How to Be More Resilient in Your Relationships

Hi there,

I’m happy to be here with you today. I hope you are taking the very best care of yourself and the people you love, and even the people who are in your community that you don’t know. We need each other more than ever.

I want to talk about a topic that comes up quite a bit in my therapy and coaching practices: feeling stuck in a place of anger or frustration after experiencing disconnection in a relationship. This happens to me still, but not as frequently as it once did. It’s taken a lot of work and intention to shift this pattern! I will give you an example:

I will try to communicate something to my partner, and there is a “miss"—it may have been how I expressed myself, or that I really wanted to slow down and have a conversation but it’s dinner time and we can’t hear each other over the kids, and every time I open my mouth to speak, my 5 year old interrupts me saying “CAN I HAVE A POPSICLE PLEASE?”. It may have been that I was looking for a specific reaction from my partner but I didn’t tell him that. Whatever it was, I’m very annoyed. I feel my internal walls fly up and I can’t even look at him because I’m so frustrated. He can tell (obviously), and he’s trying to repair. He asks more questions. He puts his hand on my back as I’m stirring the rice and the kids are throwing toys and pretending the dog bed is a sled. But I can’t. There is a logical part of my brain telling me there are so many reasons why this happened, that it’s no one’s fault, that the disconnection is normal, but my nervous system can’t seem to catch up.

Can you relate?

As I’ve worked on my anxious attachment parts in my relationship with my partner, I’ve come to realize a couple of things: as secure as I am now, there are still lingering issues that arise between us that require my attention and care. There is no such thing as fully secure, every time. We will always have moments that trigger insecurities or frustrations or impulses to run away, and it’s up to us to catch them. Next, catching them is a big deal, and if we can catch them early and often, even better. I find that if I get too bogged down in my reactions and I’ve invested a lot of time and energy into being annoyed or cold toward my partner, it’s more difficult to get out of it (and I feel the emotional “hangover” from it the next day, too).

Your version of frustration or stuckness may look different depending on your attachment styles. People with the avoidant attachment style may find themselves pulling away, becoming critical, or stonewalling their partner. People with the disorganized or fearful avoidant style may experience quite a bit of confusion and vacillate between wanting connection and feeling the need to be alone to tap into a sense of safety. As always, knowing yourself and your patterns is the key to addressing them appropriately and meeting your needs effectively.

Here are a few tips for cultivating relational resilience:

1) Know your relationship patterning. If you tend to feel reactive with your partner, how will you name that it’s happening? Are there things your partner can do to help you move out of it more quickly? I know for myself, If my partner notices right away, I am usually able to pull out of it faster. Bonus points if he can get me to look at him, because I usually start laughing :)

2) Maybe more importantly, know the ways you and your partner might push one another further into your reactivity. If my partner is oblivious to my emotional experience and doesn’t realize I’m frustrated, I usually become more upset. This requires me to step forward and be clear about my feelings so that we can do something about them. It’s really not up to him to read my mind, although I am human and sometimes I fall into that trap expecting that he will magically know why my feelings are hurt.

3) Know what repair looks and feels like in your relationship. This way, you can track what’s happening in your body. Does your partner know you’re upset? If not, that’s step one. If they do know, how did they respond? If they didn’t respond in a way that felt good to you, it may be that there is repair needed on their side as well. This may require a few moments of uninterrupted time to be able to address the needs in your partnership. If that’s not available now, how can you support yourself in being able to focus on other things until that time is free? You may need to distract yourself a bit, or repeat a mantra like “I trust we are going to address this as soon as the timing is right.” Pushing to address an issue without adequate timing or when one partner isn’t ready will only lead to further frustration and disconnection. Reminding yourself there is plenty of time might take work and some rewiring in your brain, but it will ultimately support your partnership if you don’t feel pressured by the clock.

Making an effort to move forward after moments of disconnection is different than sweeping the challenges under the rug, by the way. This is not a time to bypass the difficulty but address it more effectively. And once you learn how, you will recognize how much time you’ve spent in the limbo and discomfort of disconnection, which is another motivator to do it differently in the future.

As a reminder, I’m here to support you in your relationships! I have coaching slots open at the moment, and I also have two more therapy slots available (if you live in North Carolina). If one on one work isn’t in the cards right now, I have virtual, self-paced courses for your attachment style, too.

I appreciate you so much. Thank you for taking the time to be here with me.

Warmly,

Elizabeth