Stop and Deal With It
By Charles Rush
February 2, 2014
Romans 12: 9, 14-18 and Matthew 5: 23, 24
[ Audio
(mp3, 7.7Mb) ]
ere is a memorable cartoon from the New Yorker that features a scowling husband at the dinner table at an uptown restaurant in Manhattan with his crabby wife. The waiter has just lugged this ginormous bottle of wine over to the table for their approval. And the husband says to the waiter, “That will be fine. We have a lot to talk about.” Just about this time of year, if you aren't able to escape the frozen piles, you too just might have enough frustration built up in your life that you'd like to just get it off your chest.
Of course the
literature will tell you, don't do it. But then the literature would also tell
you not to let these resentments build up either, which can be challenging if
you work in a field with a lot of angry aggression all around you and then you
commute and get home to children that require extra attention shall we say.
Today, our
researchers have actually studied couples over many years, describing those who
are happy and fulfilled, cataloging those that are not happy, recording tens of
thousands of arguments and disagreements, looking for the clues as to how they
get solved productively and making a record of the relatively few ways that
people don't resolve them, get stuck, and slowly find that their negative
quadrant of their relationship becomes easier and easier for them to enter,
harder and harder for them to escape. Interestingly, as I said last week, they
observe very few differences between heterosexual couples and homosexual
couples. And the part of these relationships that they've studied yield
important confirmation on how to have not just a good marriage but also better
relationships with your family members. It turns out that the qualities that
make us good spouses are the same qualities that make us constructive people,
better family members, better team members at work, just better people…
And on this
point, we now have research that shows that storing up a lot of negative things
that you are upset about until you have a briny stew of bitterness big enough
to warrant a sit down where you can just have it all out with your loved ones,
doesn't work too well. It is a recipe for trouble long term.
I'm reading a
book on this research and I could imagine our team of psychologists commending
Jesus with his admonition that if you are headed to worship to re-fuel your
sense of meaning and purpose in the world and you remember that you have an
issue with someone, turn around and go see them, work it through towards
reconciliation, and then return to worship. That is how you actually maintain
real meaning in your life.[i]
Stop and deal with it.
First a couple
observations that our empirical researchers discovered that were significant.
One of them is the ideal of trust. Last week, I said that trust is sufficiently
grounding for humans that it is a kind of spiritual foundation upon which our
fuller meaning is built. Trust releases oxytocin in our brains that makes us
content. Researchers use a couple of prairie dogs that have high oxytocin
levels and they are content to sit side by side most of the day, watching the
world go by.
Humans are a
little more sophisticated and volatile but our researchers found something
quite similar when they actually put monitors on couples, observed them for a
weekend. What they found was something of an ideal for trust and it was this.
“When a woman is happily married and her husband is holding her hand, there is
almost a total shutdown of the physiological pattern signaling alarm and danger
in the brain.”[ii]
If a stranger
is holding her hand, the centers are activated completely. If she is unhappily
married, they are activated somewhat. By the way, the same is true for gay and
lesbian couples. It is a beautiful image and it strikes me as right. I know
when I went in for surgery, the nurses came around to pat me on the head and
the chaplains offered to pray for me and the hot shot doctor came to offer his
assurance that everything was under control. But I didn't want to see my kids
or anyone else, just my wife Kate.
Our
researchers have just found empirical evidence to support the Bible. We say, 'We can be the face of the Christ for each other, we can be
the love and strength of God.” And what a cool thing that we can be that kind
of trusting assurance for each other in the midst of real anxiety. It is a
pretty powerful thing. And it apparently has measurable benefits.
Epidemiologists have done studies and discovered that on the whole, you live
longer and healthier when you have trusting support around you. Looking at
immigrants to the United States, they have noticed that when you hold other
factors constant, immigrants with strong families and a tight knit community,
with a lot of interlocking friends was a significant indicator of overall
health and longevity.[iii]
Conversely, professor James
House reported that around the planet, the group that reliably die young are
lonely, socially isolated, disconnected people, the vast majority of whom are
men. Trust and tight knit relationships are a very strong foundation. As St.
Paul observed, Faith, Hope, and Love, the three keys.
Faith and love are foundational.
And they can
become powerful in close relationships because we have the power to actually
“co-regulate” each other. We can calm each other down, make each other
non-anxious, and soothe each other. I love the medical community. They call
this process, “mutually synchronizing exchange limbic regulation”. It means
that we can reciprocally make each other calmer in the midst of a storm, strong
in the face of a threat, and visionary in the midst of banality. We can express
complimentarity and make each other better. It is the strength of love in
action.[iv]
It is the strength of God in action.
Of course this same capability allows us to also ramp up negative emotion,
escalate the tension mutually, increase our misery and drive us to fury
and isolated stone-walling. And when that becomes a pattern of relating,
conflict becomes something of an absorbing state that is easy for us to enter
as a couple and hard for us to leave. Left unchecked, it moves towards
independence, isolation, and ultimately divorce.
