Dr. Steven Stosny - Empowered Love: Use Your Brain to Be Your Best Self and Create Your Ideal Relationship

E ver wonder why your self-control, rationality, and compassion seem to go out the window when dealing with your partner? Couples therapist and psychiatrist Steven Stosny explains it all in this revelatory book about the divide between our Adult and our Toddler brains. Too often, conflict in our intimate relationships reactivates our least-regulated Toddler side, bringing out an instinctive desire to assert our own way and make everything a zero-sum game. Dr. Stosny shows the way toward overcoming these destructive impulses and nurturing our more loving and clear-eyed inclinations. Drawing upon his decades of experience working with couples, Stosny distills his insights into an actionable guide for acting on our best, rather than our worst, impulses in our relationships.

Empowered Love is a valuable guide for couples who struggle with an unhealthy dynamic; those already in individual or couples therapy who want a highly effective aid to help them communicate with their partner; and licensed therapists and counselors looking for an in-depth perspective on relationship strife.

Copyright

Copyright 2018 by Steven Stosny

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication can be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Steven Stosny.

Bibliographical Note

Empowered Love: Use Your Brain to Be Your Best Self and Create Your Ideal Relationship is a new work, first published by Ixia Press in 2018.

International Standard Book Number

ISBN-13: 978-0-486-81940-2

ISBN-10: 0-486-81940-X

IXIA PRESS

An imprint of Dover Publications, Inc.

Manufactured in the United States by LSC Communications

81940X01 2017

www.doverpublications.com/ixiapress

For Fang Peng, my light

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PREFACE

Love Relationships: A World of Their Own

I n more than a quarter-century of clinical practice, Ive been fascinated, troubled, and occasionally tormented by three questions:

Why do so many smart and creative people make the same mistakes over and over?

At what point does the unavoidable emotional pain of life become entirely avoidable suffering?

How do we avoid suffering, while remaining vibrant and passionate about life?

I explored these questions in a previous book, Soar Above: How to Use the Most Profound Part of Your Brain Under Any Kind of Stress. When under persistent stress, all animals, including humans, retreat to previously acquired habits. In the stresses of modern living most of us invoke conditioned emotional responses formed as far back as toddlerhood. These conditioned responses originate in the Toddler brain (fully developed on a structural level at age three), pretty much guaranteeing that well make the same emotional mistakes again and again, and run the risk of turning pain into suffering. Soar Above shows how to develop habits of coping in ways that activate the more profound upper prefrontal cortex: the Adult brain, which is fully developed around age 28. Used consistently, these new habits lead to greater interest, vibrancy, and success in most work and social contexts.

The Special Challenges of Love Relationships

I realized fairly early in writing Soar Above that I had to write a separate book to accommodate the special challenges of committed love relationships. These occur on an altogether different playing field from those of work and social life. As well see, many of the problems of love relationships stem from partners who behave at home in ways that might serve them well in work and social gatherings but fail miserably in love relationships. No important human endeavor makes it harder to stay consistently in the profoundest part of the brain than interactions with loved ones. The simple explanation of why this is so is that living with someone invokes a wide array of routine behaviors, running on autopilot, without forethought or conscious intention. Routine ways of behaving are likely to stimulate old emotional habits when stressors are added to the mix, such as quarreling children, urgent text messages from work, or overdue bills. The Toddler brain by habit looks for someone to blame, denies responsibility, or avoids the issue altogether.

The more subtle reason that were apt to invoke Toddler-brain habits in committed relationships lies at the very heart of love. The same quality that makes love wonderfulgiving fully of the deepest parts of ourselvesalso makes it a little scary. Most lovers have not felt so emotionally dependent and powerless over their deepest vulnerable feelings since they learned to walk. Similarities in vulnerability can fool the brain under stress and increase the likelihood of invoking Toddler-brain ways of coping in love relationships. Most of the hundreds of couples Ive treated were fine at work and with friends, smart, resourceful, and creative. But at home they were like playground kids pointing out each others faults: It takes one to know one! Most were compassionate and kind to other people, but to each other they were opposing attorneys in a bitter lawsuit.

As we shall see, one of the reasons that love relationships are so hard is because falling in love is so easy. Powerful hormones and neurotransmitters heighten our senses, activate primal drives, and lower our defenses; to a large extent they make us fall in love. Despite the enormous complications of modern relationships, the human brain really wants to love.

Alas, the biology that brings us together doesnt keep us together. In fact, biology makes it more difficult to live together in happiness for more than a few years. Thats probably because the biological underpinnings of emotional bonds evolved at a time when humans were tribal, not pair-bonded. Maintaining communal connection was more important to survival than sustaining intimate connection. The focus of two individuals on each other was to reproduce, not to build a life together, as we now desire.

Of course biology is only part of the story. The social and cultural factors that at one time helped sustain long-term relationships have now become a hindrance to them. For instance, marrying for love is relatively recent in human history. Up until a couple hundred years ago, marriage was entirely a political, social, or familial arrangement. A higher authority would commit you to a union with a person you hardly knew. Sometimes you wouldnt even see your betrothed until the wedding ceremony. Lifting the veil was often the first time the betrothed were face to face. Many people retain that tradition, along with not allowing the groom to see the bride on their wedding day, even when theyve been living together for several years.

In the past, two people with very low levels of interest, trust, compassion, and love for each other agreed to form a union and build a life together. From such a low emotional starting point, theres nowhere to go but up. In modern times, we start from very high levels of interest, trust, compassion, and love, unsustainable levels given the focus and energy they consume. For us, theres nowhere to go but down.