UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT: The following transcript is provided in its raw, unedited form and may contain errors. We have not proofread this transcript, so it may include typographical errors or other mistakes due to inconsistencies in audio quality, background noise, or other factors. We cannot guarantee its precision or completeness. We encourage you to use this rough transcript as a supplement to your own notes and recollection of the session.
Tami Simon: Hello, friends. My name’s Tami Simon, and I’m the founder of Sounds True. And I want to welcome you to the Sounds True podcast, Insights at the Edge.
I also want to take a moment to introduce you to Sounds True’s new membership community and digital platform. It’s called Sounds True One. Sounds True One features original premium transformational docuseries, community events, classes to start your day and relax in the evening, special weekly live shows including a video version of Insights at the Edge with an aftershow community question-and-answer session with featured guests. I hope you’ll come join us, explore, come have fun with us, and connect with others. You can learn more at join.soundstrue.com.
I also want to take a moment and introduce you to the Sounds True Foundation, our nonprofit that creates equitable access to transformational tools and teachings. You can learn more at SoundsTrueFoundation.org. And in advance, thank you for your support.
In this episode of Insights at the Edge, my guest is Elizabeth Earnshaw. She is a talented couple’s therapist and the author of the new Sounds True book ’Til Stress Do Us Part. Let me tell you a little bit more about Elizabeth. She’s a licensed family and marriage therapist, a Certified Gottman Therapist, an American Association of Marriage and Family Therapy–approved supervisor, and I’m just getting started. She’s the cofounder of the Serena Williams–backed relationship health company called OURS and founder of A Better Life Therapy.
Elizabeth is a gifted writer. Previously with Sounds True she published the book I Want This to Work, which is really a couple’s manual, a couple’s workbook, in particular for young couples, people in their twenties and thirties setting out on committed relationship life with that spirit of “I want this to work.” She’s someone whose voice has been featured in the New York Times, USA Today, The Oprah Magazine, and more.
Elizabeth wears a lot of hats, as she describes it. She’s the mother of two children, a business owner, a mom, a wife, a friend, family member, and as I mentioned, somehow she found the time amidst all of that to write a new book, ’Til Stress Do Us Part: How to Heal the #1 Issue in Our Relationships. And that’s what we’ll be talking about today. Elizabeth, welcome.
Elizabeth Earnshaw: Hi, thanks for having me.
TS: Now, this notion of stress being the number one issue in our relationships, how did you come to identify stress, as you put it, the number one issue? That’s a very strong claim.
EE: Yeah, so I didn’t identify it at first. It wasn’t something that I learned in school, but it was the convergence of a lot of different experiences that I was having personally that I was having in the therapy room that I was having in trainings. And I talk about it a little bit in the book, but personally I was married, I had my first child and I was noticing that my husband and I, we were fighting more than we had been before we had a child and I couldn’t figure out why. I’m a therapist and I knew all the tools. I know how I’m supposed to talk to my partner and how to bring up issues gently and all of those things and nothing was really working. And then while I was working with my couples, I was noticing the same things happening. So I was working with these couples who were coming in and really otherwise in their lives, they had good communication skills, they held onto jobs, they had friends, they described their relationship as being happy previously. And I started to notice, oh my gosh, there’s all this stuff going on for the two of you and that is why you’re struggling. And so those experiences, especially since 2020, I’ve seen them kind of erupt and there’s just been so much stress for the couples that I work with that I felt like it was really important to talk about.
TS: Now, I noticed that some people perhaps glaze over when they hear a word like “stress.” This sounds too simple, Elizabeth. And yet as I read ’Til Stress Do Us Part, I actually thought you’re pointing to something brilliant and that the more we can name it, be aware of it, and talk about it in our relationships, it will be a very, very powerful, helpful medicine for us. But just talk about this word “stress” and what you mean by it. As I mentioned, I think people can perhaps just glaze over and go, “What? Yeah, of course. Everything’s stressful. C’mon.”
EE: Yeah, and I mean I think it’s like any of us would say it’s common sense. Of course if we’re under stress, we’re not going to be the greatest people to each other, and that makes sense, but there’s a lot more to it. So stress is this experience that you have within your mind and within your body, and it can be caused in a lot of different ways so you can experience stress because there’s a lot going on outside of your relationship. So maybe work is stressful, maybe you are in this sandwich generation and you’re taking care of your parents, maybe you got into traffic on the way home. So there’s a lot of things outside of our relationships that can cause us stress. And then there are things in the relationship that can cause us stress, and these could be disagreeing on things, not being able to talk about topics and getting to some sort of agreement, feeling as if the other person is distant and withdrawn. And so all of these things can be stress.
Now, what is stress? Like I said, it’s something that’s happening in your mind and your body and there’s actual physiological reactions to it. Sometimes just enough stress is really good for us and it motivates us. So things are a little bit hard at work. It motivates us to want to do even more work. It gives us some stress hormones that give us energy. Things are a little challenging in the relationship. We feel maybe motivated to make things better, but when stress reaches a certain threshold, we go outside of our ability to navigate it and we actually have something that it’s called self-regulation depletion. So we lose our abilities to regulate because stress hormones are being dumped into our body. Too many things have happened and the spillover starts to do things to our internal organs, starts to do things to our heart, our muscles, and also changes the way that we think. And because of all of this, if we are not managing stress well, it changes our ability to actually do the things that we know to do, and it changes our ability to be present with people that we care about.