Of course,
conflict is part of our life, we can't escape it. You may love the people in
your family but they can get on your nerves from time to time. How we deal with
conflict is critical. And our researchers made another elementary discovery
about how not to do it, by observing tens of thousands of arguments.
The maxim is
this regarding arguments. How you begin a discussion in the first 3 minutes
determines how the remainder of a discussion will go for the rest of it, not
all the time, just 96% of the time. 96% of the time should get your attention.
So if you blow
into the kitchen, start raving and bloviating, as my wife likes to call it,
that discussion will end with more raving and ranting by your spouse or one or
both of you walking out of the room 96% of the time. You may be able to salvage
your criticism but probably not. People think this will make them feel better
but all it actually does is communicate “I'm angry” which is met by “I'm
defensive that your angry”. “Bye” “Bye”. I'd like to meet the 4% of us who are
Houdini that can make a different ending out of these bombasts because I'm not
one of them.[v]
What we have
done is tap our center for threat and danger and
attacked, accessing our most basic part of our brain and we've stricken our
spouse or friend with that same ‘fight or flight' syndrome that mother nature
has built into our remedial emotional make up for our survival.
We think it
gets our spouses attention, which is surely does, but at the expense of
rational thought, empathy for others, humor, and an ability to reframe the
context precluding the likelihood of working things through constructively.
And what we
need is to soothe each other. Take a break and calm each other down, reassure
one another through touch so that we can regain trust and safety and engage in
reconciling mode to actually understand what the complaint is and actually
figure out a way to mutually meet it.
But what we
actually do, more often than we would like, is not deal with one issue, not
deal with another issue, not deal with a third issue, and then periodically
blow up at each other because this pile of issues has become too frustrating.
Stop and deal
with it. And I loved one researchers observation that
it will probably take up an hour of your week, processing some area of conflict
with your spouse. Really? Sounds
like a lot of time and intentionality… but then so is going to the gym if you
want to stay healthy.
Part of the
reason is the way our memory works in humans, a subject about which we are
making rapid strides in our understanding in the past couple decades. One piece
of this is called the ‘Zeigarnik effect'[vi]
Professor Zeigarnik was in a café in Vienna watching the waiters
attend to very large parties. She noticed that they had the ability to take
orders from a big table without writing anything down. And they did an amazing
job of delivering those orders correctly. But when she went to interview them
after the table had been served and asked the waiters to recall again what the
people at the table had ordered, their memory was very poor. As soon as the
orders were filled, they were forgotten.
It turns out
that once we could study the brain in real time, we could substantiate
Professor Zeigarnik's theory. Indeed, “we have much
better recall for events that are not entirely processed.”[vii]
Some researchers have even speculated that our brains do most of their work
dreaming about issues that we have not entirely processed during the day.
What does this
mean for dealing with conflict in an intimate setting? It means that we tend to
remember much more vividly, and we tend to recall much more quickly issues that
we haven't resolved, things that are still sources of frustration for us. And
the more we review them, the more likely they are to become areas where we
fester and stew, making us more and more sour.
And the positive corollary? When we work things through and
they reach a constructive solution, when conflict gets resolved by both of us
coming to a mutual understanding of the issue, how it affects us differently,
hearing what each of us needs, and committing to change in the future, guess
what? We tend to forget about these things. A big part of happiness is not having
much to stew about, to fester about. It is probably part of the reason that our
researchers now think that a lot of what we think of as boring in marriage or
good family relationships is actually more good than
we realize.
Because here
is another insight about how memory actually works in our life versus how you
might naively think it works and here I speak in broad summary. We don't
actually store a set of tapes from the past that we can pull off the shelf of
our memory bank whenever we want for a quick review. It is a little more
complicated than that, particularly our emotional memories from the past with
our families and loved ones.
We have the
original event that leaves a memory for us. Later we recall that event, but in
the telling of that event, we give it a context and a narrative that is laden
with meaning. “I remember she stepped off the boat with those Italian boots and
I was so flummoxed I couldn't remember my greeting in Italian because she so
beautifully reminded me of home.” That is a very different meaning from “I
remember she stepped off the boat but I couldn't remember what to say to her
and she had to translate my line for me like she always does”.
Once we tell
that story, we don't simply remember the original event,
our mind records the re-telling of the story with the meaning that we attached
to it. So that over time, our memories actually change quite a lot because the
meaning that we attach to these events evolves as we mature in life and recall
these events in different ways for different occasions to meet different
challenges.
It turns out
that the way you tell the story, what details you remember or omit, tells us
far more about how you are feeling in the present than you might imagine.
