In Praise of Naps (and other couples therapy verites)

I have frequently said that a turning point in my marriage came when my on-the-go wife accepted my naps.  For the first couple of years my afternoon fade into crankiness bucked up against her “How can you waste perfectly good day time,” plea.  Eventually, to the blessed relief of my amygdala and the balance of life in the cosmos, weekend naps were accorded their rightful place in our home.  I came across another confirmation in Slate today – an article which describes how lack of sleep contributes to heightened couple conflict.

Fatigue isn’t the only other stressor that may tax a couple.  I have worked with couples who have no time with each other and haven’t since their first of three children came along or who have suffered with financial setbacks that have necessitated pulling back on a previously comfortable lifestyle or who have opened their home to one’s parents.  While the heart of Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy is the exploration and calming of attachment-related anxieties and wounds inflicted in the whipsaw-like cycle which grabs the couple, we can never ignore the presence of stressors which attack and challenge connection we all hope to maintain in our relationships.  Many years ago, Holmes and Rahe engaged in a study which attempted to identify and rate the intensity of various life stressors.  A review of these events is an excellent summary of the kinds of external “psycho-social stressors” which can put pressure on a relationship and result in conflict over repeated issues – which may just be seen as symptomatic of the stress as much as (or more than) anything else.  These include: trouble with the law, bankruptcy, illness, trouble with in-laws, beginning or ending a job, a child leaving home (or hitting adolescence), change in residence, change in work situation and loss of a close friend, among others.  This is why, in any assessment of intimate stress, we must always ask, “What is happening now in your lives?  Has anything changed recently?”

Therapy Metaphors from Movies

In Emotionally Focused Therapy, we speak of a cycle which captures the couple in distress.  Often there will be a partner caught in the cycle who will experience deep, visceral anxiety over being left alone.  That feeling of utter isolation has brought to my mind an iconic scene from Kubrick’s classic 2001 – A Space Odyssey.  Frank, one of the two astronauts on the craft which is run by the malevolent computer, HAL, is performing repairs outside.  HAL manages to cut Frank’s life-line and we see this desperate figure floating out into nothingness.  The spot we see on the right is Frank, struggling for air….unmoored……lost.  This is the image that strikes me when I hear of the desperation of the partner who feels emotionally abandoned in the relationship.  She (not always, but often she) will struggle against this panic.  It is Frank’s panic as he disappears into a vacuum.

So often, when one partner experiences the panic of isolation in the void the response will be heightened protest – a very intense effort to achieve some connection….some oxygen.  This may be experienced by the other partner as attack.  His (not always, but often his) experience brings to mind the opening scene from Saving Private Ryan.  The thousands of landing craft approaching the beach.  Reinforced steel doors shield the soldiers from any assaults.  Then, with a spin of a locking-wheel, the door swings down to create a ramp for the the soldiers to disembark.  However, many of these men are decimated by machine gun fire before they can move a muscle.  It is a violent assault and you want to swing those doors back up to protect the men.  People who experience themselves to be the target of the anger and desperation  of their partners, tend to (emotionally) curl up in a self-protective ball.  Often, withdrawal to “safety” is the only conceivable step.

Thus, begins the cycle of pursuit/protest and withdrawal/protection that so many couples bring with them to couples therapy.  The task we face is to slow down this rapdily spinning cycle.  Over time, if we can slow it down, we can begin to create some safety in the couple’s interaction.  One will feel less dismissed/abandoned/despised and the other will feel less attacked/demeaned/despised.  Slowly we begin to incorporate a positive momentum in couples interactions.  We create a positive cycle.  I imagine a propellor on the Titanic.  The scene from the movie can be accessed on the web.  In a panic, the watchmen phone down to the engine room.  These people have no time to reverse the course of the great ship.  We watch the propellers slow to a stop and then reverse themselves.

The hope of the work we do, is to support couples in their passage from propellers spinning in their cycle at full speed  – slowing to a stop – then picking back up at full speed, supporting a positive cycle.

Thank you James Cameron, Steven Spielberg and Stanley Kubrick – marital theorists all!

 

It’s Always Something…..

Dan Wile, Ph.D. is a remarkably gifted – and funny – couples therapist who has written a number of fine books on the realities of joining our lives together.  Two of his classics are After the Fight and  After the Honeymoon.  Here is what Wile has to say about the inevitable differences that arise  between us in relationship:

                “Paul married Alice and Alice gets loud at parties and Paul, who is shy, hates that.  But if Paul had married Susan, he and Susan would have gotten into a fight before they even got to the party.  That’s because Paul is always late and Susan hates to be kept waiting.  She would feel taken for granted, which she is very sensitive about.  Paul would see her complaining about this as her attempt to dominate him, which he is very sensitive about.  If Paul had married Gail, they wouldn’t have even gone to the party because they would still be upset about an argument they had the day before about Paul’s not helping with the housework.  To Gail when Paul does not help she feels abandoned, which she is sensitive about, and to Paul, Gail’s complaining is an attempt at domination, which he is sensitive about.  The same is true about Alice.  If she had married Steve, she would have the opposite problem, because Steve gets drunk at parties and she would get so angry at his drinking that they would get into a fight about it.  If she had married Lou, she and Lou would have enjoyed the party but then when they got home the trouble would begin when Lou wanted sex because he always wants sex when he wants to feel closer, but sex is something Alice wants when she already feels close.”

