Grief & Marriage: Part 3
Once a marriage survives, grief, how do you thrive?
First, let go of the idea of happily ever after. Nothing organic is linear. It’s all cyclic. Today’s blog is about enjoying and enhancing bounty when it comes. This isn’t permanent. There will inevitably be periods of dissonance and loneliness again, but so, too, you will inevitably return to each other over and over with each cycle as long as you’re in it together. Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall — there is no next Spring without another Winter. I’m not here to break the cycle. I’m here to ride the waves.
In my own marriage, my survival strategy was to sacrifice verbal communication for the sake of felt-sense of togetherness. It worked, and it was a huge gift to my marriage and my own nervous system for a while. However, silence isn’t the end-game of a healthy relationship. I deserve to be heard in my marriage. My husband and I need to be able to have hard conversations without falling apart or feeling threatened. I will say that I think our current way of working in Western Culture (and, unfortunately the modus operendi of MANY couples counselors) is to over-talk and over-analyze and get bogged down in the same intractable disagreements ad infinitum — and that isn’t healthy or productive. But it also isn’t healthy and productive to indefinitely ignore friction.
What I’ve described so far is trial-and-error discovery of the first chapter of VITA couple’s coaching:
Take radical responsibility for my side of the relationship and relinquishing efforts to control my husband. I can only ever impact my marriage relationship from MY OWN side. I can’t (and shouldn’t) try to drive my husband’s side, not only because it’s disrespectful, but also because it doesn’t work.
Prioritize nervous-system co-regulation before trying to talk about anything.
What is nervous-system co-regulation? It’s training your body to relax around your partner’s body. It’s training yourself out of the reflexive habit to brace and protect around your partner and training both of you into a reflex of relaxing into a felt-sense of safety when you are together.
We all have our stress responses (aka trauma responses) and often these habitual nervous-system ticks are how we show up in our marriage. You may be familiar with the 4 Fs:
Fight: You just want to argue, want to be heard, as your partner moves away from you, you pursue. Fighters often shout or yell or bellow. If you’ve ever thrown something when angry, you were in fight. If you’ve ever wanted to hit someone or something, that’s fight. The extreme of this is physical abuse, which deserves more support than I’m offering in this particular blog post.
Flee: You just want to GET THE HECK OUT OF THERE when conflict arises. You may start walking away from your partner. Close the door. You may literally run out of the house. Or it may be more subtle. All of a sudden you’re avoiding home, overworking, finding excuses not to be around.
Freeze: You just plain shut down. This is going to look like stonewalling. Maybe it is and maybe it isn’t, but there’s an inability to answer or move. The body feels numb. There may be a lot of tension in the body and associated health problems. It can take a long time to come out of this level of shut down.
Fawn: The trickiest one to spot: you don’t fight, because your stress response is to people-please. You sacrifice your own needs to smooth things over. There’s often a large back-log of resentment if you’re a habitual fawner, and it can boil beneath the surface even as you continue to steamroll your needs for your partner.
Stress response is excellent at saving you from impending doom, but it can really sabotage a marriage. Before you can begin to communicate verbally, your body has to feel safe on the most basic level. So how to do it? In my case, reach out for touch. But there are other ways too. Eye gazing, couples breath work, and massaging each other can all help.
When you learn how to soothe your bodies together, space opens up to begin to speak again.
Remember how I encouraged you, in the last blog, to let time be spacious? Well this nervous system coregulation is so important that it’s ok to let it take years. In my marriage, I felt ready to move on to verbal communication 8 years out from loss. We may be extreme this way, but 8 years is how long it took my husband to speak our baby’s name after we lost her, and that’s how long it took me to feel ready to risk rocking the boat again and to feel ready and worthy enough to move into communication. Lucky for me, 8 years out is when I started my training to be a love, sex, and relationship coach, which armed me with a great many tools to learn how to talk together from the ground up.
3. Learn how to listen. You want to talk about the deep stuff? Great. First you have to shut up and listen.
Usually, when we’re in conversation, we’re not truly listening. We’re reacting all of the time. When listening, it isn’t about you AT ALL. Even if it is about you, it still isn’t about you, because you’re there to witness your partner and to really take in what is said. This isn’t a time to take offense. It isn’t a time to refute or fight back, and it certainly isn’t a time to store away ammunition for later. When it’s your turn to listen, all you do is listen. Though I also teach sharing and vulnerability, the listening has to be in place first, and usually the sharing piece follows naturally when listening skills are established.
4. Learn each other’s parts.
Parts work is a vital part of all my coaching, but in couples work, it isn’t just about you learning YOUR parts, you’re also being held in love and belonging as you work. Your partner learns your parts, and you learn your partner’s parts, too. This creates a feedback loop of safety in the relationship and gives you tools to meet each other when activated in different ways and to understand each other on a deeper level. SO important to be the best listener you can be as your partner unfolds some of the more vulnerable places, and so important to know how to re-regulate if things get uncomfortable again.
The last step in the VITA couple’s work is:
5. Build physical intimacy.
Intimacy was, for me, a go-to survival strategy in very early grief, but for many, MANY couples, intimacy dries up completely in times of grief, postpartum, medical trauma, and fertility experience (which all converge on babyloss). Touch is often the very last piece of the puzzle to integrate after loss. It can feel scary and overwhelming to put your toes back into sexual waters after a long dry spell. Your physical bodies are different now than the last time sex felt free and easy. Everything feels unfamiliar. The weight of expectation may shut you down There can be a lot of emotional weight around touch. Self-judgment can feel overwhelming. If this is you, do not despair. You aren’t broken. You’ve just got some feelings blocking your sexuality to keep you safe, and feelings are one thing we can absolutely find our way through. It can help profoundly to be guided with very specific direction to get you out of your head and into your body. This is where the T in VITA comes from: Vital and Integrated Tantric Approach. While tantra encompasses many different meditation techniques, most of which are not sexual, some of them are, and they are extremely powerful practice.
It is the very edgiest edge of the coaching I do: to guide couples in physical practice (picture a guided audio meditation, only sexy). There is plenty to be gained through VITA coaching even if you never delve into the sexuality practices (many of my clients don’t go here). It doesn’t feel dirty or edgy or weird in practice. In fact, it feels like the opposite of pornography. It feel sacred. This is a re-education and re-unification with the sexual body like nothing you’ve likely experienced. And it is magic. “That was the most pleasure I’ve felt in my marriage — EVER.” Is the way one client put it.
Of course, this isn’t JUST for grieving couples. It’s for ANY couple who wants to take their relationship from surviving to thriving.
Nobody NEEDS a coach to do this work. I did about half of it all by myself, and the other half I learned from Layla Martin and her teachers at coaching school. But it really can be special to say: “hey, I don’t want to do this alone.”
If you need me, you know where to find me. Book an inquiry call HERE or call +1 857-259-4041 today if you’d like to stretch your capacity to thrive in your marriage — or on your own. I’d love to hold you in this work.
YES, the couples work is powerful and amazing, but you can also lead a relationship from your side if your partner isn’t on board. So if you don’t get the buy-in you want, do not despair. It’s beautiful to step up and claim the status of visionary-leader-of-your-relationship. Here for you always, solo or with your partner.