Automating your Partner? Now what?

When we fight over memory, whose is right?

A common place of discord during couples sessions and at home involves the entrapment in past stories of who’s experience is right and who’s memory is most accurate. It is completely normal to have these types of conflicts with your partner, and the longer a couple is together the more they naturally stop paying attention to the details of relationship. Dr. Stan Tatkin, founder of the PACT approach to couples therapy, relates this tendency to the automatic brain and implicit memory. Dr. Tatkin links these brain systems to our early childhood attachment experiences which often play out in our intimate partnerships.

Implicit memory is largely hidden to us.

According to Dr. Tatkin, implicit memories play a significant role in shaping the ways individuals respond to their partners. Implicit memory is the part of your memory that is largely hidden from you, is created from past experiences, and acts in accordance with the automatic brain. Partners cannot help but bring their past patterns of relationship into partnership, be that attachment patterns, emotional responses or communication styles.

We are attracted to what is most familiar to us.

When it comes to attraction, we often are attracted to what is most familiar to us. Meaning, relational patterns that were exposed to and modeled for us as a child. Such observed patterns of connection and disconnection often become the foundation for what we are drawn to in an intimate partner. Which means they do not have to be functional or healthy yet our neurobiology stores them as familiar and consistent. Because these patterns become so engrained in us they feel natural and normal. Often when seeking a partner we may not even know these implicit patterns are drawing us towards some and away from others.

Over time our brains automate our partner.

When partners first meet they are new to each other and the brain and memory system responds to this newness. However Dr. Tatkin, notes that the longer partners are together and the more they get to know each other, the more their implicit memory controls the relationship. This automating of your partner over time is natural, yet this is where the bickering and fighting over who remembers best and who is right comes into play.

Memory is flawed and imperfect.

The problem with memory, including implicit memory, is that it is flawed and imperfect. Which can be a very disconcerting piece of information, given that the average human has great faith in their memory system! However, memory is constantly redesigning itself each time we draw a memory back. The farther away from the time of the memory we get the more times it has been redesigned, to the point we cannot say with much certiantly we remember the situation well at all. Now add another person to the equasion going through the same redesign process and well it becomes clear neither memories of the same incident are accurate. So whats going on with the who is right fight?

A relationship cannot withstand lack of security.

Dr. Tatkin states that “the problem is not that couples fight, it is that when they do, one or both of them threaten to leave the relationship.” He notes that a relationship can withstand fighting, what it cannot withstand is lack of safely and security. Threatening the security of the relationship’s “we’ness” elevates the autonomic nervous system - that fast acting, fight/flight, emergency response system in our body. As the ANS winds up our ability to rationally think through problems goes down and we act on impulse and emotionally reactivity.

Help your neurobiology out, have each others back.

To interrupt these moments of tension Dr. Tatkin recommends helping your neurobiology out. He suggests “going eye to eye and face to face,” to “not fight in the car or on the phone” as a sideways glance is a threat trigger and signals danger to your partner. Finally, he encourages couples to come back to the principals of secure functioning, reminding each other to have each others back and to remember that our job as partners is to protect each other and help each other feel safe.

Post supported by: Stan Tatkin TED https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xKXLPuju8U

Your Brain on Love by Stan Tatkin