TS: You mentioned that the pandemic seemed to bring into people’s awareness this sense of “I think I’m kind of stressed a lot most of the time now,” whether it’s about the work situation has changed, just increased uncertainty related to climate change, and am I safe in the world? Is democracy safe? There’s this sense that so much uncertainty and instability. So now it’s also of course spilling out into our intimate relationships and having, as you point out ’Til Stress Do Us Part, really deleterious effects. Now I name this stress to my partner. How does my partner then comfort me when they’re also under stress?
EE: So usually people don’t, and then that’s where the problems arise. So I get them in my office because what’s been happening for a long time is there has been an experience where both people are experiencing stress. It could be for the same reason or it could be for different reasons. They have their own stuff going on. And what people tend to unfortunately do if they’re not aware is they tend to just regulate each other. And so we are very sensitive as human beings to other people’s stress states. We feel it. And I mean anybody has had that experience before where somebody comes in and their mood or the way that they’re speaking or whatever, you can kind of feel that something’s off. And if we’re already stressed and we feel they’re stressed, then we are kind of like a cup that’s completely full and their stress spills into that cup and it spills over within us.
And so the way we respond becomes dysregulating. Somebody comes in the door and instead of they’re so stressed that instead of giving us a hug, they walk to the kitchen and get a glass of water. And our response to that is, oh, I guess you didn’t want to say hello to me because that causes our own internal distress that they ignored us even if it was not on purpose, if it had no ill intent, none of those things, it causes our own internal distress. So we say something like that and then what happens to them? They feel more distressed. And so that spills over and then they’re like, well, forget it. I had a hard day. You don’t even care about me. And they either fight, flight, freeze, and then it just continues. So usually people don’t tend to navigate it.
Well, what we want them to learn to do is to learn how to coregulate, which is to learn how to be aware of your own internal experience. You don’t have to know if the other person is stressed out or spilling over. You actually don’t have to know. But what you can know is, wow, something just shifted inside of me when I saw them or heard them do whatever they just did. And because of that, I can build awareness, I can regulate myself, and because I can regulate myself, I can actually be a coregulation instead of a dysregulation with this person.
TS: So let’s talk about that, because you’re emphasizing the physiological nature. So how do we attune to our own physiology and effectively regulate ourselves when our partner comes in and goes directly to the refrigerator and says, “Look, I’m dealing with some stuff. I’m dealing with some stuff. Come on.”
EE: And then you’re like, “Well, I’m dealing with some stuff too. I had a lot of things that I need your help.” And so the most important thing with any type of change, it’s just awareness. So now that you’re hearing this conversation, you have awareness now that when you get into these modes with your friend, your partner, your kids, whoever it is that don’t feel aligned with who you are or who you want to be, that it’s probably because you’re having a stress response. So now that you have this awareness, the next time it happens, I want you to pay a lot of attention to what did it feel like in your body? What did you start to notice? And maybe that time you don’t change it. Maybe that time you still yell at your partner or you stomp away or you just do your thing.
But then afterwards reflect, what was I feeling in my body when that was happening? Instead of perseverating, what was I thinking? Why was I right? What do I need to prove? What do I need to argue? What was I feeling in my body? I was feeling my heart race. I was feeling like my words were jumbled. I was feeling my stomach get clenched. So next time, my commitment, when I start to feel those things in my body is going to be that my only job right now is to self-soothe the antidote to stress causing all these arguments is one of the biggest is learning how to self-soothe. And so I’m going to learn to say, whoa, you came in the door and you did that. I’ve started to feel something. I’m just going to step away for a second, or I’m going to learn to breathe or I’m going to learn to slow my voice down. I want to yell at them. And instead of yelling, I’m going to say, OK, I can see that maybe you need a little bit of space and you’re just going to walk into another space. But you’re doing that for yourself. You’re actually not doing it for them. Because if you can keep yourself calm and you can keep your body in a space where it’s soothed, right? You’re not going to be fully regulated, but you’re soothing yourself, you are less likely to get into those dysregulated arguments with each other.
TS: OK, so let’s say my partner’s upset about something, and I’m a very sensitive and empathic person, and I immediately catch, if you will, the contagion of their dysregulation. And so now I’m focusing on my own breathing, and they’re like, “You’re not even asking me about what’s happening with me. You’re not there for me.” I’m not even in a place where I can reach out at that point and offer support because I’m so sensitive. I’ve caught their dysregulation pattern.
EE: Exactly. And so you might have the other person in their dysregulated state. And something I talk about in the book is that we all react differently. So some people, they’re like a cobra and they start fighting with you, you’re not even listening to me, or of course you’re walking away, or Why are you talking? My favorite in my life is why are you talking to me like a therapist when I’m trying to call myself dead? I’m like, I’m not. I’m just trying to calm myself down and use a calm voice. So some people might become fighters. Some people while you’re trying to regulate yourself, they might say, you don’t seem interested and stomp away. Some people might say nothing in the moment, and I always say this to couples, it is more important that you don’t allow the dysregulation between the two of you to continue.
