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July 7 - August 29, 2025
We instinctively dismissed the need for connection and intimacy, convincing ourselves our needs were not important.
She learned at an early age, Do not have emotional needs. It was a message Lisa internalized deeply.
Work hard to hide any emotional need. Do not need comfort. She learned to keep quiet, to be a good girl, and not to fuss or cry. As a result, Lisa often missed the attunement her body craved. Attunement soothes us, and when it is not offered, especially early in life, our bodies learn to shut it down. The effect can be a profound sense of loneliness, and this was true for Lisa.
Not being able to receive comfort from a spouse always prompts this feeling; we can’t make sense of what is happening.
because we both come from childhoods that taught us, It is safest not to need.
This has been our song and dance for decades: the war against need. It has been the leading cause of disconnection in our marriage. We’ve had to learn new inner dialogues: It is normal to need. It is healthy to reach for emotional connection. I will not retreat; I will keep my heart open.
Again, the answer is not to deny or bury our needs; they are part of our humanity. But our reactions to them and the ways we handle them—that we can change. Operating systems formed by our past can be re-formed today.
Attunement trauma can be so subtle that it is often ignored, minimized, or dismissed. When it goes unaddressed, it can become the undercurrent that keeps couples apart. They usually aren’t even aware of the source and feel bewilderingly stuck in their emotional distance.
Next, start to pay attention to your frequent thoughts and reactions to difficult moments. What patterns do you find?
What we remember as adults is not often a vivid, conscious memory. It is simply felt.
The key to any change in marriage is awareness.
To address the regular issues of life—problems, decisions, conflicts, hurts—with a spouse in a healthy way, both hearts must feel free to engage them without judgment or punishment.
To steer ourselves away from that perpetual hurt and division, we need to be more intentional about offering each other kindness and respect in those moments, looking for ways to make room for connectedness and care.
To do this, we must first understand what is making us feel unsafe and how we’re reacting to it.
Fragmenting means, in a sense, that we are falling apart. The brain takes a break from its standard operating mode as one of its critical components checks out. The left hemisphere of the brain manages our thoughts, reasoning, deduction, and choices; the right hemisphere controls our feelings, impulses, images, and sensations. When we feel a threat to our existence, part of the left hemisphere goes offline. It is not that all our executive functioning is shut off like a light switch; it is more like a dimmer switch that goes from bright to dim instantly.1 As a result, instead of reasoning, we
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Fragmentation of thought protects us from the slowness of cerebral deliberation and frees us to simply run with the faster, emotional-decision-making part of our brains.
Our amygdalae secrete biochemicals that activate us to deal with the threat.
Fragmenting leads to numbing, when something in our bodies says, I can’t bear this. We cannot become aware of the extent of the anger, grief, or fear in us—it is too much. Subconsciously we sense the danger of, What if I physically harm someone in anger, or I never stop crying in my grief, or my panic puts me in the hospital? It’s better to just push it down. This is how we survive.
but the DMZ between us is never truly entered; that space becomes the ground where foul fruit grows. The cycle of perceiving threats, fragmenting, numbing, and isolating goes on, and the roots of our trauma responses are not addressed.
To engage the roots, we must examine the ground of our families of origin.
we feel flustered and try to escape (flight) or get angry (fight) and try to gain control.
I am more aligned with anger.
While the primary response to threats is anxiety, anxiety can fuse with a sense of injustice (This is wrong and should not be). That’s when anger rises. Anger is anxiety mobilized to face a foe, activating our will to overpower or intimidate the threat.
Constantly reacting to threats will never increase intimacy or move us toward health and maturity. Any marriage that lacks safety has not developed sufficient trust to do the hard work of growing together.
The only way to regulate a supercharged amygdala is through reaching that feeling part of the brain, and that’s what true knowing does. It involves right-brain activity as we reenter the stories that have shaped us. We reflect and imagine; we feel and suffer.
True knowing begins by naming how we handled threats before we met our spouses.
“I don’t fully understand your concern, but I’m not dismissing it,”
When we see anxiety, anger, or avoidance surface, we must open the door to what those emotions are telling us about our unaddressed trauma. We need to create safety and room for our stories to unfold and for our hearts to connect.
By setting the parameters of what I didn’t want to do in light of who I wanted to be, I’d be able to return to something more profound than the current problem or past trauma. Doing this sets the intention in the face of the storm and then steadies the compass before choosing to move.
Attunement and creating space for a safe interaction slows our brains, orients us in our story, and gives us perspective on our problems. It gives us more access to the roots of what is triggering us and more ground to grow good fruit. So the next time your pulse quickens in a moment of tension, pause. When your brain jumps to a familiar survival reaction with your spouse, stop. Give yourself a minute. Notice your instinctive responses and what you’re reacting to. Remind yourself there could be another way. Slowly consider the roots and the bigger story, for both you and your spouse. And then
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Shame is the lie that someone told you about yourself.
The truth is, there is no shame in feeling shame. It is part of the human experience.
Shame, at its root, is judgment against ourselves.
But the loudest voice in their lives has been shame, saying, You are not enough. You don’t really belong with anyone. Your needs and hopes don’t matter.
The lack of attunement is usually where shame develops. It is a form of emotional neglect, which is a form of trauma.
When our parents do not offer attunement, we receive it as a form of judgment. Your need is too much. Your need is not okay. Receiving judgment from those who are meant to love, soothe, and nurture us contributes to the shame we feel—and to the shame scripts we start living with.
Here is the bind, though: withdrawing when we feel shame creates more shame. It grows exponentially in isolation. “We feel shame, and then feel shame for feeling shame,” wrote Curt Thompson. “It begets itself.”
And this far better path begins with choosing to be found in our experience of shame.
In other scenarios, curiosity in response to our spouses’ shame may sound like, “What happened? You seem a bit distracted. Want to check in about it?” Curiosity is an invitation and not a requirement. It opens a door and invites our spouses in. It communicates, I want to care for you, and makes room for our spouses to share what they are feeling. Curiosity helps us tell the story of what happened, and, as Ann Voskamp once wrote, “Shame dies when we tell stories in safe places.”6 Curiosity is foundational to safety.
When our partners feel shame, they need to receive empathy. Empathy loosens the grip of shame.
Brené Brown once said, “Shame cannot survive when met by empathy.”7 Empathy is the antidote to shame. It says to our spouses, I get it, and I’m here with
where we are? We can begin by examining our internal scripts, the foundation of our shame.
Shame keeps us locked into patterns that sabotage the goodness of attunement and connection.
Contempt changes the energy in a room like cranking up the volume of a heavy metal song.
Contempt is like a foul odor we are at first disturbed by but eventually acclimate to.
Contempt has power to the degree it is ignored and denied.
Tracing the origin of contempt brings us back to familiar territory: shame. Contempt is to shame as smoke is to fire. Smoke can be blinding and toxic, and it is nearly impossible for it to dissipate until the fire is put out. First, we feel shame; then, we move into contempt, hurling judgment at our partners or ourselves—which lifts us, temporarily, above the abyss of shame.
Contempt enables me to kill desire in myself and make desire dangerous for my partner.
Self-contempt is the shaming of the part of ourselves that we judge to be at fault for our shame.
You idiot. What in the hell is wrong with you? Why can’t you do something as simple as put your keys where they belong? Notice how the question is not a true query but an interrogative that is nothing but a judgment.
