When You Feel Vulnerable, What Else Comes With It?

By Steven Stosny

People in committed relationships emotionally respond to each other mostly by habit.

In fact, adult emotional responses of any kind are to a large extent habituated associations formed by repetition over time. Because the human brain does as much as possible using automatic pilot to conserve the scarce resource of conscious attention, specific emotions readily become associated not only with specific events and memories but also with other emotions.

For example, the childhood experience of many adults included the following. When something happened to disappoint them, the next thing that happened made them afraid or ashamed. (We inadvertently forge this association by punishing children for mistakes.)

If this emotional sequence was repeated often enough, they are prone to experience some modulated form of fear or shame whenever they feel disappointed.

Although any emotion can form habituated associations with other emotions, the most common in love relationships is the association of disappointment with fear or shame. It's a natural connection. Intimate relationships are unique in their tendency to expose the depths of personal vulnerability. Wherever you find vulnerability, you'll find fear or shame.

Some people associate disappointment with fear of harm or deprivation, though the more common linkage is with fear of isolation, i.e., disappointment threatens to make them feel unlovable: "No one will understand me," or, "No one will care."

Just as frequently in love relationships, disappointment is associated with the shame of inadequacy, a sense of failure, particularly as a protector, lover, or provider.

The vulnerability inherent in the experience of fear and shame invokes defenses, for most people, some form of anger. If the anger persists over time, it settles into a chronic but lower intensity resentment. Thus disappointment over anything runs a higher risk of stimulating resentment or anger in love relationships than in interactions with strangers. And that is why, as the old song goes, "We always hurt the ones we love."

To stop hurting the ones we love, we must be able to keep disappointment from stimulating fear and shame, which, in turn, will prevent problem resentment and anger from starving relationships of the compassion that would rejuvenate them.

It's worth noting that insight about how emotional associations may have formed originally does nothing to change them once they're habituated. Change of an habituated sequence of neural firing requires an alteration of the sequence to become habituated. In other words, just understanding how a habit may have been formed won't change it. Forming a new habit will. Forming new habits of emotional response requires the practice of "emotion regulation skill".