From Blame to Healing
The revealing trifocal lens of Toxic, Natural and Sacred Anxiety can be focused on relationships to allow greater clarity, passion and intimacy. Since Toxic Anxiety poisons relationships, each of us needs to actively confront our childhood conditioning and own our anxiety instead of projecting it upon our partner. We can learn to separate the real here-and-now issues from the emotional patterns they trigger in us. The path to cleansing Toxic Anxiety from a relationship is a challenging one: We need to take full responsibility for our own experiences and refrain from blame.
When we blame our partner for how we are feeling ("You made me upset") and assume malicious intent ("You don’t care about my feelings"), we are projecting our past onto the present, and once we do this, we lose our opportunity to grow. If we take responsibility for our own emotions ("I make myself upset") and admit our limited understanding of each other ("I really don’t know why he/she said or did that") then we can use our energy for emotional self-care and honest communication.
When we identify our anxiety, then we can take responsibility for mastering it, instead of insisting that our partner stop triggering it. Taking responsibility often leads us to discover an unresolved issue from our childhood (for which our partner is clearly not responsible). After self-calming and letting go of anger and blame we can approach our partner and share what we have learned, apologize for any hurt we have caused and discuss how to turn this battlefield into a place of healing. When couples agree to help one another heal their childhood wounds, then hurtful cycles of triggering each other’s anxiety can change to healing cycles of love and acceptance. Even if only one person becomes more aware, the ensuing change of perception affects the whole system and will eventually break a toxic relationship cycle, resulting in either a decision to separate and end the pain or a rebirth of the original relationship.
Once Toxic Anxiety patterns are tamed plenty of Natural Anxiety issues still remain, and couples most address and resolve them. These include the daily problems of who does what chores, who picks up the kids today and what color to paint the bedroom. Boundaries need to be negotiated and schedules coordinated. We sometimes forget the obvious: Couples consist of two different people with different backgrounds, different personalities, and different likes and dislikes. Differing values, priorities, sexual appetites, parenting styles and a range of other issues need to be discussed; the differences can then be resolved, or accepted.
Anxiety about finances, health, children, jobs, and so forth can divide a couple that allows problems to trigger toxic conflicts. But these Natural Anxieties can bring a couple closer if they use these issues to affirm their respect for each other and commit themselves to win/win solutions arrived at through strategies that employ creative conflict resolution to resolve differences. Many couples can benefit tremendously from training in these skills, especially if they did not learn healthy ways of dealing with conflict from observing their own parents.
© Finding Serenity in the Age of Anxiety, Robert Gerzon, 1997.
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