Unhappy Marriage / Relationship Faling Apart
Thanks to the work of researchers like Lois Verbrugge and James House, both of the University of Michigan, we now know that an unhappy marriage can increase your chances of getting sick by roughly 35% and even shorten your life by an average of four years. The flip side: People who are happily married live longer; healthier lives than either divorced people or those who are unhappily married. Scientists know for certain that these differences exist, but we are not yet sure why.
Part of the answer may simply be that in an unhappy marriage people experience chronic, diffuse physiological arousal—in other words, they feel physically stressed and usually emotionally stressed as well. This puts wear and tear on the body and mind, which can present itself in any number of physical ailments, including high blood pressure and heart disease and in a host of psychological ones, including anxiety, depression, suicide, violence, psychosis, homicide, and substance abuse.
Not surprisingly, happily married couples have a far lower rate of such maladies. They also tend to be more health-conscious than others. Researchers theorize that this is because spouses keep after each other to have regular checkups,take medicine, eat nutritiously, and so on.
Recently, Dr. Gottman's research has shown some preliminary evidence that a good marriage may also keep you healthier by directly benefiting your immune system, which spearheads the body's defenses against illness. Researchers have known this for a decade that divorce can depress the immune system's function. Theoretically this lowering in the system's ability to fight foreign invaders could leave you open to more infectious diseases and cancers. Now it has been found that the opposite may be true. Not only do happily married people avoid this drop in immune function, but their immune systems may even be getting an extra boost.
Repair attempt...refers to any statement or action —silly or otherwise— that prevents negativity from escalating out of control. Repair attempts are the secret weapon of emotionally intelligent couples—even though many of these couples aren't aware that they are doing something so powerful. When a couple have a strong friendship, they naturally become experts at sending each other repair attempts and at correctly reading those sent their way.
Most quarrels are really not about whether the toilet lid is up or down or whose turn it is to take out the trash. There are deeper hidden issues that fuel these superficial conflicts and make them far more intense and hurtful than they would otherwise be. Most marital arguments cannot be resolved. Couples spend years and years trying to change each other's minds—but it can't be done. This is because most of their disagreements are rooted in fundamental differences of lifestyle, personality, or values. By fighting over these differences, all they succeed in doing is wasting their time and harming their marriage.
The Four Horsemen
- Criticism. You will always have some complaints
about the person you live with. But there's a world of difference between
a complaint and a criticism. A complaint only addresses the specific action
at which your spouse failed. A criticism is more global—it adds on some
negative words about your mate's character or personality. A complaint focuses
a specific behavior, but a criticism ups the ante by throwing in blame and
general character assassination.
Here's the recipe: To turn any complaint into a criticism, just add my favorite line: "What is wrong with you?"
Statistics tell the story: 96% of the time you can predict the outcome of a conversation based on the first 3 minutes of the 15 minute interaction! A harsh startup simply dooms you to failure. So if you begin a discussion that way, you might as well pull the plug, take a breather and start over. - Contempt. Sarcasm and cynicism are
types of contempt. So are name-calling, eye rolling, sneering, mockery, and
hostile humor—the worst of the four horsemen—is poisonous to a relationship
because it conveys disgust. It is virtually impossible to resolve a problem
when your partner is getting the message you're disgusted with him or her.
Inevitably, contempt leads to more conflict rather than to reconciliation.
Couples who are contemptuous of each other are more likely to suffer from infectious illnesses (cold, flu and so on) than other people.
Contempt is fueled by long-simmering negative thoughts about the partner. You're more likely to have such thoughts if your differences are not resolved.
Belligerence, a close cousin to contempt, is just as deadly to a relationship. It is a form of aggressive anger because it contains a threat or provocation. - Defensiveness. It is really a way of blaming your partner. You are saying, in effect, "The
problem isn't me, it's you."
Defensiveness just escalates the conflict, which is why it's so deadly. - Stonewalling. Both husbands and wifes can be stonewallers; this behavior is far more common
among men. Stonewallers tend to look away or down without uttering a sound.
The stonewaller acts as though, he couldn't care less about what you're saying,
if he even hears it.
Stonewalling usually arrives later in the course of a marriage than the other three horsemen. It takes time for the negativity created by the first three horsemen to become overwhelming enough that stonewalling becomes an understandable "out."
