Why Criticizing Your Partner is Self-Abuse

So perhaps the title of this blog has grabbed your attention. You can readily see why criticizing your partner could be abusive to him or her. But self-abuse? How can that be?

This is a long blog, so here is a synopsis: The things for which we criticize our partners are usually deeply-set personality traits that play out in habitual behaviors. Those are direct manifestations of the powerful imprints their life experience has made on them from inception right through childhood into adulthood. Those imprints are part of their actual life story, not a “take” on it that can be changed by thinking about it differently. It is what happened and was recorded in them, in their entire physiological system. Consequently, to criticize or struggle with such traits and behaviors is, unconsciously, an attempt to deny the validity of your partner’s life journey. On a practical level, it is as nonsensical as screaming at someone to be calm…but we do it anyway! When you rob their story of validity, you rob yourself of the validity of your own story and all the truth it carries. In other words, you are denying voice to the very forces that drive you to focus on your partner. Of course, your partner can do the same, in which case you have a self-reinforcing, self-justifying loop that is a closed system without the possibility of transformation…unless a significantly more global approach is taken. Such criticism, shame, blame or struggle is 360 degree abuse. It inadvertently attempts to invalidate human nature. So what is a healthy way to deal with the frustration, fear, hurt and anger that can be triggered in us by our partner’s behavior? Read on…

Now for the fuller explanation. Humans are creatures of story. We each have our own. It is imprinted in our cells. That imprint undoubtedly begins in the womb, long before we can understand or utter a word. Our brainstem and the right side of our brain, specifically the right limbic system, are the earliest parts of that three-pound wonder-gel to mature. The brainstem begins appearing at about 33 days in the womb and is mature within 6 months after birth. The right hemisphere is functioning before birth, while still in development. It is generally fully functional between our second and third birthdays.

Both the brainstem and right hemisphere are intensively involved in sensing and feeling to serve survival. We are designed for a vividly physical experience of loving and being loved. This is fundamental, biological need serving attachment which serves survival because it leads to our being protected and cared for during our most vulnerable years. We are also designed to record and remember painful experiences so we can learn from them and avoid them in the future. Compared to this early development of the sensing-feeling systems in the brain, the left hemisphere (the “thinking” brain, engaged in logic, literalness, language and linearity, as Dan Siegel has said) shows up late to the party of life. It isn’t fully operational until around age twenty-five. These facts give broad justification to the statement by Harvard neurologist Jill Bolte Taylor when she writes, “…biologically, we are feeling creatures that think” as opposed to thinking creatures that feel.

When we are most vulnerable--before birth, during it and during the first three years of life, all our important experiences, particularly the painful ones, are being experienced and processed by a sensing-feeling brain and body. This continues to be the over-riding truth all through childhood. Our experience is dominated by our fully flowered capacity to feel compared to a slowly emerging ability to think, to contextualize our experience and express it in language (generally, authentic language production doesn’t kick in until around age two when the area of the brain known as Broca’s lights up).

So the earliest chapters of our lives, the templates of our future experiences and perceptions, are being written in our brains and bodies during a time of heightened physical and emotional sensitivity, right down to the cellular level. As the brain matures upward and leftward (retracing actual evolutionary development), those templates elaborate within the new neuro-pathways, but the essential code is the same.

Imagine that the brainstem and right brain are clay tablets. Early painful experiences are etched in them in a specific biochemical alphabet designed to encode the suffering and encapsulate it. As the brain develops upward and leftward during the first twenty-five years of life, imagine that each new level of development is actually a new writing medium, even though the alphabet stays the same. From clay we move to animal skins, then to bark and then ever more refined forms of paper so that more and more complex information can be written on a single development “layer”. At each level, the alphabet is the same but the language becomes increasingly complex to where we focus on that complexity and ignore its essential components. Consequently, even when the left hemisphere does develop, moving further and further from the older (from an evolutionary point of view) structures, it is still being shaped by the pre-eminence of the original biochemical alphabet of pain and encapsulation of pain. This answers the question why seemingly brilliant (left brain logical) people can have some pretty farfetched ideas and engage in behavior that is not the least bit logical. Even their immersion in the realm of ideas itself is a way of trying to escape the early hurt whose energy may be sublimated and dissipated to some degree, but never vanishes.

