Tami Simon: You’re listening to Insights at the Edge. Today my guest is Julia Colwell. Julie is a psychologist living in Boulder, Colorado where she leads the Intensive Learning Community and teaches classes on living consciously at the Boulder Center for Conscious Community. She has been in private psychotherapy practice since 1991, where she offers individuals and couples sessions and consultations as well as leading weekend retreats, classes, and groups.
With Sounds True, Julie has published a new book called The Relationship Skills Workbook: A Do-It-Yourself Guide to a Thriving Relationship.
In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Julie joined me in the Sounds True studio and we talked about tuning to the sensations in our bodies as a primary skill that’s needed to create loving relationships. We talked about learning to speak unarguable truths, and how also to create a space for listening to all of the truths that our partner longs to share.
We talked about fighting in relationships, and how Julie believes that most fighting is actually totally unnecessary if we can learn to work with what she calls our “reactive brain.” And finally, we talked about taking 100% responsibility for whatever is happening in your relationship. Here’s my conversation about relationship as a skill with Julie Colwell.
Julie, I think for most people when they think of a good relationship, they think, “Well, that couple, they’re really lucky. They’re just so lucky. They met the right person. And, you know, my relationship is troubled for this reason or that reason. I’m not lucky like them.” And yet, you’ve written a book now—The Relationship Skills Workbook—which seems to imply that relationship isn’t so much about meeting the “right person” but more about developing a set of skills. Is that how you see it?
Julie Colwell: Yes, I think actually we tell ourselves so many stories about how difficult relationships are: relationships are work, and yes, only the lucky few get to have really great relationships. I don’t believe that at all. I believe that with some tools, with some really specific and not even that complicated skills, people can have fabulous relationships pretty much most people can.
TS: Now, you might not believe that, but I think when most of us look around us, that’s what we see. It is what we see—meaning, I think most of us, we look, for most people they look around at their friends or their people in their family, and you know, only a few people really seem super happy at the end of the day. How do you think it is that we’re in this situation if it’s just about learning some skills? Wouldn’t we have figured this out by now?
JC: Well, who’s ever taught anybody anything? I mean, I never learned anything—even all the way from Kindergarten through graduate school, and I went to psychology graduate school—I didn’t learn one thing about how to have a relationship. Nothing. So, what I based my own style of relationship on was what I learned growing up. And between being a sibling in a pretty chaotic household and then watching my parents, who were unhappy, well those were my two models of relationships. So I could look around past that—let’s see, there’s TV.
[Laughs.] That was only so useful. That’s pretty much it. So in terms of actually having a skillset, no. I didn’t ever learn anything.
So—and again, even stressing, even in graduate school we didn’t talk about anything like emotions, strangely enough. It was awhile back. Hopefully they’re doing more of that now. But, when I learned how to do couples work, nothing about actually teaching somebody basically, like, how do you even know what you’re feeling? That seems like such a mystery for people. We talk as if we know what we’re feeling. “Well, I feel like you…” [Laughs.] And that’s my feeling, “I feel like you are…”
TS: “I feel like you’re a jerk!”
JC: Yes! That seems like how we want to finish that sentence. Or, “I feel like I just can’t do this.” So, we just start from the starting line, we go off into some place that’s all about mind—what we’re thinking about, the projections, the stories we’re making up. It has very little to do with any actual substance of our own emotional life.
TS: Well, it seems like you’re moving into a description of what you think one of the key skills in relationship might be—that has something to do with knowing what we’re feeling. So, talk a little bit about that in terms of what these key skills are, and this idea of knowing what we’re feeling as being part of that.
JC: Yes, because I do believe that’s the mysterious zone for people. And I also think, well over time I’ve made up my own stories about couples. Here’s one of them: I think that men believe women understand emotion.
And so, I’m here to say, to try to do something about that myth because I don’t think that women are really any better than men about having emotions or describing their own emotional life because we’ve got that, “I feel,”—we start there and then everyone sort of scatters and, you know, waits for the next words, if they’re the truth. And really all that’s happened is people launch into their stories and projections.
So, in terms of a skill, right there I would, I see a dividing line in my head—a highway that goes in one direction or the other—that one direction is off into thoughts, stories, beliefs—which, in my brain, are all about projections because it’s whatever I’ve learned up to now about how life works.
But the other whole merging lane is about what’s happening in my body. So, that’s not a world that I ever knew anything about, really. Literally nothing. My physical body, sure. But what was my inner world trying to tell me? I had no idea that there were signals or communications from my body.
So, in terms of a key skill, that is like, number one in neon: to actually check in with all of these signals that our bodies are desperately trying to tell us with that big stomach ache that won’t go away. I did a workshop out in the woods one time and this woman was—I can see her now—saying, “Well, I have had this headache for two years.” [Laughs.] It’s like, well, maybe that actually means something.
So these physical symptoms that people try to medicate away are so often our bodies desperately trying to reach us with these messages that are really profound and important. So, yeah, A#1 skill is: Check in with my body for what’s the truth.
TS: Now, can you make it more explicit for people what the connection is between what’s physically happening inside them and their emotional life—what that connection is? And then, what that has to do with how I’m going to have a happy relationship with my partner.
