What's Actually Inside the Most Difficult Reactions

Rachel Orleck (: 00:01

I want to start with a child, not a specific child, just the image of one, small, tired, at the end of something, maybe the end of a long day or a transition that was too abrupt or the accumulation of a hundred small things that were each individually manageable and are now collectively too much. Something tips.

Something small, the wrong cup, the broken cracker, the shoe that won't cooperate, and the child falls apart. Notice what happens in you when you picture that. For most people, something softens. The voice lowers, the pace slows. There is an almost automatic movement toward the small, overwhelming thing.

For most people, something softens, the voice lowers, the pace slows. There is an almost automatic movement toward the small thing.

For most people, something softens. The voice lowers, the pace slows. There is an almost automatic movement toward the small, overwhelmed thing. Not to fix it, not to reason with it, not to explain that the cracker can be replaced, just to be near it. To let it know, without words, that the falling apart is not a problem.

that you are not going anywhere, that it is safe to be this undone in front of you.

Most of us have this. It does not have to be taught. It arrives on its own in the presence of a small child's distress. The tenderness is just there. Now I want you to hold a different image. Before we go into the music, I wanna describe something to you, a sculpture. And I want you to let yourself live in it in your mind for the entirety of this episode.

t the Burning Man Festival in: 2015

Because there are things that an image does that words cannot fully replicate. But here's what it looks like. Two adults, wire frame, large. And you can see through them. See the open space inside. They are sitting on the ground, back to back, turned away from each other. Their posture carries the weight of a hard moment. Knees drawn up.

heads forward, the body language of two people who have gone somewhere unreachable and are no longer in contact. And inside each of them, visible through the wire, rendered in solid form where the adults are only frame, are children. Small, opaque, real in the way the adults are not quite real. And the children are reaching toward each other.

Both hands extended. Across the space the adult bodies have created between them. Wanting contact that the adult posture is making impossible. That is the image. Hold it.

Here's the intro music. ⁓

Welcome to Coupled With. Today we're talking about what is actually inside the reactions that are hardest to go toward and the tenderness that was never actually gone. Here's what I mean. The adult exterior is real. The behavior is real. The difficulty of it is real. And it is not the whole truth of what is happening in the person in front of you or in yourself.

Here is a moment most people in a close relationship have lived.

Here's a moment most people in a close relationship have lived. Something happens, not a catastrophe, an ordinary hard moment.

Something happens, not a catastrophe. It's an ordinary hard moment. A conversation that begins with tension and goes somewhere neither person intended.

One person gets loud, their frustration alive at volume with an edge or with a particular quality that communicates, I have been sitting with this for a long time and I can't sit with it quietly anymore.

The other person goes somewhere unreachable. Something closes. The warmth leaves the face. There is a flatness, a stillness, a withdrawal that says, I am not available in the way you need right now. And I don't know when I will be again.

from the outside, from each other's outside, this is what is visible.

the loudness, the withdrawal, the behavior, and something in the person receiving it makes a calculation. Quick and below conscious awareness, this is unreasonable. This is too much. I cannot go toward this. That calculation is understandable. The The exterior is genuinely difficult and it is incomplete.

Because underneath the loudness is someone who is scared, scared that they don't matter enough, that their need has been unmet so long that the only language left for it is volume. Underneath the withdrawal is someone who's learned somewhere from something before this relationship that coming close costs too much, that the safest

that the safest thing is to go somewhere protected and wait. Two people, both of them carrying something small and scared inside the adult exterior, both of their insides reaching toward the person while their outsides turn away. We can see the outsides. We respond to the outsides. We make our decisions about whether to go toward or away based on the outsides.

This episode is about learning to look through the wire.

Think about what you actually know when a toddler falls apart over the wrong color cup cup. You know the cup is not the point. You don't need to be told that. You understand without deliberating that something accumulated, tiredness, overstimulation, the ordinary difficulty of being small in a world that doesn't always accommodate small. And the cup was simply the last thing.