If my mother was anxious during her pregnancy with me, if she was struggling economically, trying to survive a war, an earthquake, a drought or other cataclysm, if she was fighting with my father or her parents, if she had a scary accident while she was carrying me, if she had a difficult time with the birth, if she and my dad were ambivalent about having me, if they had a hard time adjusting to parenthood, having to give so much and read and respond to my infantile needs, if they had a stressful dynamic between them, if either was depressed, drank, smoked, over-ate, gambled, was addicted to work, fame, the quest for money, power, recognition, if they had bouts of helplessness and rage while rearing me, if either of them died or suffered a tragic loss while I was small, if one or both of my parents were just tough as nails, judgmental, defensive, demanding, aloof…shall I go on? If any of these and any of a thousand other possibilities were unfolding while I was growing up, those things imprinted in me to the degree that my young system could not consciously process them. This is a critical point many miss when considering childhood injury. The lasting imprint begins to be recorded at the precise second that the hurt is too severe to be consciously processed by the young system.

Normal, everyday scrapes and bruises that we can cry away as they occur are not going to stay with us. On the other hand, if an everyday scrape happens and my parent shames me when I cry, that will certainly become part of an enduring record. Crying is a natural process built into our system to help us excrete pain and learn from it. After a good, full cry, our system is returned to a more balanced state than it was before we cried and we can take whatever lesson is implicit in the injury. Crying serves our survival by optimizing our system toward homeostasis, a state Harville Hendrix has called “relaxed joyfulness” with all its attendant benefits. But when we are deprived of this capacity, overwhelming painful experience is cut off from consciousness and processed in the right side of the brain which, for all intents and purposes, becomes the home of the unconscious. (As a passing note, it is worth stating that injury can happen in the womb, well before we are capable of crying. Such a hurt would in all likelihood, by the sheer vulnerability of our system at that time, be deep and carry a broad array of possible long-term manifestations in subjective experience as well as observable personality and behavior. In a forthcoming book, Life Before Birth, Arthur Janov will go where no man has gone before in comprehensively exploring the environment and experience of the unborn child.)

Terrence Real, PhD, a widely recognized specialist in men’s issues, urges us to think more broadly about the idea of childhood trauma. He suggests we too often look for big headline kinds of experiences, like molestation, physical beatings, alcoholism in the family or the death of a parent and ignore the everyday accumulation of hurts of simply not being seen or heard by our caregivers. In his bestselling book, I Don’t Want to Talk About It (p. 106) he writes “Relatively mild childhood injury can have long-lasting effects because it occurs while the very structures of the personality, body, and brain are being formed…”

The ability to disconnect from consciousness is another survival mechanism to help us endure overarching injury. The problem with it, however, is that it does not optimize our system. It is a temporary adaptation to get us through childhood. It holds the emotional load of the original experience for later retrieval and processing. If we do not enter into that process in adulthood, when we are now safe to gradually feel our way through what was “unfeelable and unthinkable” as youngsters, our system is gradually thrown out of kilter. The “container” for the old wound is more like a cage than a hermetic capsule. Its cries may not be heard by the conscious mind (Left Prefrontal Cortex), or if they are, will have their meanings scrambled. Nonetheless, they reverberate powerfully, shaking and shaping the neural corridors of our system, making love relationships increasingly difficult, raising the odds we’ll become dependent on work, money, sex, power, the approval of others, ideas, food, drugs, alcohol. They will manifest in a variety of “disorders” and “dysfunctions”, increasing our secretions of stress hormones, raising blood pressure, depleting our brain’s capacity to produce adequate secretions of critical neurotransmitters like serotonin and dopamine, and increasing our risk for all kinds of afflictions later in life from depression to heart disease. (The mechanism by which disconnection takes place in the brain is reasonably well understood, largely through the work of Ronald Melzack with his gate theory as well as his more recent work on the neuro-matrix, and through the work of Arthur Janov in elaborating on the fine points of how the gates, in particular, operate). We will compound the problem by categorizing each emotional or physical manifestation as a separate disorder, rather than seeing the common face behind a myriad of psycho-physiological masks.