You can’t control it in the other person than it is to convince them, I’m an empathetic person. Of course I care, or You’re not being fair, or whatever it is. It’s more important to do that. And in the moment, the very first time it happens, your partner might not know what’s going on, but what can be helpful is that later you talk about it and you say to your partner, sometimes when I get overwhelmed when you’re upset or something like this, I just want to make sure I’m saying the right thing, or I just want to make sure that I don’t fly off the handle. Whatever your thing is, I want to be there for you. So it would be really helpful if in the future, if you notice me taking a break or you notice that I’ve gotten quiet for a second, whatever it is that you need to do, that you just understand it as I am trying to get myself to be there for you.
The hope is, is that over time, and again, I always tell people I’m very much a realist, over time your partner starts to learn that about you, and they’re able to have a felt sense of this person’s safe, this person does care about me. This is just their way of soothing themselves. They needed to take 15 minutes or they needed to take some breaths. Hopefully they see that over time because what they should see over time is that you doing that makes the conversation more effective in the long run or the connection or whatever it is that you’re trying to do in that moment.
TS: Now, you mentioned, Elizabeth, that in your own education, stress was not emphasized as some central experience to name and to talk about in relationship, and that’s interesting to me. This is your original contribution in a sense to how couples can become aware. What’s the power of just bringing awareness to, oh, tell me about some of the stress you’re under and let me share some of the stress that’s going on for me and how that shifts the dynamic between two people.
EE: It’s so powerful because it gives people a common enemy that isn’t each other. And so all of a sudden I’m working with a couple in the room and they’re pointing fingers at each other. You always choose your mother over me, and I understand that you chose your mother because there’s all this stuff going on, dah, dah, dah. But you do that to me. And the other person’s pointing back and saying, well, you’re always so critical and you never want to X, Y, and Z. You’re so unyielding. So they’re pointing at each other. And when I can help them to see this is actually an experience that you’re both having right now that is so stressful to both of you, it causing you internal distress. And because of that you are not acting the way that you usually would. You are maybe not communicating what’s going on with the in-law the way you usually would, or maybe you’re frustrated with your partner because when your mother comes around, your partner becomes snippy or something like that, and you’re like, why can’t you just be nice?
But once you realize, maybe your partner becomes more hostile because when your mother is around, I’m just using this example, they start, your partner starts to feel dysregulated. It’s not that your partner is an awful hostile person, it’s that they feel a little dysregulated and the way they deal with that, and I’m not saying this is the way it should be continued to be dealt with, but the way that they deal with it is they get overwhelmed, dysregulated and hostile. And so all of a sudden they can say with each other, OK, well how do we want to deal with this outside stressor? Or how do we want to deal with all of these things that are impacting us and how can we be there for each other and be on a team? And that makes a huge difference in the way that they communicate about the same issues. They’re already talking about those issues, but it changes the way they talk about it.
TS: In ’Til Stress Do Us Part you share quite a bit about your own life and your own journey being a new mom with your husband, Andrew, and I can’t remember if there were open diapers in the kitchen or the dog had peed right in the center of the floor. There’s no food in the refrigerator. The sheets weren’t on the bed. And at one point Andrew was watching television while you were dealing with all of this. And I’m curious, first of all, what it was like for you as this accomplished relationship therapist to share so much about your own struggles and the discoveries you made about relationships through how hard it was for you?
EE: Yeah, I mean, something that was really important to me when all of this was going on was to figure it out because I was sitting with people who I’m helping and I’m like, oh my God, at home I’m a nut and I’m helping. I’m trying to help the two of you, so I’ve got to figure out what’s going on. For me, I feel like because I had taken time to really think about it, integrate it, understand it, go to therapy, it felt good to share it. And it’s something that I feel like can be helpful to people to share that they’re not alone, that even a therapist who deals with couples, who knows all of these things can struggle with this, that it’s human nature. But of course, at times when it was going on, it’s confusing because I would step away from an argument or a time, a time where I wasn’t particularly myself, and I would be like, what in the world this is putting into question any of these tools I know, are they real? Is it, can people learn about the Four Horsemen? And if as long as they know it, they can be better communicators? It put into question—
TS: Can you say what you mean by that? The Four Horsemen for people who aren’t familiar with that.
EE: So the Four Horsemen is a concept that’s introduced by John Gottman after doing decades of research since the seventies when he was observing couples, he would observe them for many, many, many years. And what he found was that the couples who are most successful, and by success that means they say they feel fulfilled, they stay together, they avoid four things, and they’re called the Four Horsemen. It’s a play on the Four Horsemen that symbolize the end of times, and they are criticism, defensiveness, stonewalling in contempt. And so when you come to couple’s therapy, that’s one of the biggest things that you start to talk about. You start to identify, are we doing these four things because research shows us that they can lead to divorce? Am I being critical? Am I being defensive? Am I shutting down? Am I being contemptuous? So these were things I was helping people with and I knew about, but these are things that we start to do when we are physiologically overwhelmed and distressed. And so I knew not to be critical, but I was super critical of my husband and my husband. He will admit it. He was very defensive all the time. And so like I said, it started to put into question even my role in the world, I was like, should I be teaching people these things? Because I can’t do it, but I can do it as long as I understand what to do with my distress. And I think that that’s the piece that’s missing for a lot of people.
