In my last post, I shared an example of a woman who broke, mentally, physically, and spiritually. I described the moment when her body took over and announced that it couldn’t take it anymore, couldn’t take one more ounce of anger coming at her, that she had nothing left to give to make things work. It was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back, and the moment when the broken and dysfunctional system collapsed.
Sometimes we need to break to change, to be brought to our knees. But often we can make changes while we’re still standing, although we have to be willing to do things differently. If we don’t change our own behaviors, nothing will change.
The first step in getting free from this anger-defensiveness cycle is awareness. That is, to be able to see the patterns we’re acting out—how, in trying to stay safe and keep the peace, we’re actually playing a part in the continuation of this harmful pattern. Jumping to self-blame, still trying to figure it all out, making nice when none of it feels nice, smoothing the awkwardness, and making it all seem okay, like nothing happened—all of our fixing is just our part in keeping the broken system running.
After awareness comes acceptance. We must accept that our need to make things right and eliminate conflict may have become hardwired in us, and therefore not get caught up in judging it and ourselves, once again falling down the rabbit hole of self-criticism and avoiding the issue at hand: the anger and defensiveness. As a species, we need to survive, and deeply wired into us is the belief that maintaining relationships will make that possible. While this may not align with reality, our bodies still believe it, so we will do anything to maintain the connection with our partner, even if it means throwing ourselves under the bus for someone we may not even like or respect, and might even want to lose.
So too, we need to accept that what we’re doing isn’t working—that all the mental gymnastics, figuring out, fawning, and pretending it’s all okay doesn’t make any of this okay and doesn’t change the system, and won’t change the dynamic in the future. And we need to acknowledge that all our strategies are just Band-Aids for a systemic problem. Our efforts may put out the fires when they’re raging, but they don’t deactivate the cause of the fire.
Finally, we have to accept reality as it is, to recognize that anger and defensiveness hurt us. It’s not what we want in our lives. And yet, that is what we’re living, and often have been living for a long time. We have to get real with the truth: this is how we’re treated in our relationship, not all the time probably, but enough of the time for it to matter.
We have to be honest about what’s actually true and stop hiding from the reality. This is not someone else’s relationship—it’s our relationship, the person we’re choosing to spend our precious time with. This situation of anger and defensiveness is how we are choosing to live, as Mary Oliver put it, our one “wild and precious life.”
While we like to think of these episodes as one-offs and not that important, not the whole story, we still have to pull the lens back and look at how much of our energy goes into trying to get okay with something that’s not okay, making something work that’s broken, and taking responsibility for cleaning up someone else’s mess. And we have to accept that even if we think that none of this matters or counts in the grand scheme, our life is still passing by with this as our reality. This is where our energy and attention are being spent. This is our life—not the dress rehearsal. We don’t get this time back.
The last part of the change process is action. We have to change our own behaviors around anger and defensiveness—to stop fixing the situation when it’s not working, even though leaving it broken sets off every alarm bell inside us and goes against every intuition and protective cell in our body. Still, we have to shut our mouths, sit on our hands, stop smiling, leave the room, or do whatever we need to do to not make it all okay. To simply (but not easily) let the brokenness that our partner created just be, without taking it on as our responsibility to fix, to let the chaos be and not restore the peace. If we can do that for a few seconds or even a full minute at a time, that’s the practice, however small we start.
Simultaneously, we have to stop trying to mentally muscle our way through this, figure it all out, understand what we did wrong, and with more mental gymnastics, come up with yet another strategy that will change our partner and make them less angry and defensive. We have to remind ourselves again and again that this approach of figuring it out doesn’t work and hasn’t worked. We’ve tried it, and this problem is not something that we can figure out.
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If our partner chooses to take responsibility for their actions, to change, then that will happen, but it’s not our failing for not being able to figure it out; it’s not something that our mind can figure out, and most importantly, it’s not something that we can change. At the end of the day, we have to stop taking responsibility for fixing what we didn’t cause. And maybe hardest of all, we have to be willing to live with the discomfort—and refrain from making it all okay. We have to sit with not okay.
When we take these three steps—awareness, acceptance, and action—something remarkable and profound becomes possible. As excruciating as it is to get there, we are, in a strange sense, rewarded for being brought to our knees, regardless of whether we were forced to adopt a new approach or have willingly “chosen” to shift. Firstly, when we stop rushing in to fix the situation and make everything okay, we have to actually feel what it’s like to be on the receiving end of this anger and defensiveness. We have to be with it as opposed to avoiding it by doing all the things we do to restore the peace.
The experience of feeling the pain of it, however, is our fire; it compels us to take other kinds of steps, and sometimes to say no and get clear about what we don’t want in our lives anymore. Even though it’s painful and unfamiliar, feeling the feelings as opposed to making the conflict disappear creates momentum for change.
At the same time, when we stop making everything nice and comforting, and stop reassuring them that they did nothing wrong and are not responsible for having hurt us, then we leave them to “hold the bag” for what they did and said. When we stop absolving them of responsibility, they’re left to claim it for themselves, and maybe even feel remorse. They may or may not feel anything like remorse, or change their behavior, but we’re no longer making it easy for them to deny what happened.
One thing is for sure: If we don’t stop making it okay for them to hurt us, they for sure won’t stop. Consequences can trigger change, so have the courage to let there be consequences, not just for you, but for them as well.
