Marriage Unmasked: Removing the Costume and Changing the Narrative

In a typical conversation with a couple the other day, the wife turned to me after her husband responded in a nurturing way and explained, “OK, here’s where I’m struggling: Imagine for years and years and years you are living with this big, angry Tyrannosaurus Rex, and you are constantly battling this creature and never feeling safe, because it is always coming at you with aggression, and as nice as you are, you always have this T-Rex coming at you, no matter what you do, and suddenly the T-Rex calms down and acts differently and seems safe, but you can only see this dangerous T-Rex and it doesn’t make sense that this angry dinosaur that is predisposed to aggression is something different, even if it’s behaving differently. How do you trust that when it still looks like a T-Rex to you? What am I supposed to do with that?”

She was alluding to the many years she spent with a husband who had learned to detach from emotion. He didn’t acknowledge his own vulnerable emotions and reacted to hers with irritation and annoyance. Like many men, he learned that emotions were “for women,” and not to be trusted. He had no interest in acknowledging that he even had vulnerable emotion. As a result, she gave up expecting him to be emotionally responsive.

Unfortunately, that’s when he realized that if he was going to preserve his relationship, he might need to face some childhood trauma and learn coping skills for the emotion that seeped out in reactive ways. For the first time ever, he gained understanding for how he avoided emotion and shamed the people around him for expressing any kind of  emotional need. He increased compassion and had serious regrets about his past actions.

My immediate response was, “Well, I would say your confusion and caution are very normal and to be honest, functional. It would not make sense for you to immediately get close to something that has caused you pain repeatedly. You would have to start having different, predictable experiences with the T-Rex to believe that the changes were durable before you could trust it, but please indulge me briefly in an alternative explanation:

“What if the Tyrannosaurus Rex was actually a costume with a zipper, and you unzipped it, revealing a gentle but flawed person who learned that to survive, he needed to wear the costume to keep people at a distance because they weren’t safe. He finally learned new ways of understanding and managing his uncomfortable emotions for the first time without the costume so he doesn’t need to wear it anymore, or at least as often. You realize the T-Rex wasn’t a T-Rex after all, but a scared person with the need for protective garb because he didn’t know how to survive without it until now. What if this is the real person and not the T-Rex?”

“Huh,” she responded, pondering the idea. “So you’re saying that maybe this is really who he has been all along but couldn’t show it and I’m just experiencing the real person for the first time?”

“I’m saying that it’s entirely possible that he has not felt safe enough to approach the world without the costume, but that now with different awareness and skills, he is finally showing his real self because he knows how and is willing to take the risk.”

“Oh. That changes it,” she replied.

Indeed it does.

We all wear masks. We learn early in life that if we don’t edit ourselves, or conform to expected standards, we will be hurt. We protect ourselves with personas to control how we are perceived to gain acceptance with social groups. Most of us have several personas at hand with which to cloak ourselves, depending on the various situations we face.

Most people yearn for connection, and maintain close connections where they feel acceptance. Ideally, we want to be accepted for who we are, unmasked. However, when we get hurt, we quickly shield ourselves from future pain by keeping people at a distance. That distance takes the form of figurative masks. For many of us, donning the mask is so automatic that it’s hard to know where the mask ends and the true self begins. Many people don’t know how to operate without them, or even realize that there’s a difference.

I believe people are fundamentally compassionate, but that trait is compromised when they have been wounded. We get so many messages to meet societal expectations that we don’t even trust bringing our true selves forward. It takes work to gain awareness of this and learn how to be different.

I’m hoping on this strange, fantastic holiday of Halloween with origins in Samhain, where costumes were used to ward off ghosts, that we might consider what “ghosts,” we are protecting ourselves from and consider the impact on our personal relationships. The “ghosts” of romantic relationships gone awry. The “ghosts” of ridicule. The “ghosts” of failure. The “ghosts” of rejection. We all have them.

Speaking of Halloween, removing our masks is one of the scariest things we can do. One of the most compelling “treats” we have to offer is our own compassion to other “masked,” frightened vulnerable humans who can only “unmask” when they have reassurance that they will be acceptable to us unmasked, warts and all. Happy Halloween.