TS: Now, you mentioned that with stress, it’s a cycle that can resolve itself, and I wanted to hear a little bit more about that as a physiological cycle. I mean, certainly I think all of us have the experience of flying off the handle, going for a walk, coming back, it’s an hour later, and it’s like, “Oh, I can finally talk to you now.” But I also think many people have the experience of being under stress kind of constantly. It doesn’t feel—those kind of like “I’m homicidal” situations resolve, but there’s a low-grade stress that I think sometimes for people you don’t have the experience of it resolving. So I’d love to understand more your view of that.
EE: Yes, and that’s exactly the problem right now in the world is that people have so much chronic stress that the stress cycle isn’t completing. And so like you mentioned, we all have those moments where we get really an upsetting email and we want to slam the keyboard back at the person and send something off. And thank God we don’t because 30 minutes later we’re like, oh my gosh, I’m in a different mindset now and thank goodness I didn’t say that, but chronic stress. So that’s a acute stress happens. You get away from it, you take the walk and it’s done. You take the test, that was really hard, whatever, but chronic stress, when you are living in it just constantly being bombarded, and that’s what’s happening in society right now. You can’t, those stress hormones stay in the bloodstream, they don’t go away. And so you’re always kind of at an elevated stress level.
And then when those other moments happen where you would usually resolve, you do fly off the handle in your own way. So you might fly off the handle by being withdrawn or by blasting someone or whatever it is. So we have so much chronic stress. And what I mean by that is it’s not just we’ve all always had stressors, but we can’t get away from them. So work might always have been a stressor, but people went home in the evening and they were done with that. If somebody, I remember when I was little, if somebody needed to get ahold of my dad who had a pretty stressful job, he was an attorney, they had to call the phone in our kitchen, and if it was ringing during dinnertime, that thing just kept ringing or they would take it off the hook and that was the only way somebody could contact him.
Now we have people who are working jobs and they can’t leave it. They get emails all night, they get slack pains. A lot of many more people are struggling with chronic illness, and so they are always with that illness. They’re never feeling good, they’re struggling with their health. It’s always, there are so many chronic stressors and people are often not just dealing with one, they’re dealing with many. And then you have media and social media and all of those types of things bombarding people constantly. And it’s a lot for the human body and the human mind to take.
TS: So someone’s listening and they say, “I am reflecting right now as I listened to you, Elizabeth, about the stress that’s in my life and in my partner’s life, this chronic stress and the sense that we’ve been in this state for a while now, maybe started intensifying during the pandemic, and it’s not ending and our relationship is becoming somewhat threadbare as a result. It’s not like it was previously, and there doesn’t seem to be a simple I’m-going-to-breathe-in-my-belly-and-it’s-going-to-get-better kind of answer.” What do you recommend?
EE: Yeah, so there’s not a simple answer, and I think that’s important to say. There is no pill I can give you overnight fix. It is a long-term answer. And the answer is, number one, to start identifying stressors in your life. One of the most powerful things that my husband and I ever did was we got very honest with ourselves about what are all of the things that are here? And some of them were very obvious and some of them were not so obvious. So some of them were like, well, we have a sister-in-law who is dying. That’s an obvious stressor and we know that. We know it’s there. We both worked full-time jobs out of the house. This was before work from home right out of the house, dropping kids, dropping our son off. We only had one at the time. That’s an obvious stressor.
But we had these other things and we really had to be honest about them. It was a stressor that I volunteered to be on the board of something, even though that was kind of fun. It was a stressor that we were spending money on certain things that we didn’t really need to spend money on. So there was all of these different things and we both had different things that were causing us stress. So we compiled this long list. And what I talked to couples about when we’re working together is let’s pause for a second and really look, because often people will dismiss themselves. They’ll say, well, that’s just like one thing, but that’s just life we have to work. I’ll say, well, let’s pause. I really want you to look at everything. Even if you felt it was positive initially to take on, you just bought a new house, it’s exciting, it’s positive, or you just had a baby, that’s exciting.
It’s something you wanted, but even so it’s a stressor and let’s write all of those things down. And that awareness helps people to be able to say, yeah, you’re right. There are a lot of things. There’s a lot of moving pieces. Some are out of our control, some aren’t. And then the next part of it is to really look at where you have control versus where you don’t. And I talk in the book about what do you do about the things that you have control over? And then how do you kind of adapt to and navigate the parts of life that you don’t? You are always going to face some sort of stress in life that is a part of life, but learning how to do it together in a way where you feel like a team instead of enemies is something that we can all learn to do.
TS: Now you mentioned even good stressors, good things—buying a new house—can become distressing. You talk about this notion of eustress, which is the positive type of challenge-in-a-life stress, becoming distress. When eustress becomes distress, how do we know? Because of course we want to grow and expand and take on exciting projects. How do we evaluate where to draw the line?
EE: Is it causing dysfunction in your life? I mean, it’s hard. It’s very difficult. People often resist talking about those positive things and really kind of taking an honest look and saying even though they’re positive, actually that’s causing a lot of dysfunction. One example with parents is often being very involved in all of the school things, all of the sports, all of whatever. And you’ll talk to the family and say, OK, well here’s the obviously negative things. Those are some things. Those are usually the things you actually don’t have very much control over. You just got fired or whatever from a job, and here’s all these positive things, but those positive things are costing you a ton of money. They’re costing you a ton of time. And are you extending yourself in a way that doesn’t realistically work in your life right now? And can we explore, is this something that you actually want to be doing? Is it actually bringing function to your family, to your life, to you individually? Is it helping you feel like you’re getting something out of this or is this more based in some sort of narrative you’ve created?
