Where your Marriage Began, Where all the Work Begins
Working on your marriage is important. Really important. Why? Because a “supportive relationship is the #1 predictive factor in having most positive outcomes in life” (Foundation for Psychocultural Research/UCLA Center for Culture, Brain, and Development). It is the healthiest thing you can do.
There are two major reasons why being married is so challenging and why so few people end up doing the necessary work their relationship: 1) the work is on self, not your partner, and 2) our emotion-based response patterns to of our partner’s behavior were formed during our childhood, long before we got married.
Software of Feelings Installed in the Space in Between
It feels like the current uncomfortable and disquieting emotions we experience in our marriage are new. It seems like our wife or husband is making us angry, frustrated, and vulnerable. The reality is, the foundation of all these sensations predate our marriage. So much of our current response patterns to everything in our life, especially how we react to our partner, were created by what we saw, felt, and unconsciously absorbed and inherited from our family environment the first 8-10 years of our life. It is like installed software in our midbrain generated during our early years at home, when we lived within the space in between the lives of our parents and relatives.
Friction of Marriage Silently Stirs Old Emotions
Consequently, the normal friction and agitation from the interactions and debates with your partner are simply waking up your old feelings. Our “early emotional experiences knit long lasting patterns into the very fabric of our brains’ neural networks” (Thomas, Lewis, A General Theory of Love). The sensations of vulnerability, caring, loving, anguishing, etc. within the discourse of marriage stretches our emotions, in turn stirring up old, dormant, and forgotten feelings that have been stored within us for decades. In other words, there are imbedded, emotion-response formations resting inside. Maybe your mom browbeat your dad every morning, for instance, while growing up, while you ate your Cheerios before school. Witnessing this behavior when you were 9 years old might not seem material or important to you today. That cereal bowl is long gone. But silently, unconsciously, there were a cascade of subtle feeling experiences forming electromagnetic eddies within your body. Like the weather sculping old mountain cliffs and the incessant winds carving and permanently twisting those trees at the top of the mountain, the events of our childhood shape patterns in our body’s neural systems. “It is the experiences of early childhood that create the foundational organization of neural systems that will be used for a lifetime” (Dr. Bruce Perry). If your dad was overly bossy and domineering, picking away at everyone’s foibles, there is likely now a dynamic yet unconscious imprint and residue that has you more sensitive and defensive about all overbearing behavior. Fast forward, when you crossed the marital threshold you had an “allergy” towards browbeating, a sensitivity and reaction pattern to this behavior resting below the surface. You were not conscious of it, but your partner’s behavior triggers these sleeping patterns and forgotten memories.
Your Marriage Started in Middle School
The fact is, scientifically, your relationship with our spouse actually started when we were 8 years old, since that is where the roots of all our reactions were born. “The child is far from being buried in the man, as Nietzsche says. On the contrary, it rules him absolutely” (J.Campbell, Primitive Mythology). In the moments when our spouse is debating and confronting us, there is a biophysiological reaction in our body’s emotional network, which includes our heart, stomach, and limbic midbrain. Within seconds of the debate beginning, and due to the zeal and electricity of emotions flaring in you, a current of old memories and reaction patterns erupts from that midbrain center. It is a literal wave of memory imbued, electromagnetic radiation pulling data from that organization of neural systems inside, formed in the ‘70’s or whenever we were young. This wall of radiating, sensory information bypasses our brain’s analytical centers because the latent frequency of electrons from the midbrain are too strong. “Truth is no match for emotions” (Yogananda). We then spit our reactions like an 8-year-old, giving voice to our youngest, rawest, and least understood parts of ourselves. Right here is the starting point of the work on our marriage. This is the place to start paying attention to what we release, not what our partner is doing or saying. We cannot control the other. It is about our response, not our partner’s behavior. Eventually, our partner’s actions and feelings can and will be addressed, but it is our feelings and reactions that are ruling the course of your marriage. “Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves” (Carl Jung).