JC: OK, just that. Sure. So, how this works is, here I am having a conversation, and something happens. Because we can go along and everything’s fine. La la la, everything’s great. And then something happens. Now, people seem to have a lot of judgment about the somethings that happens. “It shouldn’t have happened. We should’ve turned left. If you had just turned right we wouldn’t be in this traffic. You shouldn’t have dropped that. I shouldn’t have overdrawn our account. If only, then, we wouldn’t be having this…” So we tend to put so much energy into things that have already happened, versus, right now, this is happening. Something is happening and my body is having a reaction.
TS: Yes.
JC: So, it’s the reaction where the gold is. “Wow, I feel like throwing up. Oh, my jaw is so tight. Oh, I can hardly breathe now.” All in that—that’s what’s to be mined, because every one of those is pointing in a direction of what I’m feeling emotionally. What’s the emotion? My jaw is telling me I’m angry. My chest is telling me I’m sad. My stomach is telling me I’m scared.
So if I can connect with that, now I can tell you, “Well, the truth is I’m scared. Oh, I thought I was angry because we turned right—I guess it was left—but actually, when I tune into my stomach I’m scared. What am I scared about? I’m scared I’m going to be late.” Oh, well, that’s so useful because instead of me railing against you because you never listen to me when we’re driving down the road, I can tell you what’s the truth.
The truth is, I feel scared about being late. Now I know what’s true, you know what’s true and then I can just sit there and be scared, because you don’t have to do anything about that—it’s my body. Actually let my body feel scared, to process the emotion, to move it through, because probably in a couple of minutes, if I actually attend to that, I’m going to be fine.
So we did was just steer around the whole, you know, “We should never have…we should’ve left on time but we didn’t and now you turned left into traffic and now I’m sitting here and I’m gonna be late and you always do this.” And then you have to defend yourself, and now we’re all in this wrangle and tangle of the conflict instead of what really is—the only important thing is that my stomach is tight. Really, that’s the only thing that happened.
So if I can attend to that, and breathe, and actually feel better [takes a deep breath]. Oh, OK, now my stomach is fine. We just skipped about, well, I don’t know, anywhere from fifteen minutes to days of a conflict, where it’s the power struggle about who was right and who is wrong.
TS: It sounds to me that what you’re saying is that when people develop, we could call it somatic intelligence, or knowing how to tune to their bodies and then understand the messages they’re getting about their emotional state—then you are saying that our relationships would have a very different quality if you had two people who were doing that.
JC: Yes, very different quality.
TS: Now, let’s say you have one person who’s doing that in a relationship—how’s that going to unfold?
JC: [Laughs.] Um. It still can be quite impactful. When I teach these skills, often the very first question is, “OK, great. Now I know how to do this, but what about those other people in the world?”
TS: Yeah! It’s those other people!
JC: [Laughs.] From now on I’ll always tune into my body. Actually, if I’m in a room and I can tell anybody—it could be, I don’t know, the whole group of people at the meeting or it could be you right now, let’s see if I can do it. My mouth’s a little dry and I feel a little tight in my body. As soon as I’m doing that, do you notice that your attention is actually going into your body?
TS: I do.
JC: So, that’s interesting. Plus, you’ve had a little tour through my experience. Now, because of all the physiological queues going back and forth between us—that’s really what empathy is, and this is an open-loop system, our limbic systems are connecting more—like, it all starts to…I can impact you simply by my own attention going in instead of into something that’s more projecting and blaming.
TS: Now, I know, Julie, as part of your work, you’ve studied and inquired into the life of animals, and if we could say, the emotional life of animals—I don’t know if you’d quite put it that way—
JC: I would.
TS: —but I’m wondering what you’ve learned about relationships from the animal kingdom.
JC: Oh, really, the thought I’m carrying with me these days, which delights me, is the problem for humans is we are threatened animals who can speak. I mean that if you listen to our language about relationships, we use animal language all the time. “She’s a backbiter,” or “He just rolls over,” or “Wow, I just totally went into a freeze like a deer in headlights when we had that conversation.”
So, basically our systems are, I believe, pretty much the same as any other mammal in terms of what we’re most looking for in relationship—like, basic physiological comfort, for one; safety, what would downshift our systems—and then when we go into reactive brain, into that animal threat brain, we just, we act like animals. But unfortunately, we say things—we don’t just growl and bark and whimper, we say, “You don’t understand me,” or, “You’re so mean,” or, “I need to get out of this relationship,” which of course is just going to escalate everything.
TS: Now, you used this interesting phrase, “reactive brain,” when we move into reactive brain. What’s that?
JC: Reactive brain, I think people will very much recognize that state where there was one moment when they felt very relaxed and fine, and then the something happened.
TS: Yes.
JC: Maybe there was the big sound outside or they just saw the bill on the table or their mother-in-law just left a message. You know, something where it’s, “Uh-oh.” There’s an uh-oh response that’s automatic. It’s actually I think these days we can see there’s so much fascinating information about the brain—those things, those reactions are happening seconds before our, the rest of us is online—certainly our neo-cortex.
So, our bodies are already in reaction mode before our minds ever catch up to, “Oh, that’s…” sort of slow motion. “Oh, now I notice that I’m really upset.” You know, we can kind of get there. But generally, especially in our culture, people are already trying to talk themselves out of all of that. I think we have so much shame about being built like animals that really.
I think this is a main issue in relationships that people get triggered into reactive brain where the cortisol levels go up and the pulse is raised and the blood pressure’s up and we want to fight, flight or freeze. We want to run out of the room or have a fight or just don’t know what to do. And once we’re in that state, well, first we just have so much judgment about it. “I shouldn’t be in it. I’m ashamed to be in it in front of you, and now you’re in it, oh my god, well, I never felt this with anyone else so there’s clearly something wrong with our relationship that I’m so deeply or in so much of a triggered response.” So, I think without that judgment, wow, people could be so freed up. I go around teaching people how to just try to love their reactive brains.
