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. 

Shame destroys self-connection to feeling. This is my experience when shame gets the upper hand in my life. And this is what I observe in client after client… in marriages too.

As a therapist working with couples, I can often see how the whole dance could be different than it goes… but the couple, caught up in it, cannot see. I am just now considering, that it would be valuable to write down how we see that the dance could go and share this with the couple. And/or show them, by having them watch a portion of one of their videos, and doing gentle commentary about what would have made the interaction better, and how they might have avoided this instance of the negative cycle. This would all have to be done with positive reframing in order to prevent shaming. Among the benefits, this therapeutic action would make accessible a healthy vision to the couple of how they might evolve. Secondly, this would be another experience of the couple observing the negative cycle, but with the recognition that it requires only small changes to convert the negative to a positive cycle, that the challenge to get better is not huge but very reachable. All of this would require extra time and resources which are often not available, but this describes a therapeutic direction I would like to explore with couples. 

At the end of it all, we all want some version of the same thing. To love and be loved. To be safe and secure. To be appreciated. To belong. To have a sense of positive status. To have positive self-esteem. 

These traits are rooted in our biology. Their expression varies from culture to culture. And cultures pull for and emphasize different pieces of a common human picture. 

And different life histories cover over and hide or distort these shared human qualities.