Childhood Animated by Electrons
Turning our emotional attention back to the world of our childhood home, that elemental space in between the lives of our parents, begins the exercise of emotional maturation. This is the work of marriage. This space in between was much more than just a physical location with messy kitchen tables, TV reruns, and old photos on the mantle. This space in between was animated, radiating with the electricity of your parent’s and relative’s thoughts, feelings, and reactions. It is where all the key moments and events that formed our patterns of reactions. Bell’s Theorem confirms this, stating “once connected, objects affect one another forever no matter where they are”. Our connection to our parents, to this space of our origin, impacts us for the rest of our lives. It was the place, the field through which the current of our parents’ and ancestors’ lives coursed through the hallways and were transferred into us. Their loves, longings, joys, and losses became ours too via the silent, simple, and yet explosive, universal presence of electrons.
Leading Player of Universe
This is not psychobabble or scientific bluster. Our homes were an ongoing research laboratory of bonding and colliding electrons. Electrons are “the leading player in the universe and intimately involved with light, matter, the law of nature and our lives” (Relativity, Einstein). Everything, this computer and our bodies, are simply tightly packed electrons spinning at about 1300 miles per second, at different frequencies and patterns. These electrons store a wisdom contained in the sensations from our past which are released in the present, in our marriage, for us to understand. From this understanding comes an emotional intelligence for our future, for our children’s futures. The power of the transference of electrons in the space in between insures that the work we do today, on ourselves in our marriage, will change who our grandkids’ grandkids become. Our emotional maturation will alter generations to come.
Evolution of Our Emotions
Amazing as it sounds, our feelings, memories, thoughts, and beliefs are all electron based as well. They are physical things. They are sensed experiences that created a momentary yet strong interruption of the neuropeptide balance in the cells of our heart, body, and brain. Each new thought-feeling gets stored as a new, specific, and imbedded electron pattern within the body’s neurons. Crazy right! In neurobiological terms, “a memory is a stored pattern of links between nerve cells in the brain” (Molika Ashford, How Are Memories Stored in the Brain?). For example, a feeling and memory are created in the body when an event occurs, mom walking out the door in a huff when we were young. A normal sensation of sadness is then sparked within our young, mammalian heart. Our evolutionary, unconscious need as a mammal is to bond at a young age, for survival and health. This event simply sets off a neural, sensory cue in our ancient, limbic brain. There are need to bond/sadness cells built-in to the ancient mid brain of young humans. With mom walking out the door, there is a now a need/sadness, electromagnetic wave sent up and down the vagus nerve that stimulates the stomach and heart, leaving a lump in the belly and new neural pattern. Watch a puppy when its mom walks away. All mammalian nervous systems interact neuro-chemically the same way, wired to bond and attach. From this moment a new electrical frequency is set in motion. It is normal. It is what happens in childhood. This new frequency set now has an original image tied to it and context surrounding it; mom, door, loss, etc. This historical event then, likely, becomes the elementary root or source sadness moment. Just like all rivers have a place that is the source of their currents, humans have source events. “Everything a person is and everything he knows resides in the tangled thicket of his intertwined neurons” (T.Lewis, A General Theory of Love). This occurrence within your space in between becomes another of the original imprints of experience. The reason these source moments are so powerful is because they are stories wrapped in physical, emotional, psychological, biological, and electromagnetic material. They are whole body, not just thoughts like our adult mind often believes. To children they form an inner, neural mythology that keeps running below the surface of our adult lives.
Linear vs Emotional Time
“It is the experiences of early childhood that create the foundational organization of neural systems that will be used for a lifetime” (Bruce D. Perry, M.D, Ph.D). These events when young are long gone in historical, linear time. But in emotional, electron time, they are still humming, and become further charged by emotional losses as we enter adolescence and early adulthood.
“Hurry up. Where? Up the river?”
