Marital/Couples Relationships

All couples come together for a reason.  They are connected by both the emotional and biochemical “fireworks” of “falling in love” as well as an unconscious yearning to meet emotional needs they did not get met in their childhood (see Harville Hendrix, Ph.D. “Getting the Love You Want”).  In a sense, we all marry partners with some aspects of our father and/or mother in an attempt to get from our current partner what we did not get from our parents as a child.  As children, although our parents did the best of which they were capable, we may have experienced a lack of being understood fully, a lack of empathy, encouragement, and/or admiration from our parents.  Since being fully understood, idealized, and mirrored are natural child (and adult) needs, we experienced a wounding.  Often, we come to couple with a partner who initially – in the “blind love” (unconscious) part of the relationship – seems to fulfill these needs.  This feels great!  However, with time, we often, ironically, come to experience our partner as someone who doesn’t have a clue how to listen and empathize, much less idealize us or mirror our affective state.  In effect, we find intimate partners who have similar aspects to them as our own parents.  This can lead to intense disappointment and disillusionment in the relationship.

However, there is an overarching healthful reason for this union.  The difference between a parent-child relationship and an adult-adult relationship (which is recapitulating the original woundings) is that the two adults can, if motivated, become conscious of the patterns of mutual wounding and work together to heal the original pain; both together in relationship, and within each partner’s self.  It is with this consciousness and the intent to grow, heal, and thrive together that light is thrown on the dark corners of unconscious painful patterns of relating so we can come to heal each other, and our own selves, by developing the capabilities to empathize, mirror, and idealize both our partner and our own self.  The completion of a couple learning to meet each other’s needs and love each other the way they need to be loved is a beautiful and fulfilling resolution to couples psychotherapy.

However, there are some bumps – painful and confusing bumps – along this road to wholeness.  Very few of us are taught consciously, or even unconsciously through example, how to develop a loving and compassionate intimate relationship with another.  Because the bad news is is that if these unmet needs are left unconscious to both partners, the relationship can be like hitting your head repeatedly on a brick wall.  “Don’t you ever listen!”  “Get off my back!”  “You don’t even know me.”  “Why do you keep pushing my buttons?”  Are all common exclamations within an intimate dyad.  A dyad which can often seemingly endlessly repeat painful patterns of defend and attack over and over leaving both partners hurt, angry, unfulfilled.  These ruts often lead to isolation, loneliness, and “two people just cohabitating,” versus loving and knowing each other.  (The good news later).

For example, the primary complaint in a couple about each partner often thinly masks an unmet childhood need.  “Can’t you ever listen?” may point to the unmet need “I need to be heard and understood.”  Or, “Get off my back” may indicate a need for personal space and/or fear of intimacy.  In the former scenario, perhaps parents were not able to truly, deeply listen and hence, not being heard is a vulnerable place for this person.  In the second case, this person may have been intruded on by a parent, and has a need to feel safety from being engulfed or overpowered while maintaining a separate sense of self in the relationship.

Couples often come to psychotherapy as “a last ditch effort to see if this marriage can be saved.”  Commonly, repetitive patterns that are mutually painful have occurred over years, sometimes many years (20 or 30 years is not uncommon).  These patterns are often so familiar (“Here we go again”) that one could tape record a year (or 20 years) of repetitive conflicts, and then press the button on the tape recorder, and, although the content may differ, the interactional patterns replayed would be frighteningly similar.  The reason for this frightening similarity and repetition:  Both partners typically have one or two complementary weak spots or vulnerabilities in which they both engage in a dance of hope and pain over and over again:  Hope for need fulfillment, and pain when expected needs are not met.

These hurtful interactions often seem out of control to each partner, and the other partner is often seen to be the one at fault, “If he did what he said he would do, I wouldn’t be screaming”, or, “If she didn’t hassle me, I wouldn’t always have to go out with my friends”.  The reason our and our partner’s reactions, seem out of control or overdetermined is usually because these repeat patters poke into each partner’s core primary wounded areas.  Usually we each have two to three core wounded areas.  When a wounded area is engaged, we act primitively (as we needed to do as a child) to defend or escape (fight or flight).  This has been called being in a “pain body” (see Eckart Tolle, “The Power of Now”).  When a vulnerable part of our self is injured and we are in a “pain body” we can say some of the most damaging and horrendous things to someone we love.  Later it may be hard to believe exactly what we said.  We are horrified.

For example, a woman who was controlled/dominated as a child may react with extreme rage when she perceives her partner as “controlling me.”  The partner may not intend to control and/or may see the incident as “minor.”  But to the woman “being controlled” may mean being psychically or even physically destroyed/annihilated, and therefore she returns to a very primitive childhood emotional rage in order to gain power and to protect herself from being “crushed.”  This may frighten the husband who strikes back in anger and/or withdraws in fear.

