Feeling Each Other in Long-Term Relationships by Steven Stosny, Ph.D.
Source: Psychology Today website.
Emotional attunement is an unconscious process by which loved ones automatically attune their emotions and bodily rhythms to each other when in proximity. They feel each other, like musicians in a duet. Part of the euphoria of falling in love is feeling as one, hearts beating together. Parents feel it with infants and use it to calm their toddlers (and themselves) when stress is high. Positive emotional attunement facilitates affection, compassion, and trust.
[b]Growing Apart
[/b]To the great misfortune of humankind, emotional attunement is negatively biased. Probably because negative emotions are necessary for meeting threats to survival, they get priority processing in the brain. If you come home from work in a fairly good mood and find that your partner is brooding or upset, emotional attunement will bring your partner up a little, but its negative bias will bring you down a lot.
As interactions become routine (an inevitable result of living together), unconscious resistance to attunement emerges. At first, the urge to resist attunement is merely a desire for some privacy. But it soon gets worse. When one partner perceives subtle resistance to attunement as rejection, the resistant partner feels controlled, and resistance becomes conscious and overtly rejecting.
To keep from being “brought down,” by the other’s negative mood or overwhelmed by the other’s higher energy level, many partners dull sensitivity to the emotional world of each other. This numbing of one of the most important experiences in their lives causes automatic guilt, shame, and anxiety, which harden into chains of resentment. One party feels shut out; the other feels overwhelmed by demands. Emotional attunement becomes mostly negative. Resentment breeds more resentment, until it drains the lifeblood of the relationship.
But we can keep that from happening.
[b]Seek Attunement, Not “Validation”
[/b]A harmful tenet of pop psychology holds that emotional validation is an essential “need” of intimate partners. Not only does this put the wrong emphasis on relationships, but it also weakens the sense of self by impairing self-validation. Feelings are valid despite a partner’s inability to recognize them. Invalidating each other’s feelings hurts relationships because it blocks attunement. But invalidated feelings must never be construed as a diminished sense of self by either partner.
Attunement is sharing emotional experience. Emotional validation is, at best, a means of removing barriers to emotional attunement. When seeking validation overrides the desire for attunement, it becomes a barrier to connection. The following is too easily perceived by one’s partner as a demand.
“I’m not okay unless you validate my feelings.” Subtext: (“weather you feel like it or not because my feelings are more important than yours.)
Seeking attunement is an invitation, not a demand:
“We feel so much better when we’re connected.”
In my clinical experience, the major barriers to emotional attunement are partners confusing:
Feelings with judgments
Comfort and connection with accountability
Hurt with facts
Perspectives with standards.
Common examples of masking feelings with judgments take the form of:
“I feel unheard, ignored, judged.”
These are not feelings; they’re judgments about a partner’s behavior. Judgmental discourse is more likely to get a negative reaction than a validating response. In contrast, sharing the feelings that underlie the judgments has a better chance of stimulating compassion and connection. For example:
“I feel sad, hurt, ashamed, lonely.”
On the other side of bids for connection, partners put up a formidable barrier when they construe sincere expressions of feelings with judgments and blame.
“It’s not my fault that you feel sad, hurt, ashamed, lonely.”
[b]The “Accountability” Barrier
[/b]We all want accountability in our relationships, although cognitive biases make us demand it from our partners, while overlooking our own failures of accountability. The essential element of accountability in close relationships is compassion. Genuine accountability follows compassion, that is, your partner cares that you’re hurt or feel bad and wants to help you feel better. Disingenuous accountability is your partner admitting fault, with little sympathy for your hurt. Compassion is the key to accountability in love, but it’s difficult to feel compassion for someone blaming or accusing you. The closest you might come is remorse.
The problem with remorse is that it’s self-obsessed. (I feel bad that you’re hurt, so I want you to get over it so I can feel better.) Put another way, my compassion for my wife is about her hurt; my remorse is about mine. Since most hurt in relationships stems from self-obsession, demanding more of it in the guise of accountability is ill-fated. Remorse eventually turns into resentment, as the hurt of a partner is seen more as a burden than a cue for compassion.
[b]Perspectives vs. Standards
[/b]Intimate partners have different temperaments, life experiences, and family histories, and often different core vulnerabilities and coping tactics. As a result, the emotional components of their perspectives differ significantly. A major barrier to connection is ignoring these differences and assuming that your perspective is the standard for all humanity.
“I don’t understand you. I wouldn’t react or feel the way you do in your circumstances, so you shouldn’t, either.”
[b]Concert Pitch with the Heartbeat Hug
[/b]Before the performance begins, musicians in a symphony orchestra adjust the pitch (high-low vibrations) of their instruments to sound similar tones. Musicians slightly change their pitch to meet each other. This allows them to maintain the integrity of their instruments while playing harmoniously together. With positive emotional attunement, we maintain the integrity of our own feelings, while slightly adjusting them to form a duet.
Partners can renew positive attunement with a heartbeat hug, done several times a day.
Press your bodies together, and feel your heartbeats adjust to each other.
As a bonus, the heartbeat hug will likely stimulate oxytocin, the bonding hormone that calms anxiety and creates feelings of closeness.
Of course, the heartbeat hug must be accompanied by a desire for a closer relationship. If you both desire it, your bodily rhythms and hormones will do the rest.
