In this Bruce Muzik interview, we delve into the stages of love, the skills needed for self care and recovery,and the mindset to help you regain passionate love and connection.
Is it hard to recover and make up after a fight? But it’s not about how often you fight but how quickly you can recover.
During those fights and those times of distance, many couples grow apart, fall out of love, or decide it’s just not worth it.
But here’s the thing — every couple struggles sometimes, and every couple has to master the critical skill of recovery and reconnection.
Fighting with your partner is normal, so it’s essential to learn the stages of love and get back on track quickly. Bruce Muzik is a relationship coach who helps us understand the patterns and dynamics of a relationship in this episode.
He tells us how we can sustain our emotional connection and fix a broken relationship. Bruce also emphasizes the importance of establishing a connection before attempting to resolve issues through communication.
Table of Contents
Key takeaways from Bruce Muzik Stages of Love interview
- People use excuses like “I don’t think we’re compatible” because they don’t know the true source of conflict.
- Eye gazing for 5 minutes a day leads to connection, making it a lot easier to resolve relationship problems.
- Without that feeling of connection, communication skills just get used as a weapon.
- Start to engage in eye contact again.
- Most of us are indoctrinated with unconscious beliefs about relationships that aren’t true.
3 Stages of a Relationship
- Romance stage – We focus on only the good, and we only show our partner our light side, not our dark side.
- Power struggle stage – We start to see our partner’s dark side, and we start to show them ours. This is where most relationships get stuck.
- Mature Love – We move from feeling like two individuals to a couple who accepts each other and are able to stay emotionally connected.
Transcript: Bruce Muzik interview – Stages of Love
Luis Congdon We want to focus on the stages of love today because, as research shows, it’s not about how often you fight.
It’s how quickly you can recover and how quickly you can get things back on track so you and your partner have connection and attunement. On this podcast episode, we have Bruce Muzik.
He’s an acclaimed writer, seminar leader, and coach. He’s known internationally for helping couples achieve greater success repair romantic relationships, and ultimately fall in passionate love all over again.
I originally found Bruce’s work when watching his TED talk called The Big Secret Nobody Wants to Tell. Immediately, I was really struck by his desire to help people become authentic and talk about what’s really going in with their lives in a way so that they can show up and be genuine. Welcome to the show.
Bruce Muzik Good to be here! Thanks for having me.
Kamala Chambers I’m curious about what kind of work you do with couples and conflict. I know that’s your specialty as family therapist. Can you talk a little bit more about the stages of love and how you approach couples who are in conflict and move out of conflict?
Long-Term Stages of Love
Bruce Muzik The people who come to me are married couples who are very up and live up to 35 years. I think it’s the couple I’ve worked with that has been the longest. They’ve hit a point in their relationship where they’re either fighting all the time or they’re not fighting.
They’re too afraid of fighting, and nothing’s getting resolved. Or maybe, they think they don’t know how to rebuild a relationship. The once beautiful warm connection that drew the couples to each other is nowhere to be found.
They feel more like enemies than they do like best friends. The emotional tone in their relationship feels more like a war zone than a loving relationship. I helped couples how to rebuild a relationship, and repair the emotional bond and connection between them so that they can start to get along and resolve whatever it is that’s going on in their relationship.
Then, ultimately live happily together and enjoy being in a relationship together. I got into this because my own relationships were not working. I love being in a relationship.
I’ve always loved romantic relationships, and I always put a higher priority on them in my life, but somehow, I’ve just never been able to make them work. I was married for 7 years, and I got divorced.
After my divorce, I was like, “I’m tired of failing.” I was tired of seeing the same patterns show up over and over again and not knowing what to do about them.
At that time, I was a business coach helping CEOs and entrepreneurs make more money, and I had a mid-life crisis. I met an incredible woman. She broke my heart, and I was like, “Enough. It’s time to figure out this relationship thing.”
I took a couple of years off and started reading all the science, research, the stages of love, and what makes romantic relationships work. What I discovered was just profound.
The Science Around the Stages of Love
Bruce Muzik I discovered an area of research called The Patch Materials. The first big breakthrough I had was reading about how to rebuild a relationship. I was like, “Why weren’t we taught this at school?” If I had been taught this stuff at school, I would have happier relationships, and probably I would still be married and not divorced.
Mission To Rebuild Relationships
Bruce Muzik After a while, it became apparent to me that this was my calling. This is what I was meant to do which is to help couples learn the stages of love.
All my trainings and leadership in public speaking, couples therapy, and psychology all came together and converged over the years and I started helping couples. I totally shifted the direction of my business, and I’ve been teaching couples how to rebuild a relationship for years now.
I’ve worked with over 500 couples now, and I just love it. It’s the most rewarding work I’ve ever done and certainly feels like my mission in this lifetime.
