Isn’t it great when we see something that reminds us of being young again? Just the other night I was watching the Apple TV golf-inspired dramedy, “Stick”. There is a scene in which the young teenage phenom, “Santi” has his first sexual experience with his love interest, “Zero”. Both were virgins, and as they prepared to take things “deeper” after the first kiss, she says to him, “I don’t trust many people, but I trust you.”
This line brought me to a place of deep nostalgia for some of my first romantic experiences. I remember thinking: “I’m about to do this IMPORTANT thing with someone, and it’s going to tie us together—maybe in a way I’ve never felt before.”
Imagine being that young person, about to do this exciting, important—even scary, thing. It’s like, “Hey—I’m going to place my trust in you, so I hope you got me.” Not just sex—but all the things that come with it. I think of it as a kind of a contract, “we won’t just have sex, but companionship.”
A whole new world appears to be on the horizon.
We move from family (a mixed bag: sometimes we are understood, sometimes not), to a sense that this new person will GET me.
As adults, maybe we chuckle at these innocent star-struck lovers. Teens think they will be the perfect mirrors for each other, forgetting how it’s a stretch to expect to always be there for another human being.
So let’s raise a glass to these young lovers or anyone who believes there’s a safe harbor out there, for our hearts, in spite of everything.
Human beings are wired for connection. We need and even expect it—deep down. But even as kids, we learn some parts of us have to stay hidden. Like the time I got caught stealing a few toys as a kid. I remember pulling the sheets over my head in bed, overcome by shame. I didn’t want to be seen, but I prayed for someone—Santa? God? (who, in my 1980’s kid brain, looked like the cartoon, red bearded king from the Burger King ads)—to join me under the covers, saying everything’s alright.
So let’s flash forward from that starry-eyed teenage vibe, when there is a nervous tangle of shaky energy in the space between you and them, when there seems to be a Berlin Wall inside your brain, blocking you from that easy flow of trust and vulnerability.
For example, imagine me struggling with my wife a few years ago, when we are fighting in the car on a long distance trip, due to my inappropriate driving maneuvers. (Screw that guy in the black Lexus SUV by the way—he started it!) I hear her extreme tone and I only see that she’s “mad” at me. I tell myself, “for her to be this corrosive, she must not care about me at all.” Do I even realize this puts my nervous system on edge? Probably not, because my own anger rushes in to fill the void that fear has left in its wake.
The anger is pulsating through my body (but she is certainly not impressed with it). Anger leads me to action: flash forward a few minutes later in the trip and observe: I have just driven the wedge even farther between us, having just brutally snapped at her. I must have won “Husband of the Year” with that one.
My angry comment only increased the un-ease of course, the exact opposite thing I wanted. For someone like me whose biggest fear is rejection, I’m just thrilled with her icy silence–lasting for hours and hours. When she gets silent after we are mad at each other, I feel like squirming. I can’t stand being near myself.
Why is there a Berlin Wall in between me and a part of my brain that knows how to talk about this stuff? How do I let her in? I don’t dare do that because it would seem likely to fail.
So do most people.
It’s exactly like the story I heard once of a guy searching for a lost key.
Guy’s searching in the night under a street light for the lost key to his house, hands and knees in the dark. His neighbor happens to pass by. “What are you looking for?”
“My lost key.”
Finally the neighbor says, “Where did you lose it? Do you remember the precise spot you dropped it?”
“Dropped it? That was back there.” The man points to a dark alley, near a drainage ditch between the houses.
“Why the heck are we looking here then!?” His neighbor said.
“It’s completely dark over there—we’d never find it! At least here there’s some light!”
We hide our vulnerability–connection’s “key” in a place we never go.
For me—at the precise moment my wife seems the most pissed, it would be futile to hope she could understand this irrational and shaky place inside of me. In fact, it’s not enough to pretend that this place doesn’t exist, to hide it from her. I must slam the bank vault door—one foot thick steel—closed, so I don’t hand her the weapons of my destruction. That’s where the anger comes in.
Anger is my protection here.
So I tell myself to back off, shut down, so I don’t wreak havoc.
I shut up, avoid the anger, avoid the problem, and back off, trying to collect my rattled wits. I do it out of a sense of preserving the relationship.
So to summarize: my wife, with a highway fatality trauma in her past, sits in the passenger seat while I do some testosterone-fueled, Evel Knievel moves without her permission. My reckless driving traps her in the passenger seat. Memories of a family highway fatality flood her mind. She feels powerless, unsafe, panicked—not just in this car, but in our relationship. If she speaks to protect herself, her words will emerge harsh, risking a relationship fatality. She blames herself for this rage she cannot express. Silence becomes the one thing she can hold on to. For two hours, this quiet persists, and finally she picks up her headphones.
I can’t see any of this—I see her picking up her headphones as punishment (an escalation of the drama), and I snap, saying something so very unkind that Emperor Palpatine himself would have likely cribbed it to help turn Luke to the dark side.
I see her silence as a rejection, one of my worst nightmares… that I’m somehow going to be all alone with no way back in. This mirrors a time when I was six or seven. Beliefs learned at early ages become part of our neural wiring. Take me, for instance, being programmed to believe in the certainty of my isolation.
Just for background, these beliefs can start as something so simple. I was a kiddo with an overactive imagination, and I conceived of some pretty horrific scenes of my parents leaving and not returning due to car crashes. I’d scream out to a nanny who couldn’t understand and immediately tell myself things like, “I’m too much,” and “I’m a bad kid,” and the shame-filled kicker, “if people could see what’s inside of me, they wouldn’t like it.”
That squirmy feeling is exactly how I feel all these years later, in the car with my wife, and I’ve already learned I can’t show it. I call this the Berlin Wall inside the brain.
That wall traps us where my anger chases her silence. In my clinical model, Emotionally Focused Therapy, we call this the pursuit-withdrawal loop.
Every couple experiences a version of this.
Take my client Ellen, whose dad left her as a kid, feeling not wanted. Her husband’s late arrival sparks her hurt tone, signaling he did something wrong, leading to fights, silence, separate rooms. Take my client Jeffrey, hearing his wife’s resigned “I do everything,” telling himself he will always fail her. He hides at work, like his misunderstood kid self. My story too: I snap at my wife, hiding my pain. The situation worsens because sharing pain feels impossible, likely to escalate. Safety slips—childhood pain wires us to hide.
Therapy helps us map this cycle. There’s a trigger (A) and an angry or avoidant response (C).
In all cases there’s a deeper meaning, tied to pain (B).
The situation gets worse because no one is thinking it’s possible to share their pain. Our job in therapy is to map this out. We’ll talk about keys to doing that in a future article.
Have you ever hid your shaky core, like I did under those sheets, fearing it’s futile?