TS: OK, so, here something’s happened. I’m triggered by something my partner said. Maybe I feel criticized or something like that. And here I am, I’m tuning to the physical sensations and I say to my partner, “You know, I notice I feel heat in my body and I feel angry.” OK, so what next? Where’s this taking us? I mean, and you know my partner may say, “I feel my stomach.” OK, great. I’m glad we have the physiological data report, but where’s this getting us?
JC: [Chuckles.] That’s great. In fact, I actually teach people how to do that. And I ask them to ask each other for a weather report—what’s really the weather internally? What it’s getting you is that you’re tuning into what’s really happening. Because, what I would want you to do next is basically do something to shift your physiology. Stop talking about the issue.
TS: We’re not gonna solve the problem?
JC: We’re not going to solve the problem. I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but suddenly the problem is different. So before it was, “Oh, well, you know it might be nice to have time together.” And suddenly the problem is, “You never did love me.” Like, what problem are you really trying to solve? So, in reactive brain, the blood flow is coming out of the neo-cortex, it’s going into the limbic system, it’s going into the—all of those automatic responses—it’s going into our muscles to get us ready to do something to get away from or to deal with the threat.
It is not going into those nice places that will help us calmly sit down and sort through the issue. And it for sure is not going into, I think of it as creative brain, which is the different place from reactive brain—not exactly opposite, but it’s its good friend. But [you have to] wait to get back into creative brain to try to solve the issue, because then suddenly, “Oh, yeah we could sell the house and move into a tiny house—that would be great!”
Versus, half an hour ago, “I hate you, I don’t ever want to see you again, or we’ll never have money,” or whatever reactive brain is coming up with as the story. Because the stories from reactive brain are all going to be about competition, scarcity, not enough, everything that comes from being a threatened animal. I’ve got to fight with you or I’ve got to run away. Or, maybe I’ll just sit here and freeze into just not telling you anything. Probably some people can relate to that.
TS: So, it’s as simple and direct as, “I feel triggered right now, I feel x, y, z in my body and I think we should talk about this at another time.”
JC: It is as simple as that. That’s sort of amazing, isn’t it? All the communication skills that people think they need to learn. Because for the most part, people are very able to talk. I sit down with couples. They come into my office and it took them a lot to get there and they’re chatting away, they’re talking, they’re fine—until they get triggered. And then everything just goes wacky for them.
So, yes, John Gottman did this great experiment that’s totally shifted how I thought about doing couples work where he’s—he’s this wonderful researcher who’s done 25 years of videotaping couples and attaching them to all sorts of monitors. So the experiment was to have the couple get into an argument, they’re in front of the cameras, and then to tell them that the camera broke. “Stop, stop, stop. The camera broke. Could you just sit there?”
The couple of course is very compliant because they’re in this laboratory. And so they’re sitting there for 15 minutes, and then the researcher comes and says, “OK, go ahead. We fixed the camera.” Now they’re a different couple. So they had 15 minutes to just be and leaf through the magazines or whatever, and suddenly their physiology has settled to the point that they can talk through an issue. That is fascinating to me.
Now, of course simple doesn’t mean easy. And for me, having done my own work on this for many years, I still, when I go into reactive brain my brain is saying, “This is never going to work, this is stupid, of course I need to work on this, this is urgent!” That’s part of reactive brain, is the urgency. “I must talk about this right now. We have to deal with this.”
But all of that is so counterproductive for couples who really need to go and chill or do something to shift their physiological state. They don’t have to go away from each other. They could put on some great music—some big loud booming drumming music and dance. That would be wonderful for them. Or go for a walk without talking about it. Or sit down and just meditate together.
Actually, my very favorite shift move, which is timely for this time of year, is failsafe for me and my partner is a squirt gun fight. So I’ll be totally so mad but if I can get myself to the squirt gun and start a squirt gun fight. We are running around screaming, and it’s impossible to stay upset if I’m in the middle of a squirt gun fight.
TS: Do you think it’s possible if a couple really worked this skill that you’re describing that there wouldn’t be that much fighting in the relationship? Because I think there’s this idea that, you know, fighting’s good. You have to have a good fight. The good fight is where you both express yourself and, I don’t know, I don’t exactly know what a good fight might be. But as you’re talking it’s making me think, hmm, maybe there’s not even all that much need for fighting.
JC: I don’t’ actually believe there’s all that much need for fighting. There is a need to speak the truth. So I don’t want that to blend away into a sort of la-la land of “Oh, let’s just skip along and everything is fine,” because often I think people try hard to have everything be fine by not saying the things that are not fine for them.
To actually tell the truth about, “I feel angry,” that’s not so easy for people, especially if we’ve got an idea that now, OK, it’s better to not fight; so I agree with you, yes, that there’s no good reason to try to use English words or whatever language during some escalated state, that that will make it more escalated. On the other hand, committing to speaking the unarguable truth will allow the connection to maintain.
It’s the things that I’m not telling you that are going to start to disconnect me from you.
TS: Now, tell me what you mean by this phrase, “the unarguable truth.”
JC: Yes, what is the unarguable truth? It is the truth that you can’t argue with me about. Now that’s interesting in that there’s really not much you can’t argue with me about.
TS: I was going to say, try me! But that’s all right.
