Confusing Cover

Speaker 1: 0:00

Episode number 63, confusing Cover. Hello and welcome to the Fighting for Connection podcast. I'm Brett Nicola, a husband, father and fun lover. Listen in as I share stories, tips and inspiration that will move you toward the connection that you want in your relationship. Hey everyone, welcome back to the Fighting for Connection podcast. I am happy to be recording from my new studio. Last week our office here in downtown Buffalo moved just a few hundred feet. It's actually like the shortest move that I've ever had. I guess my all-time shortest move was moving from a downstairs apartment to an upstairs apartment, so it was like literally moving everything 10 feet up, but this was like just a few hundred feet down the street and we're all settled in here and we're having a great week just digging into relationships and their conflict cycles and really understanding the pain that is being experienced in the lives of my clients and supporting them. It is truly an amazing job. I love it.

Speaker 1: 1:29

It's December now and I hope that you all are enjoying the holiday season here in downtown Buffalo. As I look out the window here as I'm recording the podcast, a light snow is coming down. The town is alive with people. It reminds me of the song City Sidewalks. I don't know about you, but I think that December is such an amazing month of connection. I really feel like the message around this season, the Christmas message, is really full of love and grace, and I think that these components are alive during this time and they're so important for connection. You watch friends and families and loved ones all gather and share in old traditions and create new memories and it just seems like everyone's friendlier and there seems to be a lighter step in everyone's walk. I personally like to just soak it all up, because it feels like as soon as January one hits, all the lights turn off, the cold sets in and, at least here in Minnesota, it seems like we just slowly freeze and drift apart until the first 50 degree sunny day, which usually is like April or something. But I do feel like this year is going to be a little bit different for me. I'm really looking forward to January because, if all goes well, I will get to snuggle those long cold nights away with my new little boy, and I'm really looking forward to that Now.

Speaker 1: 3:10

This last weekend, kelsey and I spent a wonderful weekend down in Mexico. This is another one of those travel hacked trips. It always sounds so extravagant to be going to Mexico, but I've spent a ton of time learning how to travel for cheap, like hours and hours of reading through blogs, going, you know, sitting at the kitchen table with my laptop as chaos is all around me on a Saturday morning, reading these these travel hacker blogs and watching YouTube videos and digging through the internet to figure out a way to travel for literally like pennies on the dollar, almost free, which I kind of laugh because that's like one of the sales tactics of like these little shops down in Mexico is cheapy, cheapy, almost free, and and it really I don't know. That just kind of reminded me of that. But we we really find now that travel is possible for very little money out of pocket, and on this couples trip it it was really our child care that was the most expensive part. We paid $212 in taxes and fees for our airline tickets and then it did cost us $220 to travel around Mexico from the airport to our resorts and back, and we stayed four nights at a couple of different high all inclusive resorts where you know you're staying in a really really nice hotel room with a balcony and have some really nice restaurants and things that you can access for for no additional cost, and and so we stayed, I guess, in in Riviera Maya, which is about 30 minutes south of Cancun, and and I do this because I enjoy it. But it really is kind of a hobby for me to figure out what we can do and how we can do it for for really very little expense.

Speaker 1: 5:31

And these trips with Kelsey really are my workshop for work. As I'm on these trips my brain is always kind of thinking about my clients and my work and relationships and the way that I do that is really focusing on my own relationship. So it kind of works for me in that way that I can really dig in and focus on my relationship with Kelsey on those trips. And then I find, like I'm away home, I'm thinking like, okay, what did I learn? What are some of the skills or the tools that we used here that really were effective? You know, maybe what can I bring home to help my clients with? And in that way I find it really is it's my workshop, because so many of the techniques and skills that I teach and help other couples with our skills and techniques that I've used and had success with in my own relationship and I really love the connection that grows between Kelsey and I on these trips. But I've watched how our connection has grown through intentional effort and really some painful moments and then, as I can kind of reflect back on these things, I bring what I have learned on these trips into my work. I find that when we can work through painful moments and we can come to a reassured, secure place in the relationship on the other side of these painful moments, it's such a powerful experience for a relationship.

Speaker 1: 7:07

You know, I think back to the year after I completely revealed my struggle around pornography to Kelsey. The year after that, I think, was one of the hardest years of our relationship. That revelation really it felt like it rocked the security of our relationship. It really rocked that foundation and I think for Kelsey it really had her questioning my commitment, my trustworthiness and my love for her and for me. I guess I really was like worried about being unworthy of the relationship and I was really worried about Kelsey like rejecting me and not having capacity for me in this struggle. And during that time I really wanted to be someone that Kelsey was happy with.