 “…there is value, when choosing a long-term partner, in realizing that you will inevitably be choosing a particular set of unsolvable problems that you’ll be grappling with for the next ten, twenty, or fifty years.”

My Two Big Beefs – Part II

Beef No. 2 – Martial Therapists are not umpires.  Their job is not to hear each person’s complaints and to decide which one is more right than the other.  It is this belief that both clients and some couples counselors embrace that makes couples therapy the least successful therapy with the highest failure rate.  However, those trained in a specific approach to couples therapy (of which there are a handful), are remarkably more successful.  Clients enter couples counseling with both a great certainty and a great fear.  The certainty is that the problems the couple are experiencing are mostly because of their partner.  The fear is that they, themselves, will be blamed.  Blame and shame – these are the boulders on the shoulders of the individuals commencing couples therapy.  Any therapist who tries to impart to each person, “If you do a little more of this or a little less of that you will improve your relationship,” will ultimately do more harm than good.   What a shame that therapists (mostly trained in individual therapy – and often quite good at individual therapy) create an environment of blame and defensiveness that will usually result in one person feeling more identified as a problem, unheard, shamed and definitely unsafe.  This doesn’t have to be, but couples therapists have to avoid becoming overly engaged in the tangle of content.

Two Conversations

I think couples in conflict often engage in two conversations.  One is overt, constantly repeated and endlessly frustrating.  The other is almost always unsaid – and unacknowledged.  If we can get to that second conversation, we can find the peace and connection we so desperately need in our intimate relationships.  Instead, we get all tangled up in the conversation that doesn’t go anywhere. Like birds flitting back and forth above us, what we see is that which transfixes us and grabs our attention.  I have seen it over and over again in my office – the sad, ever-so-discouraging dance of the upper conversation that almost guarantees that both people will just….feel….bad and not feel heard by the other.  This conversation is always about something.  “You don’t help around the house …..I do too help.  What about last week when you were tired and I vacuumed downstairs…..Oh great, thanks a lot – am I supposed to bow down because you vacuumed once?”   “How come you aren’t even trying to go back to work to bring in some money?…..I have tried.  You just don’t know what it’s like out there….You aren’t doing nearly enough….You have no idea what I have done.”  These conversations don’t go anywhere because they aren’t’ about what’s really going on inside for each person.

The real conversation – the one that can get somewhere – is the attachment conversation.  It is about our needs that are deep and tug at our hearts.  These are also needs that can be satisfied once there is a safe way to express them.  They can be the need to feel truly cared for – or to feel competent and valued – or to know your partner is not going anywhere.  They are almost always about the need to be actually seen and still loved and accepted.  This most critical and meaningful conversation can be very difficult to have without the help of a relationship professional.  My bias (and observation) is that Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy is a wonderful platform upon which these “conversations for connection,” in Sue Johnson’s words, can occur.

He/She Said THAT??

I hear it so often in my office.  One partner or the other (usually both) will report that in the height of some nasty fight they escalated into, one of them said something so wounding that the target is still bruised.  He or she struggles with how to make sense of a world where they are supposed to be working on their relationship and at the same time things are said which couldn’t feel more destructive.  It’s heartbreaking to see the pain that good people can inflict on one another when they have escalated to the outer reaches of their own cycle.   It is an inescapable fact that when two people are reacting to each other from the raw and vulnerable places inside – and they are swept up in their cycle of fear, anger and reactivity, they can spin so fast (almost instantaneously) that both feel out of control.   It is for sure that these deeply hurtful statements aren’t made during a placid dinner conversation right after, “Please pass the peas.”  These missiles that are launched almost always occur when the cycle is spinning so fast, that the centrifugal force of both people’s emotional reactivity throws them to the extreme edge of their experience.  So, rather than mull on the thing said, it’s far more helpful to view the statements as symptomatic of a cycle that has gone from “zero to 60” in a nanosceond.  The path to healing is to begin to find ways to catch ourselves at the very beginning stages of this emotionally reactive cycle – to slow it down at the outset and step out of this tightly choreographed automatic dance.

