3 Skills You Need to Have a Happy Relationship

"Most of the relationship advice we get these days, online and offline, coalesces around two main relationship skills: visibility and vocabulary. So, we decode our attachment styles, learn to label our needs, communicate clearly with our partner, and establish requisite boundaries. And while such advice is important, it's just as pertinent to acknowledge that it may no longer be sufficient."

"Of course, the message here isn't that people have gotten worse at working on their relationships. Rather, it's that relationships today are being called upon to support levels of emotional challenge unlike any other time in history. There are unprecedented variants of stressors, unregulated technology integration, financial instability, communal sorrow and rapid life change all flooding our relationships simultaneously. These combined stressors, in all probability, have disrupted how our nervous systems interact in relational proximity."

"When chronically stressed, the brain does not function neutrally. As decades of research underscores, high levels of stress hormones rapidly shift neural functioning away from the prefrontal cortex (the area responsible for impulse control, empathetic attunement and perspective-taking) and toward the amygdala and habit-based systems preferential to threat detection and survival. In that state, the mind is more rigid, more reactive and more stubborn."

Most relationship advice centers on visibility and vocabulary: decoding attachment styles, labeling needs, communicating clearly and setting boundaries. Those skills remain important but are increasingly insufficient as relationships face unprecedented stressors. Unregulated technology, financial instability, communal sorrow and rapid life change flood relationships and push couples beyond capacity. Such combined stress disrupt how nervous systems operate in relational proximity. Chronic stress redirects neural functioning away from prefrontal processes for impulse control, empathy and perspective-taking toward amygdala- and habit-based threat systems. In that state partners become more rigid, reactive and stubborn, requiring emotional acumen to apply insight usefully rather than only insight itself.

Read at Psychology Today