Topic: Relationship satisfaction with mindfulness
ERP 144: How To Increase Relationship Satisfaction With Mindfulness, Part III
Welcome to The Empowered Relationship Podcast, helping you turn relationship challenges into opportunities and setting you up for relationship success. Your host, Dr. Jessica Higgins, is a licensed psychologist and relationship coach who shares valuable tips, tools and resources for you to dramatically improve your relationship.
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Hi, thank you for joining today’s podcast episode. Today’s episode is 144. This is part three of How To Increase Relationship Satisfaction With Mindfulness. I appreciate you sticking with me in this topic. I know it might not seem super compelling, sexy or even attractive, this topic… And at the same time, the essence and the skill of mindfulness I believe can be a game-changer, and I’m wanting to give you some foundation for what mindfulness is, what it looks like in our life, as well as how it benefits us and our relationship.
In episode 143, the same title, How To Increase Relationship Satisfaction With Mindfulness, I offered the first three ways that mindfulness can benefit you and your relationship. I’ll do a short recap in a moment, but I just wanna foresay that I am delayed in getting this podcast to you… The last week – actually, the entire week, and I’m still not 100%, I was dealing with a stomach bug; it was really gnarly, and I will spare you the graphic details… But that did kind of hang me up. I did my best to serve my clients and I just was limited in what I could do last week, so I appreciate your patience in sticking with me.
Before we get started, join me if you will in taking pause, to center and ground in the intention… As I share with you, as you listen and contemplate some of the tips, tools that I have to offer… That we are all on path, in one form or another, in relationship… To grow ourselves and to grow our relationship. We’re all seekers in improving our skillfulness, improving the quality of our relationship. As you’re listening, you are in partnership with others as well, and myself included.
I share over and over again stories of my own hardships, my own learnings, and the areas that I still continue to grow in, and even the areas that I have achieved some competency, I still practice… It’s not something I arrive in, it’s something I’m deeply committed to. So as you listen, perhaps holding a perspective of deeper compassion and understanding, for yourself as well as your significant other, as we contemplate these relationship principles.
I wanna encourage you that if you feel that there is a way that I might improve this experience for you, I would love to hear from you. You can contact me at [email protected]. I would love to hear any feedback, suggestions, or even questions that you have that would help this podcast, this show feel more supportive to you. Again, I can be reached via e-mail, [email protected]. You can also visit my website, DrJessicaHiggins.com, click on Contact, and you can find the various ways to reach me there.
If you haven’t listened to episode 142 or 143, I wanna encourage you to check that out first, as it gives you context, definition, examples for mindfulness. Again, sometimes we don’t really know how we’re perhaps being mindful if we don’t use that term; it’s not a term we identify with. However, we still might be experiencing the active mindfulness, even if we don’t call it that. So I give you some practical examples to relate to, and then in episode 143 I started to give you real explicit detail around the benefits of practicing mindfulness on you and your relationship. I’ll recap those briefly here.
Number one way of mindfulness benefitting your relationship is being attentive. With attentiveness, it increases the level of connection, the quality of connection. So often, I’ve talked a lot about how technology is a distraction, how our busy schedules are stress, preoccupies us, and we are really not present… And it’s really hard to cultivate intimacy and a feeling of closeness when we are elsewhere, sucked into social media, or some article, or show… And our partner is perhaps available and we’re missing that opportunity. So mindfulness really helps us be attentive and present, so that we can, again, increase the level of connection and intimacy in our bond.
Number two, the second way that mindfulness can benefit you and your relationship – mindfulness helps us cultivate the ability to respond, rather than just react. When we are simply reacting, it’s that knee-jerk response that’s often protective. This is where we will get activated in the fight, flight or freeze response even, where we feel threatened, and we are again in protection mode. This again and again will show us that it contributes to more of a negative loop, a negative cycle with our partner.
People talk about having tunnel vision and doing insane things that they deeply regret, and with mindfulness we can begin to have more control over our response, rather than feeling controlled by our reaction. This is very similar to the third way… They’re so interconnected, but I did feel that they were different enough and had enough to say that I separated them -number three way is emotionally regulated. As we increase our mindfulness practice, we become more emotionally regulated.
