How Did I Wind up Here? 

Did you ever think you’d wind up here, googling for ways to fix your marriage? Searching for some marriage communication exercises, or even wondering “is my marriage over?”

Probably not. So how did this happen? I bet you used to be really happy. 

When you were first engaged, the future looked bright. There was so much potential. You were making plans, constructing the perfect life. Figuring it out together – how to make it all come true.

This is why you decided to get married. Right?

And then, at some point, things changed. Maybe your communication problems were the first indication of trouble. You were talking past each other. Shutting down and not listening, or letting your anger get out of control. You couldn’t understand how they could possibly think that way, about something so important.

Could a simple lack of communication explain this? 

I don’t think so. After all, it was more than just not being understood, wasn’t it? And when you think about it, there were plenty of times when you understood each other just fine, you just didn’t like what the other person was saying. Maybe it was smaller things at first, like where to go on vacation or what kind of car to buy. But as time went on the stakes became higher. Things like where to live, how to raise the kids, or how to divide responsibilities. 

Over time the fights started getting more intense, with stronger emotions, and deeper, longer-lasting hurt feelings. Resentments were starting to build up, and even if you eventually worked out this or that problem, you still seemed to be having the same kind of fight over and over again.

Am I Getting Divorced?

Wasn’t divorce something that was supposed to happen to the other 50% of couples? You wouldn’t have gotten married if you thought you were going to get divorced, right? But maybe you’ve had some passing thoughts like I wonder if I made a mistake? A thought like that doesn’t pop up in your head overnight – it creeps in over time as the issues pile up. 

So how many unresolved issues add up to a marriage that’s functionally dead – just two people living together in hopeless isolation, between bouts of conflict – the kind of marriage that makes divorce seem like the better option.

You might think that just by having these thoughts you’ve already failed. But the good news is that it doesn’t. The fact that you’re reading this means that you haven’t given up hope, that you have some insight into the problem, and that you still have a chance at a successful marriage. Even if it feels like your marriage is in a nosedive, I’ve seen couples pull it out.

Lack of Communication in Marriage: The Tip of the Iceberg  

In my marriage therapy practice, the number one issue clients describe in the first session is communication problems. But almost as soon as they start talking, the issues get deeper. Yes, they may be communicating poorly, but they are also disagreeing about things, sometimes lots of things. Communication problems in marriage are just the tip of the iceberg.

Ironically, what causes poor communication is most often the same thing that causes the problems these couples are trying to communicate about – their feelings. Most people don’t understand that our feelings drive most of what we think and do, because we usually pay more attention to what we think, what we want and what we believe. And yet our feelings exert a profound influence that usually goes unnoticed.

So how can a bunch of marriage communication tools be the solution to these underlying problems? The truth is, they can’t. As long as you consider communication to be the main issue, your marriage won’t improve very much.

Don’t get me wrong, when bad communication habits are present, every issue gets worse. Things like not paying attention, interrupting, or changing the subject; shouting, rambling, ranting, or exaggerating; criticizing, stonewalling, defensiveness, or contempt – all of these are conversation killers that will increase discord and distress. And to be a better spouse, you can and should try to unlearn as many of these bad habits as you can. 

But to solve the real problems, we have to start with the deeper issue: misunderstood, mismanaged, and miscommunicated feelings. Over the course of the next several posts, you will see where feelings come from, what they are (and what they aren’t), how to handle them better, and how to talk about them effectively.  

Part 1: How Sensations in Your Body Impact Communication in Your Marriage

If you want good communication in your marriage, you have to be able to communicate your feelings, clearly and appropriately. And to communicate them, you have to understand them. Even if you consider yourself to be a rational person, you have feelings operating within you all the time. In fact, feelings are the primary driver of what you do, say, and think, even if you don’t always realize it. So, without a basic understanding of how your feelings are generated and how they impact your behavior, you’re going to have a very difficult time communicating them to your partner. And as a result, they won’t understand the experience you’re having, your needs, your points of view, or even who you are as a person. 

What Are Feelings and Where Do They Come From?

