The Space Between Stimulus and Response

Originally posted in May 2009

Close friends and family members are typically surprised when they learn that my wife Margaret and I have had a good number of fights over the years. At first glance, both of us are generally viewed as being kind, thoughtful, and maybe even a bit shy. So jaws tend to drop when people find out that we're far from being the Cleavers.

I'm not talking about getting a smidge annoyed and being sullen for a few hours after having a disagreement; we've had fights that have included world-class hollering, slamming of doors, and Margaret hopping on a bus to flee to Toronto.

I don't hesitate to openly share some of the difficult times that we've gone through because I believe that being open and thoughtfully honest about our relationship can make it stronger, and my hope is that sharing our intermittent struggles might be helpful to others who pause to wonder if they're the only ones who struggle badly at times.

The first two years of our marriage were the toughest. Just a few days after getting married, we opened our doors to a residential fasting clinic that I put all of my savings into, and from that point on, we were responsible for caring for fasting guests close to 24/7 on top of me running an outpatient practice.

I would work with patients and clients upstairs from about 8 am to 10, sometimes 11 pm, while Margaret would do what she could behind the scenes in our basement apartment.

By the time I got downstairs at night, all I wanted to do was take a shower, get a bite to eat, pray that none of the guests would require emergency attention, and go to sleep.

Margaret, having spent most of her days by herself, would want to spend some time together when I came downstairs.

Having an immigrant's "survive first, enjoy life later" mentality, I couldn't understand how she could get upset with me for not wanting to do much else but sleep after I had spent most of the day working to do right by our patients and provide for our family.

Having just gotten married and being transplanted to a new city straight out of graduate school and the comforts of her parents' home, Margaret couldn't understand why I wanted to get married if I didn't have time to enjoy our marriage.

I thought she was spoiled, selfish, and ungrateful.

She thought I was unbalanced, arrogant, condescending, and a mama's boy who only got married to have children.

With these dynamics in place, you can imagine how getting stuck in the clinic after standard working hours on a daily basis precipitated the same basic fight over and over again.

There was no magical cure for our troubles. We didn't go from having a tension-filled marriage to being a close couple overnight, or even over a few months.

But we have made huge strides over the years, and what's helped us more than anything was mutually agreeing to embrace the following principle:

Between every stimulus and response, there's a space. Within this space, we have the capacity to choose our response.

I learned this principle many years ago from Dr. Stephen Covey's The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

The idea is to use the space between stimulus and response to work at transcending a gut response that we know will lead to trouble, and in its place, to choose a response that honours our feelings and gives the other person a chance to understand our perspective, which will hopefully lead to a resolution that both people can truly feel good about.

Before I committed myself to applying this principle to everyday matters, when Margaret would show me that she was unhappy being married to a workaholic, I would seethe inside and flippantly say something like "I wish I had waited to marry you after you worked full time for at least a couple of years so that you could understand what it takes to make a living in this world."

Believe it or not, that was my best attempt be diplomatic.

Of course, Margaret would be all over the underlying "the-problem-here-is-you" tone like white on rice and she'd tell me in no uncertain terms what she thought of my self righteous, one-sided observation of our circumstances.

As I tried to embrace that sliver of a space between her wound-creating stimuli and my wound-generating responses, I found that it became natural to empathize with her feelings. I gradually went from feeling like she was constantly complaining to feeling her genuine pain over our circumstances.

It became natural for me to better understand and appreciate the differences in our upbringings; Margaret's parents were able to provide for all of her basic needs, including tuition, room and board right through graduate school, while I had to penny-pinch my way through university and chiropractic school with next to no help from my folks, who just didn't have financial help to give.

As Margaret also worked at choosing constructive responses to my tendency to get lost in work, I think she also began to better understand my mentality.

I became more grateful for her liking me enough that she got upset when she couldn't spend lots of time with me.

And I think she became more grateful for my devotion to providing for our family doing work that I believe in.

Thankfully, we're at a point now where there's a nice balance between work time, family time, and personal time. But there are still plenty of ongoing opportunities for us to remember to use the space that exists after every stimulus that comes our way to choose responses that stand a good chance of leading to peace and closeness rather than hurt feelings.

Even after we have a contentious moment, I consider the moment itself to be a new stimulus, and I strive to respond to this new stimulus by discarding every emotion but the desire to stay genuinely close. This attitude makes it relatively easy to own anything that I've done to contribute to the struggle, and to offer a sincere apology. To the best of my recollection, every such apology has resulted in an almost immediate return to a warm and loving atmosphere in our home, which is what both of us ultimately want.

I suppose this is the question that all of should ask ourselves whenever a new stimulus comes our way - when our child, a life partner, or a close friend is feeling grumpy and is short with us on some matter, we can use the space between stimulus and response to ask ourselves what we want. If we breathe deeply and calmly within this space and we aren't too terribly wounded, our answer will almost always be that we want everyone to be healthy and at peace. With this thought fresh in our minds, it should be natural to respond in a way that promotes harmony.

My experience has been that the more I consciously choose responses out of this mindset, the more compassion comes my way when life has me down for a few hours or more. And when I can see Margaret and others mindfully choosing to support and encourage me when I'm not at my best, I'm inspired to pick myself up and do the same for them.

This mindset of cherishing the space between stimulus and response can lead to all sorts of uplifting moments as we go about our daily lives. For example, when another driver is careless and almost hits us on the road, if we're in the zone of choosing peaceful responses, we're likely to give a friendly wave to indicate that we've all done the same thing before, which is just about guaranteed to lead to the other driver being kind to the next person that he or she is around. On the other hand, if we react with anger, we're likely to bring that person down and have both him and us give off more bad energy that day and perhaps beyond.

Between every stimulus and response, there's a space. Within this space, we have the capacity to choose our response.

May we all strive to choose peaceful responses.