Clearly, what we thought were invisible, untenable, and unknowable, all of our feelings of joy, longing, regret, etc. are actually physical things that stretch back in time. They are not good or bad, just there. Our emotions have left a trail. That is the basic map of all good therapeutic work, of all marital work. As you react to your partner, you carefully note and register the feeling being conjured up in you. You then take this specific feeling sequence back with you into your quiet time, into your meditation and therapy sessions and literally wallow and simmer in the sensations. The course of this inner work will naturally place you in a moment back in non-linear, non-logical time to one those core, original events: getting bullied at school, getting dropped like a hot rock by your 8th grade girlfriend, or a mom walking out. From this inner locale you begin the process of understanding the context of why mom was so enraged and left the house, for instance, and why over the years you have responded so strongly to events that triggered these emotions. You just have to begin traveling back upstream, into the space in between to retrieve the insights! It will not always be an easy journey. Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness story of traveling up river, into the remote African jungle, on which the movie Apocalypse Now was based, is allegory to this more primitive, raw, unruly side our emotional selves. Tread lightly he urges, but go. “Hurry up. Where? Up the river? ‘Approach cautiously’”. Just by allowing ourselves to relive and reexperience the moment and sensations, we literally, physically loosen and begin to shift the frequency of that electron loop. That original 25-year-old event, that left an original, tire-track like neuronal groove in our midbrain, is simply part of our personal mythology. Reliving it, getting quiet and feeling back to those early events, asking questions and probing our heart will move us to understanding why it happened, why and how the characters involved behaved the way they did. “Asking questions is the source of all knowledge” (Thomas Berger).
New Perception Changes Everything
You never have to fully agree with or actually forgive all those involved in the mythology and events of your past. Forgiveness is great, it is good to have it, but it is not a prerequisite for releasing old patterns, undoing the hold that our emotional past has on us and our marriage. This work will inevitably create a new, adult perspective on our childhood perceptions. It will create an update to our imbedded software, as we bring a parent’s perspective to our inner 8-year-old child’s experience of the past. We are the parent and child. Getting those two to parts to speak with each other is the key to our life and marriage! “A perception changes the physical, emotional, and psychological fabric of the human via the science of electrons in the body” (Seth Speaks). When you go back and be in that moment, you understand it anew. What you will find is information and insights, often wrapped in tears and regret. Sometimes it will only be a subtle sensation of how an early experience somehow served you and your life purpose. Maybe nothing big happens. Maybe it just clarifies why you have overreacted so many times during those long moments in your marriage. All these earliest emotions and reaction patterns were not only formed by physical events that we observed and experienced, as mentioned above. They were also inexorably shaped by the silent stream of emotion-studded electrons pouring from our parents. Especially in our early years when 80% of what children pick up and learn at home is from non-verbal communication, the psycho-emotional world of the space in between radiates us completely.
Plot Thickens, Your Grandmother is in Your Marriage
This radiation means our kin, all of them, sent their lives and loves down the years and generations to us via those alternating, neural currents in their limbic bodies, their hearts and minds. “Electrons are responsible for absorbing vital energy-informational particles of different spectrum from the surrounding environment and for releasing energy-informational particles from a human body” (A.Schore, Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self). A mother’s deep and quiet remorse, for instance, about her father’s indifference and absence, is transferred into her son’s and daughter’s hearts during those early years. The “heart’s electromagnetic field acts as a carrier wave for information…plays an important role in communicating physiological, psychological, and social information between individuals” (Science of the Heart, Heartmath Institute). That remorse electron current flows from the mom into the spongy, receptor heart cells of your children. Over time, the son likely enters adulthood soaked in this electromagnetic predisposition for wanting and needing attention. It likely manifests as a subtle yet overriding anxiousness, a childlike longing in his adult behavior that leads to a penchant for less emotionally mature and available partners. There is a long generational reach of neurons and electrons. The son’s and daughter’s unconscious feelings around this need becomes the vibrational template or disposition that draws experiences into their lives that repeat their mother’s needs. The hearts of our parents are powerful muscles that act like cell towers, sending out their joys and desires. Who our parents are and were, who their parents were and what they felt emanated from the cells of their heart, dripping into our kitchens and living rooms.
