James Cordova

That's a great question.

So, yeah, I was raised in a community where one of the ways that we show respect

like love and affection for each other is just ongoing joshing and teasing of each other.

So this is just part of who I am in relationship.

And as it turns out, my wife is much too tenderhearted for that kind of ongoing teasing.

Oh, often.

Often.

Yeah.

No, this was something that, because it comes so naturally to me, it took years for me to really develop a sensitivity in that spot.

Oh, absolutely.

So we were in the process of shopping for a new pair of boots for her.

And one of the things that we have is sort of like an inside joke between the two of us is that she has exquisite taste.

So way more often than not, when we're shopping for something, she makes a beeline for the most expensive version of whatever it is that we're shopping for.

And it's an ongoing sort of running joke between the two of us.

So we were having a good time shopping for boots and we're heading into this like small kind of boutique boot store in Santa Fe.

And so as we're walking in, I call out to the proprietor and I say, can you just go ahead and show us the most expensive pair of boots in the store and save us some time?

Which I thought my wife would find hilarious, but clearly in the moment did not.

What was her reaction, James?

So, you know, when my wife is hurt, she gets quiet, right?

So there's a very distinct shift in tone from the sort of playfulness and lightheartedness that we were experiencing as we were walking in the door to you can just sort of feel her pull away.

Oh, yeah, I'm not an idiot.

I can tell like something happened.

And it's interesting because like my instinct is still to see if I can maintain the momentum.

Right.

So, oh, we're having a good time.

We're feeling jokey with each other and something happened.

But maybe I can just like keep going with the playfulness and it'll just wash away.

And, you know, that just as it turns out, doesn't usually work.

So like, I've tried to like, uh, explain where I'm coming from.

Like, this is just by way of being affectionate and it's playful and like, you know, she's obviously knows my friends and my family and, and has seen that play out between, between other folks.

And, um, and I mean, she gets it, but it just doesn't work for her.

Right.

So I've tried to like help her, uh, understand it from my perspective.

Um,

which has just gone over like a lead balloon.

So, you know, in this particular couple, the, the, the wife felt like quite deeply that her husband was withholding from her, right.

That she wanted to be able to know what he was feeling, have him, um,

talked to her about his wants and needs and his ups and downs.

And he was just very much a stoic, you know, very, you know, almost monosyllabic, right?

You know, clearly loved her, but his love language was acts of service, not necessarily talking about his feelings.

And, you know, she would try and

And he would feel judged.

And then they would, you know, sort of turn away from each other.

You know, she'd try a few times and then give up in frustration.

And he would feel judged and just sort of wander off.

So one of the patterns that we often see in couples is how they respond when there is conflict between the two of them.

So something comes up that feels tense or hurtful or painful in some way.

And our natural human reaction when something is painful most often is some version of either fight or flight.

And so some of us lean a little bit more in the direction of fight.

We're sort of like porcupines.

When we're having conflict, we pull our quills out, we push our quills out, and we go toward our partner.

The sense inside of that is, I'm going to resolve this problem myself.

By moving towards it and fighting it.

And for others of us, we're more like turtles.

We've learned something more of a flight response to feeling pain.

So when we're feeling that stress of conflict or judgment, we get quiet.

We pull inside.

Sometimes it's just getting quiet.

Sometimes it's actually literally leaving the room.

And the pattern emerges such that it can happen in either direction.

If the turtle feels the porcupine's quills coming out, they start to withdraw.

That withdrawal feels threatening to the porcupine, so that person pursues even harder with their quills out even more aggressively, which makes the other person pull into their shell even more deeply.

And it's frustrating for both of them, right?

The person in the shell is waiting for the porcupine to stop poking me.

And the person who's in the porcupine role is just desperate for the other person to come back out of their shell.

And we can engage that kind of porcupine-turtle pattern until we're exhausted.

And that's, for most couples, how the pattern resolves.

We just do it till we're too tired to do it anymore.

This is a couple that I've seen somewhat regularly.

They come in, I would say, once a year or so.

And almost always initiated, you know, coming into therapy will be initiated by her because she is feeling so hurt by his behavior.

his requests for, his demands for, his not particularly skillful encouragement for her to exercise more, become more fit, watch what she eats, right?

And he has this image in mind of a particular kind of physique that he says, I mean, I can't help it.

This is just what I'm attracted to.

And his wife is...

actually quite fit she's just normal woman fit not like supermodel fit and and and um they will get stuck in this place where um you know she tries to appease she tries to go along she tries to resist and he just is projecting this experience of frustration and disappointment honestly tinged with a little bit of shame

And they can't get themselves out of this pattern when it gets sticky for them.

Oh, absolutely.

So her strong attempts are to help him see that this is what a normal person's fit body looks like, to get him to let go of that desire, or at least to, I suppose, if he can't let go of it, to keep it to himself.

