Blind spots: deficits, trauma and loss.

Some of what hurts most in a relationship is not unwillingness. It is something your partner cannot do, or an old injury that surfaces without warning. This lesson helps you tell the difference, so that you stop reading inability as intent.

No brain does everything well

Most of us accept that brains differ in reading, attention or listening. Tatkin applies the same idea to love. Everyone has weak spots in social and emotional abilities, and he calls them deficits. Examples are knowing what you feel from the signals of your own body, reading a face, and using your voice to calm someone. At the far end are people who cannot recognise faces at all (prosopagnosia).

Why does this belong in a course about threat? Because a person who is poor at one of these things usually does not know it, and neither does their partner. So the miss gets read as deliberate. Or it gets mistaken for a style: it looks like island distance or wave drama when it is neither.

He asks you to take stock. Where do your real strengths with people lie, and what have you never been good at, as far back as you can remember? Do not rely on your own opinion. Ask your partner and friends you trust to be honest, because people often rate themselves highly at things they do badly.

Stress makes everyone worse

Some errors are not deficits at all. They come from stress, and they happen to everybody.

Take reading faces. Many people are good at it when calm. Once they feel threatened, Tatkin says, their rate of misreading shoots up. Memory goes the same way. Keeping events in the right order depends on the hippocampus, and he says it works poorly once you are outside the window of tolerance from lesson 5.

This explains a familiar kind of fight: who said what, and when. If both of you were worked up at the time, his view is that neither brain stored the exchange properly. You are arguing over a recording that does not exist.

He draws a clear line here. Mistakes made under stress do not count as deficits. The question about a deficit is what you can and cannot do when you are relaxed.

Two minds never match exactly

Tatkin's phrase for this is approximation of minds. Two people never think exactly alike. When things are going well you finish each other's sentences, and that pleasant feeling makes the two of you seem closer in thinking than you are.

Good feeling also makes you generous. You let small misreadings pass, in courtship above all. As distress grows, that tolerance shrinks, and every missed cue turns into a big deal. That is why weak spots matter most in the bad times, and why it pays to know them beforehand.

Work around a deficit

A deficit is not a problem in itself, Tatkin says. It becomes one when nobody knows about it, and a bigger one when it is not accepted.

His example is a couple in which she is very sociable and he is shy, anxious in company and poor at reading faces and situations. Because he says little, other people take him for judgmental or arrogant. She is embarrassed and keeps pressing him to join in. Her wish is reasonable, but it rests on a wrong idea: that he could do it and prefers not to. He cannot.

The pressure frustrates them both, makes his awkwardness worse, and makes her seem more dangerous in his eyes. Between them they amplify the very thing she wants less of.

The alternative is to stop trying to change your partner and to combine what each of you does well. Tatkin says plenty of couples in which one is brilliant socially and the other hopeless do fine. They expect nothing different from each other, and as a team they are better than either would be alone.

Eight deficits Tatkin describes

He lists eight from his own practice and says the list is not complete. One test applies to all of them: it has always been this way. Something that began last year is a different matter. None of them is a sign of low intelligence.

1. Reading cues. Trouble reading faces, voices and gestures. Some people look to the mouth, not the eyes, and miss the shifts of tone that signal a change of feeling.
2. Theory of mind. Being able to imagine yourself in someone else's position. A tell is little curiosity about oneself, and so about the partner.
3. Alexithymia. Not being able to tell what you feel or to find words for it. Often it goes back to a family in which feelings were never named.
4. Visual detail. Asked about new earrings and a new haircut, this partner can only repeat that you look beautiful. Asked to describe your eyes as a painter would, they get no further than shape and colour.
5. Memory. Some people have real trouble with short-term memory. He calls this one tricky, because poor sleep, medication, illness, low mood, anxiety or plain inattention produce the same result.
6. Affect blindness. Not seeing certain emotions on a face, mostly the fainter shades. You have to be very angry or very sad before it registers.
7. Prosody. The melody of the voice, the tone people use with a puppy or a baby. Without it a voice sounds flat and sometimes loud, and is poor at calming a partner.
8. Thin or thick boundaries. With thin boundaries you feel everyone's pain and catch their moods, which he calls affect contagion and which can make you ill. Thick boundaries do not mean a lack of empathy, only being less affected.

Hold the labels loosely

Tatkin closes the list with a warning. You may mistake some other problem for a deficit, or pin one on a partner who does not have it. And quite often, he finds, the person who complains that the other cannot read faces turns out to be the one with the difficulty. Use the list to understand, check yourself first, and do not treat it as a diagnosis.

When old trauma or loss surfaces

Tatkin mentions one more source of surprising behaviour, briefly and as an aside. Everyone has had losses, and some kind of trauma. In his account the event itself is not what leaves the lasting mark. What does is having had nobody there, soon enough, to help with the state it left you in. That is what he means by unresolved trauma or loss. Islands, waves and anchors can all carry it.

These experiences usually involved the most important people in your life, and your partner now stands in for all of them. So the partner is the one with whom the old state returns. It comes without warning for either of you, set off by a sound, a smell, a touch or a movement. He compares it to stepping on a buried mine.

His advice is to give what was missing the first time. Stay calm and do not overreact. Hold your partner and stay with them while it lasts. Do not try to fix anything. The worst responses, he says, are to panic or to pass your partner on to somebody else at that moment.

A note from us: This lesson is education, not treatment. Tatkin's advice is about how to be with your partner in the moment. Serious or recurring trauma deserves the help of a qualified professional, and staying close in the moment does not replace that.