You might use the word feeling to describe a range of inner experiences. For example, you can use it to refer to a sensation in your body (“I feel sick to my stomach”), to an affective state (“I feel jittery”), to an emotion (“I feel sad”), or to a thought (“I feel like this isn’t going to work”). Over the next few posts, I’m going to describe a model of emotion I use with my clients, one that’s grounded in neuroscience and practical enough to use in your daily life. This model involves breaking down your experience into its component parts: our thoughts, feelings, and sensations. In this post, we’ll look at how the brain processes sensations, and we’ll see that the reality we take for granted is not nearly as real as we think it is. Then in the next post, we’ll look at how our sensations determine our affect, or our base level of feeling, and how this colors your every waking moment, affecting how we act, think, and feel. So let’s start with a little bit about the brain.

Your Brain: A Galaxy of Interconnectivity

Your brain has a hundred billion neurons, about the same as the number of stars in the Milky Way. It is a vast web of interconnected cells that consumes 20% of your body’s energy, even though your brain only makes up 2% of your mass. You can think of your brain as a supercomputer running inside your skull 24 hours a day, constantly allocating energy resources across your entire body, balancing what scientists call your body budget. Whether you need the tremendous energy to run a marathon or the minimal energy to read a book, your brain is always redistributing energy, and in the process, it creates an ongoing cascade of sensations in your body, as it switches from resting to walking to running to working to talking to sleeping, and on and on.

You Don’t Have a Skeleton Inside You – You are Inside a Skeleton

Although you feel like you have a brain and skeleton inside you, in reality, the opposite is true – you are inside a skeleton. Neuroscience tells us that all our experiences are produced within the brain, a brain that is encased in our skull. From that point of view, our own common-sense experience is inside-out. Put another way, the world we normally see doesn’t exist the way it appears, and the reality we take for granted exists mainly in our imagination. We’ll delve into this more as we go further, but for now the most important takeaway is that, as strange as it seems, although you feel as though the outside world is external to you and your brain and skeleton are internal, from your brain’s perspective, everything outside of itself including your entire body is an external object. 

Sensation: The Raw Data of Experience

Your brain can only understand what’s going on in the external world and inside your body through your senses. In addition to the five senses that perceive external objects – vision, hearing, smell, taste, and touch – you also possess an exquisitely tuned internal sensory network, referred to as interoception, that perceives the functioning of your organs and glands, in terms of their overall health, as well all the sensations that contribute to your affect, such as butterflies in your stomach, clammy hands, or increased heart rate you might notice in conjunction with an emotional state, such as fear or excitement. In the next post, we’ll look more at how these underlying bodily sensations are the foundation of our emotions. The main thing to notice in the next few sections is the extent to which the world doesn’t exist the way it appears to us, even though we might swear up and down that it does.

If a Tree Falls in the Forest and No One Hears It, Does it Make a Sound?

There is an old philosophical thought experiment that asks the question “If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound?” At first, this might seem like a silly question. Of course, the tree makes a sound – whether a person is there or not makes no difference at all. But strange as it may seem, the answer to this question is no – if no one is there to hear it, it does not make a sound. Why? Because the question isn’t really asking about the tree, it’s asking about the nature of the human experience, and the difference between the way objects exist in the world and the way they are represented in our consciousness. When a tree falls, what happens in the external world is a change in air pressure, rippling outward in every direction, but a change in air pressure is not a sound – it’s just air pressure. A sound is something that our brain creates through a complex process of physical transduction and mental representation. When those ripples of air pressure hit your eardrum, it sets off a chain reaction of mechanical energy through the many parts of your middle and inner ear, which is then converted into electrical and chemical potentials in your cochlea and projected through various parts of your lower and middle brain until it is finally represented by your auditory cortex as a “sound” in your consciousness, thoroughly transformed and no longer recognizable to you as air pressure. Therefore, without a brain getting involved, sounds don’t exist.

The same is true for color. When I look out my window, every fiber of my being tells me that the tree I see outside is green. But it isn’t – there are wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation hitting my retina, but they aren’t green. The wavelengths have an amplitude and a frequency that my brain perceives and then constructs an experience of “green” that only exists inside my brain. The same is true for every sense we have. Although they are highly reliable (green trees almost always look like green trees), and they also have social validity (you and I can agree the tree is green), none of our sensory experience is objectively real. Depending on how you feel about it, this may seem like a profound insight into the nature of reality, or a somewhat obvious fact about sensory processing. Either way, our connection to objective reality is about to stretch even thinner.

