The Spiritual Fitness Manualናሙና

Marriage, Emotionally Shutting Down - Part 1

By George Faller, LMFT, Lieutenant, FDNY (RET) 

 “Man is the only creature that dares to light a fire and live with it. The reason? Because he alone has learned to put it out.” -Henry Vandyke, Jr.

First responders know the dangers they face and the need to train their bodies to head towards the threats. Resisting fear and the impulse to flee is earned by years of practice suppressing emotion and cognitively focusing on tasks. Emotional avoidance is a skill necessary to complete the mission and give the team the best chance of success. Unfortunately, for many first responders emotional constriction becomes a habit that is applied automatically across all settings, including their marriages. Success at work comes at a huge price at home. 

In marriages there are typically two ways of dealing with stress: 1) trying to reduce the stress by turning down the heat and withdrawing from fights, and 2) turning up the heat by forcing the issue and pushing to talk and resolve fights. 

God certainly has a good sense of humor because people who deal with stress by pursuing usually marry those who deal with stress by avoiding. This produces a predictable marriage pattern common among first responders.  

For a simple example of this cycle, let’s look at a traditional marriage where the wife is the pursuer and the husband is the withdrawer. The wife, wanting to engage, initiates a conversation by asking questions. The husband assesses a threat in the questioning (usually a message he is doing something wrong) and tries to succinctly answer (yes, dear) and quickly get away to avoid further escalation of the conversation. The wife feels rejected (believes her husband doesn’t want to engage) and her resentment turns the questions into criticism (blames husband for her bad feelings). The reason the husband was reluctant to engage in the conversation in the first place is because it so often ends in criticism, and so it does again.

Each spouse’s way of dealing with stress becomes a self-fulfilling loop. A wife forcing negative conversations reinforces her husband not wanting to engage. A husband disengaging reinforces his wife’s desperation to talk. As both partners respond in ways that don’t work for the other, the distance in their relationship grows. What they need is a way to bridge the gap.