Making Marriage Work, Part 2
continued
3. Dialogue with the feelings
4. Dialogue with your Higher Power
5. Take loving action
6. Evaluate the action.
We will start with Step One of Inner Bonding: Willingness. In Step One, you choose to be willing to feel your feelings and take responsibility for them, rather than turn to protective, controlling, addictive behavior.
You cannot change your automatic reactive behaviors until you become aware of the feelings of fear that trigger them.
What do you feel in your body when someone gets angry, blaming, or judgmental toward you?
What do you feel in your body when someone shuts down, withdraws, or becomes resistant toward you?
Take a moment to tune into your body and see what it feels like when your fears of rejection or engulfment become triggered. What happens in your stomach, your throat, your heart, your arms and legs? Does your body fill with adrenaline and go into the fight or flight reaction - the stress response?
You cannot begin to react differently when your fears of rejection or engulfment are triggered until you know that fear is being activated. You will unconsciously continue to respond with your learned protections until you become conscious of what you are protecting against.
We have all learned many ways of avoiding feeling and being conscious of our feelings. All addictive behavior - substance abuse, process addictions, reactive behavior toward others, and judgmental thoughts toward ourselves - are ways of avoiding feeling the deep loneliness, as well as helplessness over the other person's behavior and feelings, that is at the core of all addictive behaviors. When your partner behaves in some rejecting or controlling way toward you, this deep loneliness and helplessness is activated. But these are such difficult feelings to feel that most of us will turn to our learned addictive behaviors to avoid them. We will either try to have control over the other person by getting angry, judgmental or giving in, or we will try to control the pain of the loneliness with substance and process addictions.
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