While Angie was not causing Richard to resist and Richard was not causing Angie to get angry and judgmental, they were each reacting to other’s learned protections with their own learned protections. Either one could shift system by learning to take care of themselves when their fears of rejection and engulfment surfaced.

For example, Angie can practice tuning into her feelings of rejection and reassuring herself that Richard’s behavior is coming from his fear of engulfment and is not a personal rejection of her. She can practice moving into compassion for herself and Richard, rather than going immediately into judgment.

Richard can practice speaking his truth and standing up for himself when Angie is angry and blaming, rather than going into automatic resistance. He can let Angie know that he is not available to being treated this way, and at same time stay open to caring about her feelings and understanding that his resistant behavior is painful to her.

While power struggle is showing up in sexual arena, it is actually taking place in whole relationship. Often sexual relationship is a barometer of what is happening in rest of relationship. With Angie and Richard, control and resistant behavior is most apparent in their sexual relationship. Sexuality is a vulnerable area, and it is easy to feel rejected in sexual arena. Because of this vulnerability, it is in this area that Angie is most controlling. It is in this arena where she feels most rejected when Richard is not fully present or prematurely ejaculates. Richard, on other hand, is most frightened of being controlled in sexual arena. Being told what to do and how he should perform sets off all his fears of engulfment. The anxiety he feels over performance as well as anger over Angie’s attempts to control him combine to make him too tense to be fully present. Without being present with his love for Angie, his body resists lovemaking.

Instead of working on sex, Angie and Richard are each working on their individual participation in control-resist system. Each are practicing staying open to honesty and caring and personal responsibility for their own feelings rather than just controlling and resisting control. As a result, their sex life is slowly improving.

This role modeling exists in form of our spiritual Guidance. Tapping into this Guidance is not as hard as you may think - it just takes practice and a deep desire to move out of fight or flight and into loving action.

The steps we can take to move out of automatic fight or flight and into loving actions are:

1. Start to attend to your feelings, physical sensations within your body that let you know when you are anxious or afraid.

2. Stop and breathe when you feel fear or anxiety in face of conflict, or in face of another’s fight or flight behavior. Give yourself some breathing time to make a conscious decision rather than go on automatic pilot.

3. Open to learning with source of spiritual Guidance that is always here for all of us by asking with a sincere desire to know, “What is loving action? What is in my highest good and highest good of other?” Asking this question with a deep desire to learn opens door to receiving information. It does not matter whether you are asking this of your own highest self within, or from an external source of wisdom. The information will come in form of words, pictures, or feelings when you sincerely want to be loving to yourself and others.

4. Take action on information you receive.

Examples of loving action are:

1. Move into compassion for other person, recognizing that he or she would not be in fight or flight without being in fear. Asking other person, again from a deep desire to learn, what he or she is afraid of that is causing this behavior may de-escalate situation and lead to understanding and healing.

2. If other person is not open to calm discussion and exploration of conflict, disengage from interaction, speaking your truth without anger or blame. For example, you might say, “I don’t want to fight with you. I’m going to take a walk and let’s try to talk about it later.” Or, “This isn’t feeling good between us. Let’s take a break and get together later.”

3. If other person has withdrawn from you, loving action may be to do something fun or nurturing for yourself.

Both staying and learning together or taking some time apart to reflect on issues or self-nurture will break cycle of each person going into fight or flight in reaction to other person’s fight or flight. It takes conscious practice to stop going into automatic behavior, but payoff is well worth time it takes to practice loving action.