Beyond the particular focus of this or that session, the couples sessions are a special time for the couple to actually spend connecting time together… something that is actually rare in many marriages. Many couples are so taken up with the business of family life, they actually spend very little personal time together. It is not uncommon for a couple to have quite positive family time together, but almost no significant personal time. Sometimes this is all that a session is…a time to spend hanging out in a personal way…and this is not a small thing. Of course, the therapist task is to help create an atmosphere of safety that will enable a struggling couple to appreciate these moments with each other, and take them in. This is very helpful background work for the actual process of working through the negative cycles in the marriage. It is easier for the therapeutic work to take hold if couple has some feeling of liking each other. 

The goal of Emotion Focused Therapy, whether for couples or individuals, is to grow the capacity for “secure attachment.” In large part, the accomplishment of this goal depends upon the acquisition of “object permanence.” Object permanence is the ability of a child to know that an object continues to exist despite being out of sight. The parallel in emotional development is to internally experience that one is loved in a relationship even when the evidence of love is not right before you. When emotional object permanence is uncertain it is difficult to sustain secure attachment. In these situations fears of abandonment and difficulties in emotional regulation are common. The expression of these struggles can be both overt or covert. In the case of pursuers the expressions of overt distress are commonly evident on the surface as emotional escalation. In the case of avoiders the expressions are covert and hidden, commonly expressed as withdrawal or inhibition of attachment reaching. How does one grow the capacity for object permanence or secure attachment where it has been missing?

The growth of attachment security is a natural by-product of the eft process. More specifically, it follows from the  work of the eft tango. The eft tango begins with unpacking instances of the negative cycle in the marriage. In a highly granular way, we reconstruct the steps of the conflict… “he said this, you said that, and in turn they reacted in this way, and in turn you reacted in that way, etc”. We then inquire depth-fully into these moments of reactivity. We look to discern the underlying emotions from the reactive emotions. To separate out the surface fight from the vulnerable feelings underneath. We begin to clarify how the reactive behaviors on the surface are understandable defensive attempts to protect from imagined vulnerable injury underneath. This process drops the interaction from the fight-flight reactive behaviors on the surface down to the true vulnerable feelings underneath. Communication from underlying “vulnerable feeling to vulnerable feeling” opens out the sense of positive attachment feeling within the couple. Paradoxically, the marital fight becomes the doorway into the marital attachment. (rewrite this)

“Reparative fantasy” is the notion that we often do not live in the simple reality of our lives but instead in the simple fantasy of how we want our lives to be. This is, in fact, quite common for most of us and it serves as a major defense against the emotional pains and traumas of our lives. The fantasies we typically hold onto are idealizations about ourselves and those we love, either as things are in the present, or often as things are going to be in the future… in essence, the idealized future to come. These fantasied idealizations often play a powerful role in marital disappointment and unhappiness!

Not uncommonly, threats to each partner’s reparative fantasy serve as triggers to repetitive negative cycles in the marriage. For example, some men are highly invested in sexual validation from their partners as a means of warding off underlying feelings of inadequacy and self-doubt. Such men are vulnerable to going into negative reactivity towards their partner if their behavior fails such a need for validation.

Although it is true that “emotions underlying attachment” are the prime movers in relationship, “how we think about our relationship” reflects our defensive needs to self-protect in our relationship. Our habitual thinking about our partner reveals our anticipations that “hurt is coming”… “so protect, protect, protect!” Of course, these “self-protective attitudes” are actually what sets up disappointment in our partner and activates their “self-protective attitudes in turn… resulting in one more negative cycle, ad infinitum!

Increasingly, I find it essential to get at how each partner thinks about the other, and the underlying assumptions that support these likely polarizing views. It is my experience that these “conclusions about the other” are partially constructed out of “distorted thinking.” These negative conclusions about the other become underlying assumptions about the other that greatly block the couples healing process.

In the CBT treatment for depression… central emphasis is placed on how the client’s thinking about themselves, and the events of the day, contains cognitive error that sets the client up for a depressive outcomes. Likewise, couples set themselves up for negative cycles in marriage by each partner’s out-of-kilter/distorted/defended ways of thinking about the other. Following the unpacking of the patterns of emotional reactivity in the negative cycle, which is at the core of EFT couples work… it then becomes important to recognize and take apart the negative conclusions each partner makes about the other. Over time, this becomes important because healing moments in the actual couples sessions can quickly be dismantled by these ingrained conclusions in the hours and days following the session.