Dating, Marriage and Divorce Conversations (DMD)
Embracing Our Humanity: Navigating Emotional Cutoff and Self-Differentiation in Relationships
Do you ever find yourself resorting to emotional cutoff in relationships? Curious about what's truly driving this behavior? This thought-provoking episode dives into the complex subject of emotional cutoff, enmeshment, self-differentiation, and their impact on our ability to recognize and appreciate our own value, as well as the value of others. We share insights on why people rely on emotional cutoff, the motivations behind it, and whether it's a healthy reaction, while also discussing the importance of acknowledging our inherent worth and ensuring our actions align with it.
Through examining emotional cutoff as a subconscious need to confirm someone's importance in our lives, we explore the unintended numbing effect it can have, rather than fostering a healing connection. Join us as we discuss the value of self-differentiation through compassionate inquiry and the power of holding space for those we struggle with, even if we have to accept something we don't want to. Discover the potential of acceptance to help us better understand our actions and move beyond the numbness of emotional cutoff, freeing ourselves from what holds us back and embracing our full humanity.
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Do you ever find yourself resorting to emotional cutoff in relationships? Curious about what's truly driving this behavior? This thought-provoking episode dives into the complex subject of emotional cutoff, enmeshment, self-differentiation, and their impact on our ability to recognize and appreciate our own value, as well as the value of others. We share insights on why people rely on emotional cutoff, the motivations behind it, and whether it's a healthy reaction, while also discussing the importance of acknowledging our inherent worth and ensuring our actions align with it.
Through examining emotional cutoff as a subconscious need to confirm someone's importance in our lives, we explore the unintended numbing effect it can have, rather than fostering a healing connection. Join us as we discuss the value of self-differentiation through compassionate inquiry and the power of holding space for those we struggle with, even if we have to accept something we don't want to. Discover the potential of acceptance to help us better understand our actions and move beyond the numbness of emotional cutoff, freeing ourselves from what holds us back and embracing our full humanity.
Start for FREE
Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.
Hello and welcome to Dating, marriage and Divorce Conversations where we analyze, navigate and troubleshoot all stages of your romantic life. I'm your host, igor Meistelman, a divorce attorney turned relationship coach. Hello everybody and welcome back to the show. This episode is inspired by an incredible session I had with a couple recently, and the topic that came up was the topic of emotional cutoff. Now, what does that mean? I understand. If I physically cut something off, or I cut someone off, whether I do it in a car or whether I do it emotionally, by disconnecting from them, i could move across the country, i could block their phone number. I guess you can call that a cutoff.
Igor:I want to talk about a much deeper concept and try to really go to a root heart of what it means to do a cutoff, and is it a healthy thing? Is it an unhealthy thing? Is it indicative of something deeper that we need to understand? Why do people do such things as cutoff, and do we even recognize when we do them? Do we realize that when we are, for example, exiting, such as going on our phone, on technology, such as giving silent treatment I talked recently about the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse from John Gottman's materials what is exactly happening inside of us that causes us, that brings us to a place of a cutoff? What is motivating this behavior? What is it that we're trying to achieve and accomplish by attempting a cutoff, and is there a better way? Should we be doing something else other than cold turkey, disconnect, bye, bye, see you later. You will never hear from me again. No, will I hear from you. Is there a better way? Well, in order to answer that question, we definitely need to go to the root, the heart of a human experience, as always, as I always like to do, because the more we can understand that on that granular level, the more we can appreciate and understand what is appropriate to do right now. Is the appropriate thing a cutoff, in fact? Is there an alternative version? Is there some other approach as to what I should be doing right now other than a cutoff?
Igor:So let's begin with the following concept and it's a concept that I bring up repeatedly, and so it must come up again as the ubiquitous, always present aspect of a relational world, and that concept is, of course, enmeshment and self-differentiation. And, of course, for those of us who are not deeply familiar with this concept, enmeshment and self-differentiation are two signees, twins that seem to never be able to separate, and they almost serve as one indicating existence or lack of existence of the other. If I'm enmeshed, what that means in world of relationship work is that I've struggled with maintaining my independent existence. I struggle recognizing, valuing, believing and cherishing who I am, what I am and what I bring to the table. When it comes to being a relational creature, enmeshment is a good indicator that I am not in a very clear place as to who I am, what I am, and therefore I need in some way to attach myself to you, and then, through you, i will experience some sense of value, of self-worth. Only through you can I experience this, and without you, i feel something is lacking, I feel something is missing, and so I will do everything possible to hold on to you, because through you and through connection to you is how I validate my existence, is how I experience value of myself, and that's why people who are enmesh will use sentences like you make me feel amazing, and she makes me feel special, and he makes me feel valued.