JC: It’s a beautiful day outside. Can you argue with me about that?
TS: Of course I could!
JC: How about, “You’re late.”
TS: I’m sure many couples have arguments over that very question.
JC: Right. And so, to notice that—and that is the only definition I have of the unarguable truth—is I know it’s arguable if someone can argue with me. It’s not, do we have statistics to back it up, or would anybody else believe it? It’s strictly, can you argue with me? So, the only thing that I believe—and I have to lay down some foul lines around this, because we have to have some agreements about this—the only things you can’t argue with me about are the things happening in my body. So that’s the line right there.
TS: Mhm.
JC: So that means, like, that’s a short list. My sensations are happening in my body. So, going back to that tight stomach, that’s mine. It’s not so easy for some couples, but it’s like, you know, the one that says, “Well, I have a headache.” The other, “If you would just have had some water!” No, it’s my head.
Sensations are in my body. Emotions then come from sensations. So I can start to link those, going back, so that fear tends to happen in the belly; sadness in the chest; anger up in the jaw and arms and shoulders, back; glad tends to feel whole-body, sexual tends to be genitals but also beyond that. All of that is unarguable. If I say, “I feel angry and sexual,” you don’t get to argue with me about that.
And that goes with another whole idea that I’m publicizing throughout the world, which is, anybody gets to feel anything anytime for any reason. I just want to kind of pause with that because people don’t really believe that.
So that if I feel angry, I have to have a really good reason, and now I’m going to have 10 reasons for you, because “If you had only” and “You didn’t” and “What about your stupid job,” of course anybody would be angry! Instead, wait a second. I have a tight jaw and I have a headache and I feel angry and I get to, because, well, for me it’s the law in my own queen land.
Because anybody gets to, which takes a lot of the pressure off from, “I shouldn’t be feeling this.” People walk around with this—poor all of us—“I shouldn’t be feeling what I’m feeling.” And just think about what that does to a person. “I’m feeling it, but I shouldn’t be feeling it.” So, that means I’m going to have to drink or smoke or eat or surf the Internet, to try to not feel what I’m feeling. I’m actually feeling a little teary as I’m talking about this because people torture themselves about this.
But if we start from the inside out—and I had to really actually figure this out for myself, because I’d think, “Well, I’m feeling grumpy but I don’t know. Look at my life; what do I have to be grumpy about? I must be fine, there’s just something wrong with me.” But from the inside out, grumpy turns into headache and tight jaw and tight stomach. Oh, and maybe I have some tightness in my chest.
“Oh, the truth is I feel scared and sad. Well that’s interesting. And maybe mad. I wonder when I started feeling mad?” Suddenly, wow, I can actually feel what I’m feeling and it’s already starting to move through me. And, if I’m in relationship of any sort with you—as a coworker or friend or partner—you have some ideas, “Oh, Julie’s grumpy again.” “Oh, something’s really happening for her.”
TS: Now, interestingly, you talk about these five categories of emotional experience. And what I liked about that is that it made it pretty simple.
JC: Yes. Simple.
TS: I liked that. And you have already named them—anger, sadness, fear, glad, and sexual—so you believe that anything that anyone’s feeling first of all, could map to one of those five categories, and that all of it’s OK, whatever you’re feeling.
JC: Yes, and for the anthropologists out there, they’re arguing with me, and they should because we could add some. And, for relationships, keeping it simple because of reactive brain—reactive brain can’t track complicated, so yes, five is really useful. And, it’s like the primary colors in that you can start mixing and matching.
For example: guilt. Well, I feel guilty. Well, that sort of thuds. I feel guilty. What does that mean? But if I tune in I can actually start pulling it apart into, “Oh, I notice my stomach’s tight. I feel scared. Oh, and I’m mad, too, but I’m scared to tell you that I’m mad because the thing happened that I did.” So then I can actually go into what’s really happening and my body can start to move out of things.
TS: OK, so the place where I’m having a question here is I think I get people tracking their bodies and giving the output of that experience at the level of sensation, and even saying it’s one of these five emotions or a combination, but a lot of what needs to happen, it seems to me, in relationship is I have to say some other things. Like, why I might be afraid or what I need from you to help me not feel so afraid, or like there’s some other stuff that might need to happen. Is that correct?
JC: [Laughs.] I remember a friend saying, “Wow, our conversations have gotten much shorter.”
TS: [Laughs.]
JC: Well, yes. And notice here, as soon as I start to go into the ‘because,’ well, just be careful. “I notice my jaw is tight, I feel angry because you were late.” All right, so now we just veered away from what’s unarguable.
TS: Right.
JC: And you will argue with me, probably, unless you’re feeling happy and then maybe you won’t. But, that part is not so easy to stay with the unarguable, but yes, I would add in—and there are some great exercises in the workbook about this—that every one of those emotions actually is giving us a communication. So that anger is saying there’s an intrusion, or there’s an obstacle. So that’s useful. It’s still about me, by the way.
I’m the one—my body is the one that’s perceiving that there’s an intrusion or an obstacle, so in other words I’m getting something I don’t want or not getting something that I want. With fear, there’s a perceived threat. With sadness, there’s a loss. So this is pretty simple stuff if I can stay with it. Wow, I feel sad. What have I lost? What’s coming up for me about loss? And then I can actually describe more of that to you.
