A quotation from Mother Teresa relevant to attachment work with couples
Quotation from Mother Teresa found in Reflections on Working Towards Peace…
“If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.”
Steps in the psyche originating in early trauma
Commonly, I think the following repercusions unfold in many of us following unresolved early trauma. First, in a variety of ways that emotional wounding happens to us early in life (and not so early), which we are unable to effectively process and integrate… and in various ways we wall off from these assaults to our safety. Over time we learn to go forward in our lives but there is this feeling inside that something has been left behind or is missing or amiss. And then over more time we form a compensating strategy or reparative fantasy that redeems us and gives us hope. Only, because our strategy is based on walling off what really happened to us, our compensating actions ultimately ring hollow. It’s like apples and oranges, no amount of a large supply of apples is going to really repair a problem in the area of our low supply of oranges. In this vein, no amount of outer adult professional success is going to repair a childhood experience of not feeling loved! Yet, some variety of this strategy is what we humans typically do, generation after generation. To this formulation I want to add one additional piece… and that is how common low self-esteem is an end result of this compensating pattern. For one, the wounded love feeling from the original injury never really goes away but instead resurfaces and confluences years latter with our adult ambivalence and self-doubting. And this latter ambivalence and self-doubting almost inevitably occurs because internally we sense that all of the adult success in the world does not truly succeed where we most need it to succeed… to heal the damaged and unloved feeling inside. This can contribute to “the fraudulent feeling” that so many of us carry deeply inside.
An unexpected event
First let me set the context.
Some weeks ago I had the privilege of bringing a couple for “a live” demonstration for a core skills training in Sacramento conducted by Rebecca Jorgensen, Paul and Nancy Aikin. Nancy did a wonderful job conducting “the live” in a separate room connected my close circuit TV. The couple, both committed “twelve steppers” who have valiantly struggled to make something special out of there love, hugely appreciated Nancy’s work laying out their cycle, the positive reframe of their conflicts, and the tight way she summarized their cycle at the conclusion of the session. The session left them feeling connected and understood.
But then something happened that I think they will remember for the rest of their lives, something akin to imprinting. And that was after the break when the couple came back for feedback with the 18 or so (unusually) highly experienced therapists in the training. Given the choice of how to receive feedback, the couple choose to receive the feedback directly from the therapists watching on. And then, for what seemed like thirty minutes, therapist after therapist showered the couple with both accurate and highly validating comments about how they saw them…how truly caring they are for each other, how hard they worked in the session, how their love was so clear, how bravely vulnerable they were, how they step up to the challenges of their relationship, how much respect they engendered, etc. My second hand words here cannot convey how incredibly therapeutic this group event was for the couple. Here we have these two individuals who have fought for years to even have lives, and now a life with one-another, who literally felt their relationship was blessed by the village elders. In meetings with the couple since, it is clear that in all of their years they have never felt such a community support for their relationship or their attachment efforts as happened on that day. On that day, a resource beyond the couple’s work itself was given to this couple. A place of safe harbor of sorts, a resource to protect against shame and defeat, a bestowal of community recognition of the goodness of their relationship.
Since that day the couple appears safer in their bones. They still have negative cycles, but they are clearer that the problem is the negative cycle, not some terrible wrongness about themselves. They are easier with each other. More secure. My impression is that it had something to do with that day, a the combination of a truly good live session followed by this remarkable group validation.
Couples attempting to heal have need of community support. Support that helps them believe in themselves. The outside support/validation can supply steadiness, holding and safety. It occurs to me that many of us live so chronically without that outside support that we are hardly aware of how much it is missing… or what a difference it can make… when it is present.
The event was striking enough, and I am thinking rare, that I wonder about some empirical investigation of such a thing? And I am curious to know how often it goes this way in live trainings throughout the eft world?
The contribution of Sue Johnson to couples therapy
It’s been there all this time, right in front of our eyes, yet few saw it. I, for one, had noted the similarity between pursuers and distancers in marriage… and the pursuers and distancers described among children in early attachment research. I appreciated these findings and took them as outside confirmation of the importance of marriage-of-opposites dynamics in marriage. But I, along with most others, did not did see deep enough into the early childhood attachment research to see the foundations of a whole new theory of marriage and marital therapy. This is what Sue Johnson did. And in so doing she has opened up a pathway to effectively treat a far broader range of troubled marriages than has ever existed before.
Couples therapy is enormously challenging work, akin to finding just the right path up the side of a mountain, often with lives hanging in the balance. Sue Johnson’s work enables us to thread the needle… with both confidence and understanding.
To begin with EFT provides a defined effective method to proceed with in the face of extreme (or not so extreme) polarization and alienation that couples bring into the start of therapy. The EFT procedure of putting the couples pain within a context of near-constant tracking of the interactive negative cycle provides both hope and “something to do” to do for the couple where there has often been no hope before. My sense of this is that rigorously looking at the negative cycle is both valuable as a way of making something overwhelmingly subjective into something objective, and as a ritual process that provides the couple something to hold onto during the really hard moments of discord and fear. Secondly, the unpacking of the negative cycle reactivity into the underlying fears of rejection and disappointment, on down to the deep underlying longings for connection, transforms the negative cycle into empathy and reconnection. Looking at the negative cycle within a context of unpacking underlying attachment feelings often results in the re-emergence of attachment feeling.
Returning to blog
Wanting to announce that I will be returning to blog posting after a nine month hiatus. In this time I have steeped myself in advanced training in emotion focused couples therapy, and look forward to integrating this work with my long term interest in marriageofopposites dynamics and treatment. The eft work has profoundly enlarged my understanding of how couples heal. In addition, my work with individuals and groups has benefited from a better grounding in attachment research and an overall greater precision. Look forward to sharing particulars over the upcoming months.