And I talk a lot about with couples, and in the book I talk about this gap. We have this narrative. I really want to be the PTA mom. That’s who I’m supposed to be. And so I take on all this stuff, but I’m also a full-time—I have a full-time job. And so how can both of those things realistically fit? Well, what they’re going to do is they’re going to fit in the time, and then at 10:00 PM I’m going to have no time for myself. I’m not going to eat anything. I’m going to be exhausted. I’m going to be hopping back into my emails for work all to make all of this fit because there’s this big gap I’m trying to fill and I explore with people, where’s that gap coming from? Is that really who you want to be? Or is that who your mother was and you think that’s what you’re supposed to be? Is that a narrative you got from somewhere? And can we reimagine who you want to be as a mother or who you want to be as a partner in the life you actually have? And so that’s something that we explore a lot.
TS: You introduced this idea of intentional sacrifice, that sometimes we need to intentionally sacrifice certain things we’re doing, because when you add it all up, it’s too much stress. Do couples make those decisions together? I could imagine my partner saying something or other about my work and how I should sacrifice this or that or commitment to my meditation community or other things. And I’m like, “Time out. This is my world. This is what I’m doing. No.” So how do you figure that out together?
EE: Yes. So you have to do it together. Well, some of the things you’re going to do individually, right? I’m thinking about myself. I started to notice I was volunteering for way too many things with my son’s life, all the things at school. I’m like, I’ll be there, but then I’m rearranging my clients and working until midnight and just wild stuff. I mean, I made a unilateral decision that I wasn’t going to do that stuff anymore. It was bringing me to stress and my husband could have cared less. He probably was in my ear saying, I don’t think you need to be the library mom and also the ice cream mom, just pick one. So some of it might be unilateral, but the really big things you’re going to work on together, and these aren’t going to be quick fixes. If your partner came and said to you, I think your job is bringing you a lot of stress and because of that you’re not showing up, I miss you.
You’re not showing up the way I want you to show up. The hope would be that you would be able to be open to hearing that, but not that you would immediately say, yeah, I’m going to quit my job tomorrow. I mean, this is my whole life and my career and everything that fills me up. The hope would be that you would be able to say, interesting. What have you noticed? Tell me a little bit more about how you think it’s influencing us. And then maybe you would look at this list of all the stressors and you would say, but hey, we’ve got all these other things too. Is it just my job or is it that we can’t navigate job and all this other stuff? And is there a way that we can negotiate around this? And most of the time people have to find some minor negotiations.
Most people can’t just leave their job tomorrow either because they have to stay in it or they love it and it’s their whole career. But maybe there are some negotiated sacrifices that are intentional. I won’t do, I know you don’t like me coming home late, so it’s going to be really hard, but I’ll let my team know that I’m not going to do anything after 7:00 PM I’m just giving that as an example, and that might change my work a little bit, but I’ll work on being home or hey, I think we’d have less stress if while I’m working, you were doing X, Y, and Z, and maybe that would help. So it’s a negotiation.
TS: Your husband, Andrew, ended up quitting his job. How did you come to that conclusion and how did it work out?
EE: Yeah, so in 2020, we both were working from home and we had a small child and we both had pretty stressful jobs. So he was working a corporate job. I think he had get on by 7:00 AM and he often wasn’t finishing until 7:00 PM, and I was having to fit my work in around all of that, but I still had the same number of hours I had to work. So it was just really, really difficult. And what we were reflecting on a lot, once we were able to start the conversation and not be at each other’s throats for all the other things we thought we were mad about is that my job is my passion. And his job was not only not his passion, but it was blocking him from his passion. And is there anything we could do to maybe change things here? Did we need to be paying a nanny to come in, which was like strapping us, right? It was so expensive. Would it be more affordable and less stressful to not do that? To maybe have him be home? Would that open up time for him to do what he actually likes to do? That would mean we’d have to spend less money, that we would have to cut back on some things that we would have to take this huge risk that maybe we couldn’t afford to live that. But we made the decision because really our lives were completely unmanageable with both of us working.
TS: When you’ve seen couples in your practice who handle these negotiations well, and you’ve seen couples who don’t handle them well, how would you describe the differences? I can imagine there’s so many issues. Let’s say one person wants to have a second child and the other is like, “That is just not a stressor I think we can take on in the system.” And for one person it’s like, “Well, this is my passion. This is my dream.” And the other person is like, “This is going to topple our system.” I mean, which couples handle these kinds of things? Well, what capacities and skills do they have?
EE: I think they have a skill of realistically assessing their lives. I think that that’s huge. When I’m working with couples who are able to say, I actually still want a baby, even though I realistically know our lives are wild right now, and it’s probably not a good idea. Those couples do better because then there can be real conversations. It’s not somebody saying, of course we could handle it. It’s just another baby. It wouldn’t be a big deal. I think it would get better if we had the baby. It’s somebody saying, I agree with you. Our lives are wild and out of control and things have gotten too hard and maybe a baby would make it worse. So I really want this. What would need to change for us? So when there’s an ability to look at things as they really are and to talk about them instead of getting closed off and defensive and idealistic, then change can happen or people can negotiate.