Glad is really about, what can I celebrate, what am I enjoying? Sexual can be sexual attraction but it’s also a bigger life energy of what am I really drawn to? What’s exciting for me right now? So each one of these emotions can lead into the rest of my experience, so long as I’m not blaming you or putting it on you. And that’s not so easy for people.
The other thing that’s unarguable—because we’ve got sensations, emotions—what I want is unarguable, and so that’s the part that’s going to engage you again. So, “I notice I feel sad and I feel lonely and I notice my body is just kind of over here in this low place. You know what I really would want? I’d really want to have some connection time with you and be, you know, maybe we could sit together.”
So that’s going to bring you back into the equation, and then you get to do the same thing. You can tell me what’s happening for you and ultimately what you want. And then things get really interesting because then we can start to weave that together about what we both want and be co-creative with that.
TS: Now this “what I want” skill—that seems where things could get a little bit more risky and challenging. I say something that I want—that requires a lot of courage. What if my partner is completely disinterested in giving it to me?
JC: Right. [Laughs.]. Good point. Yeah, well, I would say a lot of us have spent years dimming down what we want.
TS: Yes.
JC: When I teach this, people look at me with these kind of wide eyes, and they’re saying to me, “Well, I don’t know what I want. I don’t even know what I want so how can I even tell you what I want?” And then, often they start with, “Well, what I don’t want is…” and maybe build to the, “What I want.”
And there’s an extra skill in this, which is to actually get to the bottom line of what I want. People often have solved something in their minds, and they present the solution. “Well, what I want is to have sex. That’s my perfect solution.” They think this is a great solution.
TS: I think this is a great example. People are tracking their body. Person feels sexual, and they say, “I want us to have sex.” And the partner is completely not interested.
JC: Yes, they’re like, “What?!” That person will say, “I want to be emotionally connected before I have sex.” That’s a matched set right there. Yeah, so getting down underneath what I would think of as the solution—sex is the solution to, well what do I really want? “Well, I want to have sex.” I mean, it can sound so banal as I’m describing it here. But really getting down to, is that true for me? Like, is that really true in my body that I want genital expression? Well, maybe it is. Well that may or may not include you.
But maybe I want something else, and I just—my mind decided it was sex. You gotta watch these minds, you know. They’re tricksters. We, one of the things that I walk around with as an idea is that my mind does not wish the best for me. So really finding underneath, what is my mind saying: well we should be having sex X amount of times and we are not, therefore there’s something wrong with us, now I want sex. Well, huh.
So what’s really underneath all that? What do I really want? “I wanna feel normal like any other couple. I want to think there’s not something wrong with us. I want to feel close to you. I want to not feel all my other feelings.” You know, what’s really going on? And so that’s going to probably take more exploration than just whatever my mind has generated.
TS: Now, interestingly—and I think it’s related to this—in The Relationship Skills Workbook you talk about toxic habits that people have in relationship. And one of them I thought was very interesting. Here’s the toxic habit that you describe: if I hurt you enough through blame, criticism or contempt, you’ll stop doing what I don’t want you to do.
And what I’m getting at here, and what I want you to unpack for our listeners, is this idea that often instead of saying what we want, we instead criticize, or blame or do something else to try to get what we want.
JC: Right.
TS: And, help, help people really understand how they could catch themselves in this toxic habit.
JC: Yes, hard habit to break, especially for Westerners I think, I don’t know, or Americans. We seem to have this idea that punishment works; that punishment is an effective learning strategy. So, we do it to ourselves and we do it to the people around us—especially the people that are closest to us.
I have to, I don’t know, whatever the latest thing is I’m supposed to be doing—exercise more, eat better or whatever the thing is—so what’s wrong with me that I’m not, do I have to like sort of kick myself around the block. And so then, yes, now that you are sharing my psychic space, I’m going to do the same thing with you. I’m going to sort of use—especially contempt, very hard on a relationship—it might be in the tone of my voice, it might be that I kind of back of the throat thing that we do (“Tch.”) It’s universal for mammals, they have some version of that I think—in order really to try to control you.
Of course—of course, I’m saying. I don’t really know. My experience is that the other person isn’t like jumping up and down saying, “OK, thank you for helping me be better.” They’re mostly recoiling and defending and trying to get away from the connection because it starts to feel really awful, frankly, to be around that kind of, “What’s the matter with you?” That kind of ongoing message, whether it’s spoken or just indirect, that there’s really something wrong with you. It seems like what we carry with us.
There’s gotta be something wrong with someone. If we’re having a hard time in our relationship, well, it’s either me or you. And often when people come into my office, that’s what they’re trying to figure out. And they’re kind of bringing each other there so that I can decide which one’s the problem. People don’t wait to get a diagnosis anymore with the Internet, so clearly they’re sort of waiting for me to finally decide well, it’s that one, and hopefully it’s not this one.
And really, again I feel sad about that because mostly people are just frustrated because they don’t know how to do this. There’s not anything wrong with anybody—of course that’s an overstatement, we all have our challenges—but, ugh, the frustration comes from not knowing how to get out of that hell of reactive brain; and that they are doing the best they can feeling, I believe that about humans, sort of going down with each other as they are triggering/counter-triggering each other until the only solution is to get away.
TS: Now, I want to sort of circle around here because you were talking about this example of someone who felt sexual, and wanted to have sex, and said, “I want to have sex.” And I could imagine them engaging in this toxic habit of saying, “The reason we don’t have more sex in our relationship is because you’re x, y, z.”