As you may have experienced, and in the example of the couple just mentioned, many painful things can be said and done.  The pattern then exists of painful engagements leading to emotional and physical disengagement in order to avoid the pain.  The couple does not know how to reconnect peacefully and resolve the damage of the rupture in the relationship.  Many couples end up emotionally and physically avoiding each other “living in their own separate worlds” as an attempt to stop the painful pattern, thus providing immediate relief and “safety,” but leading to longer-term disconnection, loneliness, and dissatisfaction.

Now, finally, the good news is, is that if emotional needs that were unmet during childhood (to be understood, respected, supported, encouraged, etc.…) are brought to conscious light by partners, who are both willing and motivated to-tune into their own needs, take responsibility for meeting their own needs, take responsibility for their role in the relationship, and are willing to make efforts to meet their partner’s unmet needs-repair to the ruptures in relationship can occur, thus healing childhood pain in the here and now and resulting in a successful, connected, loving, and fulfilling intimate relationship.

All relationships have ruptures.  The key is how to repair these ruptures with connection.  Repairing ruptures in emotional attachment forms the crux of the marital/couples psychotherapy.  A most basic human urge is to feel safely bonded/connected and understood by an intimate other.  The safety and security this “holding love” provides is that which we needed as children and still need and seek today.  We do not outgrow this need to feel safe, loved, and understood.

When a rupture occurs in this needed bond, we get scared, hurt, and angry.  We act in many seemingly bizarre ways in order to gain connection and/or protect ourselves from pain.  One example of this pattern is the classic “distancer-pursuer” dynamic in which one partner desperately chases the other trying to gain intimacy while the other runs just as desperately to protect themselves from being engulfed and/or hurt.  The more one chases, the more the other runs.  And around and around they go.

This pattern can be altered by understanding the needs of each partner (“to be close” “to be individuated”) and developing ways to meet both needs in the context of mutual respect and understanding.  Patterns that at first may seem “crazy” always make sense with compassionate and depthful examination.

In marital/couples psychotherapy the focus is on teaching couples how to provide the other with love, respect, empathy, and safety and how to repair the connection ruptures which inevitably occur.  To this end, marital/couples psychotherapy often involves:

1. Setting a compassionate, open, and safe environment for each partner to understand themselves and the other.
   
   
2. Clarifying and understanding core painful patterns of interaction.
   
   
3. Identifying and understanding our partner’s and our own core vulnerabilities/"pain bodies."
   
   
4. Letting go of blaming each other.
   
   
5. Claiming personal ownership and awareness of our own role in the interaction and how we affect our partner.
   
   
6. Developing compassion for the source and reasons for our own and our partners reactions to each other.
   
   
7. Developing deep empathic listening skills with our partner.
   
   
8. Clarifying our own needs and expressing them assertively.
   
   
9. Understanding family of origin influences on current relationship patterns.
   
   
10. Developing a mutually agreed upon plan of relating with each other.
    
    
11. Seeking to give love to our partner in the way he/she needs to be loved.
    
    
12. "Rekindling old flames" and remembering what attracted us together initially.
    
    
13. Examining and setting realistic expectations for each other in the relationship.
    
    
14. Developing clear “here and now” communication skills.
    
    
15. Learning acceptance of each other, letting go of trying to change our partner.
    
    
16. Learning to negotiate and compromise.
    
    
17. Seeing ourselves and our partner as mutual teachers and students in learning to round out the wholeness of who we are.
    
    
18. Changing painful unresolved patterns into loving, empathic, and connective patterns in relationship.
    
    
19. Developing a mutually supportive spiritual path that transcends and utilizes the partnership to spread love and truth to others in the world.

Many couples wonder if their relationship “can be fixed.”  So much pain for so long could make anyone question the likelihood of happiness in the relationship.  And, in fact, in some marital/couple relationships, the painful patterns have gone on so long, and/or one or both partners are so depleted, that there is a lack of energy and commitment to put in the effort to make the relationship work.

However, it has been my experience, that if both partners want the marriage/relationship to work and both are committed to the relationship and willing to invest the time and energy necessary, that even long-term painful interactive patterns can be understood, and consciously evolved into more loving and empathic connections.

In order for these connections to develop, each partner must take ownership for their own role (emotional and behavioral) in the relationship conflict and commit to personal growth and change for the benefit of self and marriage.  The habit of blaming the other must stop.  There must be a willingness to compassionately understand your partner (and yourself).  Focused conscious time must be spent together in service of the relationship (in psychotherapy and at home).  There must be a willingness to learn to love your partner the way he/she needs to be loved.

If the above can occur, even slowly, incrementally, the couple relationship can be the burning crucible in which true self and other awareness, accompanied by wisdom and love, can develop and burn.  Both partners can finally give and receive the kind of love for which they have yearned.  This is truly a sacred space.