Kamala Chambers It’s such a beautiful journey, and I just love hearing you talk. It’s soothing. I think your work with couples, teaching them the stages of love, sounds a bit similar to the work you do, Luis, with helping couples how to rebuild a relationship.
I would love to hear from both of you. What is one of the main keys to break out of that pattern of either walking on eggshells or having this explosive argument for couples to learn how to rebuild a relationship?
Identify The Source Of Conflict
Bruce Muzik First, you have to address where people are coming from to know how to rebuild a relationship. Most of us are so indoctrinated with unconscious beliefs about relationships that aren’t true. “Relationships shouldn’t be hard” is part of the most common one I hear from the people I talk to.
They’re like, “This is too hard. It’s not meant to be this hard. Love is supposed to be easy.” “I don’t think we’re compatible” is the other most important one. Like somehow there’s some compatible person out there for you and there’s some incompatible people. People use these as excuses because they don’t know what is at the source of their conflict, and they don’t know how to rebuild a relationship.
The first thing I share with my clients when they either do one of my programs at Loveatfirstfight or they come for coaching on how to rebuild a relationship is this idea that there are 3 stages that relationships naturally go through.
The Three Stages Of Love
Bruce Muzik 3 Stages of a Relationship.
First Stage – Romance stage
This is the one we all know and love. In a new relationship, this is when we fall in love, the honeymoon stage, and this is what all good romance books are made of, or romantic comedy. We’re usually high on love drugs.
Our brain is pumping up serotonin, oxytocin, vasopressin, phenethylamine, and all these lovely chemicals that make us focus on only the good. We only show our partner our light side, not our dark side.
Of course, in some sense, we’re co-dependent. We’re dependent on each other to feel good. This is nature’s way of ensuring that we get together, fall in love, and stay together for long enough to have a baby and raise a child.
Second Stage – Power struggle stage
Anywhere between 2 months to 2 years into the relationship, according to the research, a horrible thing happened. The drug stopped being released, and we literally woke up from a love hangover in this second stage of a relationship.
If in the previous stage, the romance stage, we’re co-dependent with each other, in the power struggle stage, the purpose of it is to have us establish our independence and autonomy inside the relationship without hitting a breaking point. Wthout becoming so independent and so autonomous that we don’t have a relationship left.
In the process of this stage, we almost fall out of love. We start to see our partner’s dark side, which we would perceive as their bad side, and we start to show them ours.
The power struggle stage begins when we perceive a sense of permanence in the relationship. Maybe we get engaged, or we discover that we’re pregnant, or we go steady, or we move in together.
If one of the both parties perceives permanence, that’s when the power struggle begins. I like to think of it like this.
We come to the romance stage, we hit the process of that stage, and we think, “I’d probably be spending some time with you, like, maybe the rest of my life. And if I’m going to spend the rest of my life, something’s going to change, and it’s not me. It’s you.”
And so, we start pointing fingers at each other. This is the love stage where I would guess probably 95% of divorces happen, and all relationships end. I was speaking at a big conference of single men the other day.
It’s a dating conference. There must have been around 200 men in the room, and I was saying to them, “Raise your hands. How many of you are single right now.” I was talking about the power struggle stage, and 95% of them put their hand that they were single, and I said.
“Well, consider that that’s an indication that none of your relationships have lost it.” And there was definitely silence in the room, and everybody burst into laughter. They realized the power of the power struggle stage to destroy relationships, and this is where most relationships get stuck.
The Final Stage is the Mature Love Relationship Stage
Bruce Muzik If you’re lucky enough to make it through the process of this second stage, you end up in mature love.
Third Stage – Mature love stage
In mature love, what distinguishes that is you are able to be helpfully dependent on each other and, at the same time, helpfully independent from each other. You can flex and flow between needing each other and supporting each other and not needing each other and being independent in doing your own thing.
Usually, when couples hit the mature love stage, issues of connection are no longer a problem, and you move from two individual Me’s to a collective We. The way you approach the relationship is different.
You’re approaching it as a team, and you’re a teammate on the team rather than two individuals in the relationship. Often, couples in the mature love stage end up working together on some project, like you guys are working together on this business. They are past the breaking point.
Bruce Muzik They accept each other and are able to stay emotionally connected and sustain that emotional connection. 95% of the people who come to me are stuck in the power struggle stage, they’re fighting, and they don’t know how to rebuild a relationship.
The first thing I do is educate couples about these 3 stages of a relationship, and this is a big sigh of relief. It’s like, “Oh, we’re normal. We’re not crazy.” And I’m trying to assure them that it’s not that you’re not compatible and I am an expert in personality typing expertise.
Feeling Safe in a Relationship
Luis Congdon I’ve never found a couple that aren’t compatible or don’t have compatible personalities. I’ve just found couples who aren’t willing to empathize with each other and who don’t understand each other, so they see the other person as being different or ultimately incompatible.
