As I posted a few weeks ago… I have found it very valuable to encourage both in the marriage to clarify their respective roles in the recurring cycles. This is in addition to opening out each partner’s underlying dynamics in the sessions; it adds to this process each partners recognition of how they are better able or less able to manage their part in the negative cycle situations with their partner. This adds to each partner a degree of responsibility for how they carry themselves in the therapeutic process of healing the negative cycle.

I am aware as I write these words that they are in contrast to a central aspect of eft work; what is wondrous about emotion focused therapy is the way that the therapeutic action of bringing down the negative cycles takes place without involving conscious intent on either partners part. To a degree, all that is necessary is for each in the marriage is to stay open to the therapeutic work of opening and bringing down the cycle. Intent, effort and discipline is largely not a necessary ingredient in these early sessions. Their is no need for either partner to try and “will themselves to want to be in the marriage” in order for these first sessions to work. 

However, as the eft therapy progresses, and the couple begins to understand of how their particular negative cycle operates, I find it very helpful to enlists each in the marriage to clarify their own contribution to the negative cycle, and to form a sense/picture/vision of a personal project that serves to guide each in the marriage – making the negative cycle less likely, less intense, and more recoverable. That is, to not only have better understanding of what is happening within each other when the negative cycle occurs, but to also cultivate a sense of how to operate from one’s “better angels” within and between each other in the marriage.

Note that this sense of personal project cannot effectively emerge without first coming into a full understanding of how the negative cycle operates within the marriage. The key driver here is not to avoid shame or being reproached by ones partner – the key driver is the positive attachment motivation that emerges within each partner as the negative cycles are repeatedly taken down… that each in the marriage engage their personal project out of loving caring, not a sense of being right, avoiding shame, or winning in a contest of wills. 

So often in my eft couples work, couples have benefited hugely, leave the therapy very much improved… but somewhere between sometimes and often, I have been left with a felt sense, the work could have been deeper, further reaching, more transformative; that somehow the therapy stopped short of fully reworking the couples underlying core negative cycle. (to be continued)

One element that I generally add into emotion-focused work with couples (eft) is the notion of the “personal project.” That is, that pursuers and avoiders in the marriage-of-opposites, must each come to a deepening understanding of how they individually contribute to worsening outcomes in the marital conversations. Typically this involves the pursuer learning to contain their action tendency to escalate conflict encounters, and the avoider learning to come forward and reach past their action tendency to defensively shut down.

To begin with, the avoider who is commonly threatened and intimidated by the pursuer’s tendency to escalate, is reassured by the knowledge that their pursuing partner regrets their escalation and wants to do their part to not keep repeating the escalating cycle. The avoider is further helped when they see their pursuing partner “take themselves on” in the area of their emotional overreaction; this supports both a heightened sense of safety in the avoider and an increase in empathy for the pursuer’s experience of abandonment and non-support, sometimes trauma.

Likewise, the pursuer is reassured when the avoider claims their fearful avoidance of conflict and shame, sometimes trauma, and can acknowledge that their self-protective defensiveness and emotional distancing is both a problem and hurtful to their pursuing partner. What helps most here is for the avoider to be able to acknowledge their limitations in “staying present in the face of conflict” without subtly justifying their closing down; that they also… “take themselves on” in wanting to improve their ability to stay present with their partner through the ups and downs of the relationship

The goal here is for each in the marriage to take responsibility for how they conduct themselves, irrespective of the other’s behavior. There are to two poles here… one pole is that we take responsibility for how we carry ourselves, the other is that the couple helps each other be the best we can be. 

Note this is a furtherance of the eft process of probing the individual layers within each partner that underlay the couple’s negative cycle. For each in the marriage to see their own responsibility to “self-probe” and “self-clarify” their limitations and flaws lays in a huge source of security and reassurance to the marital attachment. It says, not only do we work out the negative cycles between us, but also I bring the integrity of my own self-knowledge to support the marriage as well. This is the power, at the end of the day, of coming back to each other with the truth. This is the ultimate internalization of the eft therapeutic process. 

Including each partners “individual project” into the eft work adds the resources of “individual maturation” to the process of “marital maturation.”  Because each partners individual self-contact is deepened by their individual project, the ongoing level of emotional intimacy is both deepened within the marriage, and insured for many years to come.  

This morning, while reaching towards a kitchen plate that was a gift from my father, after feeling grateful to him, I then found myself in a sadness… that I had not, at the time, let him know how much I appreciated his gift. There were so many disappointments and barriers in our relationship while he was alive, I was so often blocked from expressing my love and appreciation towards him. I was so aware of what I wanted and did not get from him, I had long since formed a habit of resentment that kept me from telling him how much I loved and celebrated him. For a moment I indulged in the fantasy that he was still alive and I could finally let him know that my love of him was more fundamental than my hurts; that I could finally bring to him the perspective of age. Sitting with this, I dropped into the thought, “things are what they are.” Somehow, in this moment, this was okay… strangely okay.

I then found myself feeling into those words… “things are what they are.” — into the foundational reality of of my life. In these moments I realized that I was “strangely okay” because I could feel all of the good intentions and feelings richly present inside of me, and that, though I had so many regrets, I had within me the full banquet of what life was about.

Sitting with these thoughts, I then realized that this situation between my father and I, also occurs in a profound way between husbands and wives. Often, with our partner, we are so aligned with what we want different, we fail to deeply experience how we already have so much of what we need in the relationship… just as it is. Commonly, we so minimize and devalue the “is-ness” of the relationship we have, that we do not take in the nourishment that the ongoing relationship brings to us. 

These words are all preamble to an important point concerning marital therapy. It is all too easy in therapy to be caught up in discussions about how each in the marriage want things to be different, implicitly minimizing and under-appreciating how things “just are” in the relationship. This failure to depthfully dig into how things “simply are” can lopside the therapeutic work into an ungrounded quest for change, that ends up not integrated with the couples daily reality. To address this potential error I increasingly move back and forth between both arenas as I conduct each couples session… between longings and disappointments on the one hand and the daily realities on the other hand.

How “things simply are” is where the attachment in a marriage vitally lives. In the midst of the negative cycle, in some way, couples often forget that they are, after all, attached! Each partners disappointments… coupled with the inflated size of conflicts, disconnects each partner from appreciation of what they already have. This becomes a disconnection from the very foundations the couple stands upon, and this understanding must be included alongside the work to bring down the negative cycles.  

Repeatedly, I discover and rediscover, how toxic shame is at the root of so much of our suffering, so much of our difficulties in realizing ourselves, and so much of our negative cycle interactions with others. By toxic shame, I here mean, those situations where we don’t just feel shame over a regretted action or failure, which is simply an aspect of being human, but where we feel a self-hating sense of shame over who we are, our very being.  

When we carry around this internal sense of toxic shame, we either remain at constant war with ourselves inside consciously, or we become avoidant of ourselves unconsciously. One expression of this situation can be great inhibition in accomplishing our goals for ourselves. This can be accompanied by common low grade depression and sense of defeat.

Another expression of interior toxic shame can be a sense of vagueness and ill-definition of our sense of self in the world. (to be continued)