Passing Down the Impatience
A man will naturally harbor anger and resentment towards his dad for all the years he never was available, for all the surly, inattentive, and emotionally neglectful behavior. Maybe this man’s dad drank, or traveled, or just did not know how to be a parent. This man’s frustration for his dad will live quietly in the neuro-transmitting cells of his stomach and mid-brain for years. In his 20’s and 30’s this latent frustration never gets loosened. He has his career, buddies, sports, casual girlfriends, and long stupor filled nights in front of the TV. His emotional state is never disturbed enough by love, loss, vulnerability, or the exasperation of caring beyond self to stir up any deep-seating emotions. And then his marriage occurs. The whirl, proximity, and intensity of his wife’s love and desires, the arrival of children, the sleepless nights, the discourse on in-laws and his family’s spending habits cracks open his heart and mind. That disquiet and anger originally formed by his desire for his father’s affection, which he had never addressed and unwound, that has been resting for years as a dull, nameless ache, is awakened. It emerges now as frustration when his wife is unavailable due to the basic household and parental demands, or by the tears of his kids. And so, these reaction patterns, echoes of his father’s neglect, arrive in all the basic flavors. Underneath most of them is a sadness and a longing, but they come out as the opposite, as disparaging remarks to his wife or possibly sardonic criticism of his kids. This is why marriage is such a wonderful challenge! We do not know what we will find in ourselves as the marriage unfolds, until life shows up.
The Great Unconscious
“The major problem is that people are aware of their conscious beliefs and behaviors, but not of subconscious beliefs and behaviors. We operate 95% of our lives from subconscious programs” (Bruce Lipton, MD). This is the problem, we enter adulthood with our child-like emotions, but are simply not aware of how deep this well goes. During childhood, in the space in between, the executive functioning of our logic-infused neocortex was not fully formed. It was too young to comprehend and manage all the biomagnetic currents that our limbic body soaked up. These left-brain mechanics, that sort, sift, organize, and rationalize our unruly emotions did fully form until our late teens and twenties. Research tells us that our analytical brains are not fully formed until our late 30’s.
Unlived Life
Therefore the neural network of our hearts and body literally biophysically merged with our parents’ hearts. “When people touch or are in proximity, a transference of the electromagnetic energy produced by the heart occurs,” (R. McCraty et al, The Electricity of Touch). The disquiet and longing of your grandmother, which divided her marriage for instance, will be the unconscious backdrop to your marital challenges until you understand and harness the information that her emotional currents deposited. Wherever we are not feeling complete in life, marriage or work, that unsettledness inexorably informs our reactions. Carl Jung reminds us how far upstream these roots go, and how important it is to at least recognize the correlation between our parents’ lives and our current issues and challenges. “Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived life of the parent” (Carl Jung).
Temperament of our DNA
The mythology and beliefs of our parents and ancestors were written and sung in the biomagnetic frequency of their hearts and bodies. Their dreams were and are the language and coding of their DNA sequences which formed and powered their genes. The electrons of their life frequency animated our homes, were sprinkled on our Frosted Flakes, and became the silent language that infused our world. “Life depends on signals exchanged among molecules” (Jacques Benveniste, M.D). The science of frequency transference tells us we inherited much more than hair color, height and our grandfather’s last name. We inherited the current of his temperament and disposition, and it is from these currents where the spirit of our emotional life began. This is also where the work on ourselves and our marriage begins. We all emerged from the balm and storms of the electromagnetic environment of home, a dialect of timeless images, thoughts, sensations, smells, and flashes of memory composed and now stored in our heart, stomach, and limbic right brain.
Autopilot
The reason we argue with our spouse, why we feel discontent, frustration, or boredom with our life and relationship is because so much of our current behavior, reactions, and desires stem from these old sensations and feelings. “We are often oblivious to how it is that basic feelings states ‘own’ how we think as we operate on ‘automatic pilot’” (E. Sterrett, Ph.D., The Science Behind Emotional Intelligence). So many marriages are stuck in this phenomenon or vortex, with the old reaction patterns “owning” each partner’s behavior, starving the marriage of all its potential growth and maturity. Developmentally, behaviorally, many marriages resemble two 10 years old in relationship. 69% of all married couples fight over the exact same topic each time they battle (Gottman, 7 Principles of Making Marriage Work). Our inner child is arguing with our spouse’s inner child. That is the dynamic of many marriages. If we do not unhook ourselves from the autopilot, child-like responses, we cannot release the marriage to its natural growth and ongoing stages. From our adult perspective, our youth seems like another lifetime. The rhythms and roots of our internal family myth are already indelibly etched in our heart by the time we enter college, by the time we enter the workplace and begin configuring spreadsheets and balancing check books.
