complete its cycle. And remember that it’s not your partner’s fault or obligation; their help is entirely voluntary and provides an opportunity for you to express gratitude for the support.
4. Communicate the Feeling and the Need. At last, the easiest part. “I feel x,” you say, “and I think what would help is y.” For example, “I feel threatened by the time you spend with your coworker, and I could use some kind of plan that will give me reassurance.” Or, “I still have this hurt about that time you did x, and what I need is some time to go through that emotional tunnel so I can get to the light at the end.”
Since writing the Scientific Guide, I’ve come to think of staying over your emotional center of gravity as the “sleepy hedgehog” model of emotion management. If you find a sleepy hedgehog in the chair you were
about to sit in, you should
• give it a name
• sit peacefully with it in your lap • figure out what it needs • tell your partner about the need, so you can collaborate to help the hedgehog Getting mad at the hedgehog or being afraid of it won’t help you or the hedgehog, and you certainly can’t just shove it into your partner’s lap, shouting, “SLEEPY HEDGEHOG! ” and expect them to deal with all its spiky quills. It’s your hedgehog. The calmer you are when you handle it, the less likely you are to get hurt yourself, or to hurt someone else.
Choose to Heal A friend of mine left a bad relationship and declared (on Facebook), “I choose to hurt no longer. [Ex-partner] can’t hurt me anymore.” The second sentence is 100 percent true and cause for celebration. But the first sentence doesn’t make sense from an attachment/completing-the-cycle point of view. When you leave a bad relationship, you have all this pent- up hurt and rage and even fear locked up inside you, which must be allowed to discharge safely.
What makes more sense is, “I choose to allow the hurt to heal.” Healing always involves pain—if you break your finger, it hurts, gradually less and less until it heals. Same goes for healing emotional injury. You can’t choose for your broken heart not to hurt, any more than you can choose for a broken bone not to hurt. But you can recognize the pain as part of the healing, and you can trust your heart to heal, just as you trust your bones to heal, knowing that it will gradually hurt less and less as you recover.
survival of the social
Which brings me to an additional stress response known as “tend and 30befriend,” which we can think of as the marriage of stress and attachment.
As an ultrasocial species, our survival depends not just on our individual ability to fight, run, or shut down, but also on our ability to collaborate with our tribe, so that we can protect them and they can protect us. Women may be more likely than men to access this “affiliative” stress response, dealing with potential threats by connecting affectionately with people. As always, to what extent this difference is inborn and to what extent it’s learned isn’t clear, but the differences start early, with girls as young as eighteen months being more likely than boys to approach, rather than avoid, a parent doing 31scary things.
Where stress and attachment overlap, the message of your emotional One Ring is, “I am lost!” and when you escape the lion and run to your
attachment object, the message is, “I am home.” If you’ve ever found yourself checking your email obsessively when you’re stressed, or updating Twitter, or texting your partner just to say, “hey,” or calling all your friends one after the next, or, like Elle in Legally Blonde, running for an emergency manicure, you may have experienced the tend and befriend stress response.
Both feeling taken care of and taking care of others register in your stress response as “completing the cycle.”
But in modern culture, there’s a contradiction built into the social remedies to stress. On the one hand, being around other people is often a core part of allowing our stress response to complete, particularly for women. On the other hand, we put the brakes on, self-inhibiting our stress response, in order to stay socially appropriate and not make other people uncomfortable. We hold on to our incomplete stress response in order to access the security of being with our tribe.
And, of course, this contradiction is even more pronounced for women, 32 who are the culturally sanctioned “managers of relationships.”When the going gets tough in a heterosexual relationship, it often falls to the woman to rein in her own stress response, in order to create space for the man to feel his Feels. In other words, if there is stress in a relationship, cultural rules make it likely to impact the woman more than the man, and it’s likely to impact her sexual interest and response. And because she has to hold on to her stress, so that her partner can let his go, she is more likely to become stuck in her stress, while he moves through his.
I blame Charles Dickens. Take Mrs. Cratchit from A Christmas Carol.
Her son, Tiny Tim, dies, and she tells her other children that she’s crying because the color of her sewing hurts her eyes, and she “wouldn’t want to show weak eyes” to her husband. When I was little, I used to think, as Dickens wanted me to, Mrs. Cratchit is so brave. But now that I know about the stress response cycle, I want to yell, “Lady, your child died! It’s not ‘weak’ to cry! And your other kids deserve to know that it’s normal to grieve!”
Being with the tribe doesn’t replace the Feels built into completing the cycle. We need to discharge the stress response, complete the cycle, before our bodies can move on. “Home” is the place—physical and emotional— where we can discharge stress without being judged or shamed or told we just need to relax or forget about it. “Home” is where we receive our partner’s “loving presence.” People who listen with a loving presence are