The second skill that’s really important is the ability to really slow down and not feel like you’ve got to make a decision tomorrow. And I know that’s hard with children because there is a biological clock, but to take the time to actually understand where you’re both coming from, what do you both feel like this is going to bring or is going to bring in a positive way or bring in a negative way into the family? And are you able to figure out a scenario where you can get an outcome that works for both of you? So in the example that you gave, if one partner is saying, we wanted two kids, but it’s not a good idea. Look at how we don’t have money, we don’t have the bandwidth, we didn’t get along when you were postpartum, it’s going to be horrible. And then the other person saying, I really, really want another kid.
If that person is able to say, what do you think would help us have the bandwidth? I want to understand you. What would life ideally look like? Where would we need to be? How would we need to be navigating things? And then the other person is able to say, tell me what you think would be good actually exchanging these thoughts. That’s when people can get somewhere. Sometimes you can’t get somewhere with it. Sometimes people are like, I want a kid and I think that we could do it, and the other person is absolutely not. And that’s really challenging because then you have to decide, does one of us yield and say, never mind, I’m not going to do my dream, or do you break up? What do you do in that scenario? But the hope is, is that you can figure out outcomes that work for you both. And so with the kids’ situation, one outcome that might work for both people is if we have a second kid, then I’ll agree to make sacrifices so our life is less stressful. Here’s the things that I think would work. But you’ve got to be able to have those open and honest conversations.
TS: One of the things I hear you saying, and I want to check this out, when you and Andrew put everything down—you wrote down all of your stressors and you decided which intentional sacrifices you could make—is that the solution sometimes isn’t just a psychological or I’m going to do this inner work and that’s going to handle what’s happening between us. There are structural changes that have to be made in the relationship and that people need to take a realistic view and be willing to make those structural changes. Is that correct?
EE: Absolutely, yes. And so a lot of it is inner work, especially in the moment of dysregulation, being able to say, I see what’s happening to my body and I can do something about it. But a lot of it is structural changes. I like that that’s what you call it, because that’s really what it is. I’m thinking about a lot of couples I work with, they take on a lot of projects. For example, they might always be redoing something in their house or they’re planning a trip or they’re, there’s just always these projects going on and the inner work isn’t going to make their life less stressful. If let’s say they have contractors in their house every single day and it’s causing leaks and it’s costing more money, and then you have work more and all those things, the inner work’s not going to change anything.
And so you have to be also willing to say, are there things about our lives that just have to change? Even if it’s really hard? Do we have to be willing to work on saving more money? Do we have to be willing to say, our house is good enough, it’s OK to have an ’80s kitchen, maybe you don’t need to gut the bathroom. It’s OK. You don’t have to keep up with the Joneses. Do we need to say, it would be better for us if we moved somewhere else that is going to have less traffic or be closer to family or whatever it is. So sometimes you need to make big changes or little changes, but structural changes, and that can be hard.
TS: And I want to make sure people have an awareness when you talk about learning to regulate ourselves in the moment, noticing our physiology. I read in ’Til Stress Do Us Part that you actually suggested that someone use an oximeter in therapy, in the therapy room, in the process to start becoming aware of their physiological shifts. And I thought, oh, that’s interesting. So give people some more ideas of how they work with their own physiology in the moment when they’re noticing dysregulation.
EE: Yeah, so one thing I didn’t mention yet, which I think is really important, and it’s often an aha moment, is when you get physiologically hijacked, there are all sorts of things happening that make it impossible to be relational. And so what is happening to you is you are responding to what you think is a threat. And it doesn’t need to be a scary threat, but it is psychologically so your body responds. It could just be a feeling of my partner doesn’t want to give me a kiss when they walk in the door. Do they not love me anymore? And then your body gets hijacked. And so those threat responses are going to make you very self-focused and they are going to make you protective of yourself. And that might look like lashing out, running away, whatever. They’re not going to make you a person that can see the other person and what they need.
You’re just trying to get away from the danger. And so what starts to happen is you actually become very hyper-focused on whatever it is that you need. And in that hyper, you begin to lose your ability to show affection. You begin to lose your ability to have a sense of humor. You begin to lose your ability to show curiosity, problem solve, share thoughts in kind of an articulate way. And so the reason I’m sharing all of this before I say what you can do is because this is all happening to your body, which is why when your partner, you’re in an argument and they try to lighten you up and make a joke and you go, that’s not funny. You are just now you’re making fun of the situation. What they were really trying to do in that moment is help you regulate and help themselves regulate, but you’re dysregulated.
And so these are all signals to you. If you notice that you can’t reach for your partner’s hand, you’re so mad and they try to give you a hug, get off me. You can’t laugh. You’re struggling to ask for more information. Hey, tell me what’s going on for you. That means you’re probably in a state where the conversation’s not going to go anywhere because you can’t be relational. You can’t do things that are going to turn down the heat between you. So you want to focus on the inside. And since we know what’s happening on the inside is that your heart is racing, all sorts of your blood is rushing to your organs to keep them going, which is why you need to pee and you need to do all those things. Your muscles are tensing in case you need to fight somebody off, your mouth is getting dry because things are going to other places.