Igor:What about you? do you have any value of your own? That becomes all of a sudden a much more difficult question to answer. What appreciations do you have for yourself? That's a very uncomfortable question, but if somebody is appreciating me that I could spot miles away, can I appreciate myself Much harder? conversation, and so on and so forth. And so the goal is to help us make our way away from that type of a measurement and always have a starting point of I have a fundamental value, i have a certain importance in my existence. I am Salam ala Kim. I'm made in God's image and therefore there is something inextricably valuable to me. So if someone says something mean, rude, hurtful, i don't have to be defined by their world. I don't have to be defined by their words. Not only that, i can even operate from a place of recognition, wonderment, curiosity. What must be going on in their world that causes them or gives them the need to express this way, that they have no other way to express other than this? And so a person who is enmeshed with someone else.
Igor:Take, for instance, a relationship of a parent and a child. If the relationship did not develop in a healthy way and there wasn't built on what we call a secured attachment, where parent honored their child, celebrated their child and even when the child needed to be disciplined, it was never at the cost of child's intrinsic inherent value. You are special, you are very dear to us and we love you unconditionally. But what happened is not okay, and so now there's consequences for your actions, but not in any way does it compromise, jeopardize your value as a human being. Who you are is important, no matter what we value, no matter what Happens to be that. There are consequences for our actions, because that is part of living in an adult world, in a world based on rules and consequences. But who you are is valuable, no matter what and when. That value is imparted and the child grows up and becomes an adult who is comfortable experimenting, who is comfortable taking risk, engaging relationships, not feeling anxiety or worry about the future.
Igor:Why is that? Because that human being it always could find their home in the following environment I do matter, i am someone, i am important and when I make mistakes I am loved, no matter what. God loves me, my parents love me, my friends love me, i love myself, i see value in who I am and my mistakes are just an opportunity to grow and to become more Well. What happens if I didn't grow up with secure attachment? What if I was judged, criticized, or what if I simply wasn't seen. So you can guess now what would be the total reverse of everything just described.
Igor:Now I'm anxious. Now I'm always worried Will others love me? Will others like me? Will I win respect from others? What if I do one action and I will be judged for it? That will be a confirmation I am bad, i am incapable, i am not deserving, i'm not worthy. All of this stuff usually will flow out of that type of upbringing or interactions in my social settings or in my classroom environments. Maybe there were teachers or classmates that bullied me, and in any of these combinations I experienced something that left me feeling and left me believing I'm not deserving, i'm not worthwhile and therefore I better be very careful.
Igor:Now I have to be always on alert, and so now I live with anxiety. I'm always worried, and anxiety long enough could become depression. And now I experience all these things that cause me to be dysregulated and panic and worry about my performance, especially performance in public, and especially my performance in my relational existence. How will I be viewed, will I be cherished, will I be valued? How will others see me? and then becomes an endless obsession of will I meet their expectations, will I meet others' standards Instead of me setting my own standards, defining them very well and living only within those parameters, of course, subject to healthy boundaries where something or someone or ideas or beliefs can enter that I can think about, analyze and process, but I don't have to obsess over them, i don't have to let them take my world captive, i don't have to be captured by others' beliefs and allow my world to be held by captive by those beliefs, and instead I could live a life where I see myself and I see you and your world can exist and my world can exist.
Igor:And this now very nicely segues us into discussion about cutoff. What is a cutoff? Cutoff essentially happens when I am so matched with you and your world signals to me that something is taking a place and in that reality, either you can exist or I can exist, but we cannot exist simultaneously and therefore there's only one way to survive under that perception, belief or emotional experience I have to cut you off. So let's take, for instance, if I experienced a relationship with one of my parents that was deeply toxic, deeply hurtful, painful, and now I'm an adult and all I keep saying to myself is I can't believe this happened to me and I can't believe the way I was treated was allowed. I can't believe God allowed this. I can't believe the universe allowed this. I will find somebody to blame for why what happened took place and why I'm now essentially damaged goods.