That is our natural instinct, right?

Like, I'm feeling uncomfortable.

I'm feeling some distress.

And you're the problem.

And if you would change, I would feel better.

And so, yeah, of course, that's the way couples come in.

That's what they're asking for.

And warm-hearted, beneficent therapists tried to meet them right there in the thing that they were asking for.

It's true.

I was originally trained in what was called behavioral marital therapy, which was very much a change-oriented approach to doing couple therapy.

And the changes that we would work on with couples is increasing the frequency with which they were doing nice things for each other.

We called that behavior exchange.

Teaching them how to communicate more effectively, teaching them how to problem-solve more effectively.

But as it turned out, even though it is a therapy that has demonstrable effectiveness, none of those skills would follow couples home.

So there is some change happening, but it's difficult for couples to sustain it.

When we first get together, we're adjusting to each other and the things that are easy to adjust to, we adjust to so quickly that we almost don't even notice that we've done it.

Like which side of the bed are you gonna sleep on?

Which side of the bed am I gonna sleep on?

Not usually an issue.

And then just above that are what I think of as like mezzanine level problems that we might have to struggle with a little bit.

Sometimes they take weeks, months or years, but we do eventually solve them and then we're good.

I've been a long-term cyclist, and I guess there's two aspects to that that are important.

One is I've become something of an endorphin addict, so it's just like it's a necessary part of who I am.

And two, bike riding like road cycling is dangerous.

I've been hit by cars like three times.

So the last time I was hit by a car, my wife responded to that lovingly as please don't ever ride your bike again, which I tried to limit.

But I get like very fussy when it's been too many days between the last like good bicycle ride.

So this cycling problem is a really good example of what I mean by a mezzanine level problem because the solution didn't come quickly or easily.

There actually was a lot of push and push back.

I was trying to get her to change to just be much more accepting of my cycling.

And she was trying to get me to change to do something less dangerous.

for your exercise, please.

And the willingness to collaborate, the willingness to compromise for us came out of really compassionately understanding where the other person was coming from.

For me to really deeply compassionately understand how scary it was for her when I was out on the road.

So I'm out on the road having a great time cycling and she's at home terrified.

That I'm going to get hit by another car, that I'm going to get hurt, or that I'm going to get killed.

And for her to compassionately understand how important cycling is for me, both for my physical health, but mostly for my mental and emotional well-being.

And from that place, we were better able to think, well, what might a compromise be?

And the compromise that we actually worked out, which I find so beautiful, is that she bought an e-bike.

We're both quite delighted with the e-bike that she bought.

And so she goes cycling with me.

And that helps both of us.

She's with me and she's able to feel like she's got some influence, some control over what's going on on the road.

And I get to go out and go as fast or as long as I want because it's easier for her to keep up.

So it's actually become...

a really sweet source of connection between the two of us.

But, you know, it took us a while to find our way to that.

No, they definitely don't.

There are definitely problems that, for all of us in all of our relationships, there are problems that will stubbornly refuse to be solved.

They are areas of friction in our relationship that arise out of naturally occurring differences between us that aren't ever going to go away.

Those are going to be sources of conflict.

We think of them as naturally occurring flaws in the fabric of our relationship.

So, for example, one of the most fundamental personality traits is the difference between introverts and extroverts.

And for whatever reason, because the creator of the universe has a sense of humor, introverts and extroverts find each other very attractive and often end up in relationships together.

Yeah.

And introverts can be attracted to extroverts because they pull them out and have great adventures with them.

And extroverts can be attracted to introverts because of that sort of steadiness.

And there's a kind of connection that comes with that sense of steady calm.

And...

what we're going to do on a Friday night is always going to be an issue because it's arising out of a fundamental difference between the two of us.

If I'm an extrovert, I've had an exhausting week.

I want to go out and do something fun.

If I'm an introvert, I've had an exhausting week.

I want to sit on the couch and watch TV.

And we're going to fight every time about that.

That seems to be the main thing that happens.

When you have a conflictual couple together in the lab, it looks like they're terrible at communicating.

And it looks like they're terrible at problem solving.

Like they actually have a skill deficit.

But if you take those two people,

and pair them with two strangers, suddenly they're really good at communicating and really good at problem solving.

And so the implication of that isn't so much that they lack a skill, it's that the emotional environment in their relationship has become so

toxic, so poisonous, so conflictual that they're not actually willing to collaborate.

They're not willing to use the good communication and problem-solving skills that they actually have because I don't want to problem-solve effectively with you.

I'm mad at you.

It is the most common way that couples come into therapy, stuck in this, it's almost like one of the analogies we use is it's like a Chinese finger trap, right?

Like each of them is pulling so hard for change that the harder they try to make things better,

the tighter the trap becomes.

And they exhaust themselves.