An Ancient Divide
This is the timeworn riddle and mystery of being human, this yawning divide between the sensibilities, awareness, and perceptions of our adult consciousness, and the deep well and fervor of our childhood sentiments and feelings. This is also simply the wonderful reality and challenge of our lives, the cosmic plan, to begin the journey of understanding that these two powerful parts of us exist and need to be reconciled. “A person is not a single entity of a single mind: a human is built of several parts, all of which compete to steer the ship of state” (Dr. Morsella, et al, Behavioral and Brain Sciences). Unfortunately, our adult, rational thinking self gets quite annoyed by the excitability of our unruly feelings. The emotions of our spouse upset us. And when we are confronted on our behavior by our partner, for actions and reactions that we “thought” made sense, the ones learned in the space in between, we are upset by such questioning and then react in our historically set manner, again and again. We are so naturally, easily lulled into believing that our logic-seeking, analytical self should always be driving, that it knows best. But there is so much information about ourselves that we can learn that will change the entire dynamic of our marriage. There is a battle inside of us, this natural conflict between these two languages, between the logical side, and the blurry, less definite inductions of our emotional side. Nature herself, ever satirical, set it up all things to work this way, this universal parable of opposites existing together. For humans it the structure of our adult minds that sit right on top of our deeper, less knowable child mind. “Nature appears to have built our abstract and rational apparatus not just on top of that of biological affect regulation but also from it and with it” (Allan Schore, The Science of the Art of Psychotherapy). And therein is the rub. That unconscious memory of mom continually browbeating dad continues to drive our negative reactions to our wife when she offers critical, yet insightful guidance. The boy child is still pissed at mom, but the man-husband thinks it is his wife that is the problem. Wrong. The wife is simply stimulating that forgotten thread of anger in the man that was spun 35 years ago at home. Adult mind still tethered to the boy’s hurt. Or the wife who currently, angrily responds to her husband because the 9-year-old girl in her still hates how her long-deceased father who used to belittle and demean her. When her husband comments about the dirty dishes or the excessive TV watching by the kids, she unleashes feelings that were saved for her father but never found expression.
Left v Right, Tough v Tender
In this gap between our adult and youth-based experiences is where all our issues live, where all our marital challenges start and continue. Our adult perceptions and self-concept have to eventually own our child-like reactions. Our rational mind is indeed powerful, but it is uneasy and typically unwilling to entertain the world and language of our feelings. Electromagnetically, our analytical neocortex is actually designed to shut down the feeling messages traveling up our midbrain. Our “egoic body-mind is by tendency recoiling from everything…avoiding relationship” (L. Sannella, The Kundalini Experience). In other words, there is a physiological basis for this war between our thinking and feeling self. Our adult neocortex or new brain is being bombarded by such an endless cascade of old brain signals, that it gates or blocks most of the sensory data trying to enter. Only a “small trickle of information is permitted into the prefrontal cortex” (Dr. Morsella, Behavioral and Brain Sciences). Our new brain is literally sitting on top of the volcanic murmurings of our ancient brain. All that we feel trying to impose itself on all that we think. No wonder we drink, smoke, work too hard, or gaze numbingly at the TV. We are often trying to keep the 35-year-old longing for our father’s full attention from slowing down our day. “Our left brain, conscious mind cannot categorize love, friendship…and resists ‘anything that interrupts’ its cognitive processing (R. Monroe, Ultimate Journey). Eventually these two languages must be understood and shared though, inside of ourselves, with ourselves. This confluence of opposing old and new brain currents unfolds inside our Reticular Activating System (RAS) which is a bundle of brain nerves that serves as the link. The RAS connects the lower brainstem to our cortex. It filters the body’s sensory information, “all the signals from the external world and internal environment, and determines what will enter our adult, prefrontal cortex” (R. Davidson, Ph.D., Physiology of Consciousness).