And that it would take a lot of softness and courage for someone to say, “Actually, you know, here’s what I’m feeling and here’s what I’m longing for or wanting.” And I’m wondering if you can help us understand what would be the skillful way for the person who is longing for something—how would they talk to their partner at that moment?
JC: Well, first I want to address that there are a lot of people out there that think either there’s something wrong with them around sex, or something wrong with their partners, and that often people come into my office and one of them believes that they’ve got something called low sexual desire. I’m sure my profession has made that popular.
And so, instead of that, which what I would call arguable story, I’d be really interested in supporting each of them to be able to go in there and find out what’s really going on. Because by the time they get there—that one person basically is shutting down their bodies—there’s been some sort of history that’s gotten them there.
And so, being able to uncover the layers of that. “Well, yeah, that started nine months ago or thirteen years ago, or some time in the past when the one who doesn’t want to have sex had sex when they didn’t want to have sex.” That’s often where it started, because they thought they should, and their bodies over time just kind of stopped being willing to do that. So, you ask, “So how do you have that conversation?”
I think it’s about willingness and courage, the way you just said, to actually hear the truth. It’s one thing to, all right, commit to speaking the truth but there’s the whole other part of this about hearing the truth—hearing what you don’t really want to hear. Like, “I didn’t like having sex with you that way.” Or, “I didn’t like how you approached me, or I didn’t, I had sex when I didn’t want to.”
That would be the big truth that people don’t speak. And then, years go by where people are building their sexual relationship on top of that kind of very thin ice. So, being able to speak that, being able to hear that. Like, “I want to hear everything.” That, to me, is again, like you’re saying, the very tender place, courageous place, and the most strengthening thing you can do for your relationship.
People want to have safety in their relationships and often I think what we do to be safe is basically shut ourselves down. And then, over time we say, “Wow, I don’t know what happened, I don’t’ feel in love anymore, but I guess this is just what long-term relationship is, so OK, we’ll just spend the next 30 years passionless and, oh well, that’s what happened to my parents.” And then you go on with that until [there’s this] cute person is at the office or whatever and then suddenly they feel alive again.
So, finding our ways back to what’s really safe—to me the only safety we have is the truth. That is what allows safety in relationship, is for me to create a space with you where you are willing to tell me exactly what’s going on. And vice versa, that I have the courage and the commitment to tell you exactly what’s going on—day to day to day, moment to moment to moment—to not just go into that place of that little white lie thing that people say, you know, what they don’t know won’t hurt them, or this just isn’t a good time, we have this nice evening planned so I just won’t tell him how much I spent today.
That stuff really matters. It starts stacking on top of—I think of this passion fire that we start with, like, love and passion and great sex, and over time we start throwing dirt on it in terms of what we didn’t say until there’s really, it’s under there if we can just sort of scrape off what hasn’t been said over the years. But, sometimes, well, I don’t know. Typically, were I working with a couple we can find those little tiny embers, but you wait too long and they go out.
TS: Now, let’s talk a little bit about the listener in this situation. What can the listener do to create the space for truth in their relationship?
JC: Well, they can breathe a lot.
TS: Mhm.
JC: They can breathe a lot. I think what happens for people when they’re trying to hear—even when they go into it, OK this time I’m going to do a better job—that right away they’ve got filters, listening for blame, for criticism, for how they did it wrong. So, trying to come back into their own body—there we are again. OK, here’s my experience, and then letting the other person be over there in their own separate experience.
So, mantras I use like, “Keep breathing, Julie, just listen, this is how they feel, that’s their body, that’s what’s happening for them right now.” And then, even if there’s a sense of being allies, which hopefully in a relationship there could be—being able to say things like, “Well, I just notice, I’m just wondering are you blaming me right now?” I’m just wondering. [Laughs.] Or, “Hah, I know…”
TS: That seems like a very evolved person that would ask, “I wonder, are you blaming me?” That would be a very evolved statement.
JC: It has saved me in conversations, for sure, instead of my old technique, which is to say, “You’re blaming me!” Or, “Why are you blaming me?”
TS: “Stop blaming me!” Yes.
JC: [Laughs.] But to actually put it out there as a possibility, which brings us both back into being conscious of yeah, oh yeah, right, unarguable, back in, wondering what’s really true right now. But a lot of breathing, and again, because of this open limbic system—most systems, all systems in our body—you know, think of our blood system, all of our blood is in our bodies, it stays here—but emotionally we are creating a loop, it’s happening between us, and so if I’m having some physiological reaction you’re going to know and you’re going to feel it.
That’s hard for couples, really hard for couples. One’s at home having a great time, the other person just had a terrible day at work and they come in and there’s smoke coming out of their head and suddenly there’s this clash of physiology, so actually breathing with that and understanding that that’s happening, and of course we’re going to impact each other, that’s how we’re built. And giving some room and space to come back into my own body, my own experience.
TS: OK, and let’s say someone’s listening right now and they know there are some truths that need to be said in their relationship, but they’re listening and they’re scared.
JC: Yes.
TS: They feel in their body that they’re scared. [Laughs.] But they’re kind of inspired at the same time. How can you help them cross that gap and actually do it? And their partner’s not the fabulous breathing listener you just described.
JC: [Laughs.] I think where I would start would be for that listener to sit down with this other person and say, “Would you be interested in having a more connected, intimate, passionate relationship? Because I am.” So, “Could we go in that direction?” So, actually setting up a field ahead of time, if they can.
