Working
with
couples and families requires a different stance from working with
individuals. I like that I can experience the relationship dynamics
directly by being in the same room with the couple. It’s so different
seeing the dynamics in action as opposed to having one individual
describe it to you from her or his view. With couples work, you can
witness how quickly one person’s response is cued by the other. Before
you know it — before the couple knows it, for that matter — they launch
into defensiveness and negativity almost as if you weren’t there. When
you try to mediate, it either makes it worse or they both become angry
with you. It quickly escalates.
I have learned to cope with this by acknowledging from the beginning that the
relationship
(or as Harville Hendrix has called it, the “in-between”) is my client. I
like to think of it as a circle, the reciprocal nature of all
relationships — in this case, close and intimate relationships.
I often describe relationship to couples as a dance in which they
have to coordinate their actions so they won’t kick each other in the
shins. The more they practice with each other, the smoother it becomes,
the less they hurt each other and the more satisfying it is. If the
music changes — as it often does in life — they have to adjust their
rhythm with each other to recover the smoothness (stability) and
satisfaction. For as long as they dance with each other, this will be a
lifetime pursuit. I know! My wife and I have been married 50 years, and
we are still adjusting our dance.
I work with relationships because I believe that everything we
experience occurs in relationship. Without relationship, there is no
existence. It’s the stress of relationship that keeps us alive — just
not too much stress.
There is no more significant relationship than the
couple
relationship. It is unique because it’s a peer relationship, not
hierarchical like most other relationships. It is an intimate friendship
that can become the basis for our security and fulfillment. But as
Murray Bowen said, a two-person relationship is inherently unstable —
too close or too distant, too intimate and vulnerable or too disengaged
and threatening. We never get it right. We just learn to adjust it so it
doesn’t become too emotionally extreme.
I believe the primary objective in
couple therapy is to help couples
improve the stability and satisfaction in their relationship and learn
to stay flexible, not rigid. It’s important for couples to maintain a
context of intimacy and engagement that allows them to experience a
sense of trust and security in which they can be “safely vulnerable.”
Couples can do this if they feel attached, which in turn depends on
their ability to emotionally engage with each other. The quality of
emotional engagement enables people to develop in healthy ways, to trust
themselves and each other.
I believe that our personalities are shaped by our relationships,
and particularly formed in our earliest attachment relationships. Out of
this experience, we tend to trigger the same kind of responses from
others that we learned beginning in childhood. These responses operate
mostly beyond our awareness (implicit emotional memory). To understand
any couple interaction, it’s important to consider that there are cues
from each person that elicit a response from the other partner, which in
turn elicits a reciprocal response from the original partner, ad
infinitum. These are the habits that we see in all relationships.
What draws us together can also push us apart
In marital and couple relationships, I believe it is typical to form a
bond with someone most like ourselves. However, what draws us to each
other are
opposite characteristics — the complementary aspects
of our relationship — that are then difficult to live with the rest of
our lives. These difficulties become the themes of our relationships,
repeated over and over again as long as we are together. For example,
one partner comes from a distant and noninvolved family of origin, while
the other comes from a close family. It’s likely that this couple will
continue to have differences concerning the involvement of extended
family in their lives. This is an example of the reciprocal responses
(habits) we see in all relationships.
So, the habitual way couples learn to relate to each other is derived
from how each individual learned to relate to others from childhood.
Partners in a couple pick each other because they fit complementary to
each other, and the habits derived from this become the underlying
forces driving the process of their relationship.
If couples have the skills to transform the emotions responsible for
the negative patterns in their relationship to more positive ones, they
will improve their recovery from the defensiveness and hurt derived from
these negative cycles. If their recovery is improved, they will have
“softened,” thus strengthening the intimacy and stability of their
relationship. It is important for the relationship to be flexible enough
to cope with these forces. At the same time, couples have to remain
sufficiently emotionally engaged to maintain the trust and security of
the relationship. If this becomes a consistent pattern over their life
span, they will have achieved a stable and satisfying relationship.
