Shadow Comforts and Sliding Doors (Post #13)

When relationships fall apart, we often hear about the big events – someone cheating, a clash over the children – and assume those were the triggers. In Daring Greatly, Brené Brown argues that the real reason relationships thrive or flounder is much less dramatic: the day-to-day decision to engage or disengage.

For most people stuffing your face with
chocolates is a "shadow comfort"

One form of disengagement is to numb emotion. Numbing behaviors include reliance on “shadow” comforts, or things we do to soothe ourselves and avoid emotions. In her book The Life Organizer, author Jennifer Louden writes “Shadow comforts take any form. It’s not what you do; it’s why you do it that makes the difference. You can eat a piece of chocolate as a holy wafer of sweetness – a real comfort – or you can cram an entire chocolate bar into your mouth without even tasting it in a frantic attempt to soothe yourself. You can chat on message boards for half an hour and be energized by community and ready to go back to work, or you can chat on message boards because you’re avoiding talking to your partner about how angry he or she made you last night.” While the occasional shadow comfort won’t destroy a relationship, regularly engaging in them can erode the foundation of trust and connection.

But it’s not enough to avoid disengagement, you must also build trust by regularly choosing to engage. For that, we introduce John Gottman’s concept of Sliding Doors. I really can’t say it better than him, so here are his words from the book The Science of Trust: Emotional Attunement for Couples:

“What I’ve found through research is that trust is built in very small moments, which I call “sliding door” moments, after the movie Sliding Doors. In any interaction there is a possibility of connecting with your partner or turning away from your partner.
Let me give you an example of that from my own relationship. One night I really wanted to finish a mystery novel. I thought I knew who the killer was, but I was anxious to find out. At one point in the night, I put the novel on my bedside and walked into the bathroom. As I passed the mirror, I saw my wife’s face in the reflection, and she looked sad, brushing her hair. There was a sliding door moment. I had a choice. I could sneak out of the bathroom and think, I don’t want to deal with her sadness tonight; I want to read my novel. But instead, because I’m a sensitive researcher of relationships, I decided to go into the bathroom. I took the brush from her hair and asked, ‘What’s the matter, baby?’ And she told me why she was sad.Now, at that moment, I was building trust; I was there for her. I was connecting with her rather than choosing to think about what I wanted. These are the moments, we’ve discovered, that build trust.”   

I’ll just close by noting that Gottman’s example, as far as I can tell, doesn’t involve a shadow comfort. He wasn’t reading the mystery novel in order to avoid his wife or other feelings. BUT he still made the decision to forego a real comfort in order to connect with his wife. It’s these day-to-day decisions to build trust – by minimizing shadow comforts and walking through the sliding doors – that result in thriving relationships.

Also see: Post #12 on the three elements of a strong relationship.

To learn more about why we are writing this series of 20 posts on social science related to relationships, read here.