Finding Hope Blog

And how is that different from what they think I owe them?

Growing up, most of us start to learn about relationships from our parents. If not parents, we hopefully find an uncle, aunt, or some other figure who can model healthy relationships for us. Lacking such a figure makes life much, much more difficult for a variety of reasons I will get into in another blog. So, for this blog, let’s talk about partners doing their best by learning from what their parents modeled for them.

There is no definitive guide to being in a relationship or being a parent. We have some themes that make relationships healthier, skills marriage counseling can teach that make things work better. Every relationship is different, however. Every relationship demands different things from its members because its members demand different things from one another. With that in mind, couples therapy needs to be pretty flexible to take these expectations into account.

Where do expectations come from? Whether we see healthy behaviors or not, we tend to learn relationship dynamics from our attachment figures (such as parents). Gender norms come from here as well, further complicating our expectations. As I watch my parents interact, I learn how a husband should treat his wife. My thinking brain might later recognize that some of the things I witnessed probably shouldn’t have happened, but my feeling brain normalized what I grew up with.

My partner grew up learning the same way. Granting that neither of our families held the same expectations or rules, my partner and I inevitably hold different views on a number of issues. Gender roles included. So now, we take two people with different expectations and tell them to make a functional relationship. Does this sound easy?

It certainly isn’t. Initially, many relationships go through the “honeymoon phase,” where each partner sees what they want to see. They overlook one another’s flaws and feel excited to see one another. In some ways, partners love the idea of their partner more than their actual partner during this time.

As time goes on and the relationship develops, however, you and your partner truly start to see each other. The little things get harder to ignore as you notice them more often. Your partner starts to act in ways that defy your expectations – and not always for the better. Likewise, your partner starts to express irritation with you for your choices and beliefs. Not everything, but far more than when you first started dating. Things get tense.

Problematically, each of you learned specific ways people are supposed to show love in a relationship. Maybe your family’s gender norms said Dad does all the yard work, so of course your husband needs to do it now. In his family, however, everyone worked together on the yard. Now, your views butt heads, with each of you expecting something different from one another. If you don’t actively discuss these expectations, you two might grow to resent one another. After all, if your husband doesn’t hold up his end of the deal, don’t you deserve to resent him?

Reconciling these expectations often proves uncomfortable at best and impossible at worst. The very first step is to recognize your expectations for your partner. Notice moments where you see the tall grass and feel irritable – that moment provides you a powerful opportunity to learn about the expectations you put on your partner. At the same time, you can very reasonably expect your partner to do this same reflection. They need to know what they expect out of you in the relationship.

After determining your expectations, you and your partner need to discuss how to make them both work in your relationship. Remember how your feeling brain expects a thing, but your thinking brain might not like that expectation? This conversation is your opportunity to pick something different for your relationship. You both already feel uncomfortable. You might as well use this chance to try something new.

Marriage counseling helps with both parts of this process. A marriage counselor can help both of you reflect inward, finding your expectations for one another. This process also proves triggering for many people, as examining your own beliefs often requires facing your past. The good and the bad alike. A therapist can help make that feel a little more bearable.

While marriage counseling can help with the first step, it truly shines in the second. If both of you know your expectations for one another, couples therapy offers a powerful opportunity to have a productive conversation. You know how conversations sometimes turn into arguments? Avoiding that requires each of you to recognize when you get worked up and catch it. After catching it, you can pull back from those feelings, avoiding being flooded so you can have a healthier conversation. A marriage therapist knows how to watch for flooding. We can help you regulate your emotions in order to discuss your expectations together.

Discussing expectations hurts. When your partner holds you to standards you don’t understand or agree with, that hurts a lot. This doesn’t have to hurt. Discussing your relationship allows you and your partner to grow together.

Does this sound familiar?

A part of you feels grateful other people care about you, but guilty at the same time. While you can put on a good face and try your best, if your friends really knew you, they wouldn’t want anything to do with you. You have to stay positive and be there for them no matter what. After all, you’re the broken one. If you fall through on too many things or they feel like you’re a burden, friends and family will have no reason to spend time with you. Why would they want to be around someone who makes them feel worse?