The feeling is real, even if the stated reason is not the real reason. The size of the reaction is not a measure of the reasonableness of the underlying need. It is a measure of how long the need has been waiting. And so you don't debate the cup. You move toward the child, not to fix it, not to explain, just to be near the overwhelmed thing, to let the distress be present.

without it becoming a problem you need to eliminate. The tenderness arrives without being summoned. It is just there. Now, your partner reacts from the same place, from accumulated hurt, from a need that has been waiting, from the feeling of being small in a moment that is asking for more of them than they currently have.

And the behavior looks different because the body is adult-sized. The voice is louder. The words are more specific. It can look, from the outside, like a choice. Like something that should be modulated. Like something the person should have more control over. Like something they should be further along then. But the need underneath the adult reaction?

is the same need that was in the child.

the need to matter, to be reached for, to have someone come toward the distress instead of away from it, to be held, not literally, not always, but in the sense of being with somebody who is not smaller or more threatened by your falling apart.

The need to matter, the need to be reached for, to have someone come toward the distress instead of away from it, to be held, not literally, not always, but in the sense of being someone who is not made smaller.

but in the sense of being with someone who's not made smaller or more threatened by your falling apart. The child's cry and the adult's anger are, at their root, the same signal. They are not the same reaching. They just arrive in different registers, through different bodies, with very different levels of social permission attached to them.

the tenderness you extend to the toddler, you still have it. It did not leave.

It did not leave when you entered this relationship. It is not gone because the person in front of you is adult-sized. It is available to you right now in the hardest moment if you can learn to see what is actually there.

Here's what happens to those child parts as we grow. They don't disappear. That is the thing most people don't fully reckon with. The need to be soothed, to be chosen, to matter to the person closest to us. That need does not become irrelevant at some point in development. It does not resolve itself through maturity or therapy or sufficient accumulation of adult competence.

It is present in a 40-year-old the way it was present in that child at four. It is just less visible because it learned to be.

Through repeated experience, the dismissal that taught us our feelings were too much. The absence that taught us needs went unmet.

Through repeated experience, the dismissal that taught us our feelings were too much, the absence that taught us needs went unmet, the households where emotional expression was met with impatience or silence or nothing at all. Those child parts learned what was safe to show and what needed to be managed. They went somewhere interior.

They became the wireframe's contents rather than its exterior.

And here's the part I want to sit with for a moment, because I think it is important and I think it often goes unsaid.

We do to ourselves what we most fear others doing to us.

The person who was told their feelings were too much.

The person who is told their feelings were too much eventually starts telling themselves the same thing. The person whose whose needs went unmet learns to preemptively invalidate their own needs, to dismiss the interior experience before anyone else can, to tell themselves they are being unreasonable, too sensitive, further along than they are now.

to treat the reaching parts of themselves with the same impatience that was once turned on them from the outside.

The adult exterior is not only armor against the world, it is sometimes armor against the self, against the parts that are still small and still reaching and still underneath the competence and the self-sufficiency and the very sophisticated emotional vocabulary hoping to be held.

This matters for two reasons. The first is the obvious one. It is harder to extend tenderness to your partner's child parts if you have never been able to extend it to your own.

The second is less obvious. The reaction your partner is having that you cannot go toward.

The second is less obvious. The reaction that your partner is having that you can't go toward, the one that looks unreasonable from the outside, may look exactly like the reaction you have been having privately toward yourself.

The impatience you feel toward their falling apart may be the same impatience you have been directing inward for years. Both of you are inside wire frames. Both of your children are reaching. Neither of you has been particularly gentle with the reaching.

The reaction that is hardest to go toward is almost always the one most desperate to be met.

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So we just named what is actually inside the difficult reaction. The child's need wearing adult clothes. The reach that continues even when the posture is turned away. That changes what the moment of hardest contact actually contains. And it changes what is possible inside it.

Here are the two versions of the same moment. In the first, the adult exterior is the whole truth. The reaction is unreasonable and therefore the responsibility goes toward it.

The reaction is unreasonable and therefore the responsibility go toward...

The reaction is unreasonable and therefore the responsibility to go toward it is dissolved. You respond to the behavior because the behavior is what is visible. The distance grows. The children inside both of the wire frames keep reaching toward each other across a gap that neither adult is moving to close. And the hard moment ends not in repair, but in the particular exhaustion of two people who wanted the same thing.

and could not find each other through the exterior.