Speaker 1: 7:54

And it really took some time for Kelsey to process through this and work through her emotions and that was hard, it was challenging for me and it definitely wasn't smooth sailing after that first conversation that first conversation I've shared here on previous podcasts. It was so difficult, so vulnerable and it really kind of left so much. It felt like in the control of Kelsey and it was a rocky period of our relationship and we had to learn how to keep breaking through the conflict cycles that would come up because of the cycle triggers surrounding this struggle that I had with pornography. But with so much prayer and forgiveness, I really think both of us doing our part to communicate clearly our love and care for each other allowed us to make it through that year. It has created a security in our relationship that Kelsey and I hadn't experienced before then. I really feel that our relationship is is so much deeper and more secure than it was at any point prior to that revelation.

Speaker 1: 9:13

But it really felt like we had to go backwards to go forwards. It was, it wasn't fun, it was very difficult and many tears and many difficult, chilly moments in our relationship after that that first conversation. But but we were really focused on preserving our relationship and figuring out how to make this relationship stronger and to help each other really feel secure in our relationship and to help each other within our faith. And I think that was really important for us and something that we were able to kind of. We were able to kind of recognize that that this was more than something just for us. This was something that we were doing for each other and that that, I guess, focus allowed for us to continue to show up in these painful ways, because I think at times our brain would have said it's not worth it and we would have disconnected, but we just kept really trying to show up for each other and and it has allowed us to navigate. I guess back then it allowed us to navigate through those difficult moments and it developed skills. That really has allowed us to continue to navigate through confusing moments that show up in our relationship today, and I think that this is really where my passion for this work has developed.

Speaker 1: 10:42

I want all couples to come and learn with me, really to learn how to conceptualize your conflict and to understand it in a way that isn't confusing. I want you to see that your brain can really begin to show up in a different way within your relationship and if you are in a conflict cycle and you can't clearly see it, you're likely going to be pretty anxious within your relationship. When you don't know what's going on and where the hurt is coming from and how to make it stop, you move into a protective response. It's like you know if, if something was just kind of chaotic and confusing and things were swinging around, you'd be really anxious and you'd be kind of looking for the next sign of danger or pain or hurt and and and that protective response is what happens in our relationships. When we begin to feel hurt and we begin to feel pain within our relationship and in and in this confusion, it's no wonder that you move into a protective response. It's a fight flight freeze response that can look like frustration or anger or defensiveness or even like apathy, numbing out. You might explain yourself and so on. And I think this apathy thing is is really something worth highlighting, because I see it quite a bit that that couples, when they experience pain in their relationship, one of the one of the coping mechanisms that shows up quite a bit is is we just kind of began to care less and and it's like this apathetic response where we just we, we, yeah, don't have, or we try to like numb out the pain there so that we don't care about it. But this is a risky thing to do because what happens is we end up creating more distance in the relationship and it doesn't end up helping anything. I think it actually can really hurt, really hurt the relationship and and your ability to help each other in that relationship and and so on. And these things really are our cover emotions and they are confusing in our relationship and I believe that they show up in every relationship. We naturally are insecure in relationships and we want to protect ourselves. We aren't just going to put everything out to anybody until we know that we're safe and we're secure and that person isn't going to use whatever information they find out about us against us and and and so just recognize that, yeah, we all kind of protect ourselves, but when our protective responses are preventing us from the connection that we want within our relationships, we we want to be able to read, recognize this so that we can drop these protective responses, these cover emotions and behaviors, and and we want to learn how to communicate in a more clear way, in a more vulnerable, vulnerable way, so that we can have the relationships that are possible to us, and I want to give you an example of what this might look like Now.

Speaker 1: 14:02

In our trip to Mexico, kelsey and I we had. We had a ball it was. It was a lot of fun and we really felt close and connected to each other. At the end of the trip and we were on our way home and after a long day of travel, we were ready just to get home and hug our kids. We'd we'd kind of filled our buckets with each other and we were missing our kids for sure. But in the last few moments of that trip, kelsey and I found ourselves in a conflict cycle, and conflict cycles happen. I really feel strongly that the goal in a relationship isn't to not have conflict cycles. It's not to learn how to prevent conflict cycles. They just pop up. They crop up because of confusion that happens between people in relationship and what we want to get really good at is learning how to get out of the cycles, not how to prevent them or how to keep them out of our relationship. And this conflict cycle started with us.

Speaker 1: 15:06

As we were getting off the plane, I knew Kelsey was really worried about how long customs would take and how quickly we could get home. We landed just a little bit after 7 pm. So if all went like really well, we could get home at like 9 or maybe just a little bit later. But if deboarding took a while and customs took a while and our shuttle took a while and so on, it could have been 10 o'clock or later, and I really think neither of us would have been happy if that was the case. So we were on the back of the plane and we were some of the last ones to get off the plane, but luckily customs only took us about 15 minutes once we got off the plane and we didn't check in any bags. So we were able to, as we exited customs, just start walking to wherever our shuttle was. That was going to bring us to the offsite parking lot that we had parked at, and as we exited customs, things were looking pretty good. It was about 7.45 or so and then this is really where the cycle popped up.