Many, many people feel this way. Guilt and shame run rampant through our culture, forcing us to feel the need to hide our true selves. We hide, burying pieces of ourselves deep within us, determined never to let them see daylight. When others get too close to finding them, we might flee or lash out, knowing our friends will leave us if they see those parts. For that matter, if we face those parts too directly, we might want to leave or hate ourselves.

These pieces often relate to feeling loved. Unfortunately, this means those we love are the most likely to see these pieces we shame, also leaving them the most likely to receive our wrath for getting too close. While we crave connection with friends and family, connection might feel as though a barrier keeps us from feeling fully honest and true. This barrier hurts, but nowhere near as much as risking these same loved ones seeing what lays beyond it.

This gets worse if you and your partner reinforce each others’ shame. Getting too close to your partner’s guilt and shame might lead to their lashing out or running from you. It then makes a lot of sense to stigmatize those pieces and try to avoid them as well. This means your relationship develops topics that cannot be discussed. Over time, you both might feel you never talk about anything that matters, or talk at all. Safe topics don’t usually feel very meaningful.

You and your partner might avoid talking most of the time, using distractions when around each other instead of engaging meaningfully. Deeper conversations likely lead to flare ups and arguments, so why even go there? Well, as both of you learn the importance of avoiding these conversations, you both also learn the importance of avoiding those shameful pieces. Over time, this ramps up the guilt and shame, potentially adding traps to that barrier that keeps you from facing those parts.

Guilt and shame in our closest relationships damage our brains physically. Early in life, this sets our attachment style, determining our brains expectations for loved ones for the rest of our lives. Kids neglected by their parents before 2 years old grow up expecting their partner to neglect them too. Their shameful and guilty parts tend to watch for these moments, lashing out or running when it seems loved ones aren’t paying attention to them.

Your connection with your partner provides a beautiful opportunity to change your attachment style. I can’t meaningfully tell you people care about you. Your partner can’t meaningfully tell you they care about you. Both of us, however, can show you we care about you. Your logical brain might already accept that, but your emotional brain needs proof. When your emotional brain gets that proof, your body brain starts to accept it and rewire your brain to accept that proof.

Marriage counseling teaches your emotional brain you’re lovable. With a marriage therapist, you and your partner learn to accept your own guilt and shame, eventually providing love and support for one another as well. Initially, your therapist might do most of this work, slowly teaching you to express yourself fully. Shame and all. Eventually, your partner might be able to do the rest, finally teaching you to love yourself fully.

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What do babies, police officers, wolves, and unsupportive partners have in common? None of them use words as their primary way to convince others to do things. In fact, our Emotional Brain doesn’t really care about words. This means, as long as nothing stands out enough that your Logical Brain flags it, others can use small tricks to take advantage of your Emotional Brain. Marriage therapy can help partners recognize these tricks from their partner, potentially flagging unhealthy relationships. At the same time, however, some of us just naturally use more persuasive techniques, speaking more directly to others Emotional Brains. That doesn’t mean we’re trying to be abusive or anything, but does mean we should be aware of these tricks when using them.

Babies can’t communicate much. In fact, they can’t really do much for you other than be adorable. With that in mind, our first trick is Simple. The Emotional Brain gets overwhelmed pretty quickly by complicated things – that’s why babies don’t do complicated things. All they really need to do is cry and make some sounds for you to recognize they need help. In line with this, a healthy relationship should feel like you can talk about deeper things. Being able to flesh out your complicated thoughts and feelings gives you space to be your whole self; a partner constantly dismissing your internal world denies you this space. This can limit your ability to grow both as a person and as a partner.