So when someone criticizes a behavior or quality that is a result of those early experiences, those imprinted templates, they are telling us our story isn’t real or valid…or they are saying they can’t tolerate the truth of our story, of what happened to us and how it is showing up today. Most criticizers go further. They tell us we are bad, wrong or dumb for being a certain way and doing a certain way, or for not being strong or tough enough to rise above that early pain. But that kind of message—you need to be tougher—is exactly the kind of early impact that caused the difficulty in the first place. It is telling a tender young system that it should not be tender and young. At its essence, the message is, “Don’t be so hurt. If you are that way, you can’t be the loving mom or dad I need you to be for me and that is intolerable. I was deprived as a child. Now I’m deprived again as an adult. It’s just too much to bear!”

Of course, this is not to say that we have to love everything our partner does. Expecting a perfect match utterly absent of disagreement or friction is another perspective forged from thwarted childhood need. So, it’s fine to dislike a behavior or quality of our partner. It’s fine to ask our partner to alter a behavior as well. But there is a big difference between asking on the one hand and demanding on the other. Fixating on a behavior, struggling to change, bend, spindle and mutilate it is simply mis-targeting. If it bothers us that much, the odds are upwards of ninety percent that it has triggered something in our own unconscious. That pain is a call to us. It is a message launched in a bottle from the shores of childhood suddenly being tossed up on the beach of the present. That’s why we need to shift our attention to the inner world and enhance our skills in navigating it, not indict our partner. (Of course, there may be some behaviors for which we have to establish a boundaries to protect ourselves in the present—such as infidelity and physical abuse, to mention only two. If therapy cannot heal them, divorce may be a rational move.)

Again, we tell our partner , directly or indirectly, we can’t abide how they are, we are negating our own story as well. We can’t have it both ways. There isn’t one “right” story and one “right” storyteller—us! If your story is invalid to me, then the very idea of the imprint is invalid in my eyes, whether I wish to admit it or not. Thus, when I criticize you, I am negating my own truth; I am joining with the forces that afflicted both of us in the first place, the forces that squelched our true original voices and our respective realities. When the poet John Donne wrote, “…every man’s death diminishes me” he was right on. Negating the life experience of any man or woman is a tantamount to attempting to kill their personhood. It is also a negation of the truth of what human beings are: creatures that come into the world as highly vulnerable and dependent feelers; creatures who do not choose their parents or their path through the world into adulthood, creatures whose prime mission is to survive and who will do so by sequestering, when they must, the painful aspects of their journey in a dark place, away from daily awareness.

There is far too much glibness present right now among some of the speakers, authors and consultants in the country when it comes to the idea of “neuroplasticity”. We are told, “Change your thinking, change your brain, change your life.” This is bumper-sticker psychology, espoused by the High Priests of the Left Prefrontal Cortex. We listen to them at our peril. Their exhortations fly in the face of the truth residing between our ears and in our bodies. We became thinking creatures last, long after we were already fully feeling. Joseph LeDoux, author of The Emotional Brain, teaches us that the neuropathways from the limbic (feeling) system up to the neocortex are far more developed than the neuropathways back to the limbic system. This is a neurological way of saying it is a fool’s errand trying to think your way out of what you were wounded into. So telling your partner he/she should be different, should buck up and forget the past, is an attempt to negate evolution. This is not about our perspective on our life’s journey. It’s the experience itself written in our cells in a biochemical alphabet whose characters are forged in deprivation of need. Further, it is no longer the past but an enduring imprint that lives within us.

It also bears stating that gaining an intellectual understanding of the way we evolved, how we are wired, what our true nature is by reading a piece such as this one, can be helpful in guiding us in the right direction. However, understanding alone will not stop us from engaging in criticism. For that, a much deeper shift will be necessary, one that engages more of the total brain and nervous system.