Speaker 1: 16:18

Usually I take charge of our navigation through airports and figuring out taxis and things like that, and Kelsey just kind of smiles along with me and she's a trooper with some of my antics and adventures that I've brought us on. But as we exited the secure side of the airport and began to navigate to the shuttle pickup. Typically we fly into terminal 2. This was terminal 1, a little bit bigger, and I wasn't exactly sure where we were going to get our shuttle from. I was really doing my best to hustle. I knew that I had to get this mama to her babies and in my haste I wasn't reading all the signs. I just started moving in the direction that seemed maybe like it was right and Kelsey was trailing 10 to 15 feet behind me and she kept calling me up to me with various questions about which direction we're going and if I knew where I was going and I would kind of throw some words back at her over my shoulder, but just kept kind of running through the airport looking for where we were going to get this offsite parking shuttle.

Speaker 1: 17:25

And, long story short, kelsey had seen a sign that I had missed. I didn't read it and that's really what caused her to start questioning Like do you know where you're going? Is it really like this bus parking? And I was like no, I don't think it's the bus parking boat, let's just go check it out. And I told her I was clueless and I told her as much and she was just kind of she was absolutely puzzled as to why I was charging off in any random direction when I didn't know where I was going. And she was pretty confident at this point that we should be going in the direction of the sign that she saw and tried to tell me that she saw. I don't remember hearing her when she said it, but had I seen the sign, or heard what the sign said, which said like airport shuttles, I think, and because our offsite parking was at an airport not airport but hotel shuttles, because our offsite parking was in a hotel parking lot had I seen that sign it would have been clear and obviously to her it seemed obvious too. But I was confidently charging off towards buses or something like that, and so she just kind of figured, I must know, and we end up at some random parking garage and there's no hotel shuttles there.

Speaker 1: 18:42

And now she's a little bit frustrated. She's not really a fan of chasing me around the airport on a wild goose chase and I really get the sense that she's frustrated and I kind of just snip back at her like you know what, you can roll your own boat if you know where you're going. Go, but I came from. Like my F behavior, if you're familiar with the cycle at all I was defensive. She saw that emotion come up in me and as soon as that happened it was like boom, the chill was present in our relationship and instantly both of us knew that neither of us were happy and we both felt pretty stuck here.

Speaker 1: 19:26

We began pretty quickly to try to resolve this, but the anxious feeling ran pretty deep here and it was really hard to show up in a way that could truly resolve it. I know for me I really wanted Kelsey to understand my perspective and I think she really wanted me to understand hers, and we both felt this conflict between us. But we couldn't get each other to show up in a way that would resolve it for us. And the whole way home we did make it back to the airport shuttle and I like to add this in there that we didn't even miss the bus, you know. So the little detour that we took didn't affect our getting home time. We would have had to wait anyways. But that's just kind of a moral victory for me and something I kind of throw in there lightly and playfully. But the whole way home, as we're driving home, we're just chipping away at this, trying to figure it out, and we both made bids for connection, tried to apologize, made some attempts to regulate and things would start to feel a little bit better. And then our conversation would re-trigger us and we'd kind of slip backwards and we began to try to resolve it again. But it was amazing to watch us just chip and chip and slowly but persistently work at this and before we walked into the house, which is about an hour away from the airport, we were really at a point of resolution where we felt reassured and confident that we really cared about each other.

Speaker 1: 21:06

And it was interesting to watch how, you know, at the airport we had two different opinions and two different styles on how to tackle the airport. My solution or problem-solving technique there is to like run around like a mouse, like as fast as you can in a maze, to just, you know, go in all the different directions until you find the exit, like that's what I do. It's just like run here, run there. No, dead end didn't work, backtrack, go here, go down there. And in my mind I'm like, yeah, eventually I'll find my way out of this. I wasn't worried that I was going to be stuck in the airport forever. I just had to figure out where it was. And Kelsey's much different. She would like you know once we get out of customs. She would like prefer to look at her phone or a map or ask someone like, hey, where is the airport shuttle pickup, and kind of makes sense, doesn't it? But for some reason that's just not my MO. I'm like, okay, we're just going to figure this out all by ourselves and these two different ways of doing things really isn't a problem.

Speaker 1: 22:14

But in this situation it triggered our cycle and had us both feeling like the other person didn't understand us, didn't value us, appreciate us or care for us. Now I think fundamentally, both Kelsey and I believe that we love and care for each other. But in this moment our brain gets confused and it senses something and gets anxious and we move into our confusing cover. For me, my confusing cover is to push away. I feel rejected or unappreciated and I push away from the pain. In this case it feels like Kelsey is the pain, but it really isn't Kelsey. It's really this feeling of inadequacy or rejection that her cover.

