SSS 184: Why You Shut Down in Relationships (And How to Stay Open)

In today's video, I'm going to be talking about why you shut down and what you can start to do to stay open to, say, emotionally receptive, emotionally connected to the people that you love, because this is the core of what's going to make or break your relationship. So why do we shut down? Why do you shut down in relationships? We got to go back and understand the nervous system, okay? The nervous system. And growing up, we developed a relationship, or you developed a relationship with your own emotionality based on how you observed your parents relate with their emotions. Okay? So if your parents weren't emotionally attuned or in tune with themselves, then chances are there were some unconscious behaviors that started to. You started to pick up from them, which caused you to develop an unhealthy relationship with your own emotionality. Now, why is that significant? Because in adulthood, then your relationships are all based around how someone feels around you. Let that sink in for a moment. How someone feels around you is determining the quality of all your relationships. So when you're in a romantic relationship, the depth to which you can go is really depending on how safe that other person feels around you. Does that make sense? You with me? So when things get intense, when things get heated, when things get overwhelming in your life, what do you default to? Okay, so the emotional shutdown pattern is a byproduct of your nervous system's trauma response. Okay? Trauma response. And you got to know this. You got to know what this trauma response is, because we all have variations of how we respond to overwhelming situations in our life. Or sometimes the overwhelming thing is your spouse or your partner saying something to you. Hey, why don't you fucking clean up the kitchen? And all of a sudden you get an old trigger because you've had a big day, and you go into this shutdown mechanism, which is a trauma response, which is either fight, flight, freeze. Okay? It's one of those two with the other one connected to freeze is appease. So we have a freeze and appease are the same, which is like, you go silent. You know what to say. Or the appease is like you just want to keep your other. Keep the person happy. I'm so sorry. Like, you just all of a sudden start to disconnect from what you're feeling, and you just go into wanting to keep the other person happy. But it's the same thing. You're avoiding the emotionality. You're shutting down to the emotions. Now, we all know what the fight response is, right? The cortisol kicks in, the heart rate goes up. And all of a sudden you're trying to defend yourself. You're trying to prove your point. You're trying to prove that you're not in the wrong dysfunction because all of a sudden you're deflecting and owning your own emotions. There flight is where you're disconnecting from the body altogether. Maybe you're fully in the head, you're disassociated from your body. Now I see this come up a lot in the clients that I coach who are from Asian backgr, because a lot of the men that I coach from Asian backgrounds, the mother is the discipline disciplinarian. The mother is the one who's really tense and harsh and tough on the kid. What do you think that teaches a young boy? When his mom is the masculine, he has no relationship with the feminine. He's disconnected from his emotionality. So his flight response is fully in his head. Doesn't even know what it's like to feel. He feels emotionally numb. So when his partner says something that pisses him off or he's just, he goes into logic, he's thinking logic and rationale all the time. He's missing the opportunity to relate with his partner's emotions and the needs behind those emotions. It becomes a big issue. Okay, so now we're aware of this response. And obviously there's many layers to this, but it's a nervous system's response to intensity. So first phase is to understand why you shut down is important because just know that it's instinctual, it's survival, it's not wrong, or you're not fucked up, there's nothing wrong with you. It's just how the body is programmed based on how you grew up and how you experienced emotions in your household. And for most people, we didn't have the most perfect parent because they were never modeled this stuff. Okay, so this is phase number one, is understand why you shut down. Because once you have awareness around this, it becomes a lot easier to start to shift into a new response, which I'm going to share with you in a moment. Love having this whiteboard. It's fucking great. Bit of visual. Feels like we're back at school learning the things that we never got taught, the important stuff. I wonder if someone was actually teaching me or us this stuff at school, would we have actually paid attention back then? I don't know. Maybe because it wasn't as relevant. I guess we're always paying attention to the stuff that's most relevant. I'm always learning when I'm like, oh, it's relevant to my life right now. Let's see here. Now that we're aware of the trauma response, we want to start to develop new ways of starting to step into staying open to emotional intensity in your life. Now, one of the most effective ways you can do that is firstly just seeing the areas that trigger you the most. Situations with your partner, situations at work, whatever it might be, and creating intentional pauses or intentional space. Intentional space. This is where you start to look at situations from a bird's eye view, from your high perspective. You go, wow, interesting. Like, you take a breath. I'm feeling really triggered right now. I'm feeling really disconnected. My mind is racing right now, or my heart is racing right now. You create intentional space by pausing. Okay? If your old reaction in your trauma response, in your emotional shutdown was, do you want to defend? Do you want to minimize, Wanted to