That is that we basically strengthen the pre-frontal cortex and improve the connectivity between the pre-frontal cortex and the amygdala. What this is all really saying is that we’re able to respond with higher level of thinking, and this is perceiving more accurately, making decisions more clearly, being able to moderate our behavior and regulate our emotional reactivity and expression. So if you’re interested in more of what I had to say about that, please check out 143.
Okay, the fourth way that mindfulness benefits us and our relationships is it increases our self-awareness. With the practice of mindfulness — and towards the end of the show I’m gonna give you links of what specific exercises you can do that cultivate mindfulness… As I mentioned in episode 142, there might be ways that you’re already practicing mindfulness, but if you wanna increase your skill, it could be beneficial and behoove you to start to incorporate some small practices that begin to develop/build this muscle of mindfulness.
So as we increase our skill of mindfulness, the area in our brain, the anterior cingulate cortex changes; this is the area that is associated with impulse control, attention, emotion, as well as our sense of self. This essentially allows us to observe ourselves, almost as in this third person. We can observe what we’re saying, our behavior, how we’re acting, and perhaps even identify our emotions.
When we don’t have this level of self-awareness, we are often hijacked by our emotional response. We are so deeply identified with our emotional experience we don’t know that we’re more than our emotional experience. For example, if I’m angry, the experience can be “I am anger.” That’s my whole experience, there’s no other part of me. I’m completely identified with being angry and the experience of anger… Versus if I develop some self-awareness, I might have a place in me that can recognize “Oh, I’m really angry” or “I am infuriated by X, Y and Z”, but there’s still this part of me that can recognize “I’m having the experience of anger”, versus “I am the experience of anger.” It’s a subtle difference, but what that does is it allows for some sense of distance and perspective, that we can recognize we are having the emotional experience, but that we are not THE emotional experience.
This allows us to feel that we are more than our emotional experience, and that perhaps we will get through it, we will be okay, we are okay, despite the emotional turmoil. Again, this takes a level of skill to develop.
Another great benefit of self-awareness is we have a mind’s eye out when we start entering into a sensitive zone. We will be able to observe ourself, and again, recognize where we might be doing and saying things that are going down a path that leads to no good. If we’ve been around the block enough, we have enough experience to recognize “That usually gets me into trouble” or “That usually creates a lot of damage” or “That usually ends up in a big blow-out fight.” It’s where we might wanna throw a dish, or check your partner’s phone, or call your partner names and really let loose on them, or just get super critical and focus on them, nitpick them, and “Can I catch that? Can I recognize that?” and then rein it in.
Mindfulness helps us control our impulses to act out in destructive and manipulative ways, and really refocus us towards our greater goal, our intention and our higher value. If we’ve looked at this and done a level of work and recognize “Oh, right, that old way, that destructive or that impulsive way leads to no good”, then we can have the awareness and make a choice, make a conscious choice to do something different, and hopefully we prepped that, so we have options that are available to us in the heat of the moment.
For the first year that my husband and I were dating, I was practicing a great deal of self-awareness around my anxious tendencies, and the anxiety was really steeped in fear of abandonment. Now, it didn’t always look like abandonment on the surface, and the content would be maybe even pretty mild – he didn’t call me when he said he was gonna call me, or perhaps he… One of the things that happened for us was we’d talkd about the future, and he would talk in very “I” terms, and being really relational, and probably being a more stereotypical female, I was thinking in “we” terms, and so I perceived that as a threat at the time… So I had to recognize that fear and the anxious tendency, and really what that allowed me to do is be self-aware and recognize “Oh, I’m feeling anxious” or “I’m feeling insecure”, and to meet that directly. Because without that self-awareness, the tendency is to — oh, I think one of my tendencies was to act like I don’t care, or be aloof, or really question and really wonder and seek for reassurance and try to understand, but really try to get my answer met by means of him, through my questions…
And typically, he would feel that and probably not enjoy it very much, and hence it would lead towards a problematic kind of experience between the two of us that was not connected. He was like, “Why are you coming in on me so strong?” and I’m like trying to seek reassurance, but I’m not doing it directly, so there’s a lack of self-awareness, and that can lead, like I’m saying, to a negative cycle… Whereas with the self-awareness and the recognition, “Oh, I’m feeling insecure” or “I’m feeling threatened”, and to be meeting that more directly allows for me to soothe that anxiety more directly and also reveal that more openly to him, so he can greater understand where I am and deepen in our communication.
