Turtle in the Hailstorm

Rarely do I take psychological theory and apply it to life and philosophical inquiry, but every once in a while I will be surprised by something that has actual application and isn’t just jargonized filler.

One such instance was the explanation given by Harville Hendrix on the progression of relationship communication. I won’t go through the whole thing here, but one point in particular really made me stop and think. He says that all relationship struggles (friendship or romantic) will undoubtedly turn on person into the Hailstorm, and the other into a Turtle.

The turtle turns inward in a fight. They will withhold their emotions, hide, and avoid the fight if possible. They are the ones who will try and keep the fight outside of themselves, and as he said, will go to bed in the middle of a fight and sleep just fine.

The hailstorm is the opposite. Rather than hide their feelings they start expressing more of them. Sometimes this turns to anger, but often times can simply be an excess of the normal things they are already feeling.

He mentions that both of these tactics are based in an instinctual fear, and that people do this all the time without realizing it.

He says that there is a lot of variation with people. Some people will switch back and forth (sometimes even in the same fight) while others will more often than not fall into one or the other. With friends, I can see where sometimes I am the turtle, but looking over my relationships, I have ALWAYS been a hailstorm in troubled times, and without fail, their inner turtle appears.

It isn’t always fun to realize when you do something instinctually that is for all intents and purposes "the wrong thing to do." In my case, I would try and "wash away" whatever the problems my guy would have, either with logic or my own emotion. The problem of course being that all I did was scare them more, making them turtle more, all the while their turtling scared me more and made me work harder. Talk about a cyclical recipe for disaster.

To hear that this is a natural response doesn’t actually make me feel better, but it is nice that when I see it laid out that I can recognize myself in this and lead towards more growth as a person. Now the trick will be to figure out how to respond to this situation without falling into my own trap while helping them come out of theirs. :)