 

 

Emotional Attunement and the Final Frontier

I’ve written before about the “Nail in the Forehead,” video. I acknowledge that it is a humorous depiction of the way genders stereotypically interact around emotional distress, but the clip is reductive and overly simplistic, and misses a crucial element in real couple interactions. That element is emotional attunement.

In the clip, the male partner is uncomfortable when his female partner expresses emotional distress—his own distress about her emotion is what drives him to want to make her emotion go away so he can feel comfortable again. He is having unacknowledged emotional reactivity to her emotion (Hopelessness? Fear? Anxiety?) and makes an anemic show of support toward her. However, the male seems more placating than attuned. In other words, he mumbles an inane statement using words that sound validating, but with non-verbal gestures that can be construed as invalidating. What he is really saying is, “You’re ridiculous, but maybe this will shut you up.”

Genuine emotional attunement is a desire and effort to experience another person’s inner world. It’s not using words to make them go away—it’s an attempt to understand someone’s experience enough to elicit authentic empathy.

Men are often socialized to disown any vulnerable emotion, such as fear, insecurity, hurt or sadness. They learn to disconnect quickly from these emotions, which can be channeled into anger, sexuality, or numbness. In part, this is why it can feel unnatural to walk into a partner’s emotional experience. If you have learned not to feel your own emotions, why in the world would you want to feel anyone else’s?

I was amazed at how well genuine attunement worked in my own marriage a few months ago. My husband can be very stereotypically male in his response to emotional expression. I learned early to lower my expectations for his emotional response, but as he has listened to my presentations about marriage over the years, he has learned the difference between placating responses and attunement, and he surprises me with his sincere support when I least expect it.

A few months ago, I took my youngest son and daughter to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida while my husband was attending a conference. I knew my youngest son in particular would enjoy the visit, and I was excited to experience it with him. However, I had not anticipated that visiting the complex would trigger me into a state of melancholy that persisted throughout the day.

I grew up in a city with a historical link to space exploration. Rockwell International  contracted with NASA to manufacture spacecraft for the Apollo missions and subsequent explorations, including the reusable shuttles. The site is now home to the Columbia Memorial Space Center.

Visiting a NASA site elicited a flood of memories related to working for my father. He owned a chemical manufacturing corporation which provided key materials used in the aerospace, defense and aircraft manufacturing industries. The summer after I turned 14, he insisted that I work at his company full-time during the summer instead of going to the beach with my friends. He was convinced that he was teaching me the value of work and saving me from being homeless and alone.

As I wandered around NASA, I recognized most of the company names from working with my father. I recalled organizing files several inches thick with invoices for Boeing, Honeywell, Lockheed Martin, Northrop, the U.S. government, and my city’s own Rockwell. My focused exposure to the recollection of the aerospace glory days flooded me with a feeling of loss and longing for my father. Throughout the day, I found myself getting choked up and teary as a reaction to various memories emerging in my head. Mostly, I recalled our rides to work together, where he would give me pep talks and tell me I had an “excellent mind,” and that I should smile more because, “You are so beautiful when you smile.” Even though I would discount his attempts with, “You have to say that–you’re my father,” I always appreciated his efforts to build my confidence. He was my biggest cheerleader and I missed him terribly. He and my mother were two of the few people I could really count on to care about me, and nothing was quite the same after they both died. I longed for their presence again.

When I got back to our hotel and my husband asked me about my day, I candidly replied, “I felt so sad all day.” I explained how the visit had triggered memories of working with my father, which highlighted his loss in my life.

My husband didn’t try to tell me why I shouldn’t feel sad, or why I should just be glad I had good memories. His reply was genuine and attuned. He responded with, “It’s ok to be sad, honey. I can see why that would make you sad. I miss your dad too. You can be sad.”

Suddenly, his telling me he understood why I would be sad and that I could be sad alleviated my sadness. In essence, he communicated that even though I experienced a deep loss, I wasn’t alone, and he was with me.

His words couldn’t have been more simple, and yet, it wasn’t really about the words. It was his authentic validation. He confirmed that sometimes in life, pain happens, and nothing can fix it, and that it was really ok if I felt less than chipper in the moment, even if it could potentially impact him. He normalized my feelings and signaled that he wouldn’t leave me alone, even in times of distress.

It’s not rocket science.

 

Photo credit: https://www.123rf.com/profile_21kompot