Primed For Conflict: The Link Between Our Present & Our Past

EPISODE 116 | PRIMED FOR CONFLICT: THE LINK BETWEEN OUR PRESENT & OUR PAST

God's attunement to me, in that sense, is what has helped me over time feel safe enough to have that space to notice the patterns of conflict in my life and trace it back to the deeper wounds in my life.

[00:00:16] INTRODUCTION
Welcome to Becoming Me, your podcast companion and coach in your journey to a more integrated and authentic self. I am your host, Ann Yeong, and I'm here to help you grow in self-discovery and wholeness. If you long to live a more authentic and integrated life and would like to hear honest insights about the rewards and challenges of this journey, then take a deep breath, relax, and listen on to Becoming Me.

[00:00:53] UNDERSTANDING THE IMPORTANCE OF INTERIOR INTEGRATION AND HEALING
Hello, good morning. Okay, so, today, I thought I'll talk about something very practical. Sometimes, what I share is a little bit more on the intellectual and conceptual side because understanding is also important, like, you know, frameworks and all that. But really, all of us are more interested, or I'd say even interested in the topic of interior integration and healing because of the practical dimension.

[00:01:24] We want to know how we can live in a way that is more whole, more authentic, right? So, I think many of us are aware, at least those of us who are interested in this topic even, are aware when we fall short. We are aware when we cause pain to others. We are very aware when others cause pain to us. And a lot of times, I think we struggle with why is it that I'm in this same quarrel again?

[00:01:53] Maybe especially with our family members, with our parents, and especially with our spouses, for those of us who are married. And sometimes, it doesn't seem to matter, no matter how much we try to read about or learn about communication, about how we can maybe try and regulate our emotions better, like in the moment, all these can be helpful, but, you know, those specific conflicts that happen in a pattern like that - when I say happen in a pattern, I mean that, you know, it feels like we've had the same fight before and we've had the same kind of fight before many times.

[00:02:34] There's usually something a little deeper about these conflicts. Okay, so, I was talking to a friend just recently about thinking about doing a Live sharing on current conflicts and how our current conflicts are. In a sense, primed by what happened to us in our past, by the memories that our bodies hold, and she thought it would be a very helpful thing for me to talk about. So, in part for her and also for the rest of us who struggle with this.

[00:03:04] MY JOURNEY OF CONFLICT AND SELF-DISCOVERY
What I'm going to do in today's sharing is I'm going to share three stories of conflicts from my own life. And it happens that these three stories are all coming from my relationship with my husband, but at different time periods, okay? So, we've been together for twenty- four years now. Oh, that sounds, seems like a long time, okay. 

[00:03:29] So, I've been with my husband as a couple, including dating days, for 24 years. And so, 24 years is a long time. And clearly with me being on my interior journey at different points of my life, the way I've experienced conflict, the way I am able to respond during conflict has changed a lot.

[00:03:50] So, I thought this would be maybe interesting for me to share some of these stories with you because I bet you will be able to find something similar in your own life. Okay, if not with your spouse, this could, the same principle applies to any relationship, all right. Because the link is between the conflicts that we currently have, especially the kind of conflicts we find ourselves having a lot and our past.

[00:04:19] So, okay. So, I'm going to share the stories. I'm going to share each of the stories first, and then I'm going to maybe afterwards point out how things have changed, all right. And maybe even before I really do the pointing out, you may find you're making the connections.

[00:04:34] So, usually when we fight with someone, we think about when you get really upset in the moment with someone, you know? How the emotion or the feeling is usually this fight energy, right?

[00:04:45] So, usually you're thinking what's wrong with that person, right, with the other person. And then maybe later on, you may think, well, what's wrong with me, right? But it's always like, what's wrong with that person? What's wrong with this person? The energy is directed at the person who's upsetting us.

[00:05:01] And then later on, maybe we regret how we handled the situation. Or we wonder why is it that we always react so badly in this situation. And then it becomes, what's wrong with me? You realize that there's this instinct to kind of like find someone to blame. And to think that the problem, so to speak, is in the other person or in ourselves.

