my partner and I keep having the same fight
over and over again I know I get defensive
and I know it makes things worse
but in the moment it feels like I can't stop myself
my partner says I'm choosing to be defensive
and if I cared I would just listen
and it's confusing because I do care
I don't want to keep reacting
this way but when I feel criticized
something in me just takes
over and I feel like I have to protect myself
then afterward I feel ashamed
and wonder why I couldn't just respond differently
what do I do when I feel like I don't have a choice
about how I'm responding
welcome to relationships after religion
my name is Jenny Morrow I'm a 20 -ear marriage therapist
and relationship coach and today we're exploring
one of the most debated questions in philosophy
whether or not humans have free will
in many religious environments
free will is not just a philosophical idea
it becomes the foundation of the whole moral system
the framing often goes something like this
you're born with agency
you should know right from wrong life is a test
and god will judge
whether or not you make the wrong or right choices
and ultimately your choices will reveal
whether or not you are good enough
to live in the presence
of god in a heaven or an afterlife
this view creates a very simplified view of agency
and human behavior for example in a Mormon or LDS
context it could look something like
if I do not wear my garments
I am choosing to be worldly
if I publicly question the prophet
I am choosing pride over humility
if I do not want more children
I am choosing selfishness instead of sacrifice
if I do not keep sweet in conflict
I'm allowing myself to be influenced by the adversary
if I want pleasure rest autonomy or desire
outside of the approved path
then I'm choosing the natural man or the world
and if you grew up with that kind of framework
it can follow you into your relationships
so something like if I do not forgive quickly
I am choosing to harden my heart
if I say no I'm choosing to be selfish
these are very limited and often even inaccurate ways
of seeing what's really happening
and from here it can get complicated because
after religion many of us
are not only trying to change our relationship patterns
we're also trying to change the moral
story that we were taught to place
on top of those patterns
and we're also looking at what's true about our experience of free will
which is the part we're going to be talking about today
the last sentence of the question
that I read a moment ago is what do I do
when I feel like I don't have a choice about how I'm
responding so today we're gonna talk about
do we actually choose what we do
or are our choices the inevitable
result of everything that came before
and while this may sound like an abstract
philosophical question
I actually think it's one of the most
important questions we can ask in our relationships
because in relationships we're constantly asking
versions of this question
did they choose to hurt me
could they have responded differently
why do I keep reacting this way
when I know it doesn't help
and if so much of who we are was shaped
before we were even conscious enough
to make any given choice
what does responsibility even mean
sometimes we experience ourselves as trapped
trapped in a situation
trapped in reactive or compulsive patterns
we can watch ourselves repeating the same
ineffective relationship moves
and then other times we experience
something that feels like freedom
it's like there's suddenly more space
you're able to take a pause
you're able to notice what's really happening
inside of you maybe you still feel the old impulse
but you're not completely consumed by it
and that experience of feeling free really matters
because in our actual relationship lives
we're not usually trying to solve
the whole philosophical debate
we're trying to understand why we feel so stuck
and what we need to do to get unstuck and to fix things
you know what helps us to feel
less trapped inside of an old pattern
what helps us to access
more space so that we can actually feel like we have
a little bit more agency in the moment
even if an old urge is still there
and that's why the question that I read at the beginning of this episode
matters so much
because this person is not asking a detached
intellectual question about free will
they're really asking because their partner is hurt
they keep reacting this way
and the answer to just make a different choice
doesn't seem to be working
because what does responsibility mean if in the moment
we don't experience ourselves as free
when I was inside of religion
I absorbed the idea that if I knew the right thing
and I cared about the right thing
then I should be able to make the right choices
and if I did not choose the right choice
then my problem was most likely something like
my will my faithfulness my humility my obedience
in some way it was like a reflection of my character
and that can be a heavy way to understand yourself
it can make every reactive
moment feel like a moral failure
it's not just I was flooded but I failed the test
and while I encourage
my clients to look honestly at their behavior
I now believe that unquestioned shame
often gives us a masked version of responsibility
where the focus is on whether or not we're good or bad
but mature responsibility
asks us a different question not
does this prove if I am good or bad
does this prove whether I am good
enough to be in the highest level of heaven