fight, wanted to get things right, wanted to appease you, now intentionally pause by just taking a step back. A step back isn't. Is. Doesn't have to be literally, it could be a figurative thing where you start to step back from the reaction through a breath. For noticing your feet on the floor, you want to start to get really curious around your old patterns. Okay? Curiosity is the thing here. Start to notice, okay, like, when I'm in these situations, this is what happens in my body. Maybe your chest starts to collapse, Maybe your shoulders get really tight. Maybe your jaw is tight, Maybe your breathing gets shallow. Get curious around these old reactions. Because once you have that clarity, now we get to choose new responses, new response. And if shutting down is killing your relationship, what's the opposite of that? You've got to define what this response is. If you haven't actually sat and clarified, who do I want to be? All of us want to have this perfect relationship. All of us want to make more money. All of us want to have the dream life. But have we defined who we need to be to have that? Because for something to risk exist physically, must first exist vibrationally, almost first exist energetically, meaning in our minds, we must clarify, we must see the identity of who we're going to embody when we see the changes in our life. So in the context of a relationship, when you have a loving, effortless, harmonious relationship is built on fun, play, intimacy, and joy. Who are you embodying when you've attracted that? Who are you embodying when you have that? It's connected to this someone who is responsive, someone who is clear on how he needs to show up, someone who is Relaxed and calm. Now, relaxed and calm doesn't mean you never feel intensity. It doesn't mean you never get triggered or you never get upset. But it means your relationship to emotional intensity changes. Instead of resisting and shutting down around emotional intensity, you now get to lean in and embrace it. So in this response, we are leaning in. You're leaning in to emotional intensity. So that means in your life right now, when something overwhelming happens, instead of the old condition thought pattern of wanting to label that as wrong or bad or something not good is happening, we're in a fight. Remove the old conditioning or meaning you're placing around on these things and leaning in is creating the new meaning, which is, yes, amazing. Now I get to practice being okay with this intensity. Right now I get to relax into whatever I'm experiencing. So leaning in is an embracing. It's an allowing. It's accepting that a part of being human is that stuff's going to happen that pisses you off. Part of being human is being angry. You're allowed to be angry. You don't have to hold that in and shut down your voice. Now, it doesn't mean you start projecting your anger outwards unconsciously and causing havoc in your life. No, being angry means you learn to harness that aggression and control it and express it in healthy ways so you're not showing up around the people you love in this dysregulated, ungrounded place. So leaning in is owning what you feel. When you own what you feel, you take responsibility for all of it. Because very often what's coming up, what you're feeling, is remnants from the past. It's got nothing to do with that person that's pissing you off. That person that's pissing you off is reminding you of how you used to get pissed off growing up. So it's not personal. And when you own what you feel, you go, hey, this moment, maybe this situation or this feeling that's coming up for me right now is an opportunity for me to heal the past, amend the past, integrate the past through embracing that. It's coming up for a reason. Okay? So owning is taking full responsibility. New response, self. Responsibility is going to unlock this evolved version of you. It's a new identity. Identity. And a new identity equals a new frequency. And new frequency equals new reality. And if you remember that, if you want to see things change in your reality, you must first change your frequency. You must first change your identity. You define that by owning what you feel, embracing the shutdown when it comes up. Okay? Instead of running from it. Once you have this clarity, once you have this awareness, the next time something shit goes wrong in your life, you're feeling anxious, angry, overwhelmed, scared, nervous. Great. That's your opportunity to practice your new identity and your new frequency. Because you don't practice when things are going great. When things are going great and everything's flowing like you. You're not really having breakthroughs, then you're already in the flow, the break. That breakthrough only happens when you have the breakdown. So the breakdown is actually the practice point for you to practice your new reality, your new frequency, through leaning in, owning what you feel instead of reacting and projecting it outward. And thinking something out there needs to change, it's you. Something inside here gets the change through you. Looking at it and embracing it makes sense. Cool. Let's see. So let's provide some practicality around this. Because the next time, in the moment this stuff comes up, I want you to be equipped with tools. Be able to respond like, what are the tools? What do we do? And if you consider the emotional shutdown as an unconscious thing in the moment, I want you to break this pattern is instead of shutting down, just slow down. Just invert the shutdown into slowdown. Because when you're going fast in your life, speeding up, and everything's urgent, everything's quick, and you rush to get somewhere, you're more likely to fall back into unconscious, reactive patterns. At this amazing client that I was working with, John, recently who we were chatting, and he noticed this old pattern in his relationship. When he would take breaks or he would go on a holiday without his