As I have said previously, being able to work with our insecurities in relationship is probably our biggest task. What we do when we feel emotionally hurt, or we’re bringing a wound or trauma, whether or not we’re aware of it or not, in our relationship, and it’s likely we have something… Or fear, or an emotional need – how we deal with that is HUGE; it’s one of the major predictors, I believe, in co-creating a lasting, happy relationship. Because when we don’t deal with it directly, we have the propensity to react, attack, blame, shame, and have all the distance shut down, stonewall – all of these things really truly because we have an emotional need that’s not being met, and we don’t know how to deal with it directly.
So when we can increase our mindfulness, our self-awareness, we can deal with that more directly and increase the likelihood of that emotional need getting met… Because your partner likely loves you and wants to help.
The fifth way, number five, that mindfulness benefits us and our relationship is it allows for more clear communication. As I was just mentioning, when we have this self-awareness, when we’re regulated, then we can speak really clearly, vulnerably, so that our partner understands, can actually feel us, can understand our perspective and feel the shape of us. When we are protective, defended and using various strategies to stay safe, our partner likely does not understand what’s going on underneath and has a very difficult time being able to help. When couples seek support, they’re often saying they need to improve their communication. What’s often true is that it’s not about the ability to communicate, it’s about the ability to understand what’s going on underneath. Most of the time, we’re not tuning into the hurt, the emotional need, the pain, the insecurity, the fear.
An example – perhaps even a classic example – is where one partner is really upset that the other partner is ten minutes late. Now, they could go back and forth and there could be blame, criticism… “You’re always late… What’s wrong!? Why can’t you get your stuff together!? You need better time management”, yadda-yadda-yadda. Well, that’s usually not gonna help. But if the partner that feels upset can recognize “Oh, I feel hurt. I feel like my partner doesn’t care. I’m sitting here waiting and he doesn’t really care about my experience or my feelings.” Perhaps that has ties to previous experiences where that person felt uncared about, hurt, rejected… And so if there’s a sharing of that – again, time and place matters here… But if there’s a willingness to reveal and share that hurt, that’s gonna be an entirely different conversation.
In an article titled “How Mindfulness Techniques Can Help Your Relationship” by Erica Turner, she writes:
“One of the biggest benefits of mindfulness is its ability to help us slow down intense emotional processes. Often, when we are upset or disappointed or frustrated with our partner, our brain is in hyperdrive. We are on high alert in trying to get our needs met and express ourselves. Unfortunately, this high anxiety status can impede us from being able to clearly tell our partners what we’re looking for from them. Approaching your partner mindfully can help you slow down so that you can have a more productive conversation.”
I believe that mindfulness can also help us develop more tact and kindness when we are feeling challenged or upset… Because sometimes what we’re feeling is intense, and there might be times where we’re not even in a position yet to articulate an understanding of our hurt, our pain, our vulnerability, so what do we do in those moments?
I think it’s important to be tactful and kind, whether or not it’s to say “I’m so upset right now… I don’t know that I can say something very constructive. I’m not ready to talk”, or some version of “I’m really upset, I feel defensive. Let’s try to make a plan to talk tomorrow.” This allows for us to be in the heat of the moment. Perhaps we are triggered, we are feeling insecure or threatened, and we’re not in a regulated place… So to have mindfulness and to recognize that we’re not in a constructive place and we can be tactful about it doesn’t mean that, again, we’re denying that we’re angry… We’re just trying to have respect for the process, and that is like “I’m really heated right now. I wanna say things that are not nice.”
