If you are in a marriage or relationship and you have given up on yourself by not living your individual life by your highest, most intrinsic, heart-driven values, it is inevitable you are going to activate the part of your brain that comes online when you try to avoid a predator (as the prey) or seek a prey (as the predator).
When the amygdala is online, you are living in, and managing your relationship(s) from, survival mode. There can be no thriving when the centre of the brain's subcortical area is ensuring you are essentially avoiding all pain and seeking only pleasure.
In Autonomic Nervous System terms, the chronic stress you are under is akin to living in a life-threatening situation, and Dorsal Vagal Hypo-arousal is the obvious next step - where your brain will automatically, and predictably, launch emotional, physical and mental shutdown as a defense mechanism.
Predictable pattern
Just as the Autonomic Nervous System has a predictable, automatic pathway from Social Connection Rest/Digest into Sympathetic Fight/Flight Activation and onto Shutdown as Defense, relationships have a similar pathway to dysregulation status.
Eat or be Eaten
If you have been unsuccessful in your attempts to Socially Connect / Engage / Attach to your partner, and they keep avoiding or rejecting you, your Autonomic Nervous System will automatically go into Fight/Flight. Your brain is now in Predator mode. Highly emotional, non-communicative. Other traits include being angry, rage-full, vengeful, controlling, authoritative, domineering, conflict-driven, suspicious, obsessive.
Because your Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) won't sustain this hyper-arousal forever, it will eventually launch the Shutdown or Dorsal Vagal state as a way for you to defend yourself. This defense impulse is because your ANS has interpreted your ongoing, chronically stressful situation, hormonal and chemical imbalances fuelled predominantly by cortisol, as life-threatening. Emotionally, this is where the Predator loses hope and collapses into Prey mode. From the Prey brain, you now perceive your partner as the Predator. You start to pretend, please to appease. You feel you have no choice, so you fawn your way through your relationships. Not just for days, often for years. You totally give up what is important to you and you allow your partner, and even others, to govern your life.
This is where long-term hopelessness sets in, or as some like to call it - Depression.
Interestingly, your ANS won't let you stay in Dorsal Vagal state forever, either. It will give you a Sympathetic charge to ensure your survival. Some can't believe it when their "miserable" partner suddenly has energy for anything but them, and joins a dance group, trains for marathons or engages in other extreme sports. These people are running away, and for obvious reasons.
And so, in stead of putting our egos aside, and getting clear on our and our partner's intrinsic values, and being OK with the fact they will absolutely change and transform throughout our life's ages and stages, we instead oscillate between survival states.
Your relationship is now a co-dependent minefield where you exhaustedly inter-change between: Control/Surrender. Effort/Apathy. Try/Give Up. Scream/Stonewall. Obsess/Resent. Attack/Retreat. Fight for it/Give up on it.
When we live in survival mode, we also oscillate between living in fantasies and nightmares, where we become highly infatuated, even obsessed with our partner one minute and put them on a pedestal, and the moment they don't live up to our unrealistic expectations/imaginations, we are trapped in a nightmare of resentment and we throw them in a pit.
Dysregulation has its roots in the past
Perhaps you can see why, having personal insight into how your Autonomic Nervous System functions, and how to regulate for your imbedded survival instinct - which has its roots in your childhood - is non-negotiable if you are going to have thriving relationships.
The end of Tit for Tat
When we live life from a thrival mentality, it is because we have identified what is actually important to us, and to our partner, and we see the damage it does to our lives when we expect others to align their individual life choices with ours. It's not only unrealistic, it's detrimental enough to destroy families, friendships and intimate relationships.
When we do step into our hearts and get clear on what we actually value, we activate our frontal cortex, the wizard brain or executive centre. This part of your brain sits right behind your Third Eye of Awareness. From here, we are collaborative, easy-going and balanced. We don't live our lives comparing ourselves to anyone, especially our partner, and we don't project our values onto anyone. We stop doing things out of spite, we lose our jealously and envy of anyone's lives and achievements. The tit for tat rollercoaster in our relationships end because we see we can all thrive, even if our highest values are vastly different.
When you make the conscious decision to address the destructive behaviours, actions and traits you display in your survival states, you are guaranteed to re-connect to the part of you that has all the wisdom you seek: Your Heart and your Ventral Vagal Circuit of calm, flow, and the pathway to you accessing your Higher Awareness. Anchored here, we see life and our partners as they are, through the eye of our heart-centred Ventral Vagal State of flow and awareness, and not what and who we think it is, as experienced through the limitations of our egoic-driven mind and thoughts, fears and phobias, based on the past.
When you start to do that, you are not only going to live your life in line with what you actually value, you will allow for the ones you say you love, to do the same. When that happens, your entire life experience will transform, be more expansive and joyful than you ever imagined.
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