The story your nervous system tells you about your partner

When our partners do something we find challenging, we tend to come up with a story about their behaviour. We think we’re responding to what our partner has done, but often what we're responding to is the story our nervous system has made out of it.

Notice this – the story doesn’t just come from your mind. It comes from your nervous system and the particular state it is in in that moment. So when something happens which you find triggering, your mind creates a story to explain or respond to it. But what it creates is more a product of your nervous system state in that moment.

Generally speaking we occupy one of three different states. Which of those three states you are in will colour the story you tell.

Let’s take an example: Your partner goes quiet just when you want him (or her) to open up to you.

If you find this triggering, you may slip into state of fight or flight activation and the story might be: He’s shutting me out. He doesn’t care. I’ve got to find a way to get through to him. In this state you may find yourself pushing even harder or breaking down and sobbing.

Eventually if this situation is repeated over and over again, you may find yourself sliding into shutdown or collapse, where the story you tell yourself could be: There’s no point. Nothing will ever change. In this state you may go quiet yourself, withdraw, go numb, stop trying, feel hopeless or walk away

When we feel safe, we can be calm and grounded. In this state we’re motivated to connect with others and we can feel compassion and empathy. In this more regulated state, exactly the same behaviour might lead to a response of: He’s gone quiet. I don’t yet know what that means. I can wait and see what shows up.

Our state of regulation or dysregulation doesn’t necessarily change the facts. It changes whether we turn the facts into a threatening story.

Sometimes when my partner goes quiet, I might go into sympathetic activation and get angry with him, asking myself what I had done to deserve this. Or if I’m feeling shut down I might start wondering whether this is going to be a daily occurrence, in which case my thought is ‘what’s the point?’

But when I’m in a more regulated state, I can ground myself and take the calmer approach of simply being curious and realising that even if I have done something to upset him, he’s not going to blame me. I can wait to see what shows up and when he’s ready, we can have a connected conversation about whatever was behind the quiet.

Maybe it helps that we’re both boarding school survivors and we’re both familiar with that ex-boarder tendency to shut down when things get tricky.

The way I see this is:

• The ex-boarder goes quiet because vulnerability feels dangerous or overwhelming.

• Their partner’s nervous system reads the silence as rejection or abandonment.

• The partner pushes harder for connection.

• The ex-boarder’s nervous system reads the pushing as intrusion or attack.

• Now each person's story about the other appears to be confirmed.

Ascending the ‘polyvagal’ ladder

These three states are part of the polyvagal theory. If you’ve not come across it before, don’t worry. You don’t need to understand it in any great detail, but it is relevant to what we have just been discussing.

Recently I’ve been reading Anchored by trauma specialist, Deb Dana, and she uses polyvagal theory to understand how we move from one state to another. In polyvagal theory our nervous system consists of three parts:

• the ventral vagal system

• the sympathetic nervous system

• the dorsal vagal system.

These different parts of the nervous system correspond to the three states of calm, activation and shutdown, which Dana sees as creating a ladder.

When we’re calm and grounded, the ventral vagal system is active and we find it easy to connect with others.

When we’re triggered we pass first into activation of the sympathetic nervous system – this is the fight/flight/freeze response to stress or what you might think of as mobilisation – and it leads us to create stories which are in alignment with that high-energy response. Either we argue or we slam about or maybe throw things.

If there is no resolution, we find ourselves moving into shutdown, which is the domain of the dorsal vagal system. It’s as if we have no fight left in us and we collapse, playing dead.

The thing I learned from Anchored is that in Dana’s version of the polyvagal ‘ladder’, we move back towards connection through mobilisation rather than jumping straight from shutdown to calm.

This makes sense of how some people can be pretty fighty – or maybe passive-aggressive – when they come out of shutdown. When we understand this, it’s easier to recognise what’s happening and know that this is just a stepping stone back to the calm of ventral vagal regulation. It also means we can start to explore what other responses would make sense in that sympathetic stage – going for a run or a walk perhaps, instead of coming out with a passive-aggressive response or a cutting remark.

The problem isn’t simply that each partner has become dysregulated. It’s that each person’s nervous-system story can recruit the other person into behaving in ways that seem to prove the story true.

The beauty of Dana’s ladder framework is that once we understand what we’ve been doing and why we’ve been doing it, it makes it easier to choose to do something different in future. And that may involve recognising the stories our minds create when we’re not regulated and making space for new stories which will bring us back into connection with our partners.

This is one of the things I help my clients to see – the kinds of stories their minds create and finding new ones which help them reconnect with each other. If you’d like to get good at this process of re-storying, book a Clarity Call – I have space for two new clients in October and you could be one of them.