Again, our researchers have followed tens of thousands of couples and in the
intake interview, they ask them the story about how
they met. Then they went back and correlated those stories with how the
marriages were doing. The results were revealing.
Of course,
most all couples who tell these stories tell about the interesting and romantic
parts of the tale. But the researchers noticed the details in the telling that
stood out a bit more in marriages that weren't doing well. Their stories
included more details that portrayed their spouse in a bad light. They forgot
to bring money on the first date or they fumbled an introduction. They had
little awkward episodes that were recounted. And sometimes the stories were
just sort of terse, bereft of much emotional meaning. “Um we met at a party, a friend of a
friend introduced us, and then we started going out and got together.” Not much
to it.
Likewise, when
they identified marriages that were strong and happy and then went back to
review the intake questions again, they noticed that in addition to just
relating the facts of the story, these spouses would stop and interject
something endearing about their spouse. “I'd forgotten my purse and he called a
cab for me without me even knowing. He does those nice surprises for people that is just the way he is.” It is a little harder to
see these because the majority of us like to tell the endearing story of how we
met.
Our
researchers called this tendency for our spouses to remember and say nice
things about us, “positive sentiment override”. That is what you want to get
going in your relationships. Conversely, you want to avoid “negative sentiment
override”. The way that our memory actually works is that we have a kind of
default disposition towards those closest to us that filters
what we recall and how we recall it. That means that once you get a good
reputation established with your spouse, they tend to give you the benefit of
the doubt when you do something boneheaded and foolish, and minimize just how
negative it is for your relationship. They will say, you are under stress or
you're having a bad day, but no significant meaning is attached to the aberrant
behavior and it doesn't alter how they view your essential character.
By contrast,
when things are going poorly and trust is weak in your relationship, spouses
tend to look for more evidence that you are not trustworthy, can't be counted
upon. They are much more likely to see each and every boneheaded move you make
as confirmation that you have a character issue rather than simply a problem
area that needs some attention and focus. It is the subject of legions of
lectures from parents to their teenage sons who just don't understand why the
Coach and their Principal are riding them so hard for a seemingly innocuous
incident. They are in the trough of ‘negative sentiment override' and they don't know how to get out of
it.
And here is
what is interesting about these negative cycles. Our research teams would
assign a couple of experts to watch these couples having an argument to give it
some objective frame of reference. And what they noticed is that when happy
couples were having a disagreement, the couples
observation of their partners attempts to do something nice or something
positive during the conflict to make amends were about on a par with what the
experts were seeing.
But for
unhappy couples, it turns out that they miss about 50% of the positivity that
their spouses were trying to communicate to them. The independent experts could
see that the partners were trying to do nice things, trying to express some
affection, but the spouses didn't see it themselves.[viii]
We are more subjective than even we realize.
The point is
this. “If we engage in attuned processing of a negative emotional event or a
regrettable incident with our partner…” and we resolve it…” we will only
foggily remember it. The details will become hazy, and the event,
insignificant. On the other hand, it we dismiss and avoid processing a negative
event, it will not disappear. It will fester, ready to be triggered again.”[ix]
Processing
these events is not complicated but it does require us to interiorize a certain
discipline that is not entirely natural, learning to do some ‘active
listening'. We have to let our partner describe their feelings about a negative
event.
And we have to
validate them, let them know that we understand that when we made this mistake,
we understand why they had the feelings about it that they had. We need to
demonstrate some empathy by putting ourselves in their position and trying to
understand it from their point of view, recognizing that their view and ours
might be quite different.
Both partners
need to be able to explain calmly what they need from each other in the future
when situations like this arise. “If your brother gets sarcastic at family
gatherings and starts generalizing about women, I need you to not just let that
go but stand up for me and show him that we don't have that kind of
relationship. I really feel put down by those asides.”
And both
partners need to accept their responsibility for their part in allowing the
regrettable incident from starting and unfolding in the manner that it did. And
both parties need to commit to standing together to keep it from happening in
the future, minimizing the consequences going forward.
A lot more
could be said about the process of reconciliation and we will in the future.
But, for the moment, it is enough to underscore the truth in Jesus' insight
that you are not likely to attain nirvana if you don't attend to the
transgressions that we make with those that we are trying to love. Not dealing
with them comprehensively is guaranteed to eventually bring you misery. Dealing
with them has the prospect of returning to stasis. More than that, when you
build it into your life, your spouses
ability to trust you deeply multiplies in manifold ways.
St. Paul was
more right than he knew. “Let your love be genuine… Hold fast to the good, care
for one another with brotherly affection… be patient, express empathy towards
each other, live in harmony. Don't just repay tit for
tat, but strive towards what is noble (the best in each of you). And insofar as
it depends on you, live in peace with those around you. Overcome the negative
stuff with a positive good.” As my grandfather would say to me, “Now that dog
will hunt.” Amen.