but instead what happened in me what conditions
made this reaction more likely
what impact did it have on myself or on another person
and what support
repair practice or structure is needed now
About 20 years ago I had just graduated from grad
school I was in my first job as a therapist
I was in a session
and I remember distinctly having this thought
about a client I thought if I were you with your brain
and your body and your history
I would be doing exactly the same thing you're doing
and even though I was religious and I had spent years
fully believing in free will I suddenly had this
strange shift in perspective
now I'm not saying that I know what is true about free will and how much if any
we have
today I wanna ask a slightly different question
and that is what creates
the lived experience of freedom in our relationships
because whether or not we actually have free will
people continually report that certain conditions
make them feel more or less free
so for example when you're flooded
and ashamed and desperate maybe wanting approval
or terrified of abandonment or afraid of being
controlled
you might notice that you experience yourself
as less free
you may technically be making choices but internally
those choices might feel almost compulsory
and that is exactly what the person
who wrote this question was describing
they know defensiveness is not helping
they know their partner is hurt
they know that they want to respond differently
but in the moment their partner's concern
it doesn't land as neutral
it doesn't land as a neutral piece of information
it's really landing as a threat
in their nervous system and it's leading to
this story that I need to protect myself right now
and once that internal system takes over
they're no longer experiencing
a wide open field of options
instead they're experiencing activation
just like the experience of threat
can lead someone to feel less free
on the flip side there are other conditions
that seem to create more inner space
and give us the experience of feeling free
such as when we're able to slow down
when we feel like we can tell the truth
when we're able to regulate our bodies
and our nervous system when we're in a space
where we're able to tolerate discomfort
or where we've had more rest where we're fed
well you know these are different conditions
that can allow us to feel more free
and allow us to hear another's perspective
without collapsing
and it does seem like these conditions
whether or not we're even free to choose those
are precursors to the experience of freedom and choice
so maybe when someone asks
how do I take responsibility
when I don't feel like I have control
maybe the answer begins here
responsibility may not mean
pretending that you felt free in the moment
responsibility
may mean becoming honest about the conditions
that make you lose access to yourself
because if we talk about free will
casually in relationships
we can become too simplistic we can say things like
well if they would have just cared
then they wouldn't have done that
and there can be a piece of truth in there which is that
safety
upon which love is built does require responsibility
but if we only talk about choice
and we don't talk about the patterns then we
miss something essential about being a human being
and generally
people do not wake up in the morning and consciously
decide to be defensive
they do not usually sit in a conflict and think
I would like to make this conversation
as hard as possible
they usually don't say to themselves I'm gonna sabotage
closeness today
that's not how things feel from the inside from the
inside it really just feels
like survival and it feels like Protection
it might feel like I have to explain myself or
if you can't get the reassurance
you need you might feel like you're gonna fall apart
and so from the outside a behavior can look chosen
but from the inside it can really feel automatic
and that's where the question of free will becomes so
interesting in relationships
because maybe what a lot of us call
choice and what looks like choice
is not actually experienced as choice in the moment
maybe a lot of what we do in relationships is activated
before it's chosen
and if that's true then our relationship patterns
might deserve more curiosity
than we generally give them
and they still require responsibility
and that's the tension
the person who wrote this question is
stuck in that exact tension
they know their defensiveness has an impact
they know they need to take responsibility
but they also know that in the moment
that it doesn't feel like they're calmly
selecting defensiveness from a menu of possible choices
it feels
something like what it feels like to be taken over
so what do we do with that
often we can get stuck in one of two perspectives
one perspective says we always have a choice
and that's the perspective that a lot of us get
in religion
um or maybe if we don't have a choice about something
we have a choice about how we
respond to the thing we did not choose so for example
maybe you cannot
always choose the thought that pops up
but you have the choice about how to respond
to those thoughts and so yeah this is a common
perspective that a lot of us subscribe to
and most of us were taught in a religious context
and this Assumption of free will this
idea that we always have some choice can really sound
clear it can sound empowering it can sound accountable
and
sometimes it is and sometimes it can be helpful in certain