Bruce Muzik Beautiful. I’m so aligned with that. I have exactly the same approach to the stages of love. How do you make couples feel safe enough?
Luis Congdon Couples talking about feeling incompatible or they’re completely different and disagreeing so strongly on a certain subject seems to be kind of the number one reason why couples come into counseling.
I think it’s great when couples can acknowledge, “Hey, we’re not getting along on this subject, and we need to figure out a way to get along or to work it out.”I think the problem with the way that relationships are painted for us is that you meet somebody, you agree on everything, and you’re just awesome, and your fights are pretty small.
But as you said, there are different stages of a relationship, and these stages loop. It’s not like you just get over the power struggle, and you’re always going to be in mature love.
At some point, you might have another power struggle, but hopefully, you’ve learned the stages of love and abilities to make each other feel safe.
It’s our ability to make our partner feel safe during that power struggle, and it’s both the partners’ jobs to make each other feel safe. It’s not just one person that does it.
That’s what I try to focus on in coaching sessions with couples, like how can I make the couple feel safe enough that they can say whatever is on their heart and mind and they feel safe hearing it and they also feel safe saying it. With that, they are learning the stages of a relationship.
Communication and Conflict Management
Bruce Muzik One of the things I have noticed through reading research and having worked with over 500 couples now is that talking doesn’t make people feel safe.
Most couples come to me saying, “We learned communication skills. We just don’t know how to get along and control our fighting” My first response to them was, “I don’t think you do need communication skills.
You know how to communicate. Think back to when you were falling in love. You didn’t have a problem communicating. You guys are firstly educated. You can speak English.
You can communicate.”What happens in the power struggle stage of a relationship is you don’t know how to connect emotionally and sustain staying emotionally connected.
The power struggle stage of a relationship isn’t a crisis of communication. It’s a crisis of connection.
Connection Stage Of A Relationship
Bruce Muzik I find connection rituals work on an unconscious level. They work in a way where by the end of doing these rituals for a week, you start to feel your partner is your friend whether or not you’re in agreement about all the things you’re fighting about. Instead of seeing your partner like an enemy, you start to see them like a friend.
Eye Gazing To Keep The Love Alive
Bruce Muzik One of the first things I do is I get my couples to eye gaze for 5 minutes a day. I have them wake up first thing in the morning and gaze into each other’s eyes for five minutes.
This has a profound effect that I call Rehumanizing each other, which helps on how to rebuild a relationship. When animals are fighting, the first thing they stop doing is looking into each other’s eyes.
They stop eye contact. If you notice that when you’re in a conflict with your partner, you will not be maintaining eye contact, and if you are, you’re probably to intimidate them and stare them down.
What I get couples to do is to start to engage in eye contact again, and that works on an unconscious, sociological level to help calm the amygdala.
That’s the part of the brain that’s responsible for the fight-flight or the freeze mechanism.
Once your amygdala is calm and you’re no longer in fight-flight mode, you start to see your partner as a friend again rather than as an enemy.
Using The Word “I Feel” To Successfully Navigate Conflict Management
Bruce Muzik The metaphor I like to say is that “Your relationship goes from feeling like a war zone where it’s natural to shout.”
You imagine if you were walking through a minefield in the middle of a war. You’d be yelling at your partner, “Watch out! Oh my God! Bomb!” You wouldn’t whisper sweetly to each other in the middle of a war zone.
Once you’re connected after eye gazing, your relationship starts to feel a bit more like a safe haven and feeling safe. It can naturally emerge without having to talk about it.
Then when you talk, you can actually start to resolve your issues and know how to rebuild a relationship. But you can’t resolve your issues, in my opinion. Relationships break if you’re not connected first.
I’m sure Luis, you’ve taught the communication skills and started speaking with eye language. You use the words “I feel” to share your feelings. What I’ve noticed is that it’s all good and well if you get couples to use eye language, but when they’re not connected, “I feel” turns into “I feel you’re a freaking asshole, and I want to kill you.”
Couples therapy for emotional breakdowns
Luis Congdon That’s usually what happens, and then I have to jump in, and that takes so much coaching. It’s insane how much coaching it takes to teach how to rebuild a relationship.
Then, I have to say, “Okay, I feel,” has to be followed by emotion, and then, they’re like, “Well, I feel like,” and then I have to say, “You can’t say ‘I feel like’, it has to be a single word that follows ‘I feel’ and it just turns into this heavy-duty coaching session where I’m constantly interjecting and interrupting which is not fun.
When sitting with lots and lots of couples, teaching them how to build a relationship, one of the things I discovered is that some of the happiest couples I’ve ever met argue and get hot. They’re “I am upset!” and the other person’s like, “Okay! You’re mad! I’m angry too.”Those couples can get heated, but what they have at the core of all of that is do they have an emotional connection.