Boys Meets Man
The RAS is the command center for your waking up, the holy grail. It is the bridge to the way in, the way home, where all those emotions from childhood finally get to be shared with our adult brain capabilities. This is where child meets the adult and the convergence of the two different languages occurs. The dynamics of activity in our RAS is vital. It is where all our energy of our life’s motivation is stored. It is the actual attention center of the brain, where the underlying capabilities of our rational functioning are drawn from (R. Davidson, Ph.D., Physiology of Consciousness). When our emotions run too strong, when our own frustration with our partner, stemming from our ancient ripples of disquiet fire too strongly, the data processing center in our RAS shuts down. New information does not get delivered to our consciousness seeking new brain. This is the science of how our motivation is squelched. Our analytical self cannot integrate the charges from below. So much emotion-based static overwhelms our higher brains ability to organize, so it literally spins aimlessly above this fray. It is electromagnetically intimidated, overwhelmed, and literally repulsed by the old brain impulses. So nothing new gets done, nothing gets resolved inside. We say we want to work on ourselves and our marriage, we recite our affirmations and get out our notebook to begin figuring it all out. And then, it all stalls. That is why the RAS is the bridge to our evolution. This is where the work on self and marriage begins. We have to physically counteract this pushing away of our feelings by our adult mind. The only way to do this is to relax and slow down the frequency of our neocortex brain waves. Our rational mind will not speak with our whimsical lower brain unless it is resting. When the brain wave frequencies of our neocortex neurons are actively and consciously slowed down though, magic happens. When we close our eyes and breathe deeply into the solar plexus, “Neuro-transmitting hormones are released into the blood that begin to synchronize the lower and higher brain centers” (Dr. Morsella, Behavioral and Brain Sciences). Similar to what occurs when we fall asleep, when we consciously relax our highly alert neocortex, it lets it’s guard down. It is like a neural sense of safety and quietude for that part of our brain that processes some 50,000 daily thoughts and facts. As this induced relaxation of our higher brain occurs, that synchronization alights. Our child-like trepidations and joys, normally dormant or released only unconsciously in flash points of marital debates or drunken tears, bubble up. Memories of fourth grade might seep up and allow a warming joy about a childhood pet dog. Or our heart might soften from a long-stored sadness for a deceased grandparent, accompanied by butterflies of discomfort from memories of being picked on by a fourth-grade bully. This dialogue between our two halves changes everything. It is the lottery jackpot of all human development and consciousness raising. The limiting and imprecise personal history that our logical brain has been harboring will be flooded with the context, bodily sensations, and emotion-studded memories it had not realized it craved. Emotions, like us, like everything that exists, are seeking fulfilment and completion. Remember, there was that initial event from childhood that generated a unique neuro-electrical loop in our midbrain. The midbrain has been sending all of these electrical currents throughout the body for years. These emotions generated loops that spread their energy by manifesting in different parts of the body, almost as subtle reminders and hints that our past needs to be reconciled. And our rational mind had no idea this was all going on. This work, this unearthing of old feelings is the beginning of what many have been calling for years emotional intelligence. This is just another term for allowing our current adult mind to be re-introduced to the feelings and memories of our youth. The way through your marriage is in, to go inside and reveal yourself to yourself. Let your inner child speak its mind and heart about the world it new in the space in between your parents.
Cave we Fear to Enter
Your goal in life is to complete it fully, and your marriage and all your relationships are essential pieces of your life purpose. “The key to living your full capacity is to have your left and right brain in simultaneous and synchronous action” (R. Monroe, Ultimate Journey). By relaxing the mind and opening the heart, so much of the vagary and incomprehensibleness of our inner world will be clarified as our rational mind gets involved. Our emotion-infused brain simply needs the guidance from our logical side. Together, they can make sense of the past, of the mythology of our storied inheritance, and begin applying this wisdom back into our life, into our marital actions and reactions. The crucible of all human wisdom is in the fire of self, in the “cave we fear to enter” (Jung). Carrol Izard summarizes perfectly what occurs when the child within meets and is guided by our adult self. “The ability to symbolize feelings and put them into words provides a powerful tool for emotion regulation, influencing emotion-cognition relations, and developing high-level social skills” (Carroll E. Izard, Emotion Theory and Research). All knowledge of self begins and ends with the coalescing of opposing forces within us. The map to moving your marriage in the direction it needs to go starts with an arrow that says, “start here”.