Argument and Reconciliation
By Charles Rush
January 26, 2014
Ephesians 4: 31- 5: 1, 2 Corinthians 5: 17-19
[ Audio
(mp3, 6.7Mb) ]
love doing weddings. I love watching couples talk about love with their hormones bubbling the joie de vivre toward each other. I get the closest view when they make those passionate, heart-felt pledges to each other ‘to have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, ‘til we are parted by death.” This is my solemn vow. Off to the honeymoon, looking good and feeling good.
And I know that
in a very short amount of time, they will both have this moment where they have
a significant argument about something that really matters, like how we will
spend our money and on what, and they will be shocked that their little
buttercup not only has a very different view from them, they don't even really
understand why there is a difference, because this is so damn obvious. And then
there is some explosion of anger, one of them walks out, and both of them are
alone, wondering what the hell they gotten themselves into. They are thinking
to themselves, is this a mistake?
I love one
expert on marriage who said, “Actually every marriage is a mistake. The
question of your life is what you do with that mistake.” Another noted
authority on marriage, Dan Wile, said “choosing a partner is choosing a set of
problems… there is value, when choosing a long-term partner, in realizing that
you will inevitably be choosing a particular set of unsolvable problems that
you'll be grappling with for the next ten, twenty or fifty years.”[i]
We all have that
day, just after one of these arguments, when you are driving down the road
together in silence, wondering if your partner is going to change enough or if
you are flexible enough to deal with this person that is not only a cute little
buttercup but also a mélange of problems. Ay yay yah!
When we are
young, we are probably not really realistic in thinking that we can change the
other person. We try harder, different approaches, only to be frustrated by all
these different angles. What is wrong with my boyfriend that he doesn't agree
with me? It is a puzzlement and you try to get some
advice from your sister, from your Mother, from your good friend. They all
agree with you, to no avail.
And here is what
is interesting, now that we have thirty years of research watching couples
argue about things. That is tens of thousands of couples, old and young,
recently married, married for decades, heterosexual or homosexual. It turns out
that 70% of the arguments you have with each other are essentially irresolvable
and you will be having them a decade from now in a different way. I exaggerate.
It is 69%. That is a number that is big enough that it ought to get your
attention.
It suggests that
our most important arguments, the ones that really get us worked up, are not
best approached by thinking that we need to win or avoid losing. Probably they
are not best approached by thinking that we are going to change this person and
get them to become different than they are. If we could analyze why we have
these arguments, and we really can't, what we would find is that the vast
majority of the difference that we have over this issue is a constitutive part
of what makes us unique, interesting. It is a value that we hold dear that we
can't really get rid of without being who we are.
When you first
met her she was so care free and just dropped what she was doing and ran off
with you for that great adventure to the beach that was so spontaneous and just
fun… I didn't know that meant I would never again attend a dinner party on time
because I don't know what she is doing in there to get ready but it takes
forever.”
“I really loved
that he was so responsible and successful and just took care of things and
planned things for us that were top line and really interesting. I didn't know
that meant that he would take over the family finances and need to control
almost all our money.”
I mention those
examples because often what we end up arguing about are things that originally
drew us to this person in the first place. We recognize that they complement
us. They do things well that we don't do well and we like that because we are a
better team.
But, Oh my God,
now he is a pain the …. So we argue about the same things over and over,
hopefully separated by many moments of intervening good times or neutral times,
but a couple months go by and you are having a quite similar conversation,
wondering if your spouse is nuts. They aren't. But you've reached this place of
fundamental difference and it is quite unlikely to actually change. So winning
and losing aren't really the way to approach these points. And you can't stop
being you, so capitulation is not an option. What is going on?
Professor
Gottman did a study of newly weds around issues of
conflict and he gives us a helpful reminder of what he was watching. He had 130
couples in the ‘love lab' filming them for a weekend and he catalogued their
arguments in terms of small every day stuff, incidents
from the past they regretted, and more substantive conflicts.
He noticed that
so much of what was actually taking place in front of him, regardless of the
subject of the argument, revolved around trust. Such as: “Can I trust you to
choose me over your friends? Can I trust you to choose my interests over those
of your parents? Can I trust you to care more about this relationship than
about yourself? Can I trust you to be home when you say you will be home? Can I
trust you to be motivated and earn money and create wealth for our family?”[ii]
He points out that
there are two different dimensions to trust when you review the videotape. The
first is whether your spouse really gets you. Do they understand you? Do they
know who you are? Are they listening to what you are saying and get what your
needs are?