Teaching those skills of the feeling stuff is great, but what those training wheels are for is having that connection.
Once you have that connection, you can argue pretty much however you want.
Bruce Muzik Exactly. I’m so in line with you here.
Connect Stages Of Love
Bruce Muzik I’m writing a book actually right now. I think I might just use this title for the book, and the phrase is ‘Connect First, Communicate Later’.
The idea is that if you connect first, very often, you don’t even need to communicate about what’s going on because the feelings of feeling like your partner is the enemy disappear.
You’re loving towards the many when you’re more likely to be empathetic and to accept their perspective and point of view without needing to change it.
Bruce Muzik But if you try to communicate without feeling connected, then communication skills just get used as a weapon, as we’ve just discovered, and it makes no sense.
And I’ve never heard anybody talk about it in such plain, simple language, so I thought I’d write a book, and that’s my message.
I think it’s my contribution to the relationship space that I want to get out there with the idea of connecting first and communicating later.
Luis CongdonOne of the things I do when I sit with couples, especially ones that I feel exhibit some of the essential qualities of being happily married or together, I ask them, “What do you think are some of the keys to your marital success?”
Calm The Nervous System Stage Of A Relationship
Luis Congdon They said, “Luis, one of the things we’ve discovered and been together for so long is if we are both feeling like we’re getting heated and we’re starting to argue, we just tell the other person we need to stop, and we eye gazed.
We do that, and we don’t talk about the problem. Until we both feel that our nervous systems are calm, we don’t talk about the problem.
We eye gazed.”I’ve never heard a couple say that about how to rebuild a relationship, but I thought it was cool, and Kamala likes the eye-gazing thing.
It’s definitely something she’s challenged me to do because, for some people, eye gazing is out of the comfort zone. I’m curious, Kamala. I want to ask you. Why do you think some people are out of their comfort zone with eye gazing?
Kamala Chambers I think eye gazing is one of the most vulnerable things you can do. It’s just you’re being seen, and you’re letting someone see who you are and where you’re at in these moments.
It’s hard to hide those things when you’re making that intense eye contact.
I love what you’re talking about here with breaking down the tic for tat, or I need to be right, or I need to get my point across. I think real success in learning how to rebuild a relationship happens when you do connect first.
Otherwise, you’re not hearing the other person. You can’t hear what is going on when your nervous system is hyped up and jacked up.
When Luis and I have an argument, the first thing he does is he looks away from me, and he won’t even look at me. I can’t even tell you how many times
I’ve said, “Look at me,” because if he’s making eye contact with me and seeing that I’m here loving him or that I’m human and I’m not trying to hurt him, then he’s going to feel the connection again.
Luis Congdon Bruce, why do you think people are afraid to eye gaze?
Bruce Muzik Eye gazing is intimate, vulnerable, and a sign of weakness.
If you’re in an attack mode, evolution has wired us to not be vulnerable to our enemies because they might just stick a knife in our hearts and kill us.
I think we’re biologically wired not to be vulnerable in front of our enemies. Yet at the same time, it can work to defuse the situation.
Vulnerability To Keep The Spark Alive
Bruce Muzik I’ve got a beautiful story I want to share with you about a little beach dog I saw the other day. I live on an island in the Caribbean.
We have a ton of stray dogs, and they’re the sweetest stray dogs out of any country I’ve ever been to.
Every country has its stray dogs, and they all have different personalities.
And so, I see this tiny, little puppy running down the beach being chased by this big Doberman dog, and I’m like, “Oh my God. This dog is going to die. It’s going to get eaten alive.”
And so, of course, the gap is closing between the dogs and the Doberman’s catching up, and this tiny street dog is looking over its shoulder, looking absolutely terrified.
And then, as the Doberman catches up, what do you think the tiny, little dog did? What was the strategy?
Luis Congdon Turned around and looked at him.
Bruce Muzik Almost. He rolled over onto his back, legs in the air in the most submissive pose in the world.
Of course, the Doberman didn’t know what the hell to do, so he stared at him, and then the Doberman started licking in the dog’s stomach.
It was this beautiful scene, and the metaphor I took away from it is the dog used vulnerability as a defense strategy. It completely defused the tension instead of running, which is kind of what we do when we’re in a fight.
Instead of trying to run away and defend itself, the dog just turned over and said, “Here I am. I’m vulnerable.”
When you open up and take the first step, roll over onto your back, reveal your soft, tender belly, and share your vulnerability with your partner, it completely defuses the fight because you’re not resisting anymore.
You’re totally vulnerable. That’s a tip on how to rebuild a relationship.
Having A Successful Long Term Relationship
Bruce Muzik One of the other distinctions I teach in the first week of my program is what you resist exists.
If you are resisting something, it tends to stay in existence because you’ve got so much energy invested in resisting it. The minute you stop resisting, it disappears.