How often do you hear a baby talk about how much your experience matters to them? The Logical Brain wants to hear all about benefits: how much money will I get from this, will I feel better after that, etc. The Emotional Brain automatically trusts people more when they’re open about doing things for themselves. That doesn’t mean we want people to be selfish, just that we trust people more when they own up to their selfishness instead of hiding it. Babies…don’t hide much. When a baby needs food, they let you know they need milk. There’s no attempt at convincing you it’s a good deal for you (other than stopping the crying), it’s for them. Likewise, you may find your partner joking often about how they do things for themselves. As a joke, that can be perfectly fine and fun to banter about. In reality, however, partners need to feel supported by one another and as though their worlds are both respected. This one may come across as gaslighting, challenging your own understanding of reality, maybe even explicitly telling you that you’re crazy for seeing things a certain way. Both your worlds matter; it’s important your relationship cares about both sides.

Ever see a movie where someone gets interrogated? Early in human history, people holding others captive often seemed hateful and mean. This, however, allows the captive to build hatred toward their captor. When the captor instead seems nice, offering drinks, asking about feelings, etc, the captive suddenly faces massive confusion. Their Logical Brain recognizes the dangers of their situation and the negative things their captor does to them, but their Emotional Brain sees someone being nice, despite the mean things that may happen during their captivity. Stockholm Syndrome develops when a captive starts to feel a sense of loyalty toward their captor, making escape seem like a disrespectful thing to do. Likewise, unhealthy relationships often go through cycles of intense disrespect, followed by strong compassion and love. A husband who beat his wife one night might bring her flowers the next day, promising never to do it again. The wife’s Logical Brain recognizes him as a man who beat her the night before, but the Emotional Brain sees someone being kind, bringing flowers, and promising change. As previously discussed, the Emotional Brain is stronger than the Logical Brain, often leaving women in these relationships struggling for years before something helps them escape.

It costs a lot for wolves to fight each other. If they actually needed to figure out who was the strongest wolf in order to have an alpha, wolves would brawl constantly. Without medical care, this would lead to a lot of dead wolves. As such, wolves need a way to fight for dominance without actually fighting. Confidence allows wolves to show their strength without actually injuring others or risking injury to themselves. While there’s nothing wrong with feeling confident, it’s important to recognize that projecting confidence forms the backbone of most manipulation. Con artists, politicians, even people trying to convince you they’re doing well when they’re not will try to show massive amounts of confidence. Our Emotional Brain wants to trust confident people, feeling they know what we should do. In relationships, this can feel as though your partner is looking down on you. After all, if they are confident in their choices and views all the time, why would yours matter? It’s important to recognize our need for one another. If your partner doesn’t respect your choices or views, that’s a flag your relationship needs work.

Our final tool is Empathy. Here, I’m not talking about actually respecting another person’s world – that type of empathy is extremely important. No, I’m talking about tactical empathy. That’s a term from hostage negotiation in which the negotiator convinces the dangerous individual they both exist in the same mental space, with the negotiator working hard to understand their hostage taker. In a relationship, both of your worlds matter. If you don’t understand your partner, or they seem emotionally shut down all the time, your relationship would benefit from marriage therapy. In this relationship, your partner may seem to only care about your world, saying they don’t have an opinion on many things, or don’t seem to care about much in general. This puts a lot of pressure on you, forcing you to decide what’s important for both of you. Tactical empathy can be used intentionally, as with hostage negotiators, or unintentionally, as with emotionally shutdown partners. Either way, it does not indicate a healthy, equal relationship.

Simple, Perceived Self-Interest, Incongruity, Confidence, Empathy (SPICE). These tools allow people to speak directly to your Emotional Brain, which can quickly overwhelm your Logical Brain. None of them are inherently evil or even malicious, but their power means we need to notice when they are used. If any of these stood out to you or seemed familiar from your relationship, feel free to reach out to me to schedule a marriage therapy session. You and your partner can learn healthier ways to communicate and respect each others’ worlds. You can feel respected and valued in your relationship.