wife, or he spent time away from his wife, he noticed this pattern where he would come home and she'd be upset about things, she would bring things up and she would get really upset, or she would start to try to trigger him because she was probably reflecting back the loneliness or the disappointment that she was feeling for him not being there. And as he started to slow down in his life, he started to step into her world. He started to get an insight into her world, and he started to see, okay, she's probably getting upset with me because I'm spending time away from the relationship and she just wants connection. And the moment he got that insight into her world, he was then able to. The next time he came home, let her speak, let her share. He was able to stay in his body because he had slowed down. Her words didn't trigger the reaction in him as much. He was hearing the pain and not the blame. Okay. And when you slow down, you start to Hear this in other people, too, right? Because not everyone's doing this work. When you can hear the pain, not blame. When you can do this, you're in a really powerful leadership position where you can help other people in your life process and unravel and unlock and let go of maybe the pain that they've been holding onto for a long period of time. In John's case, he heard the pain, listened, empathized, gave his wife a chance to speak. Is there anything else that you're feeling right now, sweetheart? Is there anything else that's coming up for you? She. She got it all out. And then she asked him, hey, what do you think about this? Like, why do you think this keeps happening? Or she asked his perspective on it, gave his perspective. And then in the short dynamic that they had, she ended up. Started to cry. She ended up having. Letting go of tears. She cried. And then after that, he shared with me that they had a really beautiful moment of just connection afterwards, of feeling really intimate with each other after that. Because the conflict, the breakdown, became the catalyst for him to step into this new response, this new level of leadership. He's in his masculine. She was in her feminine. She was processing. He was holding the space that created deeper connection in the relationship. Okay. Which is why, again, I'm hoping. I want you guys to see. I want you to see this reframe about emotional breakdowns. They're actually beautiful opportunities, the best time to develop deeper connections with people. If you hear the pain and not the blame, and you lean into having or saying or just listening when every answer you doesn't want to. When you want to go back to the old reaction, you want to stay in the listening, stay in the space. Because transformation happens during that time. Slowing down, man. You got to slow down in your life. There has to be some sort of ritual in your life where you're tuning into what you're feeling on a daily basis, and you're starting to develop this compassionate, this nonjudgmental space, either in meditation or silent contemplation, where you're understanding your body, you're starting to love your body, you're starting to love the feminine elements of life. Because this is what we're working with when we're dealing with emotions. If you're shutting down emotions, you're shutting down life, you're shutting down emotions. You're trying to shut down the tree from changing its leaves. If you're shutting down emotions, you're trying to stop the fucking sun from rising in the morning. It's Life, you cannot control the fact that you're going to feel emotions. You cannot control if someone else is experiencing your wife. Especially for the men who are trying to compartmentalize or rationalize or box in their partner's emotions by trying to fix and solve them. No, she's nature, your nature. Nature expresses, nature moves. Nature allows energy to express. When you slow down and embrace the fact that this is a part of life and your body is a feeling machine, even a machine, it's a feeling element and there's constant flux and change that's happening and you get to slow down and embrace the brace. Where is it at today, what I feel today? Can I allow this expression today? Can I honor my process today? Because the more you do that, the more you can honor your partners, the more you can honor the people around you because you're just gonna have more, more emotional space for them because you're not holding on to tension and things like that. Okay, all right. So I feel like the practical element of this that you can take away from all of this is develop the awareness, develop that self responsibility to own the fact that emotions are not personal. They usually things from the past that are coming up in the present to be healed and integrated. Slowing down and hearing the pain and not the blame will require you to develop your own practice and rituals where you connect with your emotions on your own. It makes it a lot easier to connect with other people when you do that and get some support. Like ultimately if you need some guidance or accountability with these kinds of things, therapists, coaches, a good friend who you can call up to make sure you can get a reflection if you're, if you're not seeing things clearly, getting a reflection from someone in your life is going to help a lot. Alright guys, we'll leave it there. We'll leave it there. I hope that was helpful for the guys or girls that want to go deeper. I've got a relationship school that's starting up in about 10 days time. It's a community for men and women that we can come in, work on these things, get the coaching, get the support. I've got two courses in there, one for men, one for women who want to like go deeper into this stuff and understand how to lead with more confidence to foster a more effortless connection in the relationship. The link will be in the description. It's going to be epic. Alright guys, thanks for tuning in. We'll see in the next video.