Your Experience Is Based on Prediction and Simulation

Here’s the evolutionary problem: the external world is made up of an infinite amount of sensory input, much more than your brain could ever process. For example, each of your retinas can transmit about 10 million bits of information every second. The problem is that in order to keep you alive, your brain has to represent enough of what’s out there so that you can see a predator, for example, but not so much that it gets lost in all the other data. 

So how does your brain decide what to process? First, it has to decide what it cares about in this situation, narrow its focus to that and more or less go blind to the rest. Affective neuroscientists call this your affective niche, and it is continuously shifting as the demands of your situation change. For example, if you and I are sitting in a restaurant having a conversation, your affective niche will include what I am saying, but not what the rest of the people in the restaurant are saying. However, if we are also waiting for our name to be called, then your affective niche will also be monitoring the background voices for your name. 

To decide what to pay attention to, your brain also has to do something very complex: it has to continuously predict what it thinks is going to happen next, based on everything it knows about being in similar situations in the past. So, for example, when I was a kid and had to go out to the woodpile to bring in the day’s worth of firewood, my mind was on high alert for spiders because I had seen some scary spiders there in the past. And here’s where prediction comes in: sometimes I would see spiders that weren’t even there. Not only that, I didn’t just think I saw a spider, I actually saw one –  clear as day, and then it disappeared into a twist of wood, or a shadow, or a piece of a leaf. 

Have you ever had this experience? These fleeting hallucinations are common. Maybe you thought you saw your friend in a crowd but it wasn’t them. Or saw a person in the shadows and it was just shadows. These are all products of your brain’s continuous effort to predict what’s about to happen so that you have more time to react. But here’s the really interesting part: not only is your brain constantly issuing multi-sensory predictions about what it thinks is about to happen, it’s actually projecting those predictions back through your senses so that what you are actually experiencing is not the external world coming in through your senses, but a simulation of what your brain thinks is most likely. Even stranger, your brain isn’t just doing this when you see a nonexistent spider – it’s doing this all the time. So much so, neuroscientists estimate, that your brain is actually simulating more sensory information than it’s taking in.

Think about that for a moment. Most of your experience is essentially an internally generated virtual reality presentation. Now ask yourself if that is how it feels. If you’re like most people, your normal way of thinking is that you are experiencing reality exactly as it is, but that is far from accurate. The world we normally see doesn’t exist.

Of course, we’re not totally unmoored from reality. While our brain is presenting this simulation to our consciousness, it is also continuously sampling the external or bodily sensory environment to reduce prediction error. In this way, our simulation remains tethered to the external world through a continuous prediction loop.

In summary, we can conclude that far from being able to observe the world as it actually is, we are at least three steps removed. Not only is our brain presenting us with a representation of reality (e.g., sound) that is qualitatively different from what actually exists in the external world (i.e., air pressure changes), it is also filtering out most of the available sensory information (through our affective niche). In addition, the predictive regions of your brain are so powerful and well connected that they can control the firing of your brain’s own sensory neurons to bring those predictions to life rather than display the external world your senses are perceiving. 

What are the Takeaways?

• Be a little bit skeptical about your experience. We walk around all day thinking we know what reality is, but we don’t. Remember that the things you see don’t exist the way they appear in your consciousness – your brain is constructing your reality right down to your senses. We will deepen this idea in the next part when we look at how our feelings shape our reality, and how this impacts our relationships.

• Consider how your sensory experience on its own might be impacting your relationship. How you and your partner perceive your communal sensory environment – the lighting, the air temperature, the noise level – can impact your relationship. Differences in preference can lead to disagreements about how to light and heat your home, how loud the music or television should be, and what kind of furniture is comfortable or attractive. And these disagreements will be compounded if you don’t realize they are only preferences and not perceptions of an objective reality that your partner “just doesn’t get.”

• If you want to try an exercise to help you get in more direct contact with your interoceptive and multi-sensory experience to explore the foundation of your subjective experience of reality, I recommend this Body Scan Meditation by Jon Kabat-Zinn, the founder of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, the most well-researched mindfulness intervention.

If you want to get to work now to change the dynamic with your partner – schedule a Free Consultation to discuss where you are, where you’d like to be, and how to get there.