ways but it can also become
confusing because it doesn't answer
where is that exact line
between having a choice and not having a choice
and it still works on the Assumption
that's built from this felt experience of choice
not necessarily a truth about where choice
actually is and isn't
and this can be tricky in relationships
because it assumes
that if someone is repeating a pattern
they're simply choosing it in a straightforward way
you know if someone continually withdraws
they're consciously choosing distance
um if a woman stays in an abusive situation
she's making that choice and it's her
lack of strength or her weakness that has her
stuck there or
you know based on this question
if someone gets defensive
they're consciously choosing to not listen
and it may be true that we do have a choice
I don't know I'm I'm not making the claim
that we do or don't
but it seems like most of us can look back on our past
experiences and we can wonder
could I have truly done something differently
in that moment with everything
I knew and with the brain and body
that I have and with the level of development I was at
could I have truly done
anything different in that moment
and that is a very different question
and it seems to me that when we simply assume choice
we lose a whole aspect of our experience
and we can lose compassion for how deeply
patterned people are and how deeply patterned we are
we can forget
that what feels so frustrating in our relationships
may have been once adaptive and someone who shuts down
may have grown up in a home
where that's what was modeled
that really was the level of development
they were taught for years and years
or someone who overexplains
may have Learned that being misunderstood
could mean isolation
or maybe someone who's critical
maybe trying to create safety when we ignore that
our understanding of ourselves
and others becomes too thin
and we turn relationship work into willpower
and we say things like just communicate better
or just set the boundary or just be vulnerable
and even in my position
after years of being a therapist and now
in the coaching seat
even I can get trapped back into this
mindset where I think just do the thing differently and
sometimes we're trying to give people a sense of agency
like sometimes we're trying to
cut through the fog and really help them to see that
hey I believe in you and I believe that you can do this differently
I believe you have choice here and you're not powerless
and that can be really useful and it can work
but it can also fail to work
and sometimes it can even make things worse
by reinforcing a story of shame
because a person may already know what they should do
like they may already
know what the better communication skill is
or they may already
know that what they're doing or the pattern
they're participating in isn't working
and maybe they've read the books and they've listened to the podcast
maybe they've journaled about it
but when the moment comes the body still
does what it's practiced for years
and so if we only say choose differently
we might be skipping over the actual work
because the work is not always about
knowing the better choice
sometimes the work is about becoming capable
of experiencing a choice
while you're activated and that's very different
it's one thing to know when you're calm
that you want to stay present in conflict
and then it's a whole other thing to stay present
when your chest tightens and your face gets hot
and you feel like if your partner doesn't understand
you that they're going to disconnect
and every part of you wants to defend or shut down
or explain or prove or even disappear and leave
and that is where the work really is it's not just
knowing what we value
but really about developing the capacity
to access those values under pressure
and when we can do that even a little
we tend to experience ourselves differently
so we may not know whether or not we've proven
free will but we start to feel less trapped
we feel less fused with the old reaction and
we start to feel like something in us
has a little bit more room
now the other side of the coin
and the other perspective that can happen
is that we over emphasize pattern
and we lose the ability
to acknowledge accountability and responsibility
and this is when we explain everything through trauma
attachment conditioning the nervous system
family history maybe personality or old wounds
and but then we begin to use those explanations
to avoid accountability
and so we might say well that's just my
attachment style that's just how I am
or that is just my trauma response
or that's just how I was raised
and all of that may be true
but if we're not careful true explanations
can become hiding places
because understanding where something comes from
doesn't automatically
make it acceptable to keep repeating it
and it can damage our relationships it may explain
why I become defensive
and it may give some understanding and compassion
but it does not mean that my defensiveness
has no impact so this is where we need nuance
because compassion without responsibility
does become enabling
and responsibility without compassion
becomes unhelpful blame
so a healthy relationship needs both compassion
and responsibility
we need compassion to understand that humans
continually respond to forces
that they are completely unaware of
with a brain and with a body
that they were just born with
