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.
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.
Admidst the terrible moments of high conflict, or the more usual moments of daily dulled marital distance, it is common for both partners to nurse an underlying feeling that the other is “the enemy” or “an enemy.” This kind of thinking or “attituding” is the primitive underbelly of many marital relationships. This is an aspect of “core functioning” or “core self” that probably has its roots in the primitive fight/flight emotional centers of the brain. When we remind ourselves that, in fact, our partner is not the enemy, we are then drawing upon the resources of “outer functiong” or “outer self” which likewise is probably derived from higher cortical functions in the brain. Such a shift in perspective is, by itself, valuable because it sets the stage for a taking down of polarization and the reactivation of emotional connection.
More than most psychotherapists that I know, I am indebted to psychoanalytic roots. I personally love the study of unconscious dynamics, psychodynamic conflict, transference/countertransference, dreams, and object relations, to name just a few fertile areas of psychoanalytic thought. However, as a therapist who typically works in a once or twice weekly model, I also have the therapist’s committment, as distinquished from the five times per week psychoanalyst, to accurately distill what is most essential in psychological theory for effective positive change/growth in our patients lives.
As most other current day therapists, I have long believed that it is relationship that heals. Said differently, since emotional problems are created in relationship, it makes sense that they are healed in relationship. To distill things further, it is attachment that provides the skeletal foundations to relationship. Perhaps it is a bit of an overstatment, but not by much, to say “so goes attachment… so goes relationship.” What this understanding suggest is that an effective working with deep attachment dynamics is the surest way to bring about the deepest therapeutic change, whether it be with individuals, couples or groups.
Though I honor my psychoanalytic roots with ongoing deep attention to unconscious transference and countertransference dynamics, I count myself among that minority of therapists who believe that the therapy relationship is itself, a deeply real relationship; it is every bit as real, often more real, as our patients have in their outside lives. It is my understanding that human beings have a particular ability to make deep human contact every bit as real anywhere else in their lives, even though the context for the interaction is professional fee-for-service. Perhaps akin to the “willing suspension of disbelief” that occurs in the appreciation of literature/movies/plays/video games/virtual reality, the human attachment with the therapist is fully real at a deep psychological level. From this perspective, when either patient or therapist minimize the therapy relationship because “I pay you” or because “I only see you an hour or two a week” they in fact are engaging in “attachment defense” likely analogous to how they defend against attachment wounds in their life generally.
