The Cost of Criticism

 Criticism, blame and shame--the Big 3 Negatives--can be deadly to a relationship. Why do we engage in them? The next time you have the impulse to visit either of these on your partner, try to catch yourself and check in with what's really going on under the surface. My bet is you'll discover a need and a set of feelings that you are not fully owning, and certainly not expressing in a direct and clean manner. Why is it so difficult for most of us to just ask for what we need...and why are we so quick to shift responsibility for our well-being to our partner...which really puts us in the position of being a victim, in spite of all our huffing and puffing to the contrary?
We might say that we criticize, shame and blame others precisely to avoid being on the receiving end of same, to avoid feeling wrong or bad. Feeling wrong or bad tends to light up the central brain and brainstem...we feel threatened and with very little participation from our executive centers in the neocortex,
react because those parts of the brain are designed specifically for that kind of quick reaction, to save our lives. But our lives are not actually in danger in the overwhelming majority of situations where we perpetrate the Big 3. So what's up?
Well, think about the consequences to us when we are little children and are made to feel wrong or bad. As children, we actually have little or no power. The power legitimately resides outside us in the hands of our caregivers. To anger them often yields consequences that are very difficult for little people to absorb. To be wrong or bad might mean we get spanked or yelled at and put down, ignored or isolated, or not fed when we're hungry, not changed when we're wet, not moved to a cooler or warmer environment when we're uncomfortable. It might mean privileges or prized toys or tools are taken away. The people to whom we look for safety, nurturance and love suddenly remove all of that. Most of the time, they don't do this because they're bad people...but because they're just not able to rise to the best possible version of themselves for some reason--a terrible economy pressing in on them, a natural catastrophe, war or the surfacing of some demon from their own emotional heritage.
In this situation, our system is likely to be overwhelmed and the feeling of emotional violation, loss, even a kind of temporary emotional death--these are all palpable and real to a child. The younger and smaller we are at the moment, the more dependent, the more dependent, the more likely the experience is authentically traumatic. No child can live with a continuing awareness that his or her caregivers are capable of this kind of reversal from the loving beings we need them to be. It's a genuinely shocking turn of events. In order to adapt to such an environment, those feelings of shock and loss get stuffed into the back pocket of the brain--the unconscious mind. They are held in the limbic system of the brain, the brainstem and in all likelihood, on a cellular level throughout the body. But they are not dead...far from it. Years later, as adults, no matter how old and experienced we are, when we find ourselves in a relationship whose intimacy resonates with those early intimate and dependent relationships, those feelings get stirred up. They hijack our consciousness and our behavior in the moment. This is why a six foot five inch 250 lb man can react as if he has no power when his five foot, 100 lb partner says something that touches the early emotional heritage. Next thing you know, he is using all his adult language and conceptual skills to respond by lambasting her with a ferocious verbal attack...or he is withdrawing and sulking like a three year-old. In either case, he is not his grownup self. He is incapable of seeing that whatever his partner has said is arising either from an innocent and real need for more closeness in the present, or may also be underpinned by her own old hurt. In short, we criticize, blame and shame because we are unconsciously triggered into an early scenario in which the power really did reside outside of us. We lose our grip on the present moment. This is a painful and divisive dynamic. It's cost is enormous--broken hearts, abandoned children, ugly battles over money, property and custody.
How do we get out of this? With the proper tools and coaching and commitment to be self-aware and use them, we gradually learn to speak directly from the feeling that is arising in a non-aggressive manner. "That hurts me." "I feel sad when you talk to me that way." "I'm scared when you do that." "I'm feeling engulfed, overwhelmed, like a little kid." Such openness and honesty is not easily achieved in a culture that worships supermen and superwomen...but it can be achieved. When it is, it brings grieving for both members of a couple, and in that grieving there is healing; and from that grieving is born a newer, deeper empathetic connection...and, sometimes, poetry.
C 2011 Bob Kamm