Step Eleven, Part Three---Conscious Contact

In my experience, the emotional reactivity does not stop. We're not talking about getting rid of the experience of getting hooked. We're talking about when you get hooked, what do you do next?
As you're acting, you could ask, "Have I ever responded in this way before?" If the answer is, "yes, I always respond this way. This movie is a rerun," then you're acting unconsciously. You aren't even acknowledging that you're doing it again and getting the same result.
Pema Chodron, "Choosing Peace" in Shambhala Sun, November, 2007

In her article about "Choosing Peace" Pema Chodron, an American Buddhist nun, writes about how often we find ourselves wanting to "settle the score" when someone has done something that upsets us. We want them to feel what we have felt, and we believe we can do that by paying them back, by "getting even." But retaliating in this way never makes things even, it only makes things worse. Unfortunately, one of the places we are most likely to yield to our emotional reactivity is in our intimate close relationships because that is the place where we are most vulnerable and most likely to feel hurt by what the other person has said or done.

Meditation is a very useful tool for learning to be less reactive in these kinds of situations. In meditation we can observe our feelings and our reactions without acting on them in the moment. As we do so over time, we gradually learn to detach a bit from our powerful emotions and our impulse to act on them. As Pema Chodron says, it's not that we can avoid being hooked by situations, but we can create enough conscious awareness of how we are feeling and what our usual automatic reaction is to that feeling to be able to make a choice about how we're going to respond. Being able to make a choice about our behavior means that we are also in a position to think about what the consequences will be for our relationship if our choice is based on trying to settle the score, on retaliating in an attempt to get even.

Step Eleven talks about using prayer and meditation as a means of increasing our conscious contact with our Higher Power in order to be clearer about what our Higher Power's will is for us. In our relationships I believe our Higher Power wants us to develop a kind, loving and compassionate heart which is open to our partner's needs and well-being. Using meditation as a tool to become less reactive when we are angry and/or hurt in our relationship is certainly one of the ways we can use meditation as a means of carrying out God's will for us.