The most common problem that couples bring to marriage counselors is communication. The most common solution counselors give is communication training; it all makes perfect sense.  For many couples this common sense approach is just what they need, for others this approach can actually make things worse.

Many couples think they have difficulty communicating when in reality they only have problems communicating when their emotions get in the way.  Some people can communicate perfectly with their spouse about many topics, just not the hot button issues.  Others communicate well with their friends and family, just not with their spouse. 

Research has repeatedly shown that when your blood pressure goes up all of your

 communication skills go out of the window.  A number of years ago researchers had a series of couples come into a lab.  They hooked each spouse up to a set of instruments that read their blood pressure and heart rate.  The researchers had the couples talk about a sensitive issue in their relationship.  The couples fell into one of three groups. 

Some couples stayed calm (their blood pressure remained normal) and they were able to begin to resolve the issues—the more they talked the closer they got to a solution that worked for both of them.  These are the people who can succeed on their own without marital counseling. 

Other couples stayed calm but failed to reach resolution.  These are the people who truly have difficulty communicating, so communication training and standard marital therapy will help them a lot. 

The last type of couples had their blood pressure rise as soon as they started to talk about their issues.  It didn’t matter if the couples were screaming or talking calmly—if their body was reacting their minds were closing down.  For these couples the more they talked the worse things became!  All of their communication skills instantly disappeared whenever the discussion caused either the husband’s or the wife’s blood pressure to rise.   These couples had emotional hot buttons. Couples with emotional hot buttons tend to get worse, not better, with traditional marital therapy.   The researchers also found that they only needed to look at the first 3 minutes of a conversation to know how the next 3 hours would turn out.  They found that if you begin to get upset within the first 3 minutes of a conversation, things will only get worse no matter how long you try to talk.     

Emotions Shut Down Communication

Toxic marital and other relationship problems occur when interactions trigger one or both partner’s Emergency Reflex (ER). The ER prepares your body and mind to fight (argue, compete), flee (avoid, withdraw, lie), freeze (go numb, blank or space out, disconnect, choke) or surrender (give in, become dependent).  Once you move into one of these places you become defensive and/or aggressive.  At that moment you temporarily stop loving your spouse. You cannot feel connected and defensive at the same time.  Perfect love casts out fear, and when fear predominates, love cannot be in charge. 

The ER is also characterized by a change in mind state.  When you are feeling love towards someone you look for win-win solutions—you can step back and see the big picture and you can see things from your spouse’s point of view.  When you are in the ER defense mode you get tunnel vision, become self-centered, inflexible and you see everything as win or lose. 

Hot Buttons

In some cases one or both may have emotional baggage that creates hot buttons that frequently trigger an ER. 
For example, John* was physically abused by his alcoholic father.  Even though he had long since “put it out of his mind” it remained an unhealed emotional wound. This raw nerve got triggered subconsciously whenever his wife, or anyone else for that matter, raised their voice or pointed a finger at him. Whenever his wife touched that nerve John would leave the house all together and when he couldn’t leave he would just shut down emotionally.  John never consciously recalled his father–he had trained the thinking part of his mind to never do that – but the feeling part of his mind subconsciously made the link anyway.  His wife’s pointing finger subconsciously reminded him of the way his father pointed his finger just before one of the many alcohol enhanced beatings he suffered as a child.  As a child this hot button made John run away, as an adult it made him shut down emotionally. 

While for some people, emotional baggage and hot buttons come from childhood experiences in their first family, for others it can come from previous romantic relationships or past hurts in the marriage.  Another client, Sara*, had struggled over years to forgive her husband for the affair he had early in their marriage.  She was convinced that he was truly sorry, was genuinely repentant and had been not only faithful but a good husband and father since that time.  She convinced herself that she had been able to put the past in the past and gone on with their lives.  However, the wound from the affair was still there.  Whenever she allowed herself to recall that day when he confessed, the imagined images of her husband in the arms of the other woman flooded back into her mind.  It took substantial effort to get it packed away again. 

Sara and her husband communicated well about almost every issue, except when they tried to talk about their intimate life.  These discussions made her feel disgusted.  She usually ended up picking a fight with her husband about trivial things.  Later, upon thinking back, these reactions didn’t make any sense to her and she usually just apologized, saying that she had just been in a bad mood.  Her husband of course learned not to bring up the issue again because the ‘bad mood’ always seemed to follow.

Both Sara and John later realized that emotional hot buttons—those times when your reactions don’t even make sense to you— are simply emotional wounds and sore spots that have not healed.  These mysterious and troubling emotional reactions were just flashbacks to old hurts.

Two Kinds of Flashbacks

There are 2 kinds of flashbacks: full and partial. Full flashbacks occur when something reminds you of a painful memory and that memory comes into your consciousness.

The second type is a partial flashback. When you have a partial flashback you don’t consciously recall the memory, you just re-experience the feelings associated with the memory.  

Full flashbacks can cause big problems; they are like benign tumors.  They interfere with your life and your relationships.  They raise your blood pressure and cause you to temporarily lose the ability to communicate effectively and react appropriately.

Partial flashbacks are like malignant tumors.  They can cause enormous problems. They not only interfere with your life,

 relationships, blood pressure and your ability to communicate, but because you don’t know where these feelings are coming from they lead you to come up with a false theory as to why you are reacting that way.  You end up either blaming yourself  (for example, Sara coming to see herself as a moody person) or you blame your spouse and marriage (for example, John seeing his wife as a cold person and doubting that his wife was the person God meant him to be with).  The false theories that you make up to explain away emotional reactions that you don’t understand can cause more problems than the emotional reactions themselves. 

Self-Soothing

Even without significant emotional baggage you may be unable to get yourself out of the ER once you fall in.  

Children are born with emotional gas pedals but without emotional brakes.  An infant will easily get upset when they are wet, hungry, etc. and quickly go into their own miniaturized version of an ER.  Their little bodies start to produce fight-or-flight stress hormones, but since they don’t have any brakes installed yet they are unable to calm themselves.  Hence, they require someone—usually their mother—to hold, stroke, rock or sing to them in order for them to calm down. 

These loving actions are not just psychological.  They also trigger the release of special hormones that act to turn off the stress hormones — shutting down the ER.  This cycle happens many times a day: baby gets upset, mom soothes, baby gets upset, mom soothes.

 Over the first few years of a child’s life these upset-soothe cycles happen so often that the child begins to calm down as soon as they hear their mother’s voice.  Later, they just have to think of their mother’s soothing words to calm down. Eventually they are able to hear those same soothing words in their own voice and reach a place of calm.

This is the way God planned it to work.  However many things can distract a parent, preventing this learning from fully taking place.  When parents have marital or financial problems they often get so stressed that they are temporarily unable to stay attuned to their children.  Similarly, a death or serious illness in the family or the birth of a demanding child prevents full attention. Things like job stress or a difficult pregnancy can tip the balance. When there is a hole in these early learnings people will have difficulty soothing and calming themselves. These people also find it difficult to recognize the early signs of distress in themselves and in others.  When they do become aware there is a tendency to simply try to distract themselves or their spouse.  Distraction may reduce some of the emotional intensity but it can’t bring you to a place of calm or peace—a place where you can think, understand and communicate clearly. You can’t get to a place of calm by ignoring your ER, you have to find a way to actually get out of the ER.