Speaker 1: 22:56

Emotion is kind of activating within me, or her behavior is activating within me, and when I stay in my confusing cover emotion. All Kelsey sees is like a jerk. It's just a cold, uncaring husband. And those are my words, not hers. But I really think that she doesn't see someone who truly cares for her and I do, but because I'm up in my protective space and my cover emotions, I'm pushing away from her because it feels like she's the pain and we can see how there's so much confusion here.

Speaker 1: 23:33

I want so much to be enough for Kelsey, but this cover behavior is so confusing for Kelsey because it seems to her like I don't really care, that I don't care about her or what she's thinking or what she's feeling no-transcript, and that is what she is seeing when I'm in my confusing cover emotion and behavior. And I've had to work so hard to catch myself when I'm here and to learn how to turn back to Kelsey and to hold her, to really believe that, even though I feel like I'm the problem, even though I feel like I'm being rejected, I really can be the solution here and I can hold her and take care of her pain. And I can see the pain of her missing her kiddos and unnecessarily spending time running around the airport like a mouse in a maze and the pain of it seeming like her husband didn't understand the urgency that was here and when. I can do that and I can share with her the emotion that she saw in me in a very clear way that you know. The frustration and chilliness from me was really this cover emotion and how I was trying really hard to get her home. But her behavior, her anxiety, brought up this anxiety within me, like I felt like she wasn't happy with me and that's really hard for me because I feel more than anything that I want that girl to be happy with me and as we had this conversation we really were able to move back together. Now I can't wholly speak for Kelsey's side of the cycle, but I can say that she has gotten amazing at digging below her cover emotions and behaviors and letting me see more of the vulnerable emotions underneath, and she has gotten really good at communicating those in a way where I can see her pain rather than seeing her rejection of me. And she's always just been amazing at lovingly approaching me, even in the face of her worries in the relationship, and really doing a good job to reassure me of the care that she has for me. And in this situation I really believe that together we tenderly broke that conflict cycle and these are the skills that we have learned through working on our conflict cycle and these skills have really allowed us and I guess in this situation really allowed us to hold each other's hands, to truly forgive each other and to repair our bond, our relationship bond.

Speaker 1: 26:22

As we approached our hometown of Buffalo, as we were kind of coming up to the city lights there, I really felt this reassurance and the security and this repaired connection that we had throughout that trip and I really believe that this is possible, that there is a process that we can follow that can change everything, and Kelsey and I have really experienced this change in our relationship. I've watched it with so many of my couples and I would love to teach you and so many people feel like talking about challenges in their relationship is really taboo. For some reason, we still are really protective of the challenges that show up in relationship and I am on a mission to really show everybody that everybody has conflict cycles. That's very normal in a relationship and rather than trying to hide those conflict cycles and trying to prevent them, let's learn how to work through them and I would love to teach you how to do this and you can sign up for a consultation on my website. That's absolutely free, and I will help you see your conflict cycle and give you some direction on how to break it today. But I can also work with you to really help you do the work so that you can really give your relationship a gift this Christmas season, and it's the gift of breaking your cycle, of becoming a cycle breaker and repairing your bond with your spouse.

Speaker 1: 28:01

And it's hard for me, I guess, to not feel like I'm completely blessed. I know that I'm a fortunate man and I truly have felt God's blessing in my life and relationship. I know that there's some of you out there that think that this is all easy for me to say because of who I'm married to or who I am, but here's the deal I really think that you are amazing too and that you are blessed. I think we all, as humans, have been given so much and we can truly see the blessing in our life. And I think it's much easier to see that when we aren't trying to measure our blessings against the blessings that other people have had. I find so often that we can see each other's blessings, but it's harder for us to see each other's trials and struggles and difficulties, and we know so closely our trials and our struggles and difficulties, and it just makes that measurement process very flawed. And I think it can be easy, as you listen to these podcasts, to feel like this doesn't apply to you because of who you're married to or who you are, and I really believe that that's bogus. It really is, and we can just begin to work on some of those beliefs that we have, and what we're going to find is things become much more fluid, things feel much better, and I think that this is an amazing gift that we can give to ourselves.

Speaker 1: 29:41

So have a great week everybody. Enjoy the holiday season. I'll be back next week on this podcast with another interviewed guest, so see you there. Bye-bye, this has been the Fighting for Connection podcast. If you've enjoyed this podcast and want more content like this, check out my Connected Couples Campus, which can be found on my website, wwwpivotalapproachcom, and become the difference you need in your relationship.