Does it feel like the reactions you get from your partner are always fair? Likewise, do you always respond appropriately to your partner? Many of us find ourselves overreacting to certain things, snapping at something small or storming off after hearing the wrong word. This can feel as frustrating for the overreactor as for the receiver. Both partners may feel confused and angry, unsure how to move forward if any small thing can set either of them off.

Our brains are weird. It helps to think of three different brains in one: you largely control your Thinking Brain. Some people think of this as your consciousness, or your mind. Basically, your observable thoughts occur here. Thinking Brain problems often feel pretty straightforward, with us challenging thoughts we don’t like. We can also engage in some pretty fun conversations at this level, playing with new ideas and exploring new ways of thinking. The Thinking Brain is, however, the weakest of the three brains.

The Feeling Brain pushes us into an emotional state. Research shows we engage very different areas of our brains when we feel certain ways. Ever feel angry early in the day and continue noticing things that irritate you? What about saying, “I’m having a good day,” and things just keep working out for you? Our Feeling Brain determines what we notice and can recall, essentially framing life for our Thinking Brain. Life gets complicated when our Feeling Brain thinks of the world as dangerous, because our Thinking Brain then sees life through this filter. We start to notice more danger and rationalize why certain things are not as safe as they seem. While this can help keep you alive, it probably won’t make you happy. Despite this incredible ability to frame life, however, the Feeling Brain also isn’t the most powerful brain.

The Body Brain greatly complicates life. Our Body Brain basically consists of two modes – Start (Sympathetic Nervous System) and Stop (Para-Sympathetic Nervous System). The Body Brain has its own memories, as evidenced by child abuse survivors who panic at key triggers. When the Start function, kicks in, people get pretty stressed. We call this feeling “flooded.”

When the Body Brain starts flooding, it basically shuts down the Thinking Brain. After all, thinking isn’t particularly helpful if you need to run away right now, right? As we progress through life, the Body Brain starts to pick up a number of triggers. Those with hard lives develop more triggers, finding themselves flooded more often than those whose lives felt less challenging.

This means a hard relationship – with a parent, spouse, or really anyone – can create a number of small triggers. These triggers can come up in conversations with others, such as a new partner. You might mention wanting to visit your parents, for example, and your partner suddenly starts yelling at you, eventually storming out. For you, this feels confusing and frustrating, as you didn’t do anything to warrant that reaction. For them, it also feels confusing and frustrating, because their Thinking Brain doesn’t understand the overreaction. Because it wasn’t the Thinking Brain that overreacted, it was the Body Brain.

Sometimes a relationship feels plagued with triggers. Both partners may start to blow up or leave at the slightest offense, not responding logically to their partner, but rather to a sense of flooding. Conversations start to feel impossible, as anything might trigger this effect. Your Body Brain continues waiting for any sign of danger, leaving your Thinking Brain to judge your partner and yourself for constantly overreacting.

In marriage counseling, we sit with these feelings. My training helps me recognize when the Body Brain starts flooding. I can watch for the Feeling Brain’s framing effects, helping your relationship develop healthier patterns. I can help you and your partner respond to each other with your Thinking Brains more often, ultimately working toward the relationship you both want.

If I told you researchers could predict whether or not you and your partner would stay together, would you believe me? What do you think they would watch for? Certain behaviors certainly stand out more than others. Sometimes partners joke with one another and may appear to outsiders as though they want to hurt each others’ feelings. This may just be playing around, which can actually help the relationship. Because different people mean different things with the same actions, even researchers can misinterpret behaviors.

If not behaviors, what would these researchers watch for? When would they tell the couple they needed counseling? Relationship behaviors tend to get more extreme over time, to the point where you and your partner may not even need to say anything to get your point across. Oftentimes, these polarized moments show great danger, but not because of the behaviors used.

Our biggest flag is an attitude. Specifically, contempt. In a healthy relationship – intimate or not – each participant recognizes that everyone else can see and value things differently. This dynamic allows partners to talk with one another about these differences and use curiosity to learn more about others’ perspectives. In a contempt – filled relationship, however, a partner decides their views hold the most value.

