Northampton Center For Couples Therapy’s Post

Transcript

Hi, everybody. It's Carrie Lusignan at the Northampton Center for Couples Therapy. Welcome to my video channel. Today I'm going to be doing, I guess it's the fifth in a series of relationships, superpower skills that I'm talking with you about. What I am doing is I'm identifying what I consider to be really the most important critical skills to have if you want to have a relationship that thrives and where you get all the good stuff. And make this information available to you so you can sort of start to try it out at home and see if you can make sparks fly. So today I'm going to be talking about kind of a cool relationship, superpower skill. And I wrote down what it was. I'm going to look at my journal because it's another mouthful, but as always, just like, hang in there with me because this is, this is really concrete, simple stuff. So. Cardio, kinesis, cardiac manipulation. This has to do with your relationship. I promise you. Just hang in there and this is a really simple thing to talk about and learn. So what I want to talk to you about is what happens on a physiological level to you and to your partner when you get into conflict with each other. And now some of this is going to sound like common sense. Some of it you may know. Hopefully some of it will be new information. What we know when people escalate into conflict, often not always but often, is that our heart rates go up. And when our heart rates go up, they can get us into real trouble. The general rule of thumb is if your heart rate goes up to over 95 beats a minute, you're in what John Gottman calls diffuse physiological arousal. Another term we use for it sometimes is flooding. And when you're flooding your body, basically, and your mind. No longer working like they normally would. The distribution of blood that's in you, in your brain leaves it because it's preparing to help you run. Your body is like there's a Tyrannosaurus Rex coming after me and I need to either fight or flee. Some of us freeze. You've probably heard that the 3F's fight, flight, or freeze. So what we know is that actually, we are often. Manipulating each others cardiology, even though we don't realize it and we don't intend it. There's fascinating studies out there that show this. There's studies that have been done around women who are getting MRI's done and they monitor their heart rates to see how their body is responding to the stress of it. And their heart rates of course go up and then they monitor their Physiology to see how they do when nurses in the room and their heart rates start to go down and then they monitor their Physiology. To see how they respond when their partners in the room and their partners sits next to them and talks to them or takes their hand and their heart rate goes right down. We're like each other's biofeedback devices which is pretty cool. We see this with moms and infants all the time. We know that it's it's we now know that an infants heartbeat will sink to its mother's heartbeat when its mother is holding it, when it's mother is nursing it and that we will sort of intuitively. Hold a child on the left side of us near our heartbeat. So. We are constantly informing each others Physiology. Now there are times when this happens, this cardiac manipulation, and we're soothing each other. But there are other times it happens and we're scaring the hell out of each other. John Gottman did research that showed that when you put two people in a room together who are in the process of getting a divorce, just being in the room with each other in the first minute UPS their heartbeats to above 95 beats a minute. So how does this pertain to you in your relationship, what it means? There's a good chance if you're in conflict with your partner that your heart rates either going up past a certain level that is helpful. And if it does, you're not going to be able to think clearly, talk clearly or remember things. Or you're going into like what we call hypo arousal and you're actually your heart rate goes up when you wrist talking. So you start to shut down to avoid that feeling because it's really unpleasant and you know it's normal to want to kind of. Constrict from that. But then what happens is you've got one person who's like, hey, let's talk. I want to connect heart rate up another person who's like, whoa, danger threat just curling up like a woolly bear Caterpillar just shutting down. OK, so this is important information to have because one if you know that you're affecting each other's Physiology. And you can start to become aware of it. You can start to do things, to be sensitive to the implications of that. Sometimes all you can do if your heart rates up or your partner's heart rate is up is take a break to get it down. But here's the thing. It only takes about 20 minutes to get your heart rate down into flesh stress hormones, out of your system, into your bladder so that they become inert. So I'm not talking about taking breaks forever when I suggest this. Sometimes people get afraid. They think, I mean. That I'm talking about, you know, just never returning to a topic, you have to start to be able to develop a tolerance to enter into conflict and to keep your heart rate down. Now the more beautiful thing that can be done to get heart rates down, and this requires more skill sometimes, and sometimes it requires couples therapy. But the more beautiful thing that can be done is you actually have the ability to bring your partner's heart rate down as much as you do to bring it up. So what are things you can do to bring it down? When you're sensing that your partner is upset, you're going to want to track their body language, and you're certainly going to want a partner who reciprocates that for you, I contact. Friendly expressions, soft voice, tone, pacing of words. We are in the land of nonverbals now. We are in the limbic system. In the limbic system, when we are talking about calming each other's nervous system responds just as a baby would to not words. It doesn't matter what you say. If you say it really intensely like that and you make a face like that, it's not going to work. But if you say something like this and you make a face. Kind of like this. It's going to sound radically different to your partner. One thing you can do to experiment with this is to get like a little finger pulse oximeter. We actually use them at my center, the Northampton Center for Couples Therapy. And we will have couples monitor their own heart rates and each others and notice what they can do to get their partners heart rate down and their partners heart rate up. Another thing that you can do to work on this is you can cultivate a practice in mindfulness. Meditation. Now mindfulness meditation is a whole other video in itself, but I just want to say there's over about 40 studies to date that show that if you practice mindfulness based meditation just 5 minutes a day for eight weeks, you structurally change the way your brain is made-up. You increase the Gray matter, you change the parts of your brain that are more reactive. It's like lifting weights. You lift weights, you get more muscles, you do mindfulness based meditation, you get better. Controlling your nervous system. This is like Jedi Master stuff as much as it's superhero stuff, but it's doable. So this is just a quick impromptu video. I hope you found it helpful. If you liked it, I've got four other superpower videos on this channel, as well as more to come. Feel free to subscribe to my YouTube channel and thanks for listening.