They frustrate each other so completely that often they find themselves in a spot where the only way that they can see forward towards some sort of escape is either therapy or divorce.

In this couple, the husband and his son just had a long history of being able to get into these deep, sometimes hilarious conversations about world politics, which wasn't a particular interest to his wife.

And she would find herself just feeling left out, sort of left behind, ignored.

which she found really hurtful.

And she expressed that to him as, and the change that she was pushing for was, you need to talk to your son about how rude he's being to me and how thoughtless he's being to me because he needs to include me more in the conversations that we're having.

And the husband said,

would defend his son to her and would just like not confront him in that way he would ask her for change like you just need to throw yourself into the conversation right like maybe read the paper in the morning and like you know in the service of like we're gonna have a conversation about this stuff later so so that's where they got stuck he's trying to get her

to jump more enthusiastically into their conversations.

And she's trying to get his son to be more respectful towards her.

I think what I started to realize and what colleagues of mine as well started to realize is that we had done everything that we could to help couples change the things that they were asking for change in the relationship.

And again, the discovery that what is left are the things that arise out of naturally occurring differences between people.

And it became clear that in our studies of different types of couples, that it's really not the presence of unsolvable problems that is the problem that is corrosive, but how couples approach and relate to those perpetual problems.

And for some couples...

they can bring a kind of sense of humor to their perpetual issues and they can maintain a sense of hopefulness as they confront yet again, what are we going to do on Friday night?

And for other couples, they get stuck in a place where they are trying to coerce each other to change.

And the coercion just becomes more and more exaggerated.

And rather than

collude with the couple in their ongoing efforts to change each other, we began to shift towards what does it look like to accept these naturally occurring differences between partners?

What does it look like to become intimate with the parts of our relationship

the friction points in our relationship that usually make us turn away from each other.

Can we actually find a way to use those points of friction to create deeper connection rather than disconnection?

So often the toxicity in the relationship arises right out of that sense of you're trying to change me in a spot where I can't change.

And that feels like a fundamental rejection of who I am as a person.

And so I fight back by trying to get you to change so that you can just love me the way that I am.

And you're wanting that change.

And my rejecting that and validating that is in some ways also a fundamental rejection of who you are as a person.

So we end up feeling rejected by each other.

And our, again, our reaction to rejection is some version of fight or flight.

We either fight harder or we just start to give up.

It does.

It is so challenging because the trick, if it's a trick, is to seek to understand more than to seek to be understood.

And that is needed in a moment when the thing we are most desperate for is to be understood.

But if we can, if I can take a deep breath, hold my own wanting with some compassion for a moment and prioritize understanding what you're asking of me and prioritize empathizing with what you're asking of me.

then what naturally occurs is that I start to feel more compassion for where you're coming from and when I start to feel more compassion for where you're coming from then I want to help but if I'm stuck in a place where I need you to understand me I can't access the compassion that naturally makes me want to collaborate with you

and this is something that I work with couples on often, that if the only way for me to feel better is for you to do something differently, then I'm trapped in a place where I'm in a sort of self-justifying passivity.

I don't have to do anything.

I can't do anything except maybe complain and hope for you to change.

and especially when it comes to perpetual issues, but I would say that this is true for almost all areas of conflict.

The way that we can reclaim our agency, the way that we can reclaim our power to have a positive effect on our relationship and to deepen the intimacy in the relationship is to be the one who moves first.

And oftentimes, that's simply...

Let me make sure that I thoroughly understand where my partner is coming from.

And the cultivation of that skill I talk about as developing a soft front and a strong back.

so that I can understand where my partner is coming from.

I can understand where the other person is coming from with absolute compassion and empathy.

But that doesn't mean I have to give up where I'm coming from and what matters to me.

So it is a well-rounded compassion, one that involves compassion both for myself and my own wants and needs, as well as genuine compassion for my partner and my partner's wants and needs.

No, absolutely not.

The way that I think about this is the things that are unacceptable are the things that actually diminish us as a person.

So if changing in this way, if accepting this from my partner makes my world smaller, makes me more constricted in my sense of identity or self, then that is too high a price to pay for connection.

There seems to be oftentimes a fundamental difference between partners in terms of our need for interdependence, interconnection, and our need for independence.

And we all need a little bit of both.

And the botany metaphor that we use is some people are more like cactuses and some people are more like ferns.

So some people are more like desert plants and some people are more like rainforest plants.

And in this metaphor, humidity, water, rainfall is attention, time together, and all those things that are dimensions of interconnectedness.

And so for some of us who are more like ferns and this was this was what's true in the couple that you're asking about so in that relationship The wife was more of a fern and really thrived on lots of time together lots of verbal and physical affection and the husband was into a lot of independent activities really into his work and

really into independent hobbies like carpentry and cycling, that, you know, sort of exercise kinds of things.