When we consider all this, we begin to see the fog lifting from the whole idea of blaming, shaming, criticizing, struggling with our partner, defending ourselves, even acting out. We do it because we unconsciously are trying to get away from the hurt that lives in us. When you act in a way that doesn’t satisfy my present needs, it lights up the neuro-matrix that holds my old hurt. That feels bad. So, reactively, I try to get you to change so that you satisfy my needs and stay away from the old hurt. If I succeed, we have a lose-lose situation. Ironically, if you do change your behavior and begin to satisfy a need that links down into the early injury, I will not be able to fully experience your gracious giving for very long, because it will still light up that neuro-matrix by reminding me that I didn’t get this kind of love when I was little. My early violated needs will be unmasked by the blam of your love.

So where is the win-win to be had? It exists in openly acknowledging these dynamics as central to human experience, in supporting each other in a process by which we both get to honor our story, tell our story, grieve it deeply over time as aspects of it become available for conscious processing and ultimately, in the words of Dr. Brene Brown, fully reclaim our worthiness, the truth and validity of our life story.

In Imago couples work, this unfolds on a regular basis. I have experienced it firsthand as a participant and had the privilege of witnessing people from their twenties to their eighties suddenly connect to the emotion of a long-ago moment and double over in tears in their partners’ laps. It is gut and heart-wrenching work that requires a different set of skills than most of us possess—the skill to stop defending, to fall into the feeling that is there, usually in the chest or solar plexus, and fully surrender to its cry of pain. Afterwards, people regularly say things like, “I had totally forgotten that,” or “I had no idea there was still so much hurt in me about that,” or “It was so long ago…I’m amazed at how deep the feeling still is.” In my own individual inner work, I have had this same experience many times over the last forty years and have also had the privilege of witnessing it in others. Its power and truth are undeniable.

Memory sequestered gradually distorts and erodes our psychological and physiological health. Memory opened gradually will hurt…but it is a hurt that we can finally handle in adulthood…a hurt that heals.

Special Note: For this blog, I’ve leaned heavily on the works of Brene Brown, PhD, Dr. Antonio Damasio, Harville Hendrix, PhD, Arthur Janov, PhD, Joseph Le Doux, PhD, Dr. Alan Schore, Dr. Dan Siegel and Jill Bolte Taylor, PhD. Each has made a unique and important contribution to our understanding of how our brains and bodies are affected by, hide, remember and express hurt.

C 2011 Bob Kamm

 