All this stuff is happening to you. You can target just one of those areas and you’ll start to feel a little better. So you just keep one in the back of your mind and you say, when I start to get to this place, the one area I want to target is my heart. So what I’m going to do in that moment is I’m going to breathe. I know that starts to slow my heart down, or I’m going to say, I need to go for a walk. I know that helps regulate my heart. Or we know that your breathing gets rapid. So you could say, when I get in the state, one thing I could work on is slowing my breathing down. I get into the state and one thing I could work on is I know my muscles get tense. I can make them tight and then kind of drop them.
There’s these physiological things that you can do. Drink water. I know that all this blood is moving around and I need more water. If you’re doing these things, what you’re signaling to your body is, I’m actually safe. I’m not under the threat that my automatic system thinks that I’m under. I’m not under that threat. I’m safe. I’m in my house with my partner who, yes, they were a jerk or they ignored me or they said something that hurt me, or we just got really bad news together, or I looked at the bank account and I’m freaking out. All of those things are true, but I’m not actually dying right now. And so anything you can do to your system to remind it, I’m not actually dying. I’m drinking water, I’m breathing, I’m taking a walk. All of those things will help you get back to a space where you’re not at risk. And then because you’re not at risk, you can see the other person and you can engage with the other person.
TS: And what have you discovered, Elizabeth, really is the best way to reach out when you’re doing OK, but you can see that your partner is super stressed?
EE: I think it’s important just to reach out. So whatever your personality style is, you say the way that obviously gently, you don’t want to bring it up when they’re in the middle of a work day or an upsetting moment, but just saying to the person, Hey, I’ve noticed starting with I’ve noticed just really powerful. I’ve noticed that you seem like you’re struggling. And then being curious, curiosity is huge. That helps people feel like they have space to share what they want to share, that you’re actually interested. I’m curious what’s going on with you or how have you been lately? Or maybe they’re in that hyped up state and you just say to them, Hey, I noticed you look like you’re having a hard time. Do you want to go take a few minutes or do you need some space? Just bringing it up I think is really, really important.
People aren’t always going to respond to that. Well, some people, they will be shut down in their stress state, and so they might say, nothing’s wrong. I’m fine. Some people might be withdrawn, so not shut down, but they want alone time. And they might just say, I don’t really want to talk about it. Something is going on, but I don’t want to talk about it. So also remembering that you don’t want to push people, but you do want to show people that you see what’s going on and that you’re open to it. Something you want to avoid is showing that you’re distressed about their stress because that does that dysregulating thing. So avoiding, and I think a lot of us accidentally do this, but avoiding things like, what’s wrong with you lately? Or I can just see that you’re so upset and I don’t know what to do about it, whatever it is, but trying as hard as you can to be in a regulated space when you’re reaching out to them.
TS: No, I think you’re making a really good point, because when someone’s distressed about our stress, then we’re more distressed because now they’re distressed on top of it. Which brings me to a quote that I want to read from ’Til Stress Do Us Part, it has to do with taking care of ourselves as a necessity for our partner. And here’s the quote, “If you’re not sure whether or not you take good care of yourself, ask your partner and take what they say to heart. When I work with couples, I find that a person’s partner usually has a pretty good understanding of how well the person is tending to themselves. However, when they bring up their concerns, their partner will often dismiss them by saying something like, ‘It’s not your business how I eat, sleep, et cetera.’ Here’s an uncomfortable truth.” This is you saying this. “It absolutely is their business.” And so here you’re pointing out that if I’m not taking good care of myself and I’m in a stressed situation that’s having a negative impact in my relationship, and it’s my partner’s business actually to help me see this. So in what way and how—let’s just say someone, they’re staying out late, they’re not sleeping well, they’re not taking care of the fact that they’re not sleeping well, it’s degrading things.
EE: Yeah, it’s their business because the contract is we’re together and so therefore I impact you and you impact me. And so the things that you’re doing, whether it’s that you’re working until 1:00 AM or you’re spending too much money, you’re eating really badly, whatever it is, those things are now not only impacting you, they’re impacting us. And so it is my business, number one, I love you and I don’t want anything to happen to you, and I want you to live a good life, and I want to be able to help you in the ways that I can, but it’s also my business because when you work until midnight and then you come in the door and you’re really upset, and then you pop a beer open and you drink six beers, that’s not great for our family. Or when you’re distressed and you’re not taking good care of yourself and you stay up all night and then you sleep until 11:00 AM it’s not good for our family.
I need help with the kids, or I need help with getting the yard cleaned up or whatever it is. So it’s something that people often, when they feel criticized, when they’re in a threatened state, they become individualistic. Suddenly. We want to be individuals. We want to be in a relationship when it’s good, but we want to be individuals when anybody is pointing anything out to us. So we’re like, it’s not your business that I’m smoking eight packs of cigarettes a day, and I often have to say, of course, it’s their business. If you smoke eight packs of cigarettes a day and you’re coughing up the lung and you end up very sick, of course that’s their business because not only could the worst happen, but also let’s look at all the underlying stuff that’s even causing that and how is that impacting your relationship? How is that impacting who you are, how you show up, you’re in a relationship together, you’ve signed up to deal with things in life together and you impact each other. And so then people usually hear it. It takes a little bit, but then they’re usually able to say, yeah, I could see that, and I still don’t want to change it, but we eventually get there when they notice the impact.