The key in
couple therapy is not to directly help couples solve
problems but rather to have them skillfully remain emotionally engaged
when under stress. In fact, it is likely that the difficulty couples
face in resolving conflict has more to do with emotional disengagement
than with an inability to solve problems.
Consider what John M. Gottman and Robert W. Levenson wrote in their
article “How Stable Is Marital Interaction Over Time?” for the
Family Process
journal in 1999: “It’s not the problems a couple solves but how they
deal with their emotions connected to the perpetual problems they never
solve that leads to stability and satisfaction in their relationship.”
It’s important to help couples become resilient in the face of the
many stresses, challenges, disruptions and developmental changes that
threaten to disengage them. This involves helping them remain softened
to each other and equipping them to recover when life’s experiences
create disengagement. Being able to recover restores the emotional
engagement (intimacy) of the relationship. Quicker and more frequent
recovery reduces the likelihood of disengagement, defensiveness and
hostility. This, in turn, leads to satisfaction and stability.
Emotion-focused relationship enhancement therapy
Relationship enhancement (RE) focuses on emotion as the
transformative agent in therapy and relationships. How couples manage
their emotions — a reciprocal process — is central to maintaining an
intimate and satisfying relationship. The struggle around the emotions
elicited by the couple’s differences becomes the vehicle that changes
the relationship, improves its flexibility and keeps the couple safely
engaged. Learning the skills to improve this process is the objective of
emotion-focused RE therapy.
Relationship skills, particularly in close, interdependent and
attached relationships such as couple relationships, are essentially
emotional regulation skills. Underlying each couple interaction are
deeply important and implicit (nonconscious) reciprocal emotional cues
and reactions that emerge spontaneously. These constitute the
“interpersonal habits” discussed earlier.
To get a grasp on these nonconscious, emotional habits that
contribute to stress and conflict in couple relationships, it is useful
to understand how couples communicate. Essentially, one person in the
relationship, motivated by emotion, is trying to convey information and
perceives that the other person understands the importance (meaning) of
what is being expressed.
What most needs to be understood is the
underlying feeling
that motivates the expression. For example, if one partner says to the
other, “You forgot to bring milk home,” both parties recognize the
feeling (disappointment) as the reason (meaning) for the statement. The
arousal, which is physiological, in the partner’s emotion
(disappointment) is the cue for how the couple subsequently will engage.
If the other partner feels criticized and becomes defensive (arousal),
there will be a “fight.” However, if the other partner listens by
recognizing and accepting the partner’s disappointment, the arousal and
defensiveness are reduced, and they are in a better position to
collaborate and restabilize their relationship. This is the “softening”
so often acknowledged in couple therapy.
The primary skills in couple interaction have to do with expressing
one’s self so that the other person recognizes the underlying feeling
that motivates the expression and having the other person acknowledge
it. So, speaking and listening constitute the first two skills of
emotion-focused RE. Essentially, the speaker is learning to improve
self/emotional regulation (owning expression), and the listener is
learning to accept and acknowledge an understanding of the other
person’s emotional motivation (empathic understanding).
In RE, the partners who make up a couple learn to understand
themselves and each other by exploring the emotions that motivate their
behavior. When people perceive that their relationship is safe enough,
they are freer to reveal these underlying, primary feelings to
themselves as well as to their partners, which softens the relationship.
By revealing these deeply owned feelings to themselves, individual
partners are better able to understand their experience and regulate
their emotions, giving them a sense of greater mastery. And when these
deeply owned feelings are accurately recognized without judgment and
with acceptance by their respective partners, a context is created that
fosters deeper sharing of feelings and understanding.