And they would have, you know, terrible fights about her calling him selfish and him calling her clingy.

And this was the tight knot that they came into therapy with.

As we discover this in our work together, oh, what's happening here is you've got a cactus and fern pattern happening in your relationship.

You're more like a cactus, you're more like a fern.

And when you try to make the cactus happy,

the fern just drying up and dying.

And when you're trying to make the fern happy, the cactus is feeling overwhelmed and rotting.

But when you can recognize that you're just different types of plants, then you can actually collaborate on being good and loving each other skillfully.

and what i find over and over again and this couple in particular is like oh i think you guys might be like you're more like a cactus and you're more like a fern their eyes just lit up and they started laughing right because they recognized themselves in the metaphor like that is us you are like she's like slapping his shoulder you are like a cactus and he's like you are like a fern and

And there was a delight in the recognition of that pattern in their relationship.

And you could just feel the release from the conflict.

Oh, like I'm never going to win a battle to turn my fern partner into a cactus.

And I'm never going to win the battle to turn my cactus into a fern.

But I can learn how to love a cactus.

And I can learn how to love a fern.

And we just didn't see it before.

But once we saw it, the solution seemed so obvious.

It's so important.

We're all blind to the patterns that are characteristic of our relationship.

You know, one of us is more delighted by spending and the other of us is more delighted by saving.

And we get stuck in what we call a spender-saver pattern, but we can't see it ourselves.

And we just end up fighting about whether or not to get a brand new TV.

And one of us gets called cheap and the other one gets called a spendthrift.

But if we can see the pattern, oh, we're stuck in a spend or savor pattern.

We're stuck in a cactus fern pattern.

Being able to name it actually makes it really hard to continue doing it.

So the it can be the pattern that emerges out of a naturally occurring difference between the two of us.

It's not your fault.

And it's not my fault.

It is this emergent property's fault.

So I alluded to this pattern of the spender and saver earlier.

And in that pattern, one partner realizes that what I want so desperately is I want to feel like I'm not living just to work.

I want to be able to take the money, the resources that I earn to feel abundance in my life.

And the other partner...

The saver partner feels more like the emotional meaning of money is a safety net.

And in these relationships, when the spender partner, the partner who is seeking a feeling of abundance, goes to the store to buy something that feels yummy, it feels to the other partner like they're pulling strands out of their safety net.

And they panic and say terrible things about how much money they spend and how they can't control their budget and can't they do math.

And when the other partner, when the saver partner is taking the money that they have and squirreling it away in a soup can in the backyard –

The spender partner feels like, oh, we're just in this dark little hole where no light or color ever gets in.

That kind of pattern...

can create so much distress and conflict between partners.

But when we can recognize that for one partner, it's driven by fear, and for the other partner, it's driven by a sense of lack, then we're in a better position to be able to like, well, how do I take care of my partner who's a little bit afraid?

Let me compassionately, generously

put money in our savings account to show that what scares you matters to me.

And when I can compassionately understand that my partner needs that color, needs that feeling of abundance, then I can compassionately be generous toward my partner by making sure that we are spending some of our money to do things that are making memories and having joyful times together.

Exactly.

And there's a deep sense of both generosity and I think humility in that stance.

Like we're all just doing our best out here, right?

This complicated collection of things that I'm super proud of about who I am and the way in which I'm really just a rolling dumpster fire, right?

And what elicits that deep sense of intimacy and intimate safety in a relationship is knowing that my partner can see what a dumpster fire I am

And is accepting of that.

Like loves me, again, not even anyway, but almost because.

And when I can offer that to her, that is a, that's a relationship that will stand the test of time.

Yeah.

One of the things that I remember...

is the quality of my wife that was most delightful for me, most attractive to me when I was first getting to know her, is just how tender-hearted she is, how open-hearted she is in the world.

And the example that comes up for me is my wife is one of these people that when we're driving down the road, if I'm the first person to see roadkill, I try to distract her from that.

Like, look over there.

Because to her, when she sees an animal that has been killed or hurt on the side of the road, it is heartbreaking every time.

Her mind immediately goes to the life that that little creature could have lived, the family that that little creature has that's probably missing them.

And every time, she weeps.

And I've always found that deep compassion for others just gorgeous.

And, of course, that tenderheartedness is...

simultaneously part of what makes her so sensitive to teasing.

So the very thing that I find so beautiful about her soul is also the thing that can sometimes be challenging for me in that the rough and tumble of teasing is not gentle enough for her.

It's like learning how to play the guitar.

It's like learning how to write poetry.

It's like learning a sport.

Like nobody's good at it right away.

The first time you pick up a guitar, you sound awful.

But if you want beautiful, graceful music in your life, you have to practice.

If you want deep, sustaining intimacy in your relationship, you have to practice.