When it comes your body or life, not much happens without emotion.  To your brain, emotions are essential chemical signals that connect all the systems of your body 24/7, in a complex and sophisticated communication network like no other.

To your mind, or conscious and subconscious self, your body’s ability to transmit signals of emotion and physical sensations help you survive and thrive the myriad of social, intellectual and emotional (spiritual?) challenges of life, which are natural to your own unique growth and development patterns.

How vital is this communication? Quite. As it is impossible not to communicate or to relate, it’s a quality of life matter.

Like it or not, you are a walking-talking communication system. To be alive is to communicate, to relate, and to connect with the world within and around you. Your brain is a relationship organ, which makes you a social being at heart.

Conscious communication is a window into the world of our heart and mind – and another’s from their vantage point.

As a tool, it’a a way to manage the energies we bring to our communications, so that we remain consciously aware of what is going on inside of us, our feelings, thoughts, what we want and need, and so on, without getting triggered.

In Part 1 we described eight attributes of a conscious way of talking. In this post, the focus is on attributes of conscious-listening.

Conscious-listening is a way of being intentionally present to see, to know and to recognize our own and another’s felt presence and unique value in the relationship. Safe to say, it’s not possible to authentically love another, without being willing to freely give the essential gift of listening. In other words, if we’re not genuinely listening to another, sooner or later, they will stop listening to us. (They have no choice, it’s physics.)

Listening as critical to healthy relationships?

Listening is perhaps the most critical component of effective communication. That’s because we are hardwired with emotion-drives that propel us to feel known, heard, understood, valued, and so on, aspects of our overarching drive to do more than merely survive life, to also thrive, to matter and meaningfully connect in relation to life around us. In fact, our drive to thrive in life is also critical to our physical health and survival, as stress directly impacts our health, emotional, mental and physical, in negative ways.

As important as it is to resolve past or present problems, for example, when one or both parties lack empathic listening skills, problems quickly rise to the level of seeming “impossible” to solve. Why?

• The problems themselves become non-issues because the “real” issues are questions of the heart that cannot be solved with logic alone.
• Not realizing this, we over focus on improving our “logic” – hoping to find some way to get them to see our side (disprove their logic), and thus are …
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Conscious communication is a way of talking and listening that is focused on growing strong, mutually enriching relationships.

Since most relationship problems are rooted in communications that are either avoided, forced or misinterpreted, the purpose is to provide an emotional experience that allows each person to feel safe enough to grow a quality relationship in which key emotional needs (not wants…) are expressed, mutually valued – and met through natural giving.

(To give naturally, by the way, is to give from a place of overall love or joy, as opposed to fear or guilt or shame.)

When you express your self in ways that stretch you, particularly in moments where you may not “feel” like doing so, you exercise your ability to stretch and courageously develop the capacity to authentically love your self and another.

If you’re in a relationship with a loved one that repeatedly acts in hurtful ways, you’re likely dealing with recurring rushes of anger or disappointment, regardless of whether you are consciously aware of or express these or similar emotions. It can feel as if this person keeps stealing the sense of emotional safety that you, your body and mind, are hardwired to seek.

It is only human, after all, to feel betrayed by the actions of a partner who is emotionally or physically abusive, addicted to a substance, compulsively spends money, or repeats acts of infidelity despite promises, as occurs with sex or love addiction.

While the emotional intensity is understandable, it is still a heavy weight to carry, much less balance. It’s not easy to deal with these emotions, and at the same time the repeated strikes, which challenge your efforts to restore the inner sense of emotional safety that, at any given time, you innately strive to realize in relation to life around you.

A look at the usual simplistic approach…

In response to hurtful actions of a loved one, forgiveness is largely regarded as the highest, most noble action, and a prerequisite for healing to take place. Depending on the circumstances, it often is. In fact, a stubborn refusal to forgive can both prolong and intensify suffering for the person that was wronged.

In response to being wronged or mistreated by a loved one, whether emotional or physical abuse, or betrayal and infidelity, forgiveness is often considered the most critical ingredient for healing to eventually take place.

Indeed, depending on the context, forgiveness is a powerfully healing agent. In fact, a refusal to forgive or let go often prolongs suffering for the person that was wronged.

But what happens when the hurtful actions are repetitive and ongoing? Or, when the person who has acted wrongly is not willing (or able) to make meaningful amends? Or when the wronged person is not ready to forgive?

In these circumstances, argues Dr. Janis Abrahms Spring, author of How Can I Forgive You? The Courage to Forgive, The Freedom Not To, genuine forgiveness can only take place when the onus of responsibility rests on the person who acted wrongly to earn forgiveness, and that, in certain situations, the best option for the person who was mistreated or betrayed is to have the freedom to not forgive, and to instead turn to the healing power of acceptance, one of four approaches to forgiveness.