I have observed that when couples create such a context, the partners
feel closer, more trusting and more open with each other. This does not
secure the relationship, however, unless the couple also practices the
third and probably most important RE skill, known as the relationship
(emotional engagement) skill. This skill asks couples not only to take
ownership of their feelings and respond empathically with acceptance and
without judgment, but also to acknowledge the meaning of the
relationship (“Your feelings affect my feelings”). This skill is taught
when they switch roles (listener and speaker). The instruction to the
new speaker is, “How does it make you feel to know that she [or he]
feels that way — good or bad?” Together, these three skills constitute
the basic training of RE.
Generalization and maintenance
In RE, each member of a couple practices expressing his or her
feelings and owning these feelings; this then enables each person to
accept the other. By reciprocally practicing the skill of acknowledging
the feelings (internal experience and emotional motivation) of the other
through empathic listening, a context of acceptance and nonjudgment is
created. Ultimately, through supervised and then unsupervised practice,
couples learn to create an ongoing relationship context of acceptance,
nonjudgment and emotional engagement that operates in their day-to-day
lives. Establishing this context is a critical outcome of RE therapy.
The success of any therapy lies in the ability of clients to take
what they have learned and make it a part of their everyday lives. That
is why the next two skills, generalization and maintenance, are
essential for an optimal outcome. The development of clients’
generalization and maintenance skills begins with the very first session
of RE.
Taken together, the five core RE skills allow couples to maintain a
reciprocally stable relationship and become more emotionally engaged.
However, couples will internalize these skills only after they have
attained a certain level of proficiency and experienced enough
satisfaction from incorporating the skills regularly. Thus, homework
assignments of various kinds are systematically included in the program
to encourage generalization into everyday life. Homework is described to
couples as an acknowledgment of their responsibility for the therapy
and, ultimately, their relationship. From the beginning, it establishes
the value of home practice.
Supervision of this homework is designed to improve and reinforce
generalization and maintenance of RE skills. If clients encounter
difficulties applying the skills in everyday life, role-playing is used
in the therapy session to improve the couple’s ability to use the skills
in a variety of challenging situations.
Homework assignments are designed to review the principles and skills
learned in the sessions, encourage clients to set aside specific times
for additional skill practice and help participants use the skills in
their daily lives. Thus, at the beginning of each session, valuable time
is devoted to a report by the couple about their homework assignments
and their use of RE skills outside of the therapy session. Often,
couples must first be taught to set aside a consistent time in their
busy lives to devote to their relationship and to practice. A simple
homework exercise (often the first homework assigned) is to have the
couple schedule a “playtime” each week at the same time. In this
context, play should be defined as spontaneous and not outcome-based.
Probably the most critical method of generalization and maintenance
is home practice of the first three emotion-focused RE skills. After a
period of skill training that involves a tutorial process, couples are
encouraged to schedule home practice sessions for an hour at the same
time each week. The decision to move to home practice is a collaborative
decision between the
couple and the therapist. Couples are informed at
the beginning of therapy that this will be part of the structure. Prior
to starting this process, couples are given a home practice handout,
which includes a time-out procedure, to review together. (For a copy of
this handout, contact me at
barry@relationshipenhancement.com.)
At this point, the therapy shifts from an emphasis on office sessions
to home practice, with the weekly home practices being taped.
Subsequent in-office sessions focus primarily on home practice and
involve a coaching process. Emphasis during these sessions is placed on
identifying underlying positives and improved skills. Once couples
develop a confidence and consistency in home practice, the office
sessions become less frequent. Couples understand that subsequent
sessions will be devoted to reviewing the most recent home practice
tape, and therapy shifts to a consultative process, with couples taking
responsibility for their own therapy and relationship. Couples can then
choose to come in for booster and/or refresher sessions if they haven’t
seen the therapist for a period
of time.
Through the years, I have attended workshops and conferences, taken
various training programs and fulfilled my continuing education
requirements. I marvel at how often I keep returning to the RE model. It
seems to me that it achieves the best outcomes for couples.
Source: http://ct.counseling.org/2012/06/improving-couples-attachment-security-intimacy-stability-and-satisfaction/
For English couple therapy in Paris, please contact : therapie.de.couple.paris@gmail.com
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