Pausing in discomfort of the unknown

Freedom from the known is allowing ourselves to sit with a certain level of discomfort for just a few seconds longer than we are used to. 

At that pivotal moment between what has happened & our minds interjecting and interpreting something that we decide is truth, lies an automatic learnt response. It is our protection against feeling something uncomfortable. This cognitive behavioural therapy work utilising breath-work, mindfulness & meditation allows us to develop cognitive flexibility under emotional activation. 

We start to see that it isn’t necessarily the present reality that causes anxiety; it is the memory of living in the past (that is over), and a future that doesn’t exist - with the story in our minds that keeps repeating. It pulls our brains into the narrative, the story of what we constantly tell ourselves & it keeps our bodies activated in fight or flight. This causes a neural pathway loop of anxiety between mind & body; thought & emotion. This is constant nervous system dysregulation. 

What comes first, the thought or the feeling or the heightened heart rate or tightening in the stomach? 

Unhappy relationships are partly because we are in constant state of fight or flight trying to protect ourselves from being triggered into something the mirror is showing us. We don't like sitting in the discomfort of emotions we have worked hard to suppress for so long as that has protected us from pain. Because that pattern is so entrenched, once we activate that in one other, we fight with everything we have to protect it more & we start to believe the person or the relationship is the problem. That thing that you argue about be it schedules, work commitments, parenting, finances etc etc actually isn’t the fundamental problem. 

When we start to break it down, see the activated nervous system below, understand the pattern in the relationship based on our personal attachment styles ie what you fear losing the most, what you value the most, what makes you feel heard and what dropping the fight would mean to your nervous system; that's the moment it transforms.

Relationship work is one of the quickest ways to start to understand the self & realise activation and defence patterns that once protected us are perhaps are no longer working. Couples come in with a ‘relationship issue’ and become aware that the issues might show up in different forms in life but - how we change that thing; is how we choose to see it, how we respond to it showing up and, how we pause & choose to react. That's where our power lies, that we can control. It is how we trigger reactive behaviour based on automatic responses and conditioning, childhood wounding and our history of experience. Sometimes the relationship itself isn't neccessarily in crisis but the pattern we have set-up is what needs to change, and that can only be done once we see our individual roles in contributing to it. That's our responsibility. 

Love is the easy part, breaking down the patterns of defence and automatic responses is the work. If we learn to pause long enough to just take a breath, feel it in the body & questioning the validity of our thoughts, what kind of emotion they bring up when we believe unhelpful negative thoughts ie who would we be without the story - that’s when the work starts working. I don’t 'save' relationships: you do, by showing up, by seeing one another differently and by understanding the pattern as separate from the other. 

Identifying that our thoughts are not who we are, changes everything both in ourselves and in our partnerships. Finding the wound underneath the fight allows us to soften and see one another with a different, more empathetic lens. 

Remember, we can only meet an other at their own level of consciousness.

Come visit me on the couple's couch together or individually in person at the beautiful @Akasha Temple in Hout Bay or online at www.thevirtualcouchcounselling.com