TS: I appreciate what you’re saying, but I imagine you work with some people who want to preserve their individualism and aren’t quite signing up for this contract the way you’ve described it, of being in this unit together, making these unit-like decisions.
EE: Yeah, I’m kind of a provocative therapist, so I just tell them, I don’t know why you’re in a relationship then because you can’t be individualistic and be in a relationship. So it’s your choice. I can either help you to become more relational or you can be individualistic, but the problems will stay the same. And that doesn’t mean you lose your individuality. You keep that. That’s really important. You still need to have your own personality, your own interests, your own space, all of those things. And you need to be able to have a sense of, I can see myself and I can see somebody else. I can see my partner still. When people start to become, and this mostly happens when they’re in some sort of stress state, whether they are stressed because of the relationship or something else, but when they are only able to see themselves, this is what I want, this is what I need, this is I love me as I am.
I want to do whatever I want or you change for me, but I’m not going to change for you, whatever it is. Once that happens, it’s very hard to make any movement in the relationship. And often when that’s happening, what we have to resolve is what is making it hard for you to go into that vulnerable space of weakness? What is making it difficult to say, I can lean into this. Something’s feeling like a threat here, and what could we do to relieve that distress so that you feel that you can still be you, but be a part of something and recognize your impact on other people and be willing to navigate that impact. There are certainly people who want to stay in that space. They won’t move out of it, but I will say more people than not are willing to do that work. When you’re doing that work with them on a deeper level and you’re helping them to feel safe, and you’re helping their bodies to feel safe and their minds to feel safe to explore, why do I feel like I need to be so tight around my individuality?
TS: Now, you’re a high-achieving person, Elizabeth. When I introduced you, I shared your many accomplishments, and you’re not even 40. I’m curious what intentional sacrifices, if any, you’ve had to embrace as a high achiever?
EE: So a lot, I’ve had to learn to let go of a lot of control. I’ve had to find ways that I’m delegating to people in my business, and I’m finding ways that I make mistakes. I leave at a certain time no matter what. And if things aren’t perfect, they’re not perfect. And what that has meant is I don’t have rapid growth like I did at one time with my business. My business does well, I’m still responsible, but I’m not rapidly growing, right? I’m recognizing that that had impact. I left a job you mentioned I was working with ours, and it was something that I really loved and it was exciting. And right before I was about to have my daughter, Simone, I said to them, I can’t do this and I could do it. I was fitting it into all of the places where it didn’t really fit, but I was fitting it in.
But I had to make that sacrifice of stepping away. And what that meant was that other people kind of came in and took my place and I’m not a part of the decision making there or any of those types of things. So those were two big intentional sacrifices. Smaller ones have been that I don’t agree to sign up for as many things anymore. Like I said before, I was very much, yes, I’ll make it work. I’m going to come to all the games. I’m going to do the library thing. I’m going to be the cookie mom. I’m going to do all of that. And I don’t do those things as much anymore. And so I’ve had to make a lot, my husband has had to make a lot as well, and we’ve made a lot together.
TS: So I want to just briefly share, as we’re coming to a conclusion here, how reading ’Til Stress Do Us Part impacted me, which is I suddenly started—and I mean, you’d have to say, “Tami, really? Suddenly?”—but I started looking at my partner’s stress and I hadn’t been. I was too obsessed with my own. I hadn’t really been thinking about and considering and empathizing what all of the different stressors were that were impacting her life and considering that. And I thought even just that, that eye-opening lens, and also sharing more about the stressors in my life and naming them. And so the power to me, one power in the book was simply saying, oh, use this language in your vision and in your seeing of your partner and yourself and put it all out there. What else are you hoping will be the takeaways for people who read ’Til Stress Do Us Part?
EE: I’m glad you have that takeaway because that’s truly eye open. When I’m working with couples, they’re like, oh, yes, I will start using this language. So using the language and starting to see it in your life, once you start seeing that, it opens up a completely different narrative of what’s going on, and it’s much easier than to have empathy and to communicate. The second thing that I want people to take away is that there’s really two types of things that are impacting your stress levels. One, the things you cannot control. The other are things you can control. And I hope something that you take away from the book is, I have some control here. I have to learn to adapt, to regulate, to accept these certain things that are horrible or hard or exhausting. And maybe there’s some things that we change in our life, even if it’s challenging.
Maybe we do have some power to make things feel a little bit better. And then I also want people just to learn how can you respond to each other in a different way so that you’re not dysregulating each other so that you are able to say, oh wow, this is your distress. Let me show empathy instead of shutting you down or shooting a whole bunch of advice at you, or whatever it is. Let me show you some empathy or let me be calm right now while you are not feeling calm. So there’s a lot of takeaways I hope, but I think those are some of the big ones.
TS: Elizabeth Earnshaw, author of the new book ’Til Stress Do Us Part. Really helpful book. I highly recommend it. Thank you, Elizabeth. Thank you so much.
EE: Thank you. Thank you.
TS: And if you’d like to watch Insights at the Edge on video and participate in the aftershow Q&A session with our guests, come join us on Sounds True One, a new membership community featuring award-winning original shows, live classes, community learning, guided meditations, and more with the leading wisdom teachers of our time. Use promo code PODCAST to get your first month free. You can learn more at join.soundstrue.com. Sounds True: waking up the world.