And the second
is dimension is about transparency. Do you do what you say you will do? Are you
being honest and open with me?
Trust is
actually pretty foundational in our lives. That is probably the reason that
“faith” plays such a big role in the scriptures. Faith, hope,
and love. We have faith in God, we trust God. We have faith in others,
we trust them.
Gottman made
another empirical observation that fits well with the insights from scripture.
We are looking for positive moral certainty in our partner. We want to have
confidence that our spouse has integrity, that they are honest, kind, loving,
people of good will. We look for that in how they treat others but also we need
to trust them that they are like that with us. We need to know that we motivate
them, that we matter to them, that we take priority over other people and other
concerns or interests that they have.
A lot of our
early arguments, whatever the particular issue happens to be, revolve around
this sub-text. And they their core emotional intensity from
the fact that the issue of trust and trustworthiness are so fundamental to
everything else.
I would add from
years of doing divorce counseling that these issues of trust become more
magnified as you mature. I've been surprised over the years, listening to
people talk about why their relationships fell apart after twenty or twenty
five years of marriage. When I was younger, I wouldn't have guessed that so
many people decide that there is something about their spouse that they just
can't respect. I wouldn't have guessed that the moral dimension, the spiritual
dimension would have been so important. But I've learned that as we mature, we
actually become more spiritual and this basic moral outlook on the world
becomes more important over time, so these issues that start with newly weds actually become magnified, deeper, and richer as
we mature. They impinge on our romantic lives and our core sense of fulfillment
more than I might have imagined when I was 25.
Couples that
successfully establish trust over many years develop what psychologists call
“emotional attunement”. They have arguments and important disagreements but
they read each other, give each other what they need, and they establish a
broad equilibrium in the relationship. They subconsciously calculate how to
inflict the least damage during conflict and how to maximize win/win scenarios
where they both are fulfilled.
I remember
talking with one of the Psychology professors at Princeton that had given a
paper on sex and fulfillment in relationships, a subject that everyone is
interested in. I was struck by a chart that he handed out that showed a fairly
broad distribution. Some fulfilled couples had sex frequently and others much
less so and I asked him to explain to me the discrepancy. He said, ‘how often
they engage is not nearly as important as the fact that whatever they do works
for both of them'. Right, they are attuned to each other which is how they find fulfillment through each other.
So, Tolstoy got
this almost exactly backwards. You recall that in Anna Karenina, Tolstoy
observed that happy families are all the same but unhappy families are each
unhappy in their own way. It turns out that fulfillment through attunement to
each other has many different expressions but unhappy marriages follow a pretty
tight script with less variability as it gets worse, so that there is a
remarkable similarity to their end.[iii]
This is because
as trust erodes in a relationship, each of the spouses feel
less and less secure taking risks that are outside of these fairly scripted
ways of relating to each other. Once the relationship is going south, both
players tend to avoid upsetting the apple cart and they slowly become more and
more independent over time, until they are genuinely lonely in close proximity to
each other and the actual end is fairly uneventful.
It is why Gottman's team can observe couples without having a whole
lot of tape and they can predict pick out the behavior patterns with will lead
toward divorce.
I found it
interesting that they confirm what St. Paul suggests anecdotally in our
readings today. In every letter that he writes to the early church Paul says
something like ‘become ambassadors of reconciliation'. Our psychologists say,
‘become emotionally attuned to each other'. And then he tells us what that
means, like the passage we read earlier in Ephesians, “put away anger,
bitterness, wrath, slander, malice”. Instead, “be kind to one another. Practice
forgiveness. Become tender hearted and empathetic.” This is how you live like
God. It is what Jesus showed us.
Our scientists
try to avoid speaking prescriptively like preachers. They try not to tell you
what to do, except at this point because it is so important. If you are having
an argument, if you are in negative space, and your spouse or your sister or
your best friend makes a bid for you to turn towards them, turn towards them.
Read the cues. If someone is telegraphing that they want to end or a break,
take it. If they try to make some genuine humor or signal that they want to
reconcile rather than carry this further, accept the reconciliation and
regroup.
I find it a
relief to know that you can break most of the rules of marriage occasionally,
if and only if, you are really good at repair tactics and your spouse accepts
them. Repair tactics are really important to develop and it is equally
important to actively look for ways to deploy them.