and we need enough responsibility to then say what now
what do I do now with what I can currently see
how do I relate to this pattern
now that I know it's there
how do I stop using my history as an excuse
while also not shaming myself
for the impact of my history
how do I take responsibility for my behavior
without pretending that I could have done it differently
so that's the real question
and I think that one answer is this responsibility
does not require me to pretend
that I felt free in the past
responsibility asks me to become more honest
in the present and that is a very different thing
because when we talk about responsibility
we often subtly smuggle in this Assumption
that we should have been able to do something
different at the time we should have known better
we should have been able to stop ourselves
or calm ourselves down or be more patient
and that's just not always the reality
and sometimes we might be saying
these things because the impact was real
someone really was hurt trust was damaged
the same pattern
continued and maybe a conversation went badly
and we're noticing that over time
there's an impact with this behavior
so I'm not trying to soften the impact
but I do think there is a difference between
impact and blame
so impact says this matters and blame says
this proves something about you
impact says this affected me and blame says
you should have been able to do this differently
impact keeps us in contact with reality
while blame often pushes us into our shame
or defensiveness
and responsibility has to be more skillful than blame
it's less about proving
that I could have done something differently
then or you could have done something differently then
and it's more about asking
OK now that I can see this more clearly
what does this seeing ask of me
because once I can see something
I now have a different relationship with it
once I can see that I get defensive
when I feel criticized I may not be able to change it
instantly but I'm no longer in the exact
same relationship with the defensiveness
once I can see that I get defensive
when I feel criticized
I may not be able to change it instantly
but I'm no longer in the exact same relationship
with the defensiveness
and this is where responsibility begins
not with total freedom not with a perfect choice
not with the fantasy that if you're self aware
enough you can simply override the pattern
but with a new relationship to what you can now see
so I wanna come back to the original question I'm gonna read it one more time
my partner and I keep having the same fight
over and over I know I get defensive
and I know it makes things worse
but in the moment it feels like I can't stop myself
my partner says I'm choosing to be defensive
and if I cared I would just listen
and it's confusing because I do care
and I don't want to keep reacting this way
but when I feel criticized something
in me just takes over and I feel like I have to
protect myself then afterward
I feel ashamed and wonder why I couldn't just respond
differently
what do I do when I feel like I don't have a choice
about how I'm responding
so first of all you do not have to pretend
that defensiveness felt like a free choice
in that moment in order to take responsibility for it
so it might mean going back to your partner
and saying something like
I've been thinking about what happens
when I get defensive
I know it hurts you and I know it makes it harder
for you to bring things to me
and I also want you to know that in that moment
it doesn't feel like I'm choosing not to listen
because I don't care it feels like I'm getting flooded
and I'm getting ashamed
and I'm not saying that to excuse it
I'm saying that because I think I need some support
to understand this pattern better and create a new
response
so that's a very different kind of apology
it doesn't say I had no
control so you shouldn't be hurt it also doesn't say
I'm terrible and everything is my fault
it says I'm trying to understand this pattern and take
responsibility for its impact
and that is so much more workable
especially if you actually do the work
to learn more and to actually create change because
being perfect and actually
always having the experience of free will is not really
reality so we need to be honest
with ourselves and other people about the patterns
that are happening we need to care about impact
and we need to repair
and really be willing to do the work
to learn and create change
when there is something that causes harm
if you know that you lose access
to certain parts of yourself in certain conditions
then responsibility
means taking those conditions seriously
if you know that you can
become cruel when you're sleep deprived responsibility
might mean
not having your most important conversations
late at night
if you know that you're prone to people pleasing
and that you say yes too quickly then responsibility
might mean literally practicing the sentence
let me think about that and I'll get back to you
maybe even when you know you do want to do something
so that under pressure you're more capable
to say something like that
and this is one of the shifts
I think many of us need after religion
is we need to move from the view that life is a test
to a developmental view of life
so a test based view asks did you make the right
choice did you choose the right thing
and a developmental view asks
what capacity was available to you in the moment
and what capacity needs to be built so
instead of obsessing
