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From The Durable Love Guides — a nine-Guide series for couples, written by Jerry Wheeler, LMHC, NCC. The Guides take up specific predicaments couples recognize themselves in and draw a single clinical distinction with precision. They are not techniques. They are accurate descriptions of what is actually happening — written in the register of someone who does this work for a living and has no interest in softening it.
There are conversations you and your partner begin that become, somewhere in the middle, impossible to have. One of you says something you did not mean. One of you stops being able to take in what the other is saying. Afterward — sometimes only minutes later — you may find yourself bewildered by what you just did, because the person who did those things does not match the person you know yourself to be.
This Guide is about what happens in those moments. Specifically: the physiology that produces the behavior, the threshold at which the physiology takes over, and the reason no communication technique, however good, can work past the threshold once you have crossed it.
The material is usually treated as if it were character — as if your behavior in hard conversations revealed something about who you are underneath. It does not. It reveals something about what your nervous system does under activation, which is different and which is addressable through different kinds of work than the communication frame can offer.
The Guide renders the experience from inside and from across, distinguishes between windows that narrow from practice and windows that are constitutionally narrower, and orients you toward the specific work that widens what can be widened.
This is Guide 2 of 9 in The Durable Love Guides series. Each Guide stands alone. Together they describe what durable love is built from.
From The Durable Love Guides — a nine-Guide series for couples, written by Jerry Wheeler, LMHC, NCC. The Guides take up specific predicaments couples recognize themselves in and draw a single clinical distinction with precision. They are not techniques. They are accurate descriptions of what is actually happening — written in the register of someone who does this work for a living and has no interest in softening it.
There are conversations you and your partner begin that become, somewhere in the middle, impossible to have. One of you says something you did not mean. One of you stops being able to take in what the other is saying. Afterward — sometimes only minutes later — you may find yourself bewildered by what you just did, because the person who did those things does not match the person you know yourself to be.
This Guide is about what happens in those moments. Specifically: the physiology that produces the behavior, the threshold at which the physiology takes over, and the reason no communication technique, however good, can work past the threshold once you have crossed it.
The material is usually treated as if it were character — as if your behavior in hard conversations revealed something about who you are underneath. It does not. It reveals something about what your nervous system does under activation, which is different and which is addressable through different kinds of work than the communication frame can offer.
The Guide renders the experience from inside and from across, distinguishes between windows that narrow from practice and windows that are constitutionally narrower, and orients you toward the specific work that widens what can be widened.
This is Guide 2 of 9 in The Durable Love Guides series. Each Guide stands alone. Together they describe what durable love is built from.