[00:05:20] What I realized and what I hope today's sharing will help you maybe consider is the problem may not be so much in a sense like in the moment, in that person, in the other person or in ourselves. It could be a condition that we are already in for a very long time that is priming us for conflict even before a conflict occurs, okay? It's like we have entered a place where we are ready to fight, to get upset, even before anyone has done anything, all right.

[00:05:57] THE ROLE OF PAST EXPERIENCES IN CURRENT CONFLICTS
Okay, so, the first story that I'm going to share is about, I think I was in my twenties, maybe my mid-twenties. This was before I was married to my husband and I was still studying in Canada at that time. And every year I'll come back for like summer break, okay. For like rather extended holiday back in Singapore, maybe. Three weeks at least. Usually maybe three, I can't remember now, but like, you know, at least three weeks or so, maybe a month. And I think it was maybe the third. 

[00:06:29] So, we were long distance for like five years and maybe it was like the third time that I was back for a holiday and then about to return to Canada on the last day that I was in Singapore. So, that means usually that night I will be going, I'll be flying back to Canada. And it's a long flight, right?

[00:06:49] It's like 21, 22 hours, including transit. And I won't be coming back in a long time. So, usually, I will be bringing a lot of supplies, so to speak, back to Canada with me. I'll be doing quite a bit of shopping in the last few days leading up to my departure. And always on the last day, I will be rather stressed because, you know, it's the last day, right?

[00:07:14] And I want to finish errands that I need to run. I need to buy the things I want to buy before I fly back from Singapore to Canada, where I was studying. And every time on this last day of my summer vacation before I fly back, there will always be a big fight between me and my then boyfriend.

[00:07:36] Okay, and on this particular fight that I'm remembering, I remember this particular fight well, because it's so vivid. We had just done some shopping and we were just sitting in his car in the parking lot of a mall. I think we have to go somewhere else, maybe for lunch. And we were raising our voices at each other.

[00:08:00] Well, I think I was - I mean, I was really angry. And I was crying. I remember I was so upset and I was crying. And he was upset. And he was trying to figure out what went wrong. Like, what is it? How did we end up having this huge fight again? And then in the midst of our argument, something clicked in me.

[00:08:23] So, this is something, I guess, this is something that's quite unique to me. Connections happen in my brain sometimes when I least expect it. So, at that moment in the car, in this heated argument, and I remember it was a little bit embarrassing because there were people sometimes walking past us in the parking lot and they could tell that we were fighting.

[00:08:42] I mean, I was, you know, I was clearly crying. But suddenly it hit me that this is a pattern that once again, on the last day of my time in Singapore, we were fighting again and then I realized. This is the first time I realized maybe what the trigger was. Okay, so, the trigger was my boyfriend at the time, reminding me again, maybe for like the third time that day - this was around lunchtime, right? So, in the morning - third time that day that we will still need to visit his parents before I go to the airport.

[00:09:19] Okay, so, it's kind of like that I still have to make a trip to his parent's place to say goodbye before I go to the airport. And that was like the trigger that I think, at some point, like the third or fourth time he said that that morning, that I lost it.

[00:09:33] And then it made me wonder, right, for a bit, like why? Why was it that trigger? And I knew. So, this was back then I suddenly realized this was a fight that my parents had many, many, many, many, many, many, many times over many, many, many, many, many years when I was a child. Not in this exact same context about you know going away, but there was always this sense that there's a tension over in-laws, over priority of where time was spent.

[00:10:10] And as a child, I didn't fully understand maybe, what was going on. But I was often present for the fights. And something about my boyfriend reminding me repeatedly that I needed to see his parents before I flew back to Canada put me already in that state. It was like - I don't know. I suddenly felt all the anxieties and the fears that not just the fears that I felt as a child, but it was almost like I felt I've taken on the anxieties and the fears that were in my parents when they were fighting.

[00:10:49] Okay, cognitively, I may not understand what that was about, but I felt what they felt. And the moment something kind of like reminded me, not like intellectually, but emotionally. And I could say like maybe even now, that I have the language of understanding the body and nervous system, something about this situation, this conversation felt familiar to me in a bad way.