Because if in fact you are—you’ve listened to this podcast and learned some things I’ve just been learning, and, I would say, “And if you are interested in that with me, then I want to start to develop some skills with you and tell you some things because I notice that I’ve been withholding some information or withholding parts of me or I haven’t stepped fully in to be with you because, well, because I thought that’s what I was supposed to do.”
So, actually having some sensitivity, I think, for one’s own learning with that, instead of sort of jumping off into the scary, “Well, I’m just going to say everything.” Giving yourself some time to be with that, and also some time with this whole concept of what is unarguable, because the truth doesn’t have to sound like, “The truth is I hate your guts,” or, “The truth is I never want to have sex with you,” or, “The truth is you do look fat in those pants,” right? The things we don’t want to say. That isn’t the truth, that’s going that other direction of that’s all arguable.
The truth is: “I’m scared.” The truth is: “Three years ago I started thinking I wasn’t in love with you, I had that story, and I haven’t known how to even talk about it with you.” “The truth is right now I could throw up even describing any of this.” Like, to actually go [to] sensations, emotions, and to give themselves time to be with that before having to jump straight into the mouth of this, the mouth of the lion of potential who knows what would happen.
But the other thing is, for me, being Caucasian and raised in that way, I think there’s something called “white-polite,” that a lot of people believe they shouldn’t have messy relationships and so it’s better to just kind of hold it in. So these days I’m a fan of mess. Like, yeah, if it all gets dumped out on the carpet, OK. Take some time to sort through it. If I really want to have a big, passionate connection, maybe that’s exactly what I need to do is let things kind of blow up and so that I can actually see what it is that we’ve got between us. It’s not the worst thing.
TS: Now, you make a very strong statement in The Relationship Skills Workbook—actually you make many of them—but here’s one that really got my attention. “Anytime we blame we are giving away our power,” and I wonder if you can unpack that for people?
JC: Yes, wonderful. I love what you find in this, Tami. It actually feels energetic and I can feel it anymore—I think of it as the hot potato of power, of energy, so that I can, let’s see, that something happened and I feel angry about it, and if I could just sort of heave it over to you. “Well, if you hadn’t, then I would not be feeling this way.” But as soon as I do that I’m totally losing anything I had to do to create that situation.
This actually happened last night. My partner and I missed each other in a restaurant. I’m texting, looking around, walking around, walking around. Oh, I just so wanted to blame her about it. She came home, she really, I think, wanted to blame me. Well, to sit with, OK, how did I create that? How did I create that? What it did was actually kind of help me to stay internal and instead of going over there, it helped us avoid some big conflagration, and the truth was, I totally created that!
I mean, it was up to me what I was going to do next. That was my experience. It was my life, of stepping through that. So, to bring her into the middle of that was a lie, frankly. So, it doesn’t—as soon as I blame, what I’m doing is taking any learning out of the situation. I’m right! [Laughs.] I know what happened, and you did it. So there’s nothing to learn from the situation. Versus, if I can start to wonder, “Huh, wow I just did that. That’s pretty interesting.”
TS: OK, but I’m imagining listeners thinking of all the things they’re blaming their partners for right now. And there’s a fabulous, long, interesting list from little things like: I blame my partner for being a slob, to I blame my partner for overspending money and not even telling me about it, or I blame my partner for having an affair—we could go all the way to that level. So all these, I mean, there’s little blames and there’s big blames.
Are you actually saying to people that when they engage in that kind of blame, they are no longer empowered in their relationships? And if so, there’s no place for that kind of blame? What am I going to do? My partner’s a slob who overdrew the bank account and had an affair!
JC: That is what I’m saying. The concept would be about taking 100% responsibility for what is happening for me, and in our relationship. Yes, because I am very interested in people living in a really powerful, big way. That is my goal; that we’re all walking around being as big as we can and getting everything we want. All right?
So, I totally believe that that’s possible in a relationship. You can be as big as you are—both people can be as big as they are and they can get everything they want. So when we go into reactive brain, we kind of go a few steps back in evolution and suddenly we are wrangling and fighting and using our energy in conflict and struggle and making the other person wrong or making myself wrong. So all this energy going to waste.
If I can come back into creative brain and tell you the truth and tell you what I really want, now I’m available to hear what you really want. And if we’ve gotten to the bottom line of what we both really want, now we can start dreaming about how we can both get everything we really want. So that’s how I’m putting my energy is into creating this magnificent time instead of trying to prove how wrong and bad you are, which is, as I’m saying it just sounds so cruel to the person that I love most in the world. I don’t want to have that kind of relationship anymore.
TS: Now, couples come into your office—do you have a sense in meeting with a couple early on, “Oh, this couple, they’re not going to make it, it’s over.” Or, “This couple, I think they’ve got the bones of something.” Do you have a way that you have come to assess that?
JC: Sure. The main way is generally, one person has brought the other person—it’s not generally both people’s idea to come in. So, the one that’s being dragged—the draggee—the question usually is, is that person out of gas? Because there’s an energy of, that they’re just done. They’re out of gas. Maybe they were out of gas a year ago and now they’re just sort of going through the motions.
So that’s the main thing I’m assessing for. Do each of them have what it takes—some level of energy even to try something? And often, it’s—this stuff really works, so it’s pretty miraculous, it’s what I love about my work is, once people can actually start using these skills, they notice how instantly they feel connected to themselves, their partner’s doing the same thing over there, and now suddenly they’re finding each other again after what has often been a long dry spell. There’s this like, “Oh! Oh, there you are. I remember you. I can see you again. I haven’t seen you in a long time. Where’d you come from?”
