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) 

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.