That little dog chase I saw the other was like a metaphor for me for how to have successful relationships and how to rebuild a relationship.
Kamala Chambers I love that. What I find in the work I do with intimacy is if you lead with vulnerability, it defuses the energy there and helps on how to rebuild a relationship.
How can someone want to attack you when you’re being vulnerable? If you’re leading with vulnerability and sharing authentically what’s going on for you, it’s different than just cowering down and letting the other person take over, which is a kind of archetypal thing that can happen between couples.
I know that you’re skilled in different archetypes. Can you go into the archetypes a little bit which is also important when learning how to rebuild a relationship?
Bruce Muzik I’d love to. That cowering, that’s the freeze response. You either fight or fight, and then the freeze is the cowering.
Archetypes, this is some of the most useful stuff I’ve ever learned in my whole life. Discovering attachment archetypes changed my relationship dynamics for the better, and I’ve never looked back.
It’s probably one of the most powerful pieces of work I do with my couples teaching how to rebuild a relationship.
Archetypes And Emotional Breakdowns
Bruce Muzik A very well-documented pattern tends to emerge, and this type is called by many different names; the protest, withdraw pattern.
One partner in the relationship becomes angry, needy, clingy, and demanding. They explode their energy outwards. I call this partner The Hailstorm.
Imagine a big cloud in the sky and, like big ice blocks, be hailed down upon their partner below.
The other partner, I called The Turtle. This partner tends to withdraw and retreat into their shell when they’re feeling emotionally disconnected. So let’s clarify when these archetypes start to emerge.
Usually, in the romance stage, there aren’t any archetypes at all, and in mature love, you barely ever see it again. It only emerges again in the power struggles or crisis stage of a relationship when we’re feeling insecurely attached to our partner.
What I mean by insecurely attached is we don’t feel safe around our partner. We don’t feel safe trusting that our partners have our back and that they’re going to be there for us.
Attachment System Relationship Work
Bruce Muzik We may not be consciously aware, but we may not be like quaking in our boots with fear. We may be, too, if we’re in a physically violent relationship.
The essence of it is we don’t feel securely connected. We don’t know how to rebuild a relationship, and we don’t feel our partner’s there and got our back and that we can relax knowing that the relationship is okay. When that happens, we have a natural survival strategy that kicks in from a part of our brain that the research is calling Our Attachment System.
So I like you to consider that we all have an attachment system, and it is designed to do two things that help to rebuild a relationship. It monitors the physical proximity of our partner; and how close our partner is. It also monitors the emotional responsiveness of our partner; and how responsive our partner is when we reach out to them.
Do they respond often, or do they not? It’s probably very similar to John and Julie Gottman‘s research on bidding. The idea is that we make unconscious bids to our partners to determine whether or not we’re connected to them.
The way I describe it to my clients is like a radar. We have this internal radar, and it’s going “Beep-beep. Are you still there? Will you respond to me? Are we still connected? Beep-beep.” You might sweep your radar by texting your partner, “Hey, honey. Thinking of you,” and that’s called a bid.
If a partner doesn’t respond in a timely manner, we feel like they’re not emotionally responsive, and our attachment system goes on red alert. If our partner disappears for a while, we start to go on red alert. Our attachment system goes on red alert, and this is a healthy thing.
It’s designed to seek proximity. So, we go off, and we start looking for our partner. If we can’t find them we call the police, and we file a missing person’s report, or if they’re emotionally unresponsive, we might send a second text message to them.
If we still don’t hear back, we might think, “Oh my God! Maybe they’re having an affair, and maybe he’s sleeping with his secretary,” or we might go and stalk out outside their office and go peek through the window.
Identify Faulty Attachment System And Unhealthy Control Issues
Bruce Muzik What happens is we all have an attachment system and it’s a healthy thing. But if you were brought up in a family environment where you didn’t learn what a secure connected relationship looked like, you might have developed a faulty attachment system that either goes off too early or doesn’t go off at all.
Hailstorms have what’s called an overactive or a hyperactive attachment system. They see abandonment around every corner when often, there isn’t one. In the literature, they call this kind of person ‘The anxious person’.
Hailstorms are anxious about the state of connection to their partner and they tend to fear abandonment more than any other type. So what happens is when they feel afraid that they’re going to be abandoned, instead of asking directly to have their needs met, they start to protest the loss of secure connection to their partner.
A protest is any behavior that helps to rebuild a relationship with their partner indirectly. Secure people tend to directly go, “Hey, honey. I’m feeling insecure. Will you give me a hug? I just want some reassurance that everything is okay.”
Hailstorms And Turtles Relationship’s Deficiencies
Luis Congdon I just want to jump in real quick because, as you’re talking, I can definitely identify as being one of those people that I’m a little bit of a hailstorm. I don’t know if we’re using the term the same way because when I get upset, I blow up a little bit more.
