Arguing and the Immune System

excerpts from an article on Medical Press about the effect of arguments between partners (and other stressors) on the immune system:

"Rebecca Reed, a doctoral candidate in family studies and human development in the University of Arizona College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, is studying how a couple's recovery from an argument affects their immune systems and overall health....

Though we hopefully know the difference, our bodies' immune responses don't differentiate between a peeved lover and a predatory lion. When confronted with a psychological stressor, such as a tense discussion or giving a public speech, our immune systems respond the same as they would for an impending physical attack....

Essentially, too much psychological stress literally can make you sick, while the ability to recover from stressful situations may decrease risk of chronic illness and improve overall health and quality of life......."

She believes that one way to turn off the immune response may be for couples to foster effective interpersonal communication with attention to each other's emotional states. This could help them not only emotionally recover from stressors, but also immunologically recover, she said."

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When Richard and I have a doozy of a disagreement both of us feel tender, even broken, for a while afterwards.  I go into my cave and hibernate until I feel reconstituted.  Richard immerses himself in his computer. After a bit of time passes, we reach out to each other again.

I really like the idea of each wounded partner helping the other to recover from the effects of arguing.  It's a hard task for someone who is angry or defended to also be empathic.  But the empathy is there, just retreated.  If you can make space for empathy in the rush of anger, the disagreement is likely to be more tolerable, with a quicker, more balanced resolution.

How do you and your partner do arguments and disagreements?  Do you feel the stress of arguing in your body?  How do you recover?

Does Illness Breaks Down Communication Walls?

Here is a story from an article in NY Magazine by Meaghan Winter that is largely about how weight can change relationships.  But the final vignette in the series is really about how illness breaks through the trivial and can accelerate the deeper conversations that couples who aren't living will illness may take decades to get to.

I think those of us who do live with illness as part of our relationships have known what it's like to be too exhausted or consumed to be able to squander communication energy on the easy (and delightful) irrelevancies like taking out the garbage and refilling the ice cube trays.  We have to quickly get to talking about how we are feeling (both the well and ill partner), what matters to us in the moment, what we feel capable of doing, and what are hopes and fears are.

Here is the story:

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Soon after Kyle and Alison became fast friends, he began losing weight and suffering flu-like symptoms. They started dating in their late twenties. One month later, Kyle, already “damn near gaunt,” was diagnosed with cancer.

Even as Kyle underwent chemotherapy, he kept working as a social media strategist and “tried very hard to project independence.” He had only recently moved out of his parents’ home and “didn’t want family doting.” Alison’s care allowed him his adulthood: “I tried to help him keep things as normal as possible,” she says.

Chemo so weakened Kyle that even picking a movie wore him out. Alison made their plans, and they often “restricted their radius to the neighborhood” because he was tired. Despite his illness, she didn’t consider leaving the burgeoning relationship. “I just wanted to hang out with him,” she says. Because Kyle’s illness immediately plunged them into “intensity,” “once in a while” she’d wonder, “Who’s he going to be in the future, my friend, my boyfriend, fiancé?”

Now that Kyle is cancer-free and they’re living together, they’re learning later than usual to negotiate “little New York couple things you take for granted,” like going out separately. Alison says that they “broke down the walls under a vastly different peril” means they can “broach uncomfortable topics” like how they’re feeling about themselves “without fear.” He adds, “It doesn’t mean it’s not awkward sometimes … But it never feels judgmental.”

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Do you have your own story about illness and communication.  I'd like to hear it.

What Do You DoWith Your Anger? continued

In my last post, I wrote about the power of anger. In this post I write about some of the ways anger can be handled so that it has a better chance of being heard and responded to.

Here are some of the options I use. You decide what's best for you.

Pick your battles. Decide what you can let pass, and what you really need to address. And when you address it, preface it by saying something like, "I need your help and some uninterrupted time with you. I have been holding something back and I think I need to share it with you. It may be hard to hear, but if I don't talk about it, that will be worse. This is all in the spirit of clearing the air. When would it be a good time to talk?" By framing it in this way and by including your partner in deciding when to talk, you give him some sense of control and reduce the instantaneous defensiveness which could otherwise erupt.

Write it down. In your journal. In a letter you don't send. Write fearlessly without stopping. After you see what you have written, you can pick out the pieces that can form a more coherent message. That's the message to share, not the rant.

Talk it out with a neutral party -- a friend or a counselor. This is the safe place to unleash full bore emotion. When it's run its course, extract the message to share with your partner, find a quiet time, and frame it well.

Shout it out. Find a time when you are alone. Go to the room in which you feel the safest. Shout out your anger. Say all the things your feel and think, no matter how hurtful and ugly they sound. Shout out: "I hate you." "You're a (expletive of your choosing) ." "I can't go on like this anymore." Drain yourself. If you're concerned the neighbors will hear you, shout into a pillow or into your mattress. Then extract the key messages and set up a time to talk with your partner.

The purpose of these options is not to strip out all emotion from your message. You should not neutralize all your energy and become robotic. The purpose is to get clarity.

Anger is a loud emotion and can drown out wisdom. Anger can drive you to win the battle and lose the peace. If you no longer care about your partner and only want to obliterate him and any chance of reconciliation, then blast away. But if you want to be heard, if you want your partner to try to behave differently, if you want to build a bridge, then blasting won't get you there. Do what you can to divest your rage of its venom. Then approach your partner, with a cleaner anger, with clarity about what you need, and with the love that makes you want to stay connected.

What do you do with anger?

What Do You Do With Anger?

In Shakespeare's The Tempest, Caliban hates Prospero. Caliban, born savage and deformed by the witch who used to inhabit the island, is now a slave to Prospero, the new ruler and severe taskmaker. In this soliloquy Caliban holds nothing back:

All the infections that the sun sucks up
From bogs, fens, flats, on Prosper fall,
and make him By inch-meal a disease!

This is anger, in all its graphic, metaphoric brilliance. While we may not be as expressive as Shakespeare, illness can make us damn angry.

The ill partner can get rabidly angry at the illness that has so constricted her life. She can get angry at her well partner for still being able to go out into the world, unfettered by pain or weakness. She may also get exasperated at her well partner for making her wait until he finishes watching the baseball game to bring her food or help her to get to the bathroom. She may be silently enraged at him for all the things he can still do that she cannot.

The well partner may be furious at his ill partner for changing the relationship contract without prior approval by him. He didn't sign up for years of caretaking and even less for losing the strong woman he hoped to travel the world with.

Both partners are bound to get angry at the health care system for all the ways it makes them wait or feel insignificant or suffer unnecessary complications. This form of anger can become a full time job. Rage at the system can easily overwhelm the more fragile tenderness that both partners yearn for from each other.

How can both ill and well partner deal with these forms of anger, and others? Squashing or denying it doesn't make it disappear. It only condenses it into rock hard pellets that lodge deeper down inside the body and slip out unexpectedly to cause more piercing damage. Giving free reign to anger is like unleashing a perpetual tornado. For a moment it can seem magnificent, but it will ultimately destroy everything you value.

So, what is the middle ground between silence and vengeance? When you are in the grip of anger, all you want is to unleash it, maybe even to cause some damage to the person you feel has been damaging you. Or silence it with a heavy hand. But this will not get you what you want. What you want is validation, acceptance, understanding, and reparations. To get even some of that, you need to see your anger not as a lightening bolt you hurl at your partner, or as a fire that burns you from within, but as a bridge that needs to be rebuilt between the two of you. Something broke, and it needs to be mended, by both of you, together.

In the next post I will share some of the options I use.

What do you do with your anger?