So much of the wounding we look at in therapy is in the area of “needing and wanting but not having.” And what this forms inside of us. And then what happens to us, when through changed circumstances of a relationship, the “needed and wanted” is now within our reach… when we have long ago formed core beliefs about ourselves and others based upon the assumption of “not having” what is “needed and wanted.” Commonly, the core belief that “I don’t have what I need” persists even when contradicted that I now have what I need. This, I think, is at the heart of so much of our work in psychotherapy.

So often, when we form a core belief about ourselves and our relationships with others, new experiences that that contradict the core belief, do not necessarily change or update the core belief. The new and better experiences are often internalized to create a layered belief system, with the new experiences being used to support a positive outside defense against the core negative belief, but largely leaving the internal belief unchanged at an unconscious level.

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.”

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. 

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.