[00:11:18] And so, I came out swinging, I came out fighting. And I realized that for me, I had my own fear of abandonment. I had my own fear that if I marry this person, that our marriage will reflect and echo my parents' marriage. That I would have the same kind of insecurities, experiences and fears that were present in my parents' marriage.

[00:11:45] Now, but for me at that time, just recognizing that this was actually about my family of origin, immediately calmed me down because I knew, I mean, already by then that, you know, my boyfriend was a very different person and I know that the person I was dating is not, you know, it's not my dad, in a sense, that our relationship is different from the one that my parents had, it's not the same.

[00:12:12] Right, so, that helped me to calm down and I could talk to my boyfriend at that time and tell him, explain to him, you know, like why it was that I was so, agitated. So, he wasn't immediately comforted because I think his concern at that time, we were both very young, was that he wouldn't know how to prevent something like this happening again.

[00:12:32] Because he wouldn't know what the trigger, he wouldn't know what my triggers are, right? But I did tell him, I think even then, that I don't expect him, like, never to trigger me, I don't expect us never to fight. But for us, for me, it's more about that we can learn how to repair. We know when the conflicts happen, what we can do to repair so that our relationship can be a stronger one, right?

[00:12:54] But so, this happened when I was like in my mid-twenties and already, I kind of realized there was a link, right, to my family of origin.

[00:13:03] Now, I'm going to fast forward, like, or forward now, to in our marriage.

[00:13:07] EXAMPLE: THE IMPACT OF FINANCIAL STRESS ON MY RELATIONSHIPS
So, this happened a lot in my thirties, okay, in my late twenties and thirties, in my earlier years of marriage. Whenever the conversation turned to finances, okay, turn to money, about how we're spending money, how I'm spending money, okay.

[00:13:25] I think anyone who's married out there would know that finances is one of like the big triggers, right, for arguments and quarrel and all that, okay. And there can be many reasons, like different expectations and all that kind of thing about how finances are done or handled or managed. 

[00:13:40] But there is an element that I think most conversations around conflict about finances don't cover. Okay, and so, that's what I'm going to be talking about. Now, this is to the extent, right? One day I realized, and this is many years into my marriage.

[00:13:56] Okay, so, this is one of those things that had gone under the radar for very long. Like, I didn't see the connection. I didn't realize what the connection was for very long. Or I should say, initially I thought the connection, why I get so upset when we had to talk about finances, was the sense of me being controlled. Being told what to do, and specifically to do it, you know, with money.

[00:14:19] And there were other insecurities that I had that I was aware of. And so, I thought it was just that. Then when I started my work, like my recent work. So, I started my own kind of like business and my husband sometimes helps me with, you know, looking at the books, right. One day when we were doing that and we had just barely begun, okay, we'd just sat down at the table, taken out our laptops and you know, the required things. 

[00:14:46] We just sat down and I think my husband said something like, "why are you snapping at me?" You know, like, "why are you already snapping?" I was the way I was, answering his questions, was already very impatient. I was very terse. I was snapping at him. And I realized. I realized, you know? I realized in the moment he was he was right. I was snapping at him and again. 

[00:15:12] Like I said, we had barely begun. We just sat down at the table and this time I realized that my body was already in kind of like fight. And again, the fight energy was there. I couldn't leave because doing the finances was something that we had to do, that I knew I had to do. So, I couldn't leave the situation. I had to do this, even though I didn't like it.

[00:15:34] But like every fibre of my being was, it was like geared for conflict. All right, but again, in that moment, I didn't know why. I apologized to my husband. I said, okay, I don't know. I need to maybe back off and calm down, you know? And calm down about this before coming back to it. So, we managed, we managed around this. 

[00:15:58] But a little later, I reflected again, you know. I got curious. So, it's so important when we have these things that happen in our life that keep coming up that we can be curious. Why does this keep happening? So, I started getting more curious. Why is this like doing the books or finances something that it's so triggering for me that even before something actually triggers me, I already feeling just the context is already triggering for me, right?

[00:16:24] The context of just having to discuss finances is triggering for me. And again, I realized, of course, you know, that it traces back to this is another one of those big things. That my body prepares for conflict because once again, this was one of the issues that was often thought about in my family of origin.