Kamala tends to downplay her feelings a little bit more. She’s a little more nervous to bring up the issue. To me, it was great to bring that in because that’s something Kamala and I are consistently working on in regards to it being safe for me to express my feelings, and it’s also safe for her to express her feelings in the ways that we both needed.
She is a little bit softer than I am, so I’m learning to be softer. I’m more outspoken, so she is learning to be more outspoken and be more direct with me about things, which for a long time, she’s had a little bit of anxiousness around being direct.
Kamala Chambers You’re just scary when you get mad. It’s not that you’re violent or anything like that, but my nervous system gets a little jarred, so I turtle up, and I’m working on it so I can learn how to rebuild a relationship.
Bruce Muzik I’ve heard the same phrases come up over and over again, and they usually complain. One of them is, “Nothing I ever do is good enough.”One of the other most common things that turtles report is that they shut down their feelings not because they don’t love their partner or because they’re upset but because they’re scared, and very often, they’re trying to protect the relationship.
The Difference Between Abandonment And Rejection
Bruce Muzik Hailstorms addresses the issue so that I can relax and stop feeling so anxious and just feel safe again and feel like I’m not going to be abandoned. Turtles are afraid not of abandonment but of rejection.
There’s a subtle difference between abandonment and rejection. Abandonment is being left alone on your own. Rejection is being basically told that you’re not okay for who you are.
Let me see if I can give you guys some goals. These are what I call Soothing mantras, and a soothing mantra is a set of custom words that are custom-designed to soothe your specific partner and help in the stages of love.
Using Soothing Mantras To Eventually Fade Negative Energy
Bruce Muzik One of the things I do with my couples is I get them to create soothing mantras for each other and share how they would like to be soothed and heaved at the moment so that couples can learn to soothe each other and create a safe space that helps the early stages of love.
Luis Congdon I want to hear everything that you’re saying, and I wanted to throw out there that Kamala wrote a book, and she handed me the book, “Inside, here are all the mantras I need.”
Bruce Muzik Oh, beautiful! So, I’ve noticed through now working with several hundred couples, creating soothing mantras. There are some common ones that come in over and over again.
Hailstorms, generally, because they’re afraid of abandonment, they like to hear things like, “I’m not going anywhere. I’m never going to leave you. I’m right here.” “You’re safe”. Anything that implies they’re not going to be left alone and their partner’s not going to retreat into their shell, basically.
Turtles, on the other hand, they’re afraid of rejection, and they tend to be afraid of being trapped and confined in pain. Because very often, they have experienced as children being trapped and confined in pain and not knowing how to deal with them, so they like to hear things like, “I love you just the way you are.
Don’t ever change. You’re perfect for me.” The final one is, “Take as much time as you need, sweetie. I’ll be here when you come back”, which speaks to the turtle’s desire for space and time out.
Understand The Hailstorm-Turtle Dynamic Relationship Stage
Bruce Muzik This is most of the work I do that helps relationship stages. The biggest part of the work I do with couples is helping them understand the hailstorm-turtle dynamic and helping them meet each other’s emotional needs, which leads to safety and learning how to rebuild a relationship.
I help the turtle soothe the hailstorm and meet their hailstorm needs so the hail storm stops hail storming, coming demanding, critical, clingy, and needy. Then I help the hailstorms soothe the turtle so the turtle doesn’t have to retreat into their shell.
Then, both partners, once they get comfortable with emotional intensity, can stay present and then know how to rebuild a relationship instead of doing their usual dance or dynamic, which might spiral out of control with door slamming and sleeping outside the bedrooms or whatever the case may be.
A secure relationship stage
Here’s the other thing. Hailstorms are inextricably attracted to turtles. I have barely ever met a hailstorm and a secure person in the relationship. I will say that 99% of my clients are hailstorm turtles.
I’ve never ever in my whole life met a turtle-turtle couple because they both retreat, and I’ve met a couple of hailstorm-hailstorm couples. What tends to happen is one partner will play the turtle when there are two hailstorms in a relationship.
They’re reciprocal sides of the same coin. One partner is normally a hailstorm and would tend to play more of a turtle in their relationship. My partner is in a hailstorm as well, so I tend to now play more of the turtle.
Kamala Chambers What are some tools we can utilize on how to rebuild a relationship and to help break out of that turtle-hailstorm dynamic? I know you gave us some amazing mantras. Would you recommend just telling our partners those mantras? How do you unpack that for people?
Bruce Muzik
I got about 25 different ways. The soothing mantra is one of them.
Stages Of A Relationship Patterns
Bruce Muzik One of the best ways to rebuild a relationship and interrupt the pattern is you have to be aware of your pattern. You have to understand what stuck Sue Johnson, who’s one of the founders of Emotionally Focused Therapy, which is the couple therapy that has a higher success rate than any couple therapy.
