Families do not communicate primarily by language. That might surprise you, until you consider that humans were together in families for millennia before we had a language. Even today, the most delicate communications that have far-reaching consequences for our lives occur between parents and children through tone of voice, facial expressions, touch, smell, and body posture, not language.
Although less obvious than her interactions with young children, most of her communications with her older children and with her husband also occur through an unconscious process of emotional attunement. You psychologically and even physically tune in to your emotions with the people you love. This is how you can come home in one mood, find your husband or kids in another mood, and bam! -Suddenly, out of nowhere, you’re in his mood. Unconsciously, they automatically react to each other.
Emotional attunement, not verbal skills, determines how we communicate, from our choice of words to our tone of voice. If you are tuned into a positive mood, you are likely to communicate in a pleasant way. If you are in a bad mood, your words will be less pleasant.
Now here’s the really bad news. Because of this unconscious and automatic process of emotional attunement, your children react painfully to the eggshell-walking atmosphere between you and your husband, even if they never hear you say a harsh word to each other.
Everyone in a family walking on eggshells loses some degree of dignity and autonomy. You become incapable of deciding your own thoughts, feelings, and behavior, because you are living in a defensive-reactive pattern that works largely on autopilot. No less than half of the members of these unfortunate families, including children, suffer from clinical anxiety and/or depression. (“Clinical” does not mean feeling depressed, sad, or worried, it means that the symptoms interfere with normal functioning. You cannot sleep, you cannot concentrate, you cannot work as efficiently, and you cannot enjoy yourself without drinking.) Most adults lack genuine self-esteem (based on realistic self-assessments), and children rarely feel as good as other children. They are ten times more likely to become resentful, angry, or abusive adults. If the family is violent, children are ten times more likely to become abusers or victims of violence as adults. They are also at higher risk of alcoholism, crime, mental health problems, and poverty.
The most common symptom of children in families that walk on eggshells is depression. But the signs can deceive you; childhood depression looks different from the tearful, withdrawn, or sullen adult version. In children, the disorder resembles chronic boredom. Children normally have high levels of interest, enjoyment, and excitement. If your child is not interested in the things that children are normally interested in, he lacks enthusiasm and rarely gets excited, he is probably depressed. Another common symptom of these children is anxiety, particularly worry about things that children don’t normally worry about, such as how their parents are going to spend the night together. Many children have problems in school, show aggressive tendencies, hyperactivity and excessive emotionality (anger, excitability or frequent crying that seems to come out of nowhere) or the polar opposite: no emotion at all. In this latter condition, they may seem like little stone children; you could cut a pup in front of them and they wouldn’t care. They have turned off all emotion to avoid the pain of walking on eggshells.
Research on children in abusive families might surprise you. Witnessing a victimized parent is often more psychologically damaging to children than direct child abuse injuries. In my own family, that was certainly true. I have only the faintest memories of childhood abuse: a small hole in my skull and a broken front tooth, but I have vivid nightmares of my mother being ignored and rejected, as well as demeaned and terrified. Seeing a parent abused is the deepest form of child abuse.
When it comes to the most severe forms of destructiveness, purely emotional abuse is often more psychologically damaging than physical abuse. There are a couple of reasons for this. Even in the most violent families, incidents tend to be cyclical. Early in the cycle of abuse, a violent outburst is followed by a honeymoon period of remorse, care, affection, and generosity, but not genuine compassion. (The honeymoon stage eventually ends, when the victim starts saying, “Don’t worry about the damn flowers, just stop hitting me!”). Emotional abuse, on the other hand, tends to happen every day. So the effects are more damaging because they are so frequent.
The other factor that makes emotional abuse so devastating is the increased likelihood that victims will blame themselves. If someone hits you, it’s easier to see that he or she is the problem, but if the abuse is subtle – saying or implying that you’re ugly, a bad parent, stupid, incompetent, unworthy of attention, or that no one could love you – it’s more likely you think it’s your problem.
All forms of abuse have in common a lack of compassion.
Whether overt or silent, all forms of abuse are failures of compassion; stop worrying about how you feel. Compassion is the lifeblood of families, and lack of compassion is the “heart disease” of a family’s emotional life. In fact, it would be less painful if your husband never cared how you feel. But when you were falling in love, he cared a lot, so now he feels betrayed when he doesn’t care or try to understand. You feel like he is not the person you married.
It may not seem like it from your daily interactions, but your husband probably loves you. Her emotional reactivity indicates that a strong bond still arouses the guilt and shame that, tragically, blames you. The fact that I love you is good news and bad news. Love itself is so focused on how we feel that it masks the differences between people. The very intensity of love can make the person you love seem like little more than a source of strong emotions. In other words, it seems to her that you provoke her emotions. If it feels good, you’re on a pedestal; but if it feels bad, you’re a devil.
Compassion makes us sensitive to other people’s individual strengths and vulnerabilities. As you learn compassion under stress, your husband will see that you are different from him, with your own temperament, sensitivity, experiences, longings, hopes, and dreams, all of which he probably saw when you were falling in love and your level of compassion was low. naturally tall. Self-love buries differences in the shadows of how strong we feel. Compassion illuminates our differences and allows us to appreciate and sympathize with loved ones. Love without compassion sensitivity is: rejecting (of who you really are as a person), possessive, controlling, and dangerous.