Rewire Your Brain for Love by Marsha Lucas PhD

Author:Marsha Lucas, PhD
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hay House, Inc.
Published: 2012-01-31T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 6

GROUNDED ELECTRICAL OUTLETS

Response flexibility

When I was a kid, our house was struck by lightning. Fortunately, we were away when it happened. The house didn’t have a lightning rod to direct the powerful jolt of raw electricity safely down and out, so the surge, seeking ground, zipped along all of the fast-conducting metal it could find—vent pipes, plumbing, and wires.

As the electrical surge traveled, it ignited any combustible materials along the way—wood, insulation, plastic, you name it. It was simply following its prime directive, according to the laws of physics: get to ground. One response, inflexible and impressively destructive. Half the house burned down. Even the necessary actions to put the fire out were destructive: the entire contents of the attic and bedrooms had been flung out of the second story, and the place was drowned in water.

Now that you’re heading off being hijacked by fear and gaining the ability to recover with emotional resilience, you’re ready to improve your capacity to respond with greater flexibility—even in the heat of the moment of an emotionally charged situation—from a wider, more beneficial range of possibilities than lightning bolts and firefighters. *

RESPONSE INFLEXIBILITY: DATING THUNDERBOLTS

Kind of like lightning when it hits ungrounded pipes and wiring, our histories of emotionally painful experiences can lead us to surge emotionally when we’re reminded of them, whether implicitly or explicitly. And we often have a fairly limited repertoire of responses to those situations that just set us off—rage, tears, going silent, checking out. The surge and the reflexive fire-department response leave you vulnerable to making a real mess when you don’t mean to.

One of my patients, Julia, came to see me because she kept dating men whom she couldn’t trust to stick around. She’d “get a feeling” that they weren’t going to be able to be in a relationship for the long run. She said she kept freaking out and abruptly ending relationships because at some point she’d just know that she couldn’t trust the guy.

Julia had an aliveness that was palpable, with a beautifully expressive face and a colorful, engaging way of talking. As we talked about her early relationship history, she said she had great parents and felt very close to both of them, even though they’d divorced when she was very young and had lived on opposite coasts while she was growing up. She’d lived with her mother and traveled by plane to visit her father fairly often. Her father, she said, was always loving and clear during these reunions and separations; he would always tell her that she didn’t need to worry, because he was always there for her and would never leave her. “See? He’s a really great guy. With a father like that, why am I so screwed up when it comes to men?”

* I am in fact deeply grateful to firefighters and their bold actions. It’s just that the approach doesn’t work so well when it comes to intimate relationships.

During the course of our work together, Julia dated a few different men, and I got to hear in (nearly) real time about several of her freak-outs.

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