Sue Johnson called these Dances the patterns that couples get into. These three primary dances that she identifies in her book called Hold Me Tight;
Find the Bad Guy
This is like a blame game dance. It’s an attack-attack dance. Both couples are attacking each other.
The Protest Polka
The hailstorm and turtle dance. One partner withdraws, and the other one becomes demanding and needy.
Freeze and Flee
This is where both partners retreat. So the hailstorm retreats as well, and both partners pretend they don’t need each other. I think of this like an ice age. It’s like an ice age that creeps over their relationship, and the emotional tone of the relationship is freezing cold.
You’re Dances start with a trigger. There’s always a trigger event.
It might be we’re talking about ex-girlfriends, and one partner is jealous, and the minute the guy talks about his ex-girlfriends, it is the trigger for his girlfriend or his wife to spiral into their dubs, which might sound like, “Oh! You’re texting her again. Are you?” and he starts defending and goes “Well, I’m not texting her. Not even once. She’s my ex-girlfriend. I dated her 15 years ago. What are you talking about?”
Before you know it, these things spiraled out of control in two minutes or less. They are yelling at each other, and their pattern is so ingrained. They move from the blame game to protest polka to freeze and flee in a matter of minutes. That night, they sleep in separate beds, and it all started with a trigger event.
Identify The Dance Of Romantic Love
Bruce Muzik So the first thing you have to understand if you’re going to defuse conflict is you have to be able to identify which of the dances you’re stuck in. The trigger events, the trigger of your dances, and then give them a name.
It’s critical to give each dance a name, and this is one of the big pieces of Sue Johnson contributed to the space whose naming a dance. I had a dance with my partner that I called The Knife Dance, and the knife dance emerged because I wanted to express it like a knife in my heart, and she expressed it like a knife at her back.
When you’re aware of your pattern and the trigger events, you can start to interrupt it before it happens and then choose a different strategy on how to rebuild a relationship.
For example, if we notice this thing coming up or a knife dance coming along, the first person to notice that will scream out, “Knife dance!” and that is our sign like it’s a pattern interrupt. It’s a sign to interrupt the pattern, and we stop, and we have a prescribed set of steps on how to rebuild a relationship that we do afterward.
“We” Love Languages
Bruce Muzik The first one is to move into We love languages and start to use We language instead of I language.
Usually, I’ll start by saying something like “Honey, we’re just hurting each other. Let’s connect first.” And then we’ll stop, and with my eye gaze, if we’re feeling connected enough, we move into some kind of Harville Hendrix type in modern dialog or whatever the case may be.
I think one of the most powerful tools I can give you is to sit down and start to analyze your dances to become aware of them. You don’t need to change it. You just need to become aware of it and then give it a name.
Broken Toes And Negative Judgment
Bruce Muzik Look at what all the trigger paths and share points are, and share those triggers with your partner. So your partner knows what I call your Broken Toes. If you think of salsa dancing, you have to dance as a team. If your partner has a broken toe and you don’t know they have a broken toe, that could be a big problem because you might step on their broken toe by accident.
We all have broken toes or these emotional hypersensitivities from our past, our childhood, and previous relationships. We are sensitive to certain issues, and yet we don’t know we have broken toes. So we end up standing on each other’s broken toes.
Luis Congdon I like what you’re talking about the work with Dr. Sue Johnson on how to rebuild a relationship, and she’s come on the show. Since Kamala and I got in touch with her work, we’ve done exactly what you were talking about on how to rebuild a relationship, which was naming our patterns.
Just to share quickly, one of my patterns is that I will turtle love sometimes. It’s not like people are just one way, and they’re always going to be that way.
For me, there are times when I’ll feel upset about something Kamala has done or something just didn’t work the way I wanted it to, and I’ll shut down. Kamala noticed that with me.
Naming Patterns And Emotional Breakdowns
Luis Congdon Kamala said, “You know, I’ve noticed that you have this pattern where you kind of shut down. You don’t talk to me. I need you to open up and say, ‘I’m fine’.”
I tend to not look her in the eye. It’s my way of avoiding dialog, and we named that pattern the I’m Fine pattern. When that used to happen I can say that once we named the pattern, we took power over it.
We named the ‘I’m fine’ pattern, and when Kamala saw me doing the I’m fine thing, she’d say, “Oh, no! Not the I’m fine thing,” and we made it into something playful, which was wonderful. It took the seriousness out of it, and I would laugh and say, “Okay, yeah. I’m doing the I’m fine thing. You’re right.”
This is what happens when you name the patterns or the agreement. Instead of doing The, I’m fine pattern, our agreement is “Okay, we noticed it. We can laugh about it,” and then, there are two options.
