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)

There are predictable steps to emotional healing when one has gotten to the point where they experience their partner as essentially bad/dangerous/impossible.  This is a highly common attitude for couples in long term trouble. There are two common patterns. The first is the experience of the pursuer… commonly there is a sense that their partner is emotionally absent, checked out, not tuned in, essentially abandoning. For the avoider… their partner is seen as having a short fuse, readily escalates, and prone to dangerous anger, even rage. In both situations it is common that one or both partners end up in polarized dichotomous black/white thinking. This polarized thinking is triggered by repeated moments of feeling emotionally endangered. In this situation there is very little empathy and high fight/flight reactivity. In some important way the partner is not actually seen as a whole person… what is seen is a stereotype. And at many moments, the stereotype is experienced as absolutely real. Emotion focused therapy includes a very useful understanding of how to intervene and heal the emotional dance of this pattern between two partners. What I wish to do here is to describe the steps of interior psychological change that occur within each individual as they undergo this relationship healing. (to be cont)

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.