You and Your Spouse: Parenting Each Other
It takes two to tangle, but the emotional tangle can be even harder to unravel when you and your mate each bring your own struggle with fear to your relationship and your co- parenting. Sex should deepen and reaffirm a couple’s bond. But it may not work that way.
If you’ve suffered sexual abuse, physical intimacy with your mate may trigger unconscious fear — fear that you try to work out by avoiding deep emotional intimacy with your partner.
If you grew up in a home with a depressed or angry parent, or parents who were emotionally absent, you probably didn’t get enough opportunities to develop a strong oxytocin response. Your emotional thermostat may be turned up too high — your fear response is too strong. Your love response may not be strong enough to overcome your fear of others.
As an adult, you may be able to fall in love and get into a relationship, because nature gave us lots of dopamine, the chemical of reward-seeking and pleasure, to get us over our fear of strangers so that we could find a mate. But once the excitement of dopamine wears off, we need the oxytocin response to keep us together.
If we’re not pumping out lots of oxytocin — during sex, cuddling, sleeping side by side, eating together — it may be a struggle to keep the fear in check.
When you first get into relationship, you’re experiencing all this oxytocin and dopamine, and it feels great. But suddenly, what used to feel good doesn’t feel so good anymore. Now, intimacy feels uncomfortable or threatening, while conflict escalates.
If this is a pattern you fall into with your mate, you can see how it would complicate your parenting. When you and your mate regress emotionally, how can you act as a stable, co- regulating parent to your child?
This is not to say that you won’t be able to employ the oxytocin parenting strategies successfully until and unless you have no fear yourself. What we are saying is that you may need to learn to use the same strategies to help each other move out of the place of fear and into a place where you can calmly connect with each other again, so that you can help your child regulate.
Parenting Each Other
You and your spouse co-regulate, just as you do with your child. When your mate becomes dysregulated, you may too, and vice versa. If you’ve practiced regulation techniques that replace cortisol and adrenaline with oxytocin, you can help your mate come back into regulation — to calm down. It’s much harder to co-regulate an adult than it is a child, because the adult’s brain is so much more developed. But it can be done.
If you’re stressed or even having a fight with your mate, it may seem difficult to stay connected. Establish ahead of time that, when things heat up, either of you can ask for a “connection break.”
The process of healing in your relationship begins when each of you can see through the coldness or anger to the fear, and then help the other come back to a place of calm and love. In the next section, we’ll go over some ways you can chill out yourself and your mate. Remember, until you and your mate can learn to help each other move through fear, it will be harder to help your child.
Remember:
- We all have a natural healing ability.
- We are innately equipped to heal ourselves, our families and our children.
- The more you spend time working on yourself and your own process, the more you open up and can make that healing possible for the rest of your family.
How to Chill Out: ER Protocol for Spouses
In the event of an emergency, put the oxygen — or oxytocin — mask on yourself first, and then help the person beside you. Here 
are three simple ways to trigger your oxytocin response when you need a quick dose of calm:
- Ten deep breaths: People always tell you to take a deep breath because it really works. It’s difficult to breathe slowly and deeply when you’re stressed and, conversely, breathing as though you feel calm tells the body/mind to relax. Inhale slowly through your nose, counting to 10. Then, exhale for another count of 10, trying to empty your lungs completely. Don’t gasp or force in more air than your lungs can hold; just find a comfortable, consistent pace for drawing air in and out. Repeat 10 times.
- Make eye contact: Gazing into the eyes of someone you’re close to helps trigger the oxytocin response. Our brains naturally switch into the mode of connection when we look into each other’s eyes. It’s not necessary to stare or get into a contest to see who blinks first. Instead, feel free to look away for a moment and then return your gaze to the other person’s.
- Hug: A hug is a safe, socially acceptable way to get a little hit of connection when we need it. (Although it seems like an obvious oxytocin producer, scientists haven’t studied the effects of hugging on oxytocin levels.) Hugging brings us back to our baseline of calm and connection.
Choose Love — B & S
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This is an excerpt from the book Oxytocin Parenting by Bryan Post and Susan Kutchinskas. Buy it now for only $1.99 as an e-Book from Amazon!