Igor:And so what do I do in order to survive this deeply painful reality? There's only one thing I can do I cut you off for my life. I erase your number from my phone number. I block your number. I tell all my friends and relatives how I will never speak to you again and I remind everybody that I don't want to deal with you and that if you ever reach out to me, good luck getting hold of me. I will never answer your phone calls or your emails or text messages. I will ghost you. Why must I do all this? and here's the irony Why am I cutting you off? It might seem like healthy. Move right, make some separation from that toxic person. Now I want to be very clear about something.
Igor:Here's important caveat If somebody is being physically, emotionally, psychologically abusive, manipulative, and you need to create physical distance from that person, that is absolutely the right thing to do. There has to be room to disengage. There has to be safe space that I could retreat into and move away and create space between you and me so that I don't have to be experiencing victimization, i don't have to feel that I'm your captive and you get to do with me whatever you want and you can mistreat me or abuse me whenever you want. It's perfectly okay to create physical distance. However, we're not talking about physical cut-off, where I physically distance myself. We're talking about emotional cut-off. What is going on in my inner world And what goes on in that world is going to be very indicative and very helpful to give us some guiding posts.
Igor:Where should my journey continue? if I am one of those people, if I find myself committing an emotional cut-off of someone else in my life, why am I doing this? What is driving the behavior? Because the irony will be is that the more I am cut-off, the more I am enmeshed with that person. And that's the great paradox. Because let's think about this, let's unpack that statement. Why would my cut-off be indication of enmeshment? Wouldn't it be an indication of my independence? No, it's not, because true independence, in terms of being relational, is when I could finally see you and accept that you are also going through a journey, accept that you are going through something and you have your own history. You have your own journey that brought you to where it brought you, and so when my parent wasn't able to give me, for instance, the emotional love that I needed or recognition that I craved so badly, it's not because they were waking up in the morning and saying to themselves gosh, how do I ruin my child today. What would be a good way to cause permanent damage, to afflict my child?
Igor:Now, if a person did live with that, i first want to say how sad and sorry I feel for that person. It is truly a sad experience, and that person will need to go through a certain amount of therapy and processing and a real, real, deep journey to be able to free themselves from an evil that maybe took place, that befallen in their life. But that's not what we're talking about here. What I'm discussing now is parents who woke up and literally did their best, even when they messed up and they hurt us and they did damage to us, but it was never intentional damage. They simply did the best they could with the tools that they had available to them. So how do I relate to a parent like that? I still feel hurt. Are you telling me. I should just forgive them. I should try to turn off that memory. Should I delete in some way? No, exact opposite. I should walk closer to that memory and as I come closer to that memory, i should also come closer to realization that the person who was interacting with us was a human being who was doing the best they could with the tools available to them.
Igor:And so when I attempt to cut them off, what I'm actually cementing in my world is their permanent place in my world. You see, we could cut off, but cut off is just a fancy phrase for having a numbing effect. All I did was put a massive bandaid with no vacane on it and I numbed the wound, but I did no healing. I did no freeing, no liberating, no unburdening of that wound. All I did was numb it. And by numbing that wound, all I do is I actually affirm and confirm in my subconscious And for those who it's a really severe for in subconscious or unconscious part of ourselves we're cementing actually how important this person is in our lives and that I simply cannot separate myself from that person. And so all I could do is attempt a cut off. But that cut off is a statement of affirmation, confirmation that this person is so important to my life that the only thing I could do is attempt to cut them off. And so by doing a cut off, by sort of saying you don't exist anymore, i will not answer your phone calls anymore, i am actually cementing in my mind how important they are, because, think about it, if I had to take on such a radical step, if this is what I needed to resort to, i am making statement to myself how critically important they are. After all, how do we part ways with people we don't think, who are not so important? you know what we do We just stop thinking about them. But when I have to take a crucial step, such as move across state lines, i have to cut you out of my phone number. I have to keep telling everybody or mentioning to other people just how much you're not important to me and I will never speak to you again. And here, look, i deleted their number and I blog them. All of these steps are actually votes for just how much this person is still very significant to me and I cannot live without them. And so I have to resort to these drastic steps because I have not been able to figure out any other way to create a healthy differentiation between them and myself.
Igor:So what would a journey begin to look like? Well, the first step would be self-differentiation. I could start to practice to recognize their independent existence. How do I do that? Through compassion. Compassion is the very thing we need to get this job done. I can stop and, instead of speaking from place of judgment and from place of criticism, i can speak from a place of compassionate inquiry.