And the negative
emotions that St. Paul described as spiritually destructive, we now can measure
and explain with a lot more neuro-physiology than we
previously. Anger, wrath, contempt, slander- they
really are damaging. And once you start down that path, it becomes harder and
harder to stop because we are accessing different parts of our brain.
We can measure
it. When you get into a heated argument. When you
start raising your voice and screaming to make your point. When you give full
vent to your anger, watch out. This is dangerous territory likely to become
more dangerous. Our brain flips into a different mode, a more elementary mode
of self-defense that releases adrenaline. We don't “process information very
well. We lose access to our sense of humor and our creativity. We repeat
ourselves and become aggressive or we run away and stone wall.
We are turning
away from our spouse and we can now show that even venting our anger, which
therapists thought might be productive for a while, generally doesn't have the
benefits that we thought it might. Watch out because it generally escalates the
negativity and puts you in a mind set that is less
able to make a constructive resolution.
This what was easiest for our psychologists to document.
They could predict couples that would get divorced because they manifest what
Professor Gottman calls ‘the four horses of the Apocalypse'. Criticism,
defensiveness, contempt and stonewalling in both partners. We've all
seen it, almost all of us have engaged in it. Elizabeth Taylor and Richard
Burton won Oscars acting it in “Who's Afraid of
Virginia Woolf”.
They escalate
the negativity mutually and have the effect of emotionally disengaging us from
each other. Left unchecked, you can turn your partner into an adversary where
you start to see their interests as a threat to yours. When you get to this
point, our researchers say that we have really ‘betrayed' each other. We are no
longer a team working together, but rivals in very close proximity. Miserable,
frustrated, sad- after a few months or years of this, you finally call it quits
and it is the right call, sad as that might be.
The boys at the
lab had a couple of insights that I pass on. The first is that we all have
these negative fights but people that have strong relationships are able to tap the
brakes when things are escalating negatively with some positive emotion. They
acknowledge their partners when they have a valid point, they interject humor
that they both can laugh at, they interject empathy.
They know when they are flooded and they take a break.
We now know that
the breaks need to last about twenty minutes for the adrenaline and other neurophyisological changes that have kicked in to subside.
But it puts a break on the negativity and controls it, allows your rational
mind to engage again so that you can work towards something constructive.
And the other
insight that they had is that boring is good. Boring is an underrated virtue.
They use four quadrants to define our behaviors. Both of you are fulfilled
(really good stuff). He is fulfilled, she is less so. She is fulfilled, he is
less so. Both of you are frustrated. The two, so-called boring quadrants are
actually in stasis or equilibrium and that is good. And there is a lot more good going on there that probably needs to be described
more articulately.
Positive
relationships, as you know from your experience, seed each other with positive
emotions. The masters in these studies are the people that are warm towards
other people. They express visible affection which releases oxytocin
that binds us to each other. There is a species of prarie
dog that has high oxcytocin and psychologists use it
to exemplify this point. They mate for life and spend a lot of time sitting
right next to each other, just happily viewing the prarie
side by side.
Masters in these
studies show interest in their spouse. They want to know about their hopes and
dreams, about their fears and anxieties. They make their spouses feel safe.
They are understanding and empathic. They share humor and re-frame tough stuff
so that you can both come at it from a different angle. Not surprisingly, they
keep their romantic life lively because all these qualities allow us
to be intimate. [iv]
They ask
questions. They are actively interested in their spouse. They communicate
excitement when they see them. They are quick to find joy. They support their
spouses.
The Masters of
relationships express positivity towards each other far more often than
negativity. They corral their anger, their hostility, insults, sarcasm (The New
Yorker's disease), contempt, belittling, disgust, and emotional withdrawl. We all do these things and some of us are in
business environments where we have to turn this stuff off when we cross the
threshold of our house because so many people are practicing these negative
emotions all day at work where we are trying to do in the enemy.
We now know that
expressing negative emotions shortens our life and they make life less
fulfilling to live. And we all want to become more than just adequate with our
relationships. We'd like to become masters in relating well with our families
and our friends. We want to love and we want to become genuinely lovable. We
are all a work in progress, helping each other to become stronger, hopefully
accessing our positive energy more than our negative energy. As St. Paul says,
“God has given us the ministry of reconciliation and entrusted to us this
ministry of reconciliation” that we might become imitators of God, as beloved
children to one another. May you be so blessed. Amen.