Discernment Counseling – For Couples “On the Brink”

William Doherty is a nationally recognized authority in marital therapy who has written a host of really helpful books – my favorite being Take Back Your MarriageDoherty came to speak to the annual conference of the Washington Association of Marriage and Family Therapy on 3/3 and introduced a room full of raptly attentive marital therapists to Discernment Counseling.  “How do we deal with the couple,” Doherty asks, “where one partner is leaning into the marriage and the other is leaning out?”  To attempt conventional marital therapy in such situations is an invitation to disappointment on everyone’s part.  So Doherty has devised a powerful approach in which he works mostly separately with each partner.  The referral often comes from divorce lawyers and in situations in which the “leaning out” partner is feeling done, but is willing to at least speak to someone because some ambivalence (if even ever-so-slight) remains.  The partners agree that divorce will be off the table for six months as they work to see if reconciliation is even possible.  The benefit of this kind of work is that that therapist can have open and very candid conversations with each person about the consequences of divorce; their own role in bringing the marriage to its current state and whether each is willing to make an all out effort to see if the marriage can be brought back.  Studies have shown that of divorcing couples, fully 30% have at least one partner who is ambivalent and in 10%, both parties are.  For more information, you can check out Doherty’s Couples on the Brink website.

In the Grip of the Cycle

It’s hard to adequately describe the poignancy and pain of people who are locked into a chronic, demoralizing, soul-sapping cycle of conflict in their intimate relationships. John Gottman observed that couples enter relationship counseling, on average, after they have experienced serious problems for six years. That’s a lot of painful grinding on each other. No wonder the couples we help in couples therapy start out so painfully estranged that they are all but hopeless when they sit in our offices for the first time. And yet, I have no doubt – none – that unions that are challenged, with wrenching conflict, can be healed, set right and made stable for good. It doesn’t happen overnight and so people who engage this process need to be patient, courageous and kind to themselves. The first step, as Dr. Sue Johnson describes in her brilliant work setting out the approach of Emotionally Focused Therapy is to recognize and then get control of the cycle of conflict that is sparked automatically with distressed couples. It is amazing to be in the room with people who go from zero to 100 mph (emotionally speaking) in a millisecond. To witness this instantaneous transition is to respect forever more the power of the amygdala and emotional circuits of the brain. Time and again, I see this sad and painful drama spark in my office – one partner will say or do (or not say or do) something that will have deep attachment significance to the other and the reaction will be instantaneous and explosive. Both people are swept up into an agonizing dance. Each is reacting to the other – and reacting from a deep, frightened, exquisitely human place within. To the outside world – and to their partner – this pain is seen as anger, judgment, withdrawal, defensiveness – so many things that make it hard to reach out and provide the comfort, assurance and safety that both people hunger for at their core (especially when the connection with their partner seems shaky). The first step in good relationship therapy is de-escalation of conflict. Understanding those triggers that sweep each of us, instantaneously, into this cycle is the first step. It doesn’t happen overnight, but the relief it brings is as palpable as the heat generated by the conflict.

Reaching Out – The Power of Repair

All relationships have conflict. We will wound each other, often withtout even realizing the depth of the hurts we inflict. When our partner protests, often with anger, we recoil and defend ourselves. We think, “You’re saying I’m a bad person. You’re wrong and here’s why.” We so want to protect ourselves from the bad feelings that arise when our partner protests, that we can’t hear their own pain through their anger……and so it goes, until each of us reacts to the other’s anger or withdrawal, distancing ourselves further from the one person who can provide us safety and care. How can we slow and reverse this distancing? Many suggest that it is through the power of Repair. What is Repair? One way of thinking about it is that Repair is the word, act or touch that says, “I don’t like what’s happening to us, here. I don’t want to be hurt, angry or distant.” It can be stated in those simple words. It can also be the soft touch of concliation or gesture that moves towards the lover rather than away (helping with a task; making a cup of tea; giving a small, but thoughtful gift). It can be with humor. It can be with an admission of our part in the painful exchange. A colleague, and therapist trained in Gottman’s work suggested to me that the most powerful of John Gottman’s ideas is the power of repair. This is a useful idea in this time of gift giving.

Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy

John Gottman, Ph.D. has observed that when couples come in for their first appointment with a marital therapist, their relationship has had serious problems for, on average, six years.  I often tell couples that it is rare that two people will sit across me me and say something like, “We’re basically doing fine.  We just need some help with communication.”  Much more likely, I am sitting with two very wounded people, their feelings rubbed raw from years of conflict, pain and emotional distance.  Dr. Sue Johnson observed years ago that the intensity of the conflict – the very sense of being out of control – is tragically understandable – as each person’s deepest need for connection has been unmet.  This “attachment” need (see earlier posts) is so deep it is felt, literally, on a cellular level.  People are just so emotionally exhausted and strained when they first enter marital therapy that any therapist who blames either person, rather than compassionately trying to understand the particular wounds and needs of each is doing more harm than good.  Emotionally Focused Therapy, among many things, is like a balm to people’s psychic sores.   I am on the EFT community’s list serve and I am frequently moved by the deep care and compassion of these attachment therapists.  It is a pure and fine form of therapy.  The abiding belief of this community is that healing of even the most strained relationships can come to us if we are patient and give care rather than judgment.