This means disagreements stop fleshing out differences. Instead, one or both partners start feeling judgmental, better than their spouse. Humans pick up on this quickly. Ever feel like someone was talking down to you during a conversation? That’s contempt. When strangers use contempt, we often try to leave. When your partner uses contempt, it can feel pretty tempting to check out emotionally.

Once we check out emotionally, we lose the positive foundation relationships need. If these positive moments disappear and actual conversations feel loaded with contempt, neither partner feels satisfied. This gets more extreme over time, to where either partner may start looking outside the relationship to get their needs met. Isolating, drugs, and cheating can happen at this point.

In marriage counseling, we work to fight contempt. Your partner is not your enemy, they are potentially your greatest source of connection. By treating the relationship as a unit that wants to work, we can specifically target this attitude, helping you both feel more respected and valued. Once your relationship frees itself of contempt, you will feel more valued and respected. Over time, this may lead to a deeper connection and sense of fulfillment.

Contempt is the enemy. Your partner doesn’t have to be.

We all experience pain. We lose friends, family, and dreams, working to value and care for what we can. In a perfect world, we find comfort in these joys, holding onto our beacons of light when the world feels too dark. This drives us to do better – to be better – over time as we experience pain and loss. Ideally, we learn our lessons as our lives constantly get closer to how we want to live.

In reality, however, our world also comes with distractions. Instead of facing my pain, I can open Facebook. I can watch TV to avoid thinking about where I fall short of my own ideals, never sitting with that pain. When I can avoid the pain this easily, why would I choose to face it? However, only through facing it can I grow from my experiences.

This results in many of us diving into our phones as soon as our thoughts start to get uncomfortable. Instead of feeling lonely, isolated, and anxious, we can get slight dopamine hits from Facebook and Reddit. As a result, our lives start to feel monotonous, rushing past us. Days disappear where we can’t remember accomplishing anything, or any moments for which we feel true pride and joy. This can create a painful sense of guilt and shame, which in turn sends us back to our distractions – a vicious cycle.

Trauma only makes this harder. Our lives need to feel like a coherent story for us to move forward, yet our brains cannot integrate traumatic experiences into this story. As a result, traumatic experiences sit with us, tiny moments waiting to resurface and create pain in us. Without a consistent story or view of myself to hold onto, I might feel quite tempted just to jump into my distractions to avoid facing this chronic pain.

Drinking, video gaming, and other forms of isolation can result from this. As these distractions become more and more common, we build habits. These feel even harder to escape. As our lives turn into long lists of habits, life loses even more meaning and we may grow depressed. Life feels like just running through the motions, waiting for those short moments of peace when we can find our distractions.

Existence requires suffering. While it hurts, pain offers us opportunities to grow and refine ourselves into who we actually want to be. Pain pushes us to connect with others for support and with ourselves for self acceptance. Facing that pain instead of running from it helps us feel truly alive.

In therapy, I can help you sit with this pain. We work together to process painful moments, integrating them into the story of you, allowing you to heal. When you can do this in therapy, you can connect with a part of yourself that may feel ignored and avoided most of the time. Once you can make these connections alone, you can move toward true self acceptance. Attune with yourself in the presence of your significant other and the two of you may experience a profoundly beautiful understanding.

Why do we all feel so lonely? Usual medicine says you are fully responsible for your own mental health. In a way, that makes sense – you are the one most affected by your brain, after all. When so many people within our culture feel a certain way, however, top marriage counselors take a more systemic focus. We look at large issues that affect many people and our ability to feel connected with one another.

We all experience pain in our lives. In a perfect world, we can be open with one another about this pain and work together to help one another through it. We can share in our experiences and advice along the way. This can lead to powerful relationships where partners feel connected to one another and increasingly safe sharing in their struggles and hopes. In our current world, however, particularly during COVID-19, we feel isolated from one another. Social media overwhelmingly leads to members feeling worse after viewing it and, right now, that’s most of what we get for trying to “connect” with friends and family.