Usually people stonewall as a protection against feeling flooded. Flooding means that your spouse's negativity— whether in the guise of criticism or contempt or even defensiveness—is so overwhelming, and so sudden, that it leaves you shell-shocked. You feel so defenseless against this sniper attack that you learn to do anything to avoid a replay. The more you feel flooded by your spouse's criticism or contempt, the more hypervigilant you are for cues that your spouse is about to "blow" again. All you can think about is protecting yourself from the turbulence your spouse's onslaught causes. And the way to do that is to disengage emotionally from the relationship.
Gottman was able to predict a divorce simply by looking at the physiological measures of couples in stonewalling/flooding conversations. When flooding is underway, one of the most apparent signs of physiological distress is that the heart rate speeds up—-pounding away at more than 100 beats per minute—even a high as 165. (in contrast, a typical heart rate for a man who is about 30 is 76, an for a woman the same age is 82). Hormonal changes occur, too including the secretion of adrenaline, which kicks in the "fight or flight response." Blood pressure mounts.
These changes are so dramatic that if one partner is frequently flooded during marital discussions, it's easy to predict that they will divorce.
Recurring episodes of flooding lead to divorce for two reasons. First they signal that at least one partner feels severe emotional distress when dealing with the other. Second, the physical sensations of feeling flooded—the increased heart rate, sweating, and so son—make it virtually impossible to have productive, problem solving discussion. When your body goes into overdrive during an argument, it is responding to a very primitive alarm system we inherited form our prehistoric ancestors. All those distressful reactions, like a pounding heart and sweating, occur because on a fundamental level your body perceives your current situation as dangerous.
When a pounding heart and all the other physical stress reactions happen in the midst of a discussion with your mate, the consequences are disastrous. Your ability to process information is reduced, meaning it's harder to pay attention to what your partner is saying. Creative problem solving goes out the window. You're left with the most reflexive, least intellectually sophisticated responses in your repertoire: to fight (act critical, contemptuous, or defensive) or flee (stonewall). Any chance of resolving the issue is gone. Most likely, the discussion will just worsen the situation.
In 85% of marriages, the stonewaller is the husband. This not because of some lack on the man's part. The reason lies in our evolutionary heritage. Anthropological evidence suggests that we evolved from hominids whose lives were circumscribed by very rigid gender roles, since these were advantageous to survival in a harsh environment. The females specialized in nurturing children while the males specialized in cooperative hunting.
As any nursing mother can tell you, the amount of milk you produce is affected by how relaxed you feel, which is related to the release of the hormone oxytocin in the brain. So natural selection would favor a female who could quickly soothe herself and calm down after feeling stressed. Her ability to remain composed could enhance her children's chances of survival by optimizing the amount of nutrition they received. But in the male natural selection would reward the opposite response. For these early cooperative hunters, maintaining vigilance was a key survival skill. So males whose adrenaline kicked in quite readily and who did not calm down so easily were more likely to survive and procreate.
To this day, the male cardiovascular system remains more reactive than the female and slower to recover from stress. For example. if a man and woman suddenly hear a very loud, brief sound, like a blowout, most likely his heart will beat faster than hers and stay accelerated for longer, according to research by Robert Levenson, Ph.D and his student Loren Carter at Berkeley.
The same goes for blood pressure—his will become more elevated and stay higher longer. Psychologist Dolf Zellman, Ph.D at the University of Alabama found that when male subjects are deliberately treated rudely and then told to relax for twenty minutes, their blood pressure surges and stays elevated until they get to retaliate. But when women face the same treatment, they are able to calm down during the twenty minutes. (Interestingly, a woman's blood pressure tends to rise again if she is pressured into retaliating). Since marital confrontation that activates vigilance takes a greater physical toll on the male, it's no surprise that men are more likely than women to attempt to avoid it.
Its a biological fact: Men are more easily overwhelmed by marital conflict than are their wives.
Men have a tendency to have negative thoughts that maintain their distress, while women are more likely to think soothing thoughts that help them calm down and be conciliatory. Men, generally, either think about how righteous and indignant they feel which tends to lead to contempt or belligerence. Or they think about themselves as an innocent victim of their wife's wrath or complaint.
Without help, some couples will end up divorced or living in a dead marriage. in which they maintain separate, parallel lives in the same home. They may go through the motions of togetherness—attending their children's plays hosting dinner parties, taking family vacations. But emotionally they no longer feel connected to each other. They have given up.
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