TS: Now, you said, Julie, how passionate you are about helping individuals, couples, people all over the world live these big, big, big, big, big, big, big, unbounded lives. And, early in the book, you talk about something that you call the upper limits problem, and you talk about how your mentors, Gay and Katie Hendricks—actually, this is a very strong statement, said, “The only real problem—real problem—in a relationship is this upper limits problem.” What is this upper limits problem?
JC: When I read that in their book, called Conscious Loving, I just couldn’t believe the hyperbole of that statement. I’d never heard anything that crazy, which is what got me interested in what they were up to. Yes, the idea would be, if you could get yourself out of reactive brain, suddenly you’re living in creative brain, and then the question is, well, what else can we create?
Because most of us have not spent a lot of time living from creative brain—especially in relationships, in many ways we’re just not wired for it. As humans we know, we are great at being scared—we are so, we’ve mastered fear, at least feeling it, maybe not dealing with it. Anger, we’re great at. Sadness, we’ve got those down. But, letting our bodies feel joyful and happy and alive, not so much.
So, actually noticing what we do to interrupt feeling good is about how do I handle the upper limits issue. So there I am feeling good, Katie Hendrix says that most of us can handle about four seconds of feeling really good. So maybe you can stretch it out to eight seconds, or maybe half an hour at some point. I wonder what I’m up to? I think I can do it for maybe even all day these days, but I’ve been working on it for 20 years.
But the other side of this is really noticing when I have felt good for a while, that my body needs a rest! It’s like a balloon—I gotta find a way to deflate. And sometimes I’ll do that by creating a fight or I might feel sick as a way of just getting some rest, or I’ll bang into something, that’s one of my favorite ways of getting my own attention.
So, to not see those as failures as much as signals about, “Oh boy, now I’ve kind of gone as expanded as I can. I need to pull in, I need to contract some, give myself a rest.”
TS: Were you able to identify where some of the ceilings or limits were for you in happiness or pleasure or free flow, and how different it is now from what it used to be? The sense of hoping to see the difference, and how you started seeing the limit?
JC: There’s this whole description in [the book] of the Karpman drama triangle—victim, villain, hero triangle—of stuckness and power struggle. When I first learned about this, I can clearly remember just really being in reactive brain, being stuck in reactive brain. I remember thinking, “Oh my god, if I’m not doing that what am I going to do with my time?”
That was my life, to be adrenalized, to be stressed. I thought that was what a good person did! That the more exhausted and stressed I was, the better human I was. So, there’s a watermark, way below the line. So that’s where I started, with moments of sort of coming out of that and then going back into believing that that’s what life was.
So, over time I don’t think that anymore. I did find my way out into creative open space. I did solve the issue of what do I do with my time, which these days is to look for the next way to have fun and the next thing to create and how else could I enjoy life? That’s a whole new experience for me. Well, new in the last few years for sure.
TS: Now, our program is called Insights at the Edge, and I’m always curious to know what somebody’s edge is. And in this case, the living edge for you in relationships. Here you are. You’ve written this book, you’re a therapist, but I know lots of people who’ve written books and are therapists and have quite troubled times trying to apply some of their best knowledge in their own lives, and that’s OK. But I’m curious for you, what would you say is the edge of putting your own learning into practice in your life?
JC: I like the edge idea because I do have a sense of kind of an edge of the world—like the people, the sailors going off in their ships to the edge of what they’ve known. That’s what I think for me, it’s like, now and then I get to the place of, “Hey, hey maybe this is possible? I never even had that thought before. I never even heard of that before, of anybody living that way.”
So, for me, I think my own learning edge is being sure I have enough rest, coming back down and letting myself have that, and then going back to that expanded state and starting to really wonder, “Wow, I have so many ideas about how I was raised, things, how life is—what if that’s not true? What if it’s just not true?”
“What if I were living in flow all the time and suddenly these coincidences that aren’t really at all coincidences—they’re just living in flow, and wow, what could life be like if it was just one long unwinding of flow? What cool magic could happen?” So that’s what I’m exploring. It’s very fun.
TS: And I do have one final question for you. The Relationship Skills Workbook, now it’s out in the world to help individuals and couples. What’s the vision that you have for what relationships could be like?
JC: I’m going to start with what I feel saddened by and then go there. I believe people suffer so much in relationships. They have so many ideas of how things should’ve been and they’re not, and so much disappointment and feeling mad at themselves, mad at their partners, but that this is just how it is.
So, starting there, my vision is that people can be released from that. That they can start to understand that they’ve got the power to move themselves out of reactive brain, to support their great teammate of their partner to also live in creative brain, and that in that place they can co-create really what they wanted all along.
They can find the passion again, they can find the sexual charge, they can create, co-create their dreams because that’s where their energy is going and that’s suddenly what they can see and feel and know in themselves and in their partners. And it’s probably what they came into the relationship for to begin with, that now it can actually come forward and be possible for them.
TS: I’ve been speaking with Julie Colwell. She’s the author of the new book, The Relationship Skills Workbook: A Do-It-Yourself Guide to a Thriving Relationship, and it’s a book that is packed with exercises and practices and charts—a real workbook—that you engage with. Incredibly beneficial. Julie, thank you so much. Thank you for being with us on Insights at the Edge.
JC: Thank you, Tami. It’s been a true pleasure.
TS: It’s always great to talk to you. SoundsTrue.com—many voices, one journey. Thanks for listening.