Add to that our current political climate. The media in general survives by getting views; hatred and polarization generate views. As a result, many people who try to stay informed feel generally scared of the world and scared of their fellow citizens, thinking many people hold crazy and outlandish viewpoints. It only makes sense to start feeling fearful and spiteful in this world. Social media allows us to tailor our own corner of the news, thus leading to an even more isolated corner.

Yet it’s hard to stop. Your brain gets bored if everything tries to be interesting or make you feel good, so the algorithms on every site literally make some of the posts more appealing than others so you keep scrolling. You wait for something interesting, your brain on the edge of anticipation. We then get stuck, losing an hour to the mindless scroll down our Facebook, Reddit, or Twitter feed.

We may find ourselves scrolling social media even with other people nearby. Many times, partners will set up Netflix together and each scroll on their phones, only partially watching the show. On the surface, this seems like quality time together, with both people engaging in the same activity. In reality, however, each of you is in your own world with your own tailored bubble, missing each other. No matter how close you try to get physically, then, you still feel alone and trapped in a bubble.

Marriage counseling teaches you to spend this time together more intentionally. We recognize that pain is hard to face, as is asking for help. Social media is a constant temptation to avoid our pain, offering an easy out. Often in marriage counseling, our first step consists of helping you and your partner just exist in the same world. While in this world, you share in each others’ feelings and start to explore your dreams and hopes together. This leads to feeling safe enough to discuss your fears and failures, creating a powerful relationship.

With my help, you and your partner can confront your pains together, joining as a team to face life as it truly is, not just as the media wants you to experience it. You and your partner can feel close to each other after a night of cuddling. A show becomes a fun topic to discuss, not a distraction that leaves you both feeling you wasted the night. Bedtime can feel like the culmination of bonding together, where you and your partner can snuggle up and feel appreciated.

You don’t have to feel so alone.

Your husband just won’t talk about it. That didn’t seem like a problem at first – you just learned to avoid certain topics. Over time, though, the one or two things you couldn’t talk about just kept growing, until now all kinds of things seem scary to bring up with him. So you don’t. I mean, why bother? If all you get is a grunt or an, “I don’t know,” why would you risk him getting mad you brought “it” up? You try to feel all right not talking about it and sometimes legitimately do feel like you don’t need to talk. You know, however, that the conversation needs to happen. The “it” needs to be in the open, ready for you two, well, to open up.

Communicating with your husband in this situation can feel impossible. You want him to listen to you and to listen to him in turn. You want to feel the two of you can come to each other for help and work together, as a team. Instead, it feels like you have to choose whether to avoid anything remotely sensitive or accept having a hostile spouse. He may try to avoid thinking about it, but ultimately this setup isn’t working for him either. As humans, we need opportunities to feel safe and vulnerable with people we love. When he bottles everything up, he may start to numb his feelings instead of facing them, but they still exist. He doesn’t want to feel emotionally shut down.

You both want the same thing. You want a partner you can come to when you feel scared or alone, who you know has your back no matter what. When you try to tell him this, though, he just nods or grunts and things continue as they always have. You both need your partner to accept your primary emotions – how you really feel – not just the secondary emotions – such as anger or frustration – you feel safe to express right now. When you can express primary emotions to each other, your marriage starts to feel more like a team effort where the two of you can work together toward happiness. Instead of feeling like you don’t know the person next to you, you and your husband can learn to talk to each other and truly hear one another.

In marriage counseling, I work with the two of you to express these primary emotions. We start slowly, making sure both of you feel safe and supported by me. As we develop this, you can start to support each other. I know how isolating it feels to bottle up emotions, hoping they just go away. My experiences as a husband and father in Minnesota offer me unique insight into how to connect with these primary emotions, moving past your husband’s defenses and helping him feel like he can express himself openly and honestly. He wants to connect with you as desperately as you want to connect with him, he just doesn’t know how. In marriage counseling, I can help the two of you learn how.

