The Anatomy of a Breakdown

The challenge with breakdowns is often that they arrive unexpectedly, and at full volume, loaded with emotional baggage, which makes it hard to dial back. I’ll get to the way to manage a breakdown later, but for now lets talk about the genesis of a breakdown.

The most common way for a breakdown to develop occurs when one partner had expectations of the other that go unmet. There is a corollary of the equation that amplifies the upset when the original expectation was unspoken, meaning that the person was expecting something their partner did not know about. Obviously, the upset there falls to the partner who is unfairly maligned. Let me say categorically that it is unreasonable to have expectations for behavior that are not agreed to.

Another common cause of a breakdown occurs when trust is broken. Trust can be broken in ways big and small. Small might be something like, you agreed to pick up dinner, and didn’t which leaves your partner mad and hungry or as I like to say, hangry. That is a little break in trust. If it does not amount to much of a breakdown, and its not dealt with immediately, the upset will linger and on a gradient, your partner will accumulate a lot of these little breaks in trust as emotional baggage. Then one day, when you least expect it, they will unload on you with a laundry list of broken promises, and other failures of your character.

Its that accumulation of emotional baggage that is the real culprit in breakdowns. We like to use the word “space”. When your partner lets you down, and you do not deal with it, then you will find that you accumulate space between you and your partner. The longer it goes on, and the bigger the space, the more likely it is that contempt will set in. According to relationship experts, contempt is considered the most significant predictor of relationship breakdown and is often seen as a major factor in breaking up couples; it is often described as the “silent relationship killer” due to its destructive nature when present in a partnership. 

The real objective in sharing this information is to encourage you to deal with the little breaks in trust so that you are not facing a scenario where contempt can rear it’s ugly head.

One of the unspoken aspects of breakdowns is that very often, they occur because one partner made some assumptions about the behavior of the other. We are meaning making machines and we make up shit all the time. Then we operate like the shit we made up is the truth, and we come at our partner with both guns blazing, meanwhile, they have no idea what is going on!

If you are wondering about space in your relationship, try this to measure the impact. Do you find that you look forward to sharing space with your partner? In other words, take the measure of your affinity for your partner. In the event you find that your affinity is declining or lower than usual, then its time to have a conversation about space. ‘

Petra nd I have made an agreement that we will not allow space to occur between us. This means that either one of us will ask the other, “If everything is ok?” about this or that. It’s a way of checking in and making sure that space does not occur.

Now, as to how to deal with a breakdown, that is for another post. Stay tuned!