Ethical Slut - Dossie Easton [66]
So: if feelings like to be heard, and anger is a feeling that can be very hard to hear, how can we vent anger without creating more trouble than we relieve?
EXERCISE Gibberish Fight
This will be both silly and very satisfying. Set the timer for two minutes. Stand facing each other, a little distance apart. Express your anger simultaneously with stance and gesture: stamp your feet, wave your arms, and speak to your partner in entirely inarticulate sounds—moans, groans, sighs, growls. (If you’re not sure what we mean here, imagine Donald Duck having a tantrum.) It’s hard to describe this in words, but when you go for the drama, freed from the need to make sentences, or to figure out who’s right and who’s wrong, or even to make any sense at all, you’ll communicate your feelings very well—and then have a good laugh. This is a great way to vent and break up the tension before a more serious conversation.
Triggering
How is it that we sometimes get triggered into very strong emotions, particularly at times of intimate conflict? We all do it; it’s not just you. Dossie recalls at nineteen having panic attacks that seemed to come out of nowhere, until one day she noticed that something had moved fast near her face. Her father was prone to sudden bursts of temper accompanied by a hard slap across the face, and Dossie realized that whenever something moved suddenly near her face—even her lover—some part of her believed that she was about to get hit. Once she understood this, she became able to look around and see that nothing was threatening her in the present, and these panic attacks disappeared.
New research into brain functioning has given us a lot of very useful information about how triggering works on the physiological level. We have an organ called the “amygdala” in the middle of our brains, right under the hypothalamus, that does the job of remembering situations associated with strong emotions, both pleasurable and terrifying, and setting us into action. The most familiar form of this phenomenon is its greatest extreme, the flashbacks experienced by abuse survivors and combat veterans.
The amygdala has a direct line to the pituitary gland and can set off our emergency response systems before our intellects can catch up. Adrenaline pours into our bloodstream, norepinephrine floods our synapses, our cells release all their sugars into our veins to give us energy to fight or run, and everything instantly feels terribly, terribly urgent. Triggering is particularly common, and intense, in intimate arguments, where all of our old triggers we learned as children, when we were truly helpless, may get stimulated.
The first thing to recognize is that nothing can get resolved in this adrenalized state. The flight-fight-freeze responses to adrenaline give us tremendous energy to survive a crisis, but not very much in the way of common sense.
But all is not lost. Two things happen during this physiological stress response that we can learn to use. The first is that if we can occupy ourselves for fifteen or twenty minutes without restimulating the stress reflex, our physiology will return to normal and we will return to sanity. The process of taking a time-out to get calm again is described below.
Better yet, every time we succeed in spending that fifteen minutes taking care of ourselves in the kindest way we can muster, we actually physically heal our amygdalas—by growing more fibers that deliver soothing neurotransmitters—and thus increase our capacity to soothe ourselves in a crisis. So practice, practice, practice being kind to yourself.
Here’s how to take a time-out when you and a partner get triggered. Find a way to stop and separate, then find a kindly way to take