In this post, the meaning of making connections is not what you might think it is. I am not referring to the connections between partners that we would like to see develop through the process of couples therapy. I am writing about brain connections — not only those connections between one person’s right brain and another’s — but also those within an individual’s brain.
As I have written before, a major goal of Neurodynamic Couples Therapy is to help couples view their repetitive conflicts as the clues and guideposts through the journey of healing each other’s historical traumas, wounds and losses together. The precise words intimate partners use during their conflicts have been attempting to reach the emotions that have been stored in their right brains since childhood and are waiting to be discovered and metabolized. Usually, they haven’t quite been able to get there on their own, because they have only a conscious understanding of the clues they have been dropping along the way.
I have been obsessively watching the Olympic Games in Milan/Cortina. The ability of professional athletes who have trained throughout their lives to make unbelievably difficult physical feats appear effortless is thrilling. When medal winners are asked by reporters, “How did you perform so well under the pressure of the Olympics?” the athletes say, “We just go out there and enjoy ourselves.” In brain language, they let their right brains be in the forefront, while their left-brain training is in the background.
Current scholars in the fields of neuroscience, infant research and relational psychology emphasize that the mechanism of right brain-to-right brain communication is the engine that drives the formation of our most intimate relationships. This mechanism is the essential process through which infants and their mothers form an attachment — either in a healthy or pathological manner — and it determines the template that infants form in their right brains for all future relationships.
Illustrating how the system heals is best told in the stories of couples who used their therapy to heal each other. The names have been changed to preserve confidentiality.
Most of us have had the experience of interacting with an individual therapy patient or a personal acquaintance and subsequently being with them and their life partner and feeling startled at how differently they behave when together from the ways we have known them individually. We are witnessing the operation of an intersubjective system that is co-created by the two brains of the couple as a natural part of all intimate systems. The characteristics of each system are determined by our earliest attachment experiences.
It is distressing to me that I hear from therapists with increasing frequency, “I don’t treat couples anymore.” When I ask them why, the answer is usually some version of “It’s too hard.” “Too hard?” I ask. “Yes; there are too many emotions flying around the room at once, and I can’t keep up with what is going on. So I just end up feeling overwhelmed, and the couple quits coming because they aren’t getting any better.”
At the end of the previous post, I described couples therapists with these words: “We are the guardians of safety within the therapeutic system…. We hold the healing frame….” This blog has addressed the issue of therapeutic safety numerous times, but we cannot be reminded too often to take another look at safety.
In the previous post, we looked at the patterns of couples’ interactions that we most commonly see when the partners are in conflict. Now we turn to how we address their patterns therapeutically.
Anyone who has done couple therapy is familiar with the patterns of behavior that partners demonstrate with each other from the moment we meet them. Some of these patterns can be pleasurable and functional, but those are not the ones that lead couples to seek treatment. We identify them as patterns because they are repeated with amazing similarity across conflict content. They contain the painful material that has brought the couple to treatment, as both partners compulsively and consistently perform the complementary roles that are necessary to maintain the patterns. Neurodynamic Couples Therapy names these patterns recycling dramas.
In the late 1980’s, a film entitled Look Who’s Talking came out in which Bruce Willis gave voice to the inner thoughts and feelings of an infant. I will never forget one scene in that movie, because of its eloquent demonstration of a piece of human development. The baby’s mother is leaning over his crib, with the camera shot of her being from the baby’s perspective. He has been crying, and the mother responds with, “Ooh; it looks like you’re hungry.” The voice of the baby responds, “Whoa! How did she know?!”
A few years ago, the University of Denver administration conducted interviews with corporate CEO’s and upper level management within the government to determine what their students should be learning in order to be attractive in the current job market. The consistent answers were the ability to work in teams and good EQ. Interesting that the art of accompanying is valued in many settings!
The theoretical foundations, structure and techniques of Neurodynamic Couples Therapy provide built-in motivators that enhance a couple’s desire to stay in treatment. Those primary motivators are hope, respect and mutual understanding.
It has been said almost too many times that treating couples is very hard work. But, so what. Most couple therapists aren’t afraid of hard work. What they don’t like is working too hard and feeling like they are getting nowhere. It is very difficult to stay motivated that way.
Fleeing treatment is an understandable wish. Effective Neurodynamic Couples Therapy is often frightening and painful–sometimes horribly painful. Metabolizing historical feelings requires that they be relived precisely as intensely as they were originally experienced when first stored, along with the perceived sense of danger that was present in the original experience. It makes sense to be scared of this process, so addressing the wish to flee should be seen as a normal part of the treatment.
There is no doubt that treating couples is often quite difficult. This is a primary reason that many therapists decide to not treat couples at all. In fact, statistics say that the rate of failure for couple therapy is higher than for individual therapy.