One of the challenges that my husband and I have – and if you’ve listened to my podcast long enough, you’ve probably heard me mention it a time or two, and that is when we play volleyball together. Now, we typically play our same-gender volleyball, so he plays men’s beach volleyball, and I play women’s beach volleyball. The net size is different, so it’s really appropriate that we play separately. However, it’s often a recreational, fun thing to play co-ed together at times.
When it is just casual, we play fairly well together and sometimes we really click and we have a blast. However, when we play more competitive teams, the intensity increases and our challenges emerge. There was a time – I would say last year – that we were invited to play, and it was a more competitive team, and we knew going into it that it would challenge us… And my husband was saying what he was gonna do to help, and I was saying what I was gonna do to help, so that we could have a better experience. Ideally, as teammates, we wanna support each other, we wanna encourage each other and we wanna be positive with one another. However, when things start to go in a downward spiral, it’s like somebody makes a mistake, and if my husband were to make a mistake, he would appear to be frustrated, and I would think “Did I not set him well enough? Is he upset with me?” and then I would start to play more hesitantly, and then I don’t play as well, and then he’s frustrated because he expects more from me… And it just starts to really, like I said, go downhill.
On this particular occasion, I don’t even remember [unintelligible 00:24:16.26] but I remember at one point I was fighting off the tears. I was not having fun, and I was almost ready to call it quits. I think my husband had said something kind of snarky, and I took it personally, and then I said something… Anyway, it just was compounding. And it was a rift between us; even that in and of itself, he would wanna leave it on the court, ideally. Well, we definitely took it home, and he was upset with me, and I think on some level he’s thinking “Oh, I want him to be different” and he’s wanting to feel like he can play full out, and be expressed… Nonetheless, I was upset with him too, and my initial run with this – I did this with my journal; luckily, I didn’t spout this off to him… But I was like “Oh, you have such a bad mood, and you’re negative…”, and I had all these thoughts about him and how it wasn’t okay. And then I really was doing my practice around “Okay, that’s a lot of blame, that’s a lot of shame, and that’s talking all about him. That’s not saying anything about what’s going on for me.”
As I really tried to unpack this and really get to “Okay, what is it that I’m feeling?”, I realized when I play with him, I sometimes will get scared. If I see that he’s having a hard time, I’m afraid he’s upset with me. I get scared, I get worried, I get nervous, and I start to not play well. And that’s all me. I react, I have a hard time, and so I wanted to acknowledge that. So by me coming to him and saying “I get scared, I get worried, I feel nervous, I feel really responsible”, whatever it is, and then I can talk about where that comes from, and the vulnerability, and perhaps the pain around that – that’s a whole different conversation than “You’re this, you did this, and you said this”, and you know, to really grill him.
So I feel like that’s a really important distinction in the way of communication, that when we can increase our mindfulness, we can have a better understanding around what’s going on underneath – our emotional pain, our emotional need.
Now, I can also say that when I play volleyball, I play best when I play with a level of encouragement, and almost this cheering on. Not every player likes that verbal expression. You can even see it in the professional – some players are much more quiet and non-verbal, where other players are clapping, and they’re cheering each other on, and they’re saying “Let’s go!” They’re saying all these things, and that’s definitely more my style. So I think my husband and I have definitely different styles, and we’re still learning how to support each other… But that’s an emotional need that I have perhaps on the court.
Now, I know I’m talking sports, but this is, again, a little bit of a microcosm of how our dynamic sometimes shows up, and it is a little bit of a pressure cooker. I’m sharing this as an example of how easy it is that we can go to blame, reacting, criticizing, shut-down. But if we can get at what’s going on underneath, that allows us to have a much more constructive conversation.
The sixth way that mindfulness benefits us is as we practice mindfulness, we basically change the insula, the part of our brain that’s associated with empathy and compassion. As we develop more mindfulness, we increase our ability to understand our partner’s perspective, therefore allowing us to understand our emotion, feel more empathy and compassion, and with that, the desire to help and support.
This is a major turning point in any of the difficult interactions where we go from feeling misunderstood, hurt, slighted, polarized and really disconnected, to being able to understand one another. Even despite the differences, if we can understand and begin to have compassion and empathy, that’s gonna cultivate more connection and a desire to help and support and get on the same team, and essentially have each other’s back.