[00:16:50] And this isn't just, you know, I think many families, right? So, it isn't just my immediate family of origin. It's one of those things that's very dramatically thought about in the extended families in different ways. It's almost like there's some kind of trauma or traumatic memory around money.

[00:17:07] And so, whenever this topic comes up, I already feel unsafe. And this feeling unsafe, this feeling of being unsafe, I realized started when I was very young. You know, it's almost like as a child, if I happen to overhear a conversation going into the area and the topic of finances, my body was already getting prepared for a fight or flight.

[00:17:34] Maybe even it's not directly at me, I was getting ready for conflict; to bear witness to conflict, to hear conflict. I wasn't feeling safe. So, this is something that I later unpacked in therapy, you know, financial trauma or trauma around the emotions of, you know, on finances. And this is the dimension, I think, a lot of times when we talk about financial management, whether it's in families or our own, we don't really look enough at.

[00:18:02] Even here, there is actually a very emotive dimension. And if our nervous system is actually out of our window of tolerance, which means that if we're actually in a fight or flight, we're in a sympathetic state, our nervous system's in a sympathetic state, we're ready to fight or to flee - to fight or flight, or we are in freeze - we can't think properly.

[00:18:26] It's just one of those things. We can't think properly. So, if we can't think properly. How can we like even, you know, plan, let's say financially and all that, right? So, I'm just sharing from my own experience. For the longest time, I'm not regulated the moment I have to enter a context when I have to think about money and finances, right.

[00:18:44] Whether it's on my own or with my spouse. And which is why fights just happen very quickly when we discuss money. So, that's the second story, right? How current conflicts tie back to the past.

[00:19:01] And for me, as I got more aware of this, it became a lot more helpful because I actually can plan ahead. I know if we're going to be discussing about finances, I know I'm going to be feeling unsafe. I know that I need to do something beforehand to get more grounded, you know. And my husband understands this. So, I'm blessed that I can talk, I can explain these things to him. And because he's also making his own journey, he understands he has his own triggers, right?

[00:19:24] We know what, where are kind of the danger zones. And we go slow and we do, you know, like kind of like small steps and we don't try to do anything regarding accounts or finances at the end of the day when we are really tired, because that's just asking for trouble because we both know that our thresholds are a lot lower then. Right, okay, so, that's the second story. 

[00:19:45] The third story is actually very recent. Just happened last week and it's very - it's also very illustrative, right?

[00:19:55] RECOGNIZING AND ADDRESSING EMOTIONAL TRIGGERS
So, for those of you who may be only joining now, I'm talking about how current experiences of conflict can actually be primed from our past and how that awareness can really change the way we are in the present.

[00:20:08] So, last week we were in the car together. My husband was driving. I can't remember where we were heading to but generally this period of time, like this couple of months, has been a time where it's been trying for me emotionally. There are things going on in my personal life, in my family that are draining a lot of resources for me, emotional resources, as well as physical resources.

[00:20:32] So, I would say my baseline is already a little more, you know - I'm more sensitized, okay. I'm more easily dysregulated in general. So, we were in the car and I was talking, so, we were having conversation and it was a normal conversation, which is a pretty interesting conversation. So, I was in the middle of telling a story or something or sharing something with my husband and then he suddenly accelerated.

[00:20:59] Okay, so, he was the one driving and he suddenly accelerated. Like it felt like a lot, very fast. I think I was trying to overtake a car or something, but it felt to me like in the moment where I kind of felt like, whoa, what what's happening? That felt unsafe to me. And then I realized I felt anger, like very angry.

[00:21:20] I was very angry at my husband for what he just did. Even though it was just a short distance that he accelerated. We were, I think, trying to get on the expressway. So, after we had the moment of like, whoa, like, you know, like be safe kind of a thing. I tried to get back into the conversation that we were in.

[00:21:41] I was the one that was talking halfway right so, I tried to continue sharing about whatever it was I was sharing but even as I was talking, I could feel my heart was racing my muscles, my back muscles, my neck muscles were tense. That anger that I was feeling in my body, it was still there. I was mad at my husband, even though rationally, logically, I felt I knew there's nothing to be angry about.

