- Emotional responsiveness – tuning into and supporting the other.
- Ability to tune into emotional level -> growing up with parents served as model of emotional responsiveness.
- Respond
- Love is a dance
- Dance w/ someone who will tune into them & respond. Feel safe.
- Bound to go wrong — if you dance with somebody theyre going to step into your feet.
- Point is: in a good relationship, you can recognize what happen, you can tune in (present) and you can repair it.
-Emotional responsiveness: the willingness to tune into you emotionally, and to allow themselves to tune into your non verbals or words and to allow themselves to feel what youre feeling and who respond to that in a way that you feel that you matter
- Distressed couple: all caught up in their own feelings.
Conflict is the virus, the inflammation is the emotional disconnection. You cant connect to the person & cant get them to respond to you. The person is in the room but theyre not paying attention to you.
couple: 1 demanding and getting angry 2 defending and distancing
what 1 really saying is where are you where are you
im all by myself, he doesnt care about me, im not important to him, and that im by myself --> desperation under the anger
- Attachment: one that demands, one that shuts out.
- Me: Shuts out
- "Learned" to FREEZE. "Tuned out because everything I say is wrong. it will only get matters worse. I stopped talking to protect myself" They dont understand the impact of shut down.
- What they don't understand in an intimate relationship -> if i cut off emotionally, I shut the person out. And if the person cares about you -> triggered danger cues and fear in the brain.