Several months ago I had an experience with a couple that I work with, and I felt like it was such a profound shift. They approached the session with a conflict which related to their younger daughter; they have five children, and this is their youngest, and they were describing a difference of an opinion around how to parent, and it was pretty charged.
The mother was much more concerned about safety, and really thinking that the daughter should not be unsupervised as she walked from one location, with her friend, to the next location. It was a pretty short distance.
The father was really a proponent for allowing her to learn some skill and some independence and some freedom. And again, as I mentioned, they were pretty at odds and pretty polarized in their perspective… And I asked them to share more, what the safety and the structure provided for the mom, and what the freedom and independence provided for the dad, in their parenting style. Both of them went – and willingly; I appreciate their willingness to do the work here – and were able to connect with a very deep emotional place in their childhood, where the father had felt a level of control that he didn’t even get to feel a growth in him that he could feel his own decisions, and he could make his own decisions and learn from those decisions. It always felt like he was stuck between a rock and a hard place, and it was extremely painful. He talked about that pain, that lack of trust, that feeling of doubt and uncertainty, that lack of confidence that he felt in that hyper-controlled environment.
Whereas conversely, mom described a very lenient and open family up-bringing – little control, little structure, and she said often times she was in situations that felt unsafe. She wanted more care, she wanted more guidance and limits in parenting, and she connected with a deep level of pain around that.
As they listen to one another’s hurt and pain in their family of origin, as you can imagine, with that vulnerability they were able to have a greater level of compassion for one another’s perspective, and really the desire to wanna support each other… And in my vantage point, that they can have both structure at a level of ability to gain some independence.
There might be many ways, many solutions to arrive at a place where they can have a win/win, but that’s not gonna come from battling, criticizing, power struggling; it comes from a place of understanding, empathy, so that people wanna help each other. There, the opportunity and the possibility for creative solutions becomes way more relevant and accessible.
With continual practice, if we can give our partner the benefit of the doubt, have more experiences where we on face value feel incredibly disconnected, polarized in our experience and we approach the conversation with this level of curiosity, slowing down, really trying to hear the deeper layers, cultivate this empathy and understanding, and come to more of a creative solution, we begin to build a roadmap that we can have practice with, we can repeat this, iterate it. The more practice we have, the more security we built, that our partner does care, does have our back, is interested, and we start to build a climate that’s safe even in the midst of great differences.
So again, we approach our partner with this benefit of the doubt, belief that they have our interest, our desire at hand, even if it appears that we’re on opposite ends of the spectrum, that there’s this good will, and that we know how to engage one another in a productive, positive way.
The seventh way that mindfulness benefits us and our relationship is it allows us to be in a place of acceptance. In the series that I did about pain, I talked about how life presents challenges that’s gonna involve some level of pain. We can worry about it, try to avoid it, push it away, make it be different, and all of those attempts often create more suffering. What’s really interesting in my field of work when couples approach me, if they’ve been in a level of pain for a number of years, it’s often their attempts at dealing with the pain that are more problematic. It’s their fighting, it’s the affair, it’s the shut-down, it’s the checking out, it’s all the ways that we attempt to deal with the pain indirectly that cause way more suffering.
In this regard, mindfulness increases our ability to be present with what is. Now, this is much easier said than done. When my husband’s hurting, it hurts. I wanna help. I wanna lift him up. And at the same time, sometimes he needs to be sad, he needs to hurt, and for me to just be in a place of acceptance, and even empathy. Yes, I can have the desire to help, but again, not to try to make the pain go away.
This becomes even more difficult when perhaps your partner is mad at you. That can feel alarming and threatening, and a lot of the times, myself included, will want to explain, convince, describe, protest, avoid… All these ways of diverting and deflecting the pain. It’s hard to meet the pain. But as I described in that pain series, that if we can meet the pain, we’re much more likely to work through it. And again, if we don’t, we are likely to create more suffering.
