If you’ve come to a stuck point or crossroads in your relationship, how do you figure out the best way to respond to the situation and move forward?
Pausing and reflecting is one of the key steps on the path to being more emotionally mindful that can help you discover a new perspective and take a fresh approach to any issues you and your partner may be struggling to resolve.
By taking time to reflect and make sense of our experiences, we can consider what we’ve learned about our emotional dynamics and appreciate the impact our emotional experiences have had on us. And by listening to what our reflections reveal, we can take informed and appropriate action.
Before we look at an exercise that’s designed to help us pause and reflect on our experiences, let’s take a closer look at the science behind reflection.
Why Reflection is so Important
Self-reflection is the act of examining, contemplating and appreciating your experience.
It’s the fuel that powers continued healing and growth, because experience without understanding has limited benefits. None of us can truly know if we’ve experienced something, let alone learn from it, unless we take time to pause and reflect on it.
On a neurobiological level, when we reflect on our emotional experience and try to make sense of it, we link together different parts of our brain, enabling emotionally rich knowledge to be organized, consolidated and integrated into our memory system. New information gets imported into our neural networks, gradually overriding the negative feelings, beliefs and perceptions associated with our early wiring.
The Benefits of Reflection
Helps us re-integrate hidden or suppressed emotions and feelings: Stepping back and looking at what got activated inside of us by a particular situation, and thoughtfully considering what we discovered from our response to it, helps us reintegrate our core feelings, needs and desires back into our emotional repertoire.
Opens up a different perspective on how our past is controlling our present: As we clear away the static that our old wiring causes, we get to see how the internal working models of our past are controlling our present relationship experiences and limiting our options. This process helps change our point of view, enabling us to see ourselves, our partners and our relationships more objectively.
Helps us appreciate more clearly the wisdom that comes from being in touch with our true selves. As we listen to our core feelings, we gain access to the important information that they afford us, including how best to move forward in an informed way that aligns with our intentions and values.
Aids emotional healing. New feelings can arise that further our ability to accept and reintegrate aspects of ourselves that we’ve unknowingly avoided or disowned.
The Reflection Exercise
Find a quiet place in which you can sit and quietly reflect on an interaction you’ve had with your partner, family member, or friend, that was emotionally charged, and during which you recognized getting triggered and responding defensively.
Try to recall how “Recognizing and Naming” your experience and applying the principles of “Stop, Drop And Stay” worked for you.
Now, while thinking about your emotional experience, consider these questions:
- What did you learn about yourself?
- How did you understand why you got triggered and responded defensively?
- What emotional sore spots of vulnerabilities do you now recognize within yourself that set your early programming in motion?
- What aspects of yourself and your experience are you not comfortable with feeling, sharing, or showing?
- Which of your emotions, desires and needs do you worry or fear might threaten your relationship?
Some of these questions will be easy to answer, others more challenging. It takes time to develop the skill of constructively reflecting on ourselves and how we respond to our emotional experiences. The best thing to do is to try to let these questions linger in your mind. If you don’t get an answer right away, that’s fine. Over time, aspects of the answers will become clearer and you’ll notice what psychologist Diana Fosha calls a ‘click of recognition’.
Keep returning to the questions in the exercise. Use them as your guide, and if they cause other questions to arise, so much the better. The main purpose of the exercise is to gain some clarity about yourself and allow your awareness and learning to gradually sink in over time.
We and our relationships benefit when we find the courage to be present with ourselves, to accept and reclaim the feelings, needs and desires we’ve been avoiding in order to get to a better place in our relationships. Doing this process takes time. It takes quiet contemplation. But finding regular time to thoughtfully consider the key lessons of our experience, while remaining emotionally connected to ourselves, enables us to deepen our understanding, maximize our learning and, ultimately, move our relationships forward in a better, healthier direction.