The Judgment on Judgment

     There is a popular notion that judging is bad. We have the biblical warning, "Judge not, lest ye be judged." We have Buddha saying, "Make no comparisons" which is what a judgment is. Therapists and self-help afficionados regularly coach us not to judge, not to make others wrong, but rather to listen and be present non-defensively. There's some real merit to this but before we get to that, I think we need to untangle
a few things.
      The human brain is wired to make comparisons and judgments, to know what is good water to drink and what bad; to know what is a good plant to eat and what bad, to know which animals can be approached without fear and which we should stay away from. It is also wired to use this capacity when interacting with other humans. First, who am I safe with? Who will nurture me and love me? Later, who is a good friend I can count on to be a good playmate. Still later, who is a good person to work with or for; who is someone I can trust with my effort, my money, my heart? All of these require that we hone our capacity to make good reality-based judgments. We are learning creatures, so we build on past experience. This doesn't always guide us to the best decision, but then, if we make a mistake, we have another opportunity to learn. So there is a critical, life-saving and life building capacity to the ability to judge well, to be good at comparing. Frankly, in my role as a consultant for individuals and organizations, I get paid for my clarity about the best options, and for my ability to grow that same acumen in others. Having good judgment about who to hire, what to pay them, how to put them in a situation where they can do the best for the company...not to mention having good judgment about how to bring a product or service to market, how to maintain a competitive advantage--all these are very important functions. As a mother or father, it's critical to have good judgment in discerning what food is actually nutritious, what schools are good, what teachers in those schools are the best, to what degree your children should be exposed to TV and other technologies...and so on, more important decisions where good judgment is called for.
      So let's not paint with too broad a brush and give judgment per se a bad name. It's part of our survival and thrival repertoire.  It can also really get in the way of a relationship, especially a love relationship. Maintaining a deep, empathetic connection with your partner is simply far more important than making judgments about him or her. I'm specifically thinking of how people tend to make their partners wrong or feel less than. What's the upside to that? Oh, yes, if you're wrong, I'm right and I get to feel good. I do? I love you. You feel bad that I made you wrong and now I feel good?       Somehow, that just doesn't pencil as a strategy for intimacy, does it? So when we say, "Judge not..." we are talking about the realm of human experience. We are saying that judgment separates us from others, rather than uniting us. We are saying that if I dismiss my partner's needs as childish instead of hearing the child within those needs and ministering to him or her, if I do that, I am stepping back, not forward towards my partner. I am being cold, not warm.  The same applies in many other situations. I see a homeless person on the street. If I think, "Oh, that fellow is a useless, disgusting, a drunk" I have forgotten one of the cardinal rules of life: there but for the grace of God or circumstance go I." Malcolm Gladwell has pretty well put to rest the idea that there is really any such thing as "a self-made man" or woman in his book Outliers. Those of us who have good lives have them only partially because of our own efforts and to a large degree because of good fortune and opportunity. When we start thinking it's really all about us, we are descending into narcissism.   It is quite possible to disagree with your partner without making him or her feel stupid. In fact, it's possible to mentally note that you disagree and then move into curiosity about why your partner sees it the way he or she does.
      It's possible make a judgment to avoid another human being without erasing his or her humanity. It is possible to be temporarily angry at someone without doing same. It is possible to disagree with the politics of someone without demonizing him It is possible to think that your kid's teacher isn't very good at teaching without robbing her of her humanity.
      There is a large middle ground here where judgment and empathy not only can co-exist but should and do when we are secure in our own selfhood. Sadly, this territory has been abandoned by many of our public figures. When we label or judge or one-dimensionalize another, we legitimize the whole activity of labelling, judging and one-dimensionalizing a human being...and that includes others doing it to us. A vicious cycle that turns others (and ourselves) into objects, like a donkey on whom we want to pin a tail just to feel better. If we compulsively go around doing that, labeling and judging others, flattening their humanity into a cardboard cut-out, it speaks much more loudly about something missing in us than it does the reality of others. It puts up an arrow the size of a billboard pointing to our past and asking, "What happened to you? What happened to your ability to walk in another person's shoes?" The obvious task, then, is to take responsibility for something being lost or denied within us...meaning, get into therapy. There are plenty of good therapists out there who specialize in this kind of emotional recovery. We certainly focus on that in our Imago work, but so do many others, including those who have been trained by Terrence Real in Boston and Sue Johnson in Ottawa, and the Janov's in LA. I'm sure there are others I"m not familiar with.
      The point is to embrace the fact that if you are a chronically judgmental person, you are separating yourself from others. It's a self-reinforcing downward spiral. You judge them. That makes you feel separate and alone. In turn, to cope with that feeling, you make them wrong or less than you. This denies you much of the richness of life available through deep connection and vulnerability. It is a primary impulse in humans to attach to each other; detachment is a secondary adaptation to a painful experience. So, clearly, if you're constantly labeling and detaching from others or simply diminishing them (there are always degrees along a continuum with this sort of behavior), there is a reason. Something, perhaps many things happened as you grew up and moved into adulthood. Those reasons can be discovered through gentle emotional archaeology...and ultimately healed. We know too much today about how human beings function to just settle for being a frustrated person who tries to convince himself he or she is right and most of the rest of the world is wrong.
The bottom line on judgment, then, seems to be that when it serves our survival and our thriving, it's a good thing. But in our love relationships, at work, in our community if we use it in a way that is disconnected from essential human feelings, it speaks more volumes about us than the object of our judgment. In that case, the bible is quite right: judge not, lest ye be judged.
C 2011 Bob Kamm

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