After working through several instances of the negative cycle, wherein couples commonly feel considerable relief and feelings of reconnection… one important continuing resistance to change resides in the negative core beliefs/conclusions that each partner has of the other. These negative beliefs are stereotypes that each have formed of the other to protect themselves from vulnerable hurt over a long history of discord and disappointment. Oftentimes, it is these core negative beliefs that keep propelling couples back into mistrust even after they have made considerable progress in understanding and taking down their negative cycles. In recent years it has been my experience that in the middle of treatment it is often necessary to probe deeply into these negative beliefs, explicate their role in propelling each partner back into the negative cycle, to fully unpack the protective function of maintaining the negative beliefs, to lay out how they actually propel more negative cycle and mistrust, and to encourage the formation new beliefs that more accurately reflect the compassionate understanding the couple has learned in the therapy. At times, this part of the therapy can be quite challenging but is essential! Otherwise, the good moments of change can remain compartmentalized and not fully spread through the hearts and psychologies of each in the marriage. That is, the negative beliefs, if they remain unaltered, serve as a final bastion of self-protection, pushing away, mistrust and insecure attachment… the raw materials of the negative cycle. They block the full taking-in and internalization of the change events in the therapy.
In a way, each micro-intervention in eft therapy is directed at taking down these negative beliefs and replacing them with the compassionate human story of lovers who have lost each other and are afraid… and how the negative hurtful things that each say/do in the marriage are prompted by a sense of threat to that which is most dearly needed between them. To this degree, engaging negative beliefs each has of the other, is a common part of cycle-work generally. What I am emphasizing here is that focusing upon deconstructing the negative beliefs themselves, just like focusing upon trauma and relationship injury, is also a powerful additive to the therapeutic mix. It leads to powerful “reorganizing existential moments” wherein each in the marriage is invited to reclaim (or claim for the first time) the primacy of viewing their partner as special and worthy of loving.
Is it not true that all falling in love involves “reparative fantasy”… to varying degrees? And that the first negative cycles are commonly activated by disappointments related to our partner failing to be the “fantasied other” that we thought/hoped they were? And that this throws us back into the wounds/raw spots that the reparative fantasies seek to protect us from? And that the future of the relationship is a kind dialectic between our “reparative disappointment” and our healthy capacity for attachment and our attachment history. This would involve the differences between self and other that especially disappoint. If these thoughts are accurate, could it be that these early disappointments form a kind of “core negative cycle” that somehow is a template and energizer for all the negative cycles to come. Thinking this way, in doing both Level 1 and Level 2 work, I find myself “on the lookout” for how the couples original differences that were so disappointing, and somehow not fully comed to terms with, can be at the center of the ongoing negative cycle process.
Key to this line of thinking is that we all come into relationships with places of insecurity and vulnerability that the reparative fantasies functionally form to protect us from.
Another way to think of this is that when relationships begin, there is a “fantasied” developmental line that starts and “real world” developmental line. The real world developmental line has to do with the whole range of safe or not safe interactions the couple is able to accomplish in their hours/days/years together… much the stuff of eft cycle work. The fantasied developmental line is prompted by our attempts to reparate our wounded individual histories within the context of the relationship. Commonly, except perhaps in the more securely attached relationships, both partners will tend to hide portions of their reparative fantasies from their partner, even from themselves. What is hidden here is the deep sense of “inner wound” which is actually an “attachment wound,” the sense of rejectability, terrible vulnerability… and the specter of shame. I am thinking as I write this that this is the stuff of Level 2 work, issues to be engaged when the couple has found places of safety with each other.
Not uncommonly in relationships, one person may tend to dominate while the other may tend to submit and give way. The person who “carries the day” may tend to take the other’s submission as tacit validation of his or her chosen course. And, in fact, the submitting person can often feel that they are “being good” by avoiding the conflict of disagreement. However, “unpacking” the pattern of habitual submission often reveals an underlying collapse of self-assertion… and resentment and fear often live inside of of this collapsed submission. Since the submitting person is often avoidant of directly expressing their discontent, their underlying negative feelings are often not obviously recognized by their more assertive partner. However, they may note at times a sense of withdrawal, lack of initiative, absent presence or emptiness in their there submitting partner. These moment of recognition will often trigger pursuing in the assertive one, which often results in denial, sometimes more submission, and yet more distance. This becomes one common form of the negative cycle, which leaves both partner’s feeling emotionally threatened and unsafe.
Recently I have been exploring the notion that the seeds of a “core negative cycle” are present in most couples from the very beginning of the relationship. The idea goes something like this. That couples, parallel to becoming attached and bonding with each, also become consciously/unconsciously aware of qualities in the other that trigger anxiety, apprehension, judgement, or fear. However, in the heat of the early attachment/bonding process, these negative concerns are pushed to the side, barely recognized, or not seen at all. In technical terms, suppressed or repressed. This is almost universally done by both parties in the relationship in the interest of protecting the newly developing but vulnerable primary attachment. Perhaps in response to a biological imperative, if we consider that human attachment behavior, in addition to being a psychological process, is even more deeply a biological phenomenon. In essence, we are powerfully motivated to ignore or try to ignore, these threatening differences lest they threaten the precious love we want to bring into being.
I am drawn to this understanding after years of helping couples through their negative cycle process only to finally confront/engage a central negative cycle which often involves fundamental personality differences that the couple has never fully faced up to. A certain place where the couple has an almost autoimmune/allergic reaction to each other. However, having worked through many negative cycles leading up to this point in time, the couple comes to this moment with many emotional successes under their marital belt, and finally have the requisite sense of safety and security to talk about these core differences in a compassionate caring way. Said differently. they come to this moment with hard won “object constancy” that allows them to finally look head on at differences they were too frightened to fully see up till now. In a way it is like finally looking at the “bogey man” head on… and realizing that you are no longer terrified! And that the differences are just that, just differences!
There are hurts too much to bear. Emotional hurts, that at any given time, we cannot bear to fully feel. Or rather, the way we bear them is to not feel, deny they exists, alter our perception of their importance, confine them to psychological compartments, or intellectually explain them away.
Now, complicate this picture, by considering that the hurts that most bedevil our lives first occurred to us in childhood… a time in our lives when we are least able to integrate/synthesize terrible hurts, a time when we need whatever defenses we can summon to make these terrible assaults go away. To somehow make them not there. The child’s mind does its best to hide from hurts it finds intolerable.
All adults falling in love bring these “inner child” hurts with them. Without exception! The question here is how aware each partner is that this is happening? The other question is how intrusive the childhood hurts are to the relationship? (to be cont)