Igor:Why was my parent like this? Why is my spouse like this? Why was my former best friend showing up this way? Why is that? all they could think of as a way to relate to me was to hurt me, was to punish me, was to take revenge against me. Perhaps they're living with something in their own life that's causing them so much pain and such a limited ability of maintaining presence that all they could think of is to be hurtful. They cannot think of any other way to show up for me, because, if they could, they would, and so I could now, from that place of curiosity, allow for them to take on shape, form, life of existence. Now they could begin to exist for me, and I could even begin to ask questions like why did you do those things? What is it that you needed? What question I love asking is how did it serve you? What did you achieve by doing that? What did it give you or offer you? by me needing to experience you this way, what did you need to see out of me? that you wanted to maintain a certain dance, a certain form of interaction between us, and you felt that the only way you could preserve this dance is by showing up in these painful, hurtful ways. How did this serve you? And here's the cool part When we take the time to really truly practice seeing that other person's humanity, their fragile state of existence, as they were, we're actually subconsciously allowing our own world to exist as well.
Igor:And so what is one very powerful way to soothe and comfort our own world? You know what that is? By internally, secretly, away from everybody's eye, holding space for the other person, especially a person who we struggle with. Person we struggle. Holding space for Person we struggle, honoring, recognizing, allowing to exist in their own pain, in their own struggle. Somehow we need them to also remain in a place where they are demonized, where they're belittled in our own eyes, where we see them with a very myopic vision, only in some narrow sense can they exist.
Igor:You can only be an evil door. You can only be my abuser. You can only exist as the one who mistreated me. There could be no other quality in you. I cannot allow room for your humanity. And if I ask myself, why is that? Because if I allow you to be human, if I allow you to have your imperfections, what will that then signify? What will that leave me with? If I have to allow you to exist?
Igor:And very often what people will discover when they think about these types of deeply, almost existential questions is they'll discover then I have to now accept. Maybe something happened to me that I don't want to come to terms with, maybe the pain I felt until now from the way you treated me. I never wanted the surface, and so in order for me to truly allow you to be human, for you to exist, i now have to hold space for my own humanity, of my own feelings. What happened, of what it was like for me around, what happened? and I don't want to go there. I don't want to be vulnerable that way. But guess what if we don't go there? You know what we do We leave it in the subconscious, but it lives through us, it interacts through us, it talks back to our relationships through us, and we are wondering sometimes why am I having these intense reactions to you?
Igor:Why is it that when I'm interacting with my spouse, i get triggered so easily in the following situations? Why is it that when these things happen, like I just see the pattern, x happens, i go to Y and I immediately have these types of responses? Why is this happening? Well, a big reason it's happening is precisely because I have refused or I have failed to acknowledge or notice that there's some deeply unresolved part of me that's still comes online and instead of me resolving it and bringing it from the subconscious into conscious and then be able to do something about it and what we call unburdening myself from whatever it is that I'm holding and carrying around with me, instead of doing this unburdening, instead, what I choose to do is I continue to energize its strength.
Igor:By doing what? By saying this person won't exist for me anymore. Oh yeah, this person hurt me. Done with them. They don't exist anymore. I won't acknowledge them, i won't say hello, i won't say goodbye, you don't exist. Once more problem.
Igor:Every time I say that, every time I encounter that conscious thought, i actually give another vote for just how much you exist, and it's really only the road through radical forgiveness, absolute forgiveness and acceptance.
Igor:I want to fully accept you and I could begin by simply saying to myself why do you do what you do?
Igor:Because this is who you are.
Igor:You couldn't be anything else.
Igor:This is what you knew, and you served the world and me and yourself through the tools that you had, and these are the only tools you had.
Igor:This is all you knew.
Igor:You had nothing else and your disposal, and so you did what you know best, which is you showed up in the ways you could, and I want to now honor that and recognize it and allow room for it to exist as it is, because if you could have done better, you would have, and because you didn't, that is the proof that you couldn't have done more, and now all I could do is practice accepting you in your humanity, accepting you as who you are.
Igor:And that's why that emotional cut-off is a weapon of choice for overwhelming percent of people, because in some ways, it's much easier to settle for the present numbness than for the opportunity to go to a very vulnerable place, feel a lot of emotion, but then to unburden and free ourselves from those things and maybe, just maybe, return with a deep embrace to those people who we had to cut off in order for us to exist. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. Thank you for joining us today. For questions, comments, topics you'd like to hear more about, or to try our 24 week relationship challenge, email us at relationship reimagined at gmail.