[00:22:11] I mean, we are safe, you know? And I don't want to keep harping on this. But that fight energy was there in my body and it wasn't being released. And it felt very incongruous for me to continue talking about whatever I was talking about with this fight energy there. And I could feel that tension building inside me, you know.

[00:22:35] So, I just, after a while I just stopped for a moment and I - this is something new or newer that I've learned to do with my husband. I just decided to just tell him, I said, "Okay, I'm actually feeling very dysregulated right now". I said, "just now, what happened with the car when you did the acceleration", I said, " I'm feeling very dysregulated right now".

[00:22:54] I said, "I just need a moment. I can't keep talking. I need a moment to collect myself". And he was like, "Oh, okay". Right, and so, we just drive, we drove in silence for a while and I was just trying to be present and breathe. I wasn't even trying to understand what was going on. Just being attentive to, I guess, my inner child.

[00:23:18] Like, I was just trying to tell myself like, "Oh, it's okay. It's all right. We're safe. We're safe", you know? Like, what's this about? You know, why are you so angry? What is it that's upsetting you so much? It was just my internal dialogue, right? I was just trying to be compassionate and kind to myself, to my body.

[00:23:38] And it took a while for the fight energy to subside, you know, for me to be able to just thank my husband for his patience, you know? And I couldn't immediately tell him what it was. But the anger that I felt in that moment, at him, for that speeding up subsided. And then we could continue the conversation that we were having earlier on.

[00:24:05] Okay, so, it wasn't till later in the day, you know, sometimes these things, when we are making this journey of integration and healing, there is an ongoing sense of being present to ourselves, right? And sometimes, things make connections, happen when we are not explicitly trying to make the connections happen.

[00:24:27] So, later on in the day, I think in that same day, at some point, it clicked for me. Another connection with my past. And now that I remember it, at the moment I remember it, it became so clear. See, another place that often felt unsafe for me when I was a child was inside the family car.

[00:24:51] And this is something that my brother and I, we recently talked and we realized that we both have different kinds of memories of feeling emotionally unsafe in the car. Because think about it. When you are in the car, when you're a child, you're in the backseat, right? You're kind of - you really, you literally can't leave the room, right? 

[00:25:10] When conflict happens, even if the conflict is not - the words may not be directed at you. You are in that space and you feel all kinds of things, right. And so, for me, unfortunately, another place where often things become emotionally charged, when angry words are spoken, voices can be raised, both in terms of whether it's the, you know, the parents in front who are arguing, or sometimes we getting scolded or me getting scolded as a child at the backseat - a lot of these memories take place in the car.

[00:25:48] Now, it doesn't mean that every time I feel I'm in a car, I feel emotionally unsafe. So, there are certain triggers, right? So, one of the triggers is when someone gets lost or, you know? Like the driver takes the wrong exit or something and then that often is a trigger for quarrelling, an argument.

[00:26:07] Another trigger would be when there is, literally speeding, maybe some short burst of speed of accelerating when one party - so, we're talking about the two people in the front seat. Now, as a child that will be my parents, right? When one party deems the other person, like the driver, being unsafe, that, you know, the person was driving not safely then that would often be a trigger for conflict, right.

[00:26:33] So, it's almost like these connections are already made inside me, not even in my cognitive, like in conscious, intellectual memory, right. It's not in my recall memory, but it's in the body. Like, you know - so, when I'm in the car and the car suddenly speeds up like that, my heart rate immediately goes up.

[00:26:55] It's not because we were in an accident before. So, I think if that had happened, that would be another reason why I would feel unsafe. But it's not so much the physical safety that puts me into fight or flight. It's that sudden acceleration immediately prepares my whole nerve and my whole system for an argument and feeling angry and blame. 

[00:27:18] And it's like I'm spoiling for a fight, you know? I don't know how to describe it, but maybe you may have experienced that before, you know? How you just, you literally just want to fight, you just - you are spoiling for a fight to discharge the energy and you know, you're going to be unreasonable.

[00:27:33] Well, maybe some of us may not know that. For me, initially, at one point, I guess I didn't know I'm unreasonable. But at some point, even when I know I'm being unreasonable, it's like, you don't care about being unreasonable anymore. You just need to say whatever you want to say out, right? It's an energy that you can't control.