Toxic interaction patterns seemingly take control of partners’ lives to negatively affect the possibilities for fun and intimacy in their couple relationship.

When a relationship becomes toxic it reflects the habitual ways partners manage their emotions, in particular, the emotions that human beings find most challenging, such as anger and fear.

In Part 1, we explored five toxic interaction patterns in which partners collude in scripted roles with one another, and get stuck activating one another’s protective-response patterns. In Part 2, we looked at the neuroscience beneath these emotional command circuits, in ready position to activate, and how they destabilize each partner’s inner sense of emotional safety in the relationship, setting them up to be at their worst, when they most need to be at their best to effectively handle challenging situations.

In this post we explore key factors that affect the balance of relationships, and the first step partners can take to break free of the toxic patterns and restore balance in their relationship and, or personal life.

What would it take to restore balance?

Restoring balance in a couple relationship is primarily about each partner establishing their own inner sense of emotional safety in relation to the other.

The latest findings in neuroscience place love and healthy relationships at the center of what optimizes our health, physically and emotionally, and the quality of our lives in general.

Perhaps no experience in the course of our lifetime, whether conscious or subconscious, consumes more energy, or produces more intense emotions, and up and down extremes in thinking or behaving, than the drive to secure the heart of that special person we seek, and to make a difference in some way – to matter and bring value to the relationship.

A growing body of scientific evidence shows that the way we express love and care for one another, from the time we are infants and throughout our lives, directly affects the health and physical structure of our brains and nervous systems.

Love that turns toxic is neither healthy nor genuine, though the intentions of each partner are often well-meaning.

A couple relationship can be described as toxic when, due to intense emotional reactivity and defensive interaction patterns, it no longer promotes, and instead harms the individual mental, emotional, and physical, well-being and growth of each partner. The relationship is increasingly off balance, a factor that is affected by, and directly affects the individual inner sense of balance, health and safety of each partner.

In contrast, genuine love is an empathic connection that recognizes the authentic other and self as separate and unique beings, even encouraging the individuality of each as essential to the formation of healthy intimacy in a relationship.

Neurological findings in the last decades show that we are wired for certain early protective behaviors in life, and that these become habitual responses automatically activated throughout life, often without conscious awareness. Intense emotional experiences in childhood can alter the structure of the brain and have enduring effects in adulthood.

Everyone has ideas about love; for human beings, it is a lifelong preoccupation. The love relationship is unique in that, across cultures, nothing drives otherwise normal human beings to do crazy things than the quest for a love bond in a couple relationship.

What is genuine love, however?

It has many attributes. One experience of love is, as Mark Twain describes, “the irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired.” Recent findings in neuroscience would agree with Mr. Twain’s statement. Romantic attraction appears to release the same levels, if not higher, of dopamine and oxytocin into the bloodstream as drugs.

Genuine love, however, is all encompassing. It mirrors the attributes of human nature at its best.

“Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence,” says psychological theorist Eric Fromm. It’s something that “stretches your heart and makes you big inside,” notes poet and author Margaret Walker.

An even more far reaching view says that,

“Love has no awareness of merit or demerit; it has no scale… Love loves; this is its nature.” ~ HOWARD THURMAN

Attributes of a genuine love are ones that reflect our human nature. We are relationship beings, hardwired with inborn strivings, for empathic connection.

The eroticization of male dominance and female passivity in couple relations is a game in which there are no winners, a luring trap that blocks what makes human relationships human —  an empathic connection — a hardwired drive to mutually know and compassionately understand one another that is rooted in our nature to matter as meaning-seeking relational beings.

This capacity remains dormant, however, unless developed. It is a learned ability that requires such skills as being open and vulnerable to one another, an essential aspect of growing the courage we need to love with our whole heart. (To love with our whole heart, in a nutshell, means to develop our capacity to remain empathically connected to self and other, in moments when core fears, such as inadequacy or rejection, get triggered.)

In a cultural context that relegates empathy, vulnerability and emotional closeness as weakness or “girly,” and emotions of pain, hurt or fear as signs of inferiority or defect, especially for men (to women who want to be “accepted” as “equals” in this milieu), is it any wonder why so many couples get tripped up in their attempts to create vibrant, mutually enriching relationships?

It has to do with the dehumanizing nature of these cultural norms.

For this and other reasons, looking more closely at the negative impact of these cultural stories opens up possibilities for men and women to see one another anew, and, rather than compete, to honor the intrinsic dignity and value of each in relation to the other, first and foremost, as human beings, with an amazing potential to work cooperatively as partners in forming a healthy relationship and an enriching context for one another to grow and self-actualize as uniquely contributing individuals.