Emotions run deeper than the surface. It helps to think of emotions in two forms – primary emotions and secondary emotions. Primary emotions come from our immediate, most powerful needs – to be loved, safe, and empowered. Secondary emotions also serve an important purpose – keep our primary emotions safe.

Usually, we convey our secondary emotions to one another. This means instead of being sad, I might feel resentful. Instead of feeling hurt, I may feel angry. Instead of feeling lonely, I feel hopeless. Even though I might look like a resentful, angry, hopeless man, however, the sadness, hurt, and loneliness are still there, just harder for others to see.

Unfortunately, marriages often fall into patterns involving only the secondary emotions. As soon as I see criticism, I get defensive – it’s much easier than feeling worried or sad. In response, my partner starts to see this defensiveness coming and doesn’t know I’m feeling worried and sad at the same time, so they ramp up their criticism to get a reaction. You can see where this goes.

Therapy for married couples, then, focuses on helping partners access their primary emotions. It takes a lot of work, but sitting with our feelings can give us a chance to relax our secondary emotions, letting our primary emotions start to come out. Marriage counseling, then, focuses on helping partners express their primary emotions to one another and start to see that softer side.

Marriages that only share secondary emotions don’t succeed. Both partners feel lonely and isolated, like talking never really gives them the chance to say how they really feel. Marriage counseling gives you the space to communicate these needs and desires in session, then learn skills to communicate them at home.

I offer marriage counseling services here in Minnesota, focusing on helping men start to express themselves to their partners. Opening up can feel very difficult, with a lot of potential judgement to work through in order to show any vulnerability. Learning to do so, however, can help your marriage find hope.

We actually have an objective answer to this. Affective neuroscience tells us we have two routes to fulfillment:

First, we can pursue meaningful activities. Alternatively, we can meaningfully connect with others.

Last week, we talked about autopilot and the nature of avoiding our pain. All of us have pain – our imperfect nature guarantees it. Facebook scrolling and other mindless activities offer us a meaningless way to avoid this pain – sacrifice of our mindfulness and attention. As mentioned before, this is a tempting route – life isn’t easy and forgetting that for a few hours makes a lot of sense.

Alternatively, some activities better mesh with who we want to be. Perhaps changing the oil on my car makes me feel Productive. Maybe cleaning the house satisfies my need for Progress. Reading a book might push me toward Growth. Countless tasks and activities offer us opportunities to feel not just happy, but fulfilled.

Our other route to fulfillment – meaningful connection with others – proves more complicated. I’m not talking about small talk or just co-existing with someone; these forms of connection often leave both partners feeling lonely and unfulfilled, as if something is missing and they aren’t quite sure what.

Meaningful connection requires opening up to others, embracing some level of vulnerability in order to engage on a deep level with someone we cherish. Unfortunately, our pain can often keep us from feeling safe enough to engage in this way, telling us to keep up our walls and hide rather than risk letting someone hurt us. Further complicating this, our brains start to change physically as we develop habits, making it even harder to open up to others later in life.

For many of us, our pain has walled off one path to meaning. With walls too thick to allow us to connect with others, we retreat within ourselves, looking for other ways to find fulfillment. This might mean hiding from thought and focus with mindless activities or it might mean exclusively using meaningful activities to satisfy our need for fulfillment. While this may work in the short term, it ultimately leads to feeling isolated and alone and, for those in a relationship, partners who also feel isolated and alone.

To work on both these paths to fulfillment, we must consider our values. I cannot pursue meaningful activities or connect with others if I don’t understand myself and what matters to me. This reflection can be painful and may lead us back into mindless activities in order to hide from the pain of reflection, thus reinforcing the pattern and the walls.

In therapy, the safe, judgement-free environment offers a space to let down these walls. At first, this means trusting the therapist to create a safe environment despite the difficulty in expressing what matters; over time, however, our brains begin to change as we practice new ways of being.

With time and trust, we can find a door in even the thickest walls.