Recently, I’ve been working with a couple… I’ve worked with them for a period of time, just periodically, when they need a little tune-up and a little bit of support, and we really worked with an issue that had been deep and long-standing, that had really originated from their early years of dating. It was a situation that was really shameful and tender, and it related to a very intimate moment that they had had, and something was said about body… It just was really difficult and painful. And as we were addressing it, the partner that was hurt was describing this really crippling, gripping pain that was very charged and raw… That every time she thought of the instance or anything that reminded her of it, she just felt just in shock, and still almost triggered by it, and really at a loss around how to build any repair.
Her husband – his initial feeling was like “Oh my gosh, we’ve talked about this so much; I don’t know how to make it better, I don’t know how to help.” His pattern is to feel like “Oh man, I’m in the doghouse. I don’t know how to get this right”, and he would perhaps get a little defensive, or try to spin… And they would just get nowhere.
So as I invited them to really unpack what was going on in that moment for them each individually, and really connect with their emotional experience, and what that meant for them, as they were listening to each other, really what I like to do is once we unpack it, I wanna encourage that partners turn to one another and share their vulnerability.
Basically, fast-forward, their ability to turn to one another, share their pain, their vulnerability, and really mostly in this case it was for the wife and for her to share her pain, and as she was able to do it more vulnerably, her husband was able to hear her… And yes, it hurt. He does not wanna feel his wife in pain, and definitely he doesn’t wanna feel that it’s as a result of something he did. At the same time, he was able to regulate enough to hold ground, attune to her, empathize, and then be able to help, comfort, share apology, offer reassurance in a real genuine, connected way.
When I met with them next, she described the pain having been dissolved, and that she felt just this lifting, and that it had no real grip on her anymore. The charge had been dissolved and resolved, and it really helped them lay out and unpack the moves that they made that helped cultivate that experience.
It was really a beautiful moment for them to feel that connection together, and also to feel like they have a template that they can basically replicate, of things that allowed them to be vulnerable, that allowed them to hold the ground, to accept that “Okay, there’s pain here. How do we meet this? How do we be attuned? How do we empathize?” I would wish this for you, I’d wish this for all of us, that in the areas that we still hold pain, that we can begin to have some of these conversations, to alleviate that stress, that pain, that disconnect… Ultimately, to build these bridges, to find each other, to feel this place of connection that allows us to feel the intimacy, the bond, that strength, and I think largely increases our relationship satisfaction and happiness.
There are great benefits to practicing mindfulness, and to recap the seven ways that I offered you… Number one is we are more attentive and present. Number two, we’re much more informed and able to respond intelligently, skillfully, rather than reacting. Number three, we’re much more able to be emotionally regulated, and have our wits about ourselves, have a clear mind, clear heart. Number four, we’re more self-aware. Number five, we are much more clear in our communication. When I mean clear, that we’re talking about what’s really going on.
Number six, we increase our ability for empathy, and to have conversations that are empathetic. Number seven, mindfulness helps us be able to be in a place of acceptance, even when things are painful or difficult, that we can meet them more directly, rather than doing all of the things we do that sometimes create more suffering on top of the pain.
As I mentioned earlier in the show, if you would like some support in developing exercises around mindfulness practices, I wanna encourage you to check out the show notes for today’s episode, that can be found on my website. Again, my website is DrJessicaHiggins.com. Click on Podcast, and you can find the most recent episodes there at the top.
Now, once you’ve clicked on the episode – today’s episode is 144 – scroll down towards the bottom and you’ll see Mentioned. There will be several links that will give you access to other articles that lay out exercises that you may want to experiment with or explore. And again, the whole idea of practicing mindfulness is to increase your ability to be present, training your mind to be in the here and now in a non-judgmental way.
Again, I’ll quote Lode Dewulf: “Mindfulness is a mental state which is achieved by focusing one’s awareness on the present moment, while very calmly acknowledging and accepting one’s feelings, thoughts and bodily sensations.”
Thank you so much for your interest in improving your relationship. It is important to learn how to increase relationship satisfaction with mindfulness to improve your connection.
Thank you for listening to today’s episode. If you have any questions or wanna reach out to me for any additional support, please feel free to contact me. Again, my contact information is on my website, on the Contact page. The website is DrJessicaHiggins.com
Until next time, I hope you take great care.
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