View this post on Instagram

Every once in a while, a powerful anger and frustration toward my husband rises in me.

In those moments, it’s hard to believe that just a few days prior my feelings were those of peaceful contentment.

These changes in mood do not surprise nor bother me.

Rather than trying to shame them away, I become curious:

What is happening to my system that is reducing my capacity to deal with my life, bringing me to overwhelm?

More often than not, my irritation is not in response to something my husband did or did not do. He was not doing anything differently than the week before, when I felt at peace and in love.

I notice that when I am irritated, my mind attaches itself to an old and familiar story: I experience some lack, and the familiar narrative is about not enough-ness.

That feeling is incredibly old and even more uncomfortable.

The automatic way to deal with it (or escape it) is to focus on how my husband is the reason for my feeling. In that moment, it seems that the only thing that can make me feel better is if he changes in the way I want.

This time, I was harboring feeling alone and unsupported.

Intellectually, I know that I am not alone and that I have plenty of evidence to prove I am supported by people and the universe. Somatically, however, I just could not come to peace.

When my nervous system is dysregulated—and irritation is a sign that the nervous system is stuck in fight—my body deals with survival issues.

This is a sign that I need to focus my attention on my own feelings, validating my experience, while also bringing my system back to homeostasis, so that I can think clearly.

What we usually do is automatically focus on what our partners (or parents, or friends, or neighbors) are doing wrong, holding them responsible for the way we feel. This only puts fuel to the fire of our already dysregulated system, and makes it even harder to come out of the overwhelm.

For me, that feeling of being alone in the world, carrying the burden of responsibility for everything, is so old, so familiar, so part of the identity I’ve been fused with for most of my life that when I’m in it I can forget that it is no longer true.

I also forget that this feeling is much older than my relationship with my husband.

I have a memory of traveling on a night train with my father. I was young, younger than seven years old. It was nighttime and my father was sleeping, while I could not sleep all night. I was worried that while he was asleep we risked missing our stop. I kept on waking my father up to check that we were okay. He’d reassure me and go back to sleep, but I could not find safety in my body or in my mind to relax enough to sleep.

Many years later, my husband and I traveled with our young daughters through Russia and took night trains on several occasions. I was amazed at how peacefully my daughters were sleeping through the night, safe in their knowing that the adults were taking care of everything so that they could be children.

I still wonder sometimes why even with my father by my side, I did not feel sufficiently safe and trusting to relax. I also use this incident as proof that my inner state is not about people in my life, but my own psycho-somatic state.

I realize that I was a highly sensitive and anxious child, continuously expecting “something bad” to happen.

Of course, certain circumstances during my childhood felt like evidence for my anxiety. But I know now that the anxiety was there before life gave me reasons for hyper-vigilance.

My anxiety is inherited.

My anxious being viewed everything from the lens of fear and found lots of reinforcement for my anxious thoughts throughout my life.

These days, when I find myself feeling alone and unsupported, I know that this is not my current reality.

This is my default setting.

It took me many years of working to disrupt the connection between my thoughts and the sensations of threat in my body. Working somatically with my body and nervous system, I began accessing a more peaceful state of being.

The addiction to stress is a chemical dependency. This was my baseline. I only recently understood that I spent most of my life in chronic stress, which was my normal.

As a result, my anxious and stressed-out inner child was often running my relationships.

This tendency toward stress and worry may never completely leave my system.

Wishing it away is not helpful. The only sustainable way forward is to learn to live with it, so that it does not run my life.

One morning last week, as I was sitting in the final poses of my yoga practice, breathing deeply, my body in its happy place, I was able to see my husband as my “we.”

I remembered a small but sweet gesture he’d made just that morning that I’d discarded as insignificant when I was closed off. Now I was able to see his “contribution” to my life, allowed the sweetness of recognition to fill me. Immediately, my tension melted, and the released energy moved through me as tears.

These moments of heart opening—that I so frequently observe in my work with clients—are the precious reminders that when we are calm and regulated, we have increased capacity to access a higher perspective, higher-order thinking, which includes thinking as a “we”.

My husband and I have gone through so much together over these last 34 years. A whole life worth of stuff.

And yet I still find myself on occasion in these states of feeling like he did not do enough for me. Or that I chose the wrong person for me.

Such narratives are just leftover debris from the past, not the real reason for my emotional experience.

Such moments are about me slipping into my default setting: a worried inner child is now driving the bus.

Blaming myself for not doing or being enough is familiar.

Blaming my husband for not doing or being enough is also familiar.

These are old models of behavior I inherited together with my anxiety and worry. They do not serve me in my current life.

In these moments, it helps to remember to not escape the discomfort by blaming the other, but to attend to that scared or worried inner child.

Show up for her, be with her, validating her feelings and reassuring her that I will never abandon her. That she is never alone or unsupported, because I am here. When I instead focus my attention on blaming others, I abandon the needs of my inner child, actualizing its greatest fear.

Our feelings are not scary when we know how to be with them.

Our feelings are breadcrumbs that guide us back home to ourselves.

The more we can create a safe home within, the more we can release our partners from that impossible task.

When we enter our relationships as a wounded inner child, we’ll appeal to the wounded inner child in our partner. When we show up as adult, we shift the whole relating dynamic.

~

For more paradigm-disrupting insights about relationships, join my mailing list here.

Learn how to discern when your inner child drives your adult relationships so you can take your power back. Book your free introductory conversation.

~