How do you know if your marriage or relationship is off-course?
When you can’t identify your own need for connection, or don’t know how to meet your partner’s, your reaction tends to fall into one of two categories:
1. Turning away from your partner or spouse, as you attempt to turn off your need for connection
2. Criticizing or becoming overly demanding toward your partner or spouse, as you try to regain a connection with them
Most likely, when emotional connection drops off, conversations drift toward practical complaints. Garbage not taken out. Dishwasher not loaded. Finances, sex, parenting, all of it becomes terrain for fighting.
What gets lost in those conversations: the emotions driving them, and the needs underneath those emotions.
How This Plays Out in Relationships
When an emotionally intense moment hits, the level of emotion can itself become the problem.
Both partners get flooded. Behaviors escalate. The deeper fear, the real need, gets buried under the reaction.
An emotion is always present, even when you don’t feel it. When you’re unaware, you’re likely cut off from it rather than free of it.
Numbing out is still an emotional state. So is shutting down mid-conversation.
If you get angry because your partner isn’t responding to you, escalating that anger makes them less likely to give you what you actually need.
Escalation signals threat. It shuts down the very responsiveness you’re looking for.
Share Your Experience in Your Marriage or Love Relationship
Do you relate to one of the two negative patterns in your own marriage or love relationship? Do you see your partner or spouse in one of the patterns as well? Share your experience with us, and help other couples learn from your own lessons.
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Travis Atkinson, LCSW, specializes in evidence-based couples therapy including the Gottman Method, EFT, and Schema Therapy, for couples in NYC and online. Take the first step today.
