You Scored
The Resolver
Your relationship is extremely important to you and you crave closeness and connection with your partner. To your credit, you are willing to address the issues and brave enough to remain engaged in conflict. However, at times, you may tend to over-explain your perspective in an effort to resolve things without being aware of what’s going on with your partner.
What You Fear
Your primary fear is being disconnected because you can’t get your partner to understand. It's important for you to learn to regulate your emotions, tolerate differences, and focus on your own internal experience, rather than on explaining the issue and trying to manage your partner’s reaction.
Mistaken Belief
“I have to get you to understand me. I won’t be okay unless we resolve this.“
How You Show Up on the Outside
You tend to focus on managing your partner’s reaction rather than sharing your own inner experience. You may lead with emotions and have a tendency to self protect by over-explaining, pleading, and reasoning with your partner.
You may feel compelled to continue explaining your perspective until your partner understands, becoming increasingly frustrated if your explanations don't seem to land. Sometimes you may share more words than your partner can process in the moment. This is an anxious response that can potentially flood and overwhelm your partner.
Your intention is to protest the disconnection you fear–if you can get your partner to see where you’re coming from then you’ll stay close and connected. But the downside is that your partner is likely to get triggered and react by getting defensive, shutting down, or withdrawing.
What’s Going on Inside
You may feel anxious and unsettled and struggle to feel safe until there’s a repair. When you’re upset with your partner, your nervous system may be in sympathetic arousal, which means your body is mobilized for survival and self protection in order to get your needs met.
Even if you think you’re calmly explaining, there is an underlying anxious activation in your body that your partner can detect through neuroception (the subconscious ability to detect threat), which makes it difficult to have an effective conversation. This state of alarm in your body may be outside of your conscious awareness.
At the surface you may feel frustrated, annoyed, irritated, offended, confused. On a deeper level you may also be feeling hurt, scared, desperate, disconnected, overwhelmed, exhausted, out of control, or alone. You fear being misunderstood and disconnected from your partner. Deep down you may also have a fear of abandonment that gets inflamed by these interactions.
Tips for Growth
Notice when you’re getting into a loop of explaining and take a break.
Expand your tolerance for lack of resolution by reminding yourself that you and your partner will have a much better chance of communicating constructively when you're both regulated and that you can handle waiting.
Get curious about your deeper emotional experience and connect with the softer and more vulnerable feelings underneath the anger and frustration.
Make a plan with your partner in advance to return to the conversation after a break so you have the safety of knowing the issue will be addressed.
Send short clear messages to your partner about the one specific instance at hand, emphasizing your own internal experience and more vulnerable emotions.
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