about whether things could have been different
we can ask questions
that can support a different outcome the next time
and this does not erase accountability
it really makes accountability more useful
so for the defensive person
they might need to think about it when they're calm
and take time to really notice
what happens in their body
when feedback comes toward them
so maybe taking some mindfulness or meditative moments
to practice slowing
down and maybe then talking about with their partner
what helps and what makes it worse and
learn to separate impact from indictment
because for many defensive people that's really the whole wound
their partner says this hurt me and what they hear is
I am bad or I made the wrong choice
so if they want to become less defensive
then they need to work directly
with whatever translation they're making
and they may need to practice hearing I had an impact
without turning it into I am bad
and that might take practice
you might actually need to go through it multiple times
and keep reminding yourself
that your partner's pain is not automatically
an indictment of your character
and it may even be helpful to learn that listening
is not the same as agreeing with every detail
there might be parts you agree with there might be parts you don't
there might be times where you don't agree at all
but really the only way to get to more clarity
is to learn how to listen with your partner
and if your partner wants to
support you in this process
then they may also need to learn something
not because they caused the defensiveness
or that they're responsible for managing it
but because relationships are cocreated
and the conditions matter
so maybe the partner learns to bring up concerns
for example more directly and less sarcastically
maybe they learn not to start hard conversations
right as the other person's walking out the door um
maybe they learn to give it a soft
start up something like hey I
want you to know this because I care about our relationship
and I'm wanting to resolve it
so it doesn't mean walking on eggshells
it really means becoming
more conscious of the conditions
that make repair more likely
and this is one of the most important distinctions
in relationships is that supporting someone's growth
is not the same as taking responsibility
for their pattern
you can care about how you bring something up
without becoming responsible
for whether the other person can handle it or not
and you can soften
your delivery without abandoning your truth
and you can even understand their defensiveness
without agreeing to never have needs
so you can participate
in better conditions without making
their reaction your fault
and this nuance really matters
because if we're not careful then the free
will conversation can go wrong in two directions
number one it can become harsh and it can say
you always have a choice
stop making excuses pull yourself up by your bootstraps
do this right and then the other direction
can become enabling and it can say
you are activated so you're not responsible
but real relationship work
really lives in between those two and it says
of course this pattern came from somewhere
and now what are we gonna do with it
and that's the line that I would keep coming back to
of course this pattern came from somewhere and now
what are we gonna do about it
of course defensiveness is probably protecting shame
and now how can you work with defensiveness
so that your partner is not left alone with their pain
and how can you face your own shame
and do whatever work you need to do there
that is responsibility without pretending
we do not have to pretend
that the pattern was easy to interrupt
or that we felt calm and free
or that our history didn't shape us
but we also don't have to pretend
that the impact isn't real or that it doesn't matter
and this is the balance
and this balance becomes easier
when we stop thinking about responsibility
as self condemnation many people think self hatred
or self shame is responsibility
and they think that if they punish themselves enough
it somehow proves that they understand the harm
but shame often keeps us self focused
instead of really turning
toward the other person's experience we collapse into
I am terrible I always do this
I ruin everything I'm never gonna change
and then the other person may end up
having to focus solely on taking care of us
even though they were the one that had
a concern or an impact that they wanted to share
so that's really not responsibility
and there can be a part of this in terms of the dance
sometimes we have to go back and forth and attend to
the concern
someone is bringing up and the shame that someone feels
and you can move that back and forth
but the problem can be when shame
starts to take the center stage
and responsibility goes quiet
so maybe loving without dogma means this
we stop pretending
people are totally free in every moment
and we stop pretending that people have no
responsibility for the impact if you're looking at
diving into higher levels of relationship development
I do offer private coaching for individuals
and then my husband and I together
offer private coaching for couples
I also offer a self paced
online relationship mastery course
so to get info on any of those options
go to www.jennymorrow.com to learn more
and share this episode with anyone who could benefit
be sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode
take care and I'll see you next time