[00:27:49] So, for me, when I realized this connection again, I know later on, I was able to share it with my husband and that is one of the blessings I have because both Henry and I, we have been making our own journeys of integration and healing. We've both been revisiting our families of origin and our childhood.

[00:28:06] Not to blame our parents, not to find fault with them, but to have understanding about why we are the way we are, why our capacities for love, why our capacities for, you know, regulation of emotion is as compromised as they are. We want to understand why is it that the kinds of things that make us go mad at the kind of things that make us go mad. 

[00:28:30] The reason being, we want to be able to be more present to ourselves and to one another, to each other in our marriage as well as with others, right - at work and with other people.

[00:28:42] THE JOURNEY OF SELF-AWARENESS AND HEALING
So, when I look at these three stories that I shared in today's Live, I also look at changes and progressions in the level of my self-awareness, right?

[00:28:55] So, for example, the first story I shared, it was like the third or fourth time that we had really big fights that I finally made the connection, right? That I finally kind of made the connection.

[00:29:07] The second story that I shared, it was more of, it was something smaller. I think my awareness was really more developed that when my husband told me I was snapping at him, like, you know, it's like, why are you already snapping at me? What it seems like every time we want to talk about finances or do our accounts, you're so irritable. That was enough for me to also realize, yes, there's a pattern. And actually, I realized that this was something that made me feel unsafe.

[00:29:38] And then finally the most recent experience that I shared in the car. It was almost like I didn't even need my husband to point it out to me. It hadn't reached that point yet. I don't know whether he was aware. Maybe he felt a bit of the tension, right, that was in the air. Maybe he felt a bit of the tension in the air, but it was so soon, it was still happening.

[00:29:56] He hadn't said anything to me and I was simultaneously aware as I was talking to him, that there was distress and tension and anger building inside me. So, as you can see, there is kind of like progress in my awareness and progress or development in how I could respond.

[00:30:17] Now, why is this important? You know, all the theory in the world really doesn't make a difference if it can't impact our relationships, right? If it can't impact our relationship with ourself and our relationship with others. And sometimes, I get really, really sad when I look at other couples that I know who have a lot of conflict in their marriage and all they can see is the current problem, you know, is that all they can see are the issues with the spouse - which is normal.

[00:30:59] A lot of times it's not that the other person is blameless, right? But it's sad when they can't see that that's just the tip of the iceberg. That there are so many other things already contained within their system, the memories in their body that in the first place, prompted them to choose the spouse because we, even our choices of our spouse, especially if we are unhealed, there's something there that leads us to be attracted to a certain kind of person.

[00:31:27] Oftentimes, we are drawn to the very kind of people that have hurt us. You know, that sometimes, you know, there's a saying, we marry our parent. Why is it there's such a saying? Because unfortunately, a lot of times exactly, that is what happens even when we are aware that our relationship with our parent is very unideal. It's very - maybe there's a lot of conflict and there's a lot of stress.

[00:31:50] But when we haven't broken the cycle, when we haven't healed, it's almost like there's a part of us want to choose someone that's similar to our parent and we're hoping that this time the story will end differently, right? So, that degree of, you know, our lack of awareness in our present, sometimes prevents us from actually finding the healing that we need.

[00:32:16] And that is one big reason why when I'm accompanying people in difficult relationships, especially if it's in a marriage that they are having, that they're struggling with, I always, always encourage them to seek out support for themselves, not even couples therapy. Okay, not even couples therapy because the issue is not just about managing the relationship between two people, between ourselves and someone else.

[00:32:41] The issue first and foremost is to become aware of what we bring the emotional charge, that we bring the fears and insecurities, that we bring the kind of things that we don't even realize we've inherited - that we bring into our new families, into our new marriages, into our work. The kinds of conflict that we have in our professional lives, you know? Or in church.

[00:33:04] It doesn't matter, as long as it's with other people. If you notice, if you become more self-aware, you might find that certain kinds of personality traits are particularly irritating and annoying to you, right? Or certain kinds of situations immediately put you at the edge of your window of tolerance. It's like, just a little bit more and you know you're going to snap.