Naming the pattern
- I can say, “Hey, you know? This is how I’m feeling right now. This is what it’s about.“
- “You’re right. I’m avoiding the dialog. I don’t know how to open up but I’ll come back to it later,” with the promise that I will come back to it.
Yesterday, Kamala was like, “Oh, wow. Yeah, the I’m fine pattern.” It got brought up in one of our dialogues with someone, and she said, “I don’t remember the last time you’ve done that.”
Kamala Chambers Sometimes it can be easy to beat yourself up because “Oh, we’re still having these arguments” or “We’re still having these things coming up.” But to take time to acknowledge the growth that’s there is important for Luis and me.
Luis Congdon Go ahead, Bruce. We want to let you finish up whatever you are saying.
Bruce Muzik What you’re pointing to is Sue Johnson’s seven steps on how to rebuild a relationship. The last one is to celebrate your wins. Come together as a team, like “Yeah! We did it! High five, man!”
It creates this environment of “We’re a team fighting the conflict rather than fighting each other.”So I love that you guys are celebrating your wins. It’s beautiful.
And Luis, just for your understanding of hailstorms and why they end up retreating as well, often when hailstorms retreat, it’s for different reasons than when turtles retreat. Turtles tend to retreat to protect themselves or protect their relationship and to stop the fighting from escalating.
Reasons Why People Retreat – Unhealthy Control Issues
Bruce Muzik Hailstorms retreat because they can’t reach their partner, and they’re afraid they can’t reach their partner. What they’re trying to do is indirectly express their hurt to their partner and get their partner to respond.
I’ve locked myself in my apartment and turned off the lights once. This was six to seven years ago before I had no awareness of this stuff. When I had a fight with my girlfriend, I was hoping she would knock on the door and then literally climb onto the balcony to come and rescue.
That would be a proof that she has passionate love. This whole childish little thing, like I turned my phone off. I wanted her to panic, “He’s turned his phone off! He is not in his apartment!”
So that she could experience loving me, missing me, being worried, and then come and find me and rescue me. At some point, after an hour of sitting in darkness and my phone off at my apartment, I was like, “Bruce, you’re a grown man.
What the hell are you doing?!” I went over to her house, and I cried and cried in her arms, and I just apologized, and I told her like “This is what I do. When I ran away from you, I wanted you to chase me. That’s why I ran away from you.”I’ve heard that from many other hailstorms as well.
Relationship retreat
When they retreat, what they’re secretly hoping is that their turtle partner will come and chase them. But the turtle doesn’t see that. They’re like, “Oh, well. He has retreated. He always doesn’t love me.” I will retreat even further, then.
It has the counterproductive effect of not solving anything. My partner now knows if I end up ever retreating on her, she should come running after me, and it’s just me in pain. It’s like I’m in so much pain that I don’t know how to communicate that in the heat of the moment.
Luis Congdon That’s well put and definitely speaks to my work with couples. I remember this explosive Latin lady speaking in a couples group that was stuck in negative energy. She talked about this big fight she and her husband had.
They were in the bedroom together. It was nighttime, so they were about to go to sleep. She said, “I got angry. I just stormed out of the room, yelling at him. I went in and lay at my child’s bed.” And then, she laughed and said, “But the bed was so small that my legs were hanging off the bed.”I was just fuming, and I asked her.
I said, “While you were in there waiting or angry, what were you wishing would happen?” She just laughed, and everybody knew what her answer was going to be. She just said, “I was wishing he would come in and get me. But instead, I ended up falling asleep in there, and then, I woke up angry that he didn’t come and get me to that room.”
Bruce Muzik What a great story.
Fighting And The Uncertainty Stages Of Love
Bruce Muzik Here’s what I would love to just convey to anybody listening.
You can fix this. There is hope, and there are people you can work with. You could go find a therapist. You can go and speak with Kamala and Luis. You can come to loveatfirstfight.com and get one of my online training programs.
There are many options, and it can be healed. The second thing is if your partner gets angry and critical, and you’re a turtle, just know that they’re in pain.
They are hurt. If you take their anger at face value, you’ll be missing its beautiful gift and message. If you’re a hailstorm dating a turtle and you’re thinking that your partner is withdrawing because they don’t love you and they don’t care, know they’re also in pain.
This is their learned behavior and strategy for protecting themselves. If you stop getting demanding and critical, they’ll probably come out of their shell. Finally, connect first and communicate later. If you can remember that when you’re fighting, stop, interrupt, name your pattern, and start connecting.
Whether it’s through eye gazing or holding each other hands. That will make a massive difference when you actually do speak. In my upcoming book, I’m going to be sharing 25 different ways to successfully navigate the initial stages of a relationship. I’ll get hold of you guys when it’s done and maybe will arrange another free copy for your readers.
Kamala Chambers That sounds great. It’s been so great to have you here Bruce Muzik talking about how to rebuild a relationship. Thank you so much Bruce.
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