothing and defended from nothing. The previous suffering had given way to tenderness and insight and relief. And a sense of reconnection with her.
I also learned that from that place of fear, deficient emptiness and defensiveness, it would have been impossible to have been met from the outside. I truly didn’t need anything from her other than her loving presence to meet what I had been experiencing. However, I had chosen to go through the whole cycle on my own and only shared it with her once I had fully understood it. That allowed me to take responsibility for my own experience and not place any demands on her.
With neither demands nor requests (which would have been perfectly fine had I found real needs to be met), I recounted my previous hour to her. She listened with kindness and an open, loving presence. Once I had finished, she commented, “isn’t that closing off something that we all do?!”
Sometimes, when we share with our partners our painful experiences before they have been clarified and worked through, and come across as an imposition, they can trigger in them reactivity based on their own wounding. We think that partners are chosen consciously given their visible traits, but a lot of the matching is done by our unconscious.
This is often recognized when we see the complementarity of our woundings, i.e., the very expression of my wounding brings out my partner’s. Another way to understand this is by realizing that our partners’ traits both awaken our wounding as well as present the opportunity to heal them in the relationship. Hence, there is no such thing as a “random” choice of a partner. (Have you ever noticed repeating themes and patterns across different relationships, either in you and/or them?)
I felt grateful that this time around I had been able to take the experience to her only after I had worked through it, and that she had received my vulnerable communication with such interest, caring and respect.
A day hike at Figueroa Mountain, in Santa Barbara County, California. November 2019. ©Ciro Coelho/InwardRide.com