[00:33:27] There is a pattern to these things. Most people don't notice these patterns, right? But when we finally notice these patterns, it's very helpful to get curious, compassionately curious about why, right? But putting in now, the God dimension, for me, I can't make this journey of awareness because there's so much fear in even looking at myself, so much fear in finding out that there's something malfunctioning inside me, that there's something wrong with me, that I can't make this journey of awareness without the experience of God's unwavering, unchanging love holding me.

[00:34:10] Right, so, God's attunement to me, in that sense, is what has helped me over time feel safe enough to have that space to notice the patterns of conflict in my life and trace it back to the deeper wounds in my life. So, this is still ongoing, people. It's still happening. And of course, I always, I often say when I narrate these things to you, I'm calm, I can tell the story.

[00:34:37] I'm hoping that you can make the connection to something similar in your life. But we all know that as we're going through this, it's really hard. It's really hard, right? So, that's what I wanted to share with you today. Kind of a very practical, a practical storytelling of how integration can make a difference to the way we live our relationships, how it can actually reduce the severity of our conflicts even, right?

[00:35:08] So, most of the time we can't expect the other party that maybe we're in conflict with, to have that kind of awareness about themselves. We can only try and manage ourselves, right, to be more present to our awareness.

[00:35:23] THE IMPORTANCE OF REPAIRING RELATIONSHIPS
And even if we can't in that moment arrest the conflict, like we can't stop the conflict from happening, this awareness can go a long way when we seek to repair.

[00:35:35] Because you know, when we become aware that a big part of the reason we fought, or we were in conflict, or we lost our temper, had to do with us, we realize that there's something we can say sorry for. I mean, there's something that we can genuinely seek forgiveness for because we also want to apologize for hurting the other person.

[00:35:57] And usually, for me at least, that helps me a lot with the desire to reconcile and feeling less defensive. Because whatever may have happened, I can be very - I can be very ready to acknowledge that, you know, I was already swallowing for a fight, for example, in these three examples that I gave, right. And it really helps me to work with my husband in a way that makes both of us feel like we are on the same team.

[00:36:29] So, some of these things you hear a lot, you can read often about communication styles, about, you know, being on the same team fighting. When I was in marriage prep, all those years ago, there was a saying, it sounds kind of cheesy, but you know, the saying like hold hands and fight. I don't know how many of you who are married who gone through marriage prep might have heard that before. We were told to hold hands and fight.

[00:36:51] It doesn't make sense. I mean, it didn't, that literally doesn't work for us, okay. When you're mad at someone, you don't want to hold hands. But I think what they're trying to convey is that we're on the same team. Right, and knowing that we're on the same team sometimes doesn't help because we really don't feel in the moment. You don't feel like you're on the same team because all that anxiety and fear of abandonment that maybe isn't even yours.

[00:37:16] Like for me, I've inherited from those before me, into myself as well. All that makes you want to survive, and that could mean fighting. But becoming aware that this is what I carry in me, and has helped me to not be so afraid when I'm going through these things and to also help my partner, my husband, be less afraid.

[00:37:39] So, both of us now are less afraid of the emotional charges that we bring. We're less afraid when we are in conflict and we know what we need to do to get grounded again, ourselves, and to reconnect and repair.

[00:37:53] So, I hope that this sharing has been helpful for you and if there are any stories Of your own that you can think of, I invite you to revisit those stories maybe, and ponder what charge, like what emotional charge might you be carrying from your past that was already priming you for the conflict that you are having.

[00:38:23] Okay, so, that's it for today. And if you have any comments or any questions for this, please ask. It was a very practical, it was a very, very practical session, yeah, on integration.

[00:38:34] Okay, then. See you guys at another Live. Next time then. Bye!

[00:38:40] CONCLUSION
Thank you for listening to Becoming Me. The most important thing about making this journey is to keep taking steps in the right direction. No matter how small those steps might be, no matter where you might be in your life right now, it is always possible to begin. The world would be a poorer place without you becoming more fully alive.

If you like what you hear on this podcast, would like to receive a monthly written reflection from me as well as be updated on my latest content and offers, make sure you subscribe to my newsletter Begin Again. You can find the link to do that in the show notes. Until the next episode, happy becoming!