There are profound automatic responses that many of us form to protect ourselves from terrible pain inside that is commonly evoked in close relationship. And it is these profound automatic defensive/self-protective reactions that most threaten the success of eft couples work. It is the automatic responses that drive the negative cycle. The challenge is to hold the eft work together long enough to get to these underlying fundamental patterns; in essence, to get to the master negative cycle (and the mutual reactivities), that underlays all the varied instances of the negative cycle.
What I am trying to get at here is a way in which two people together trigger a kind of psychological autoimmune response to each other. So often these two people do not recognise this fundamental triggering, but only derivative negative cycles fed by the underlying autoimmune difficulty. Finally getting to the underlying negative cycle is hugely helpful in both defusing the negative cycles generally, but also opens the door to a greatly increased sense of intimacy.
This core negative cycle is often rooted in core personality differences in the couple… often opposite ways of coping and proceeding in the face of life challenges, different modus operandi in the world. These are differences that, if taken seriously early in a relationship, would threaten the ongoingness of the relationship. The couple, galvanized in love, often suppress full awareness of the differences in order to protect the relationship that each deeply desires to form a life around. That is, the suppression of the full awareness of the differences is in the interest of protecting and sustaining primary attachment. When in the course of successful eft therapy, when we finally arrive at these core differences that have forever undermined the couple, by that time enough attachment security has typically been established by working enough negative cycles, each in the marriage are generally able to explore the core negative cycle successfully, understanding that they can finally come to terms with the differences in this or that practical way, and without attributing terrible badness to each other. In a way, the couple has finally grown enough of a track record of security that the bogey man can finally be disarmed.
