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.