Emotional attunement softens discussions of disagreements and negotiations about behavior change, with outcomes more likely to satisfy both partners.
Emotional attunement is an unconscious process by which loved ones automatically attune their emotions and bodily rhythms to each other when in proximity. They feel each other, like musicians in a duet. Part of the euphoria of falling in love is feeling as one, hearts beating together. Parents feel it with infants and use it to calm their toddlers (and themselves) when stress is high. Positive emotional attunement facilitates affection, compassion, and trust.
[b]Growing Apart
[/b]To the great misfortune of humankind, emotional attunement is negatively biased. Probably because negative emotions are necessary for meeting threats to survival, they get priority processing in the brain. If you come home from work in a fairly good mood and find that your partner is brooding or upset, emotional attunement will bring your partner up a little, but its negative bias will bring you down a lot.
As interactions become routine (an inevitable result of living together), unconscious resistance to attunement emerges. At first, the urge to resist attunement is merely a desire for some privacy. But it soon gets worse. When one partner perceives subtle resistance to attunement as rejection, the resistant partner feels controlled, and resistance becomes conscious and overtly rejecting.
To keep from being “brought down,” by the other’s negative mood or overwhelmed by the other’s higher energy level, many partners dull sensitivity to the emotional world of each other. This numbing of one of the most important experiences in their lives causes automatic guilt, shame, and anxiety, which harden into chains of resentment. One party feels shut out; the other feels overwhelmed by demands. Emotional attunement becomes mostly negative. Resentment breeds more resentment, until it drains the lifeblood of the relationship.
But we can keep that from happening.
[b]Seek Attunement, Not “Validation”
[/b]A harmful tenet of pop psychology holds that emotional validation is an essential “need” of intimate partners. Not only does this put the wrong emphasis on relationships, but it also weakens the sense of self by impairing self-validation. Feelings are valid despite a partner’s inability to recognize them. Invalidating each other’s feelings hurts relationships because it blocks attunement. But invalidated feelings must never be construed as a diminished sense of self by either partner.
Attunement is sharing emotional experience. Emotional validation is, at best, a means of removing barriers to emotional attunement. When seeking validation overrides the desire for attunement, it becomes a barrier to connection. The following is too easily perceived by one’s partner as a demand.
“I’m not okay unless you validate my feelings.” Subtext: (“weather you feel like it or not because my feelings are more important than yours.)
Seeking attunement is an invitation, not a demand:
“We feel so much better when we’re connected.”
In my clinical experience, the major barriers to emotional attunement are partners confusing:
Feelings with judgments
Comfort and connection with accountability
Hurt with facts
Perspectives with standards.
Common examples of masking feelings with judgments take the form of:
“I feel unheard, ignored, judged.”
These are not feelings; they’re judgments about a partner’s behavior. Judgmental discourse is more likely to get a negative reaction than a validating response. In contrast, sharing the feelings that underlie the judgments has a better chance of stimulating compassion and connection. For example:
“I feel sad, hurt, ashamed, lonely.”
On the other side of bids for connection, partners put up a formidable barrier when they construe sincere expressions of feelings with judgments and blame.
“It’s not my fault that you feel sad, hurt, ashamed, lonely.”
[b]The “Accountability” Barrier
[/b]We all want accountability in our relationships, although cognitive biases make us demand it from our partners, while overlooking our own failures of accountability. The essential element of accountability in close relationships is compassion. Genuine accountability follows compassion, that is, your partner cares that you’re hurt or feel bad and wants to help you feel better. Disingenuous accountability is your partner admitting fault, with little sympathy for your hurt. Compassion is the key to accountability in love, but it’s difficult to feel compassion for someone blaming or accusing you. The closest you might come is remorse.
The problem with remorse is that it’s self-obsessed. (I feel bad that you’re hurt, so I want you to get over it so I can feel better.) Put another way, my compassion for my wife is about her hurt; my remorse is about mine. Since most hurt in relationships stems from self-obsession, demanding more of it in the guise of accountability is ill-fated. Remorse eventually turns into resentment, as the hurt of a partner is seen more as a burden than a cue for compassion.
[b]Perspectives vs. Standards
[/b]Intimate partners have different temperaments, life experiences, and family histories, and often different core vulnerabilities and coping tactics. As a result, the emotional components of their perspectives differ significantly. A major barrier to connection is ignoring these differences and assuming that your perspective is the standard for all humanity.
“I don’t understand you. I wouldn’t react or feel the way you do in your circumstances, so you shouldn’t, either.”
[b]Concert Pitch with the Heartbeat Hug
[/b]Before the performance begins, musicians in a symphony orchestra adjust the pitch (high-low vibrations) of their instruments to sound similar tones. Musicians slightly change their pitch to meet each other. This allows them to maintain the integrity of their instruments while playing harmoniously together. With positive emotional attunement, we maintain the integrity of our own feelings, while slightly adjusting them to form a duet.
Partners can renew positive attunement with a heartbeat hug, done several times a day.
Press your bodies together, and feel your heartbeats adjust to each other.
As a bonus, the heartbeat hug will likely stimulate oxytocin, the bonding hormone that calms anxiety and creates feelings of closeness.
Of course, the heartbeat hug must be accompanied by a desire for a closer relationship. If you both desire it, your bodily rhythms and hormones will do the rest.
Emotional attunement softens discussions of disagreements and negotiations about behavior change, with outcomes more likely to satisfy both partners.
