Renewing Your Relationship During a Pandemic
As 2020 began, we thought we saw ourselves, our relationships, and our world clearly. Three months later, enormous changes occurred in our social environment as we moved into sheltering.
Pressed up against each other, our focus on our intimate relationships became more intense, revealing both strengths and vulnerabilities in the way we treated each other. Being confined, facing losses, and away from pleasant distractions it was hard not to feel the strain we were living under and to see its effect on our partnerships. See Love in Covid: How the pandemic is affecting our relationships.
And then, what had started as a crisis - went on and on - morphing into a chronic condition. Over time, sheltering became increasingly disruptive, and began to affect our mental health, and our physiology. Our individual stress levels rose, and we began to lose sleep; we became more anxious and depressed, which in turn affected our ability to focus our attention effectively, remember accurately, and think clearly. As all this was playing out within our homes, we were seeing inconsistent and conflicting reports of the pandemic that revealed disturbing social, economic, and racial inequities in the larger social environment. It was disorienting; the resulting accumulated stress and exhaustion shifted what we focused on and the perspective from which we viewed events. The lens through which we viewed ourselves and the world altered our perceptions, emotions, thoughts, and behaviors.
While some of us were able to cope well, many in more compromised situations were struggling. People got lonelier, more anxious, and depressed, and both substance abuse and the use of antidepressants rose sharply. As the challenges mounted for each of us individually, pressure on our long-term intimate relationships grew, with increased irritation, decreased satisfaction, and both divorce and domestic violence rates rising.
When we are flooded by anxiety, it is easy to become overwhelmed by negative thoughts and feelings, and we feel helpless to move forward constructively. But if we can regulate our emotions and keep our perspectives hopeful, we can focus on the positives and train our brains towards hope and optimism. There are specific steps that can lead to stronger connections with ourselves and with each other.
Strengthening these connections is the work I have been doing for four decades. Partners come to me very hurt and angry, feeling lonely, alienated, resentful, and betrayed, and my job is to help them find a way to love each other again. And yes, it is possible, there is a path to move from hurt and anger to love and connection. And we need that path more now than ever to take care of ourselves and our relationships, so we can be a part of a larger healing. It is not easy, and it takes work, but it is achievable using the tools and perspectives in this website, and it starts by making a choice: A choice to move away from fear and anger and towards hope and optimism.
The guided Do It Yourself (DIY) program introduced here, Love for the Long Haul.com can help you to strengthen, enhance, or renew your relationship see Relationship Blueprint overview, and Tools. This path is rooted in scientific research. Research on relationships reveals the four critical components that lead to the success of long-term intimate relationships can be strengthened by learning new perspectives and tools. And the past two decades of study of interpersonal neurobiology shows how we can actually change our brains by creating new neural pathways. This process helps us become more secure, more emotionally well-regulated individuals, happier, calmer, and more capable of love and compassion. We can be better partners in our intimate partnerships because we are better able to listen to our partners, understand them, and resolve our differences. As we become better communicators, and happy, stable, and secure partners, we will be much better able to apply our learning to our relationships with our children, parents, friends, colleagues and neighbors.
Soon we will leave 2020. How we will remember it depends on what we choose to focus our attention on. If we are able to move our focus past our constraints and disappointments and see it as a time when we renew our relationship with ourselves, our partners, and families, we will be on track to develop 2020 vision.
Gandhi “If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change… We need not wait to see what others do.”