In the second, the.

In the second, the adult exterior is the presentation, real and present and sometimes genuinely difficult to be near, but not the totality. You hold one additional piece of information. Underneath what is visible is something smaller, something scared, something that is reaching for you even now while the posture says otherwise.

And that piece of information changes what you can offer. Not excusing the behavior, not absorbing whatever arrives without limit, but meeting the need beneath the behavior rather than only responding to the behavior itself.

The difference between those two versions is not a large behavioral change.

It is a shift in perception and what you are willing to see when you look at the person in front of you in their hardest moment.

You can look at the wire frame or you can look through it.

Both are available to you. Only one of them brings you into contact with what is actually there.

Here's the one thing I wanna offer, and it is not a script or a strategy. It is a question. Well, two questions actually. One for each direction. The first is outward. The next time the reaction arrives, the loudness, the withdrawal, the thing that the adult exterior may look like.

the loudness, the withdrawal, the thing that the adult exterior makes look like more than your responsible.

The next time their reaction arrives, the loudness, the withdrawal.

The thing that the adult exterior makes it look like it's more than you're responsible for going toward? Before you respond from the outside in, ask yourself one thing. Not, what is wrong with them? Not, why are they doing this? Just, what are they afraid of right now?

Not what they're angry about, what they're afraid of, because underneath almost every adult reaction that is hard to be near is a fear that is much smaller and much older than the behavior suggests. The fear of not mattering, of being left, of being found inadequate, of being too much, of the connection being lost.

Those fears are not adult sized. They belong to the child inside the wire frame.

Those fears are not adult-sized. They belong to the child inside of the wireframe, the one with both hands extended, the one who has been reaching the whole time while the adult body turned away.

You don't have to answer the question out loud. You don't have to fix the fear or resolve the wound. You just have to let it slow you down enough to actually see what's in front of you. Not a difficult adult making unreasonable demands. A person who is small, scared parts are hoping. Against the evidence of their own exterior,

that someone will come toward them anyway.

That is the tenderness. It is already in you. It just needed something small enough to recognize.

The second question is inward. When your own when your own reaction arrives, when you feel the adult exterior doing what it does, when the loudness of the withdrawal or the impatient surfaces, ask the same question of yourself. What am I afraid of right now?

Not what happened, what the small part of you, the one that learned long, what the small part of you, the one that learned a long time ago that certain needs were risky and certain feelings were too much. What is it afraid of in this moment?

the tenderness you extend to your partner's child parts begins, almost always with the tenderness you are willing to extend to your own. You cannot see what is reaching inside the wire frame of another person if you have never allowed yourself to see what is reaching inside yours.

I want to return to the sculpture before we close.

I described it at the beginning of this episode. The two wireframe adults back to back turned away from each other. The children inside them solid and reaching. I want to tell you something I left out.

The artists design the sculpture so that when the night falls, when the light disappears and the desert goes dark around it, the children illuminate. They glow. The adult wireframes recede into the darkness.

The adult wire frames recede into the darkness, become barely visible, become almost nothing. And what remains? What becomes the only thing visible against the dark are the children, still there, still reaching, still luminous.

I think about that detail often.

The idea that when things are darkest, when the adult exterior is most defended, most turned away, most impossible to reach, the part that still wants connection does not go out. It glows. It has been glowing the whole time. Inside the frame, patient and small and still extending both hands. We just couldn't see it through the wire.

Your partner's difficult reaction is the wire frame. It is real, it is present, it is sometimes genuinely hard to be around. But it is not the whole of what is there. Inside it, reaching is the part that wants what you want, that has always wanted what you were wanting, that has never stopped hoping the adult exterior on the other side of the room

would find a way to look through the wire and see them there.

the tenderness you have for the small, scared, reaching thing. The thing you slow the thing you slow down for automatically when it arrives in a small body, you were born with it. It did not leave when you grew up. It did not leave when the relationship got hard. It is available to you right now, in this moment and in the next hard one.

if you are willing to look for what is glowing inside the frame instead of only seeing the frame.

Search the sculpture, sit with it. Let it show you what this episode has been trying to say. They are not too much. They are a child who never got enough. And neither, if you're honest, are you.