Category Archives: Couples Therapy

Balance Your Life Emotionally —Is Your Relationship Creating Comfort and Caring?

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(Third in a series of Balance your Life articles)

Emotional balance is such an important part of your wellbeing and happiness.  What I mean by “emotional balance” is feeling that you are getting comfort and caring in a way that feels good to you.  This comfort and caring can come from a combination of loved ones, friends, spouse, or yourself.  Often we have to learn what we need so that we can make healthy decisions about how we get these emotional needs met.  That is the key to finding the right balance for you–learning and exploring what works better and what doesn’t work in your relationships and with your primary support system.

In my work with women, this is a huge focus because women often haven’t taken the time to really examine what is right for them emotionally.  I often see women leaving relationships (lifelong parters) because they are shut-down emotionally or depressed in their primary relationship. Or they are not being met emotionally because their partner is lost in his cave or retreating due to his struggles in life.  But the key is learning from these experiences–not just feeling victimized and angry.
One way to learn is to engage in Couples Therapy that addresses the bonding process in a relationship, ie, how each of the partners likes to attach and feel cared for can really help teach women and men how to find a healthy emotional balance in their relationship.  Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy (EFT) and Internal Family Systems Therapy (IFS) are two approaches that create changes in the bonding process and help couples find a healthier connection with each other.

As a woman, here are some things you can explore  to help you find what is a healthy emotional balance for you:

1)  What is your attachment style, or the way that you attach or connect to others?
2)  Do you connect easily in relationships or do you tend to distrust others or feel afraid of connecting with others or fearful of others caring for you?
3)  Have you experienced loss and trauma in relationships?  Anyone who has divorced or left a relationship has this.  What have you done to help you move through this trauma and learn your part in it and the suffering you felt as a result.
4)  What are the patterns of attachment in your past relationships?  Is this a similar pattern to your relationship with your parent?  Is it working for you?
5)  What do you crave in a relationship?  What behaviors make you feel loved and cared for?
6)  What are you doing to care and nurture yourself on a daily basis?  This will help you to see what feels nurturing and caring so you can look for it more in your relationships.

Healing From Divorce: The Case of Kamilla

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Healing From Divorce : The case of Kamilla.

The transition that I see the most in my practice for women is divorce: the trauma of the breakup, the denial and fear around uncoupling, the betrayal of affairs, and then the huge re-stabilization of yourself, your life and your next relationship.

Kamilla was happily married, so she thought.  When suddenly she found out her husband was sleeping with her best friend, and had been over the past six months.
Kamilla felt so devastated and betrayed.  Why, she asked, did he do this to me? Was I so unavailable and I didn’t even know it?  Why didn’t he talk to me about how he was feeling?  I would have done anything to work through this with him.

These are very appropriate responses to this kind of acting out to get out of a marriage, probably the worst kind of a breakup we could suffer from our partner.  When I started working with Kamilla, she suffered so much because she couldn’t understand her husband’s behavior.  Isn’t that what we all do when we feel pain or receive a painful blow, we try to understand it all so we can reason through it.  Or we try to reason in order to fix it.   But what I’ve found is that this just makes the pain last longer because we are re-circulating it rather than working through it.

As I began to teach her how to slow down her mind through mindfulness meditation practices, she began to learn how to go into her feelings and be present to them rather than trying to reason and think them all through and understand something that isn’t rational but emotional.   This was healing for her to finally release some of her grief about losing the relationship she adored.  In the process of learning to be with and express her feelings more openly, Kamilla realized the true cause of her divorce.  She was able to see her parts that were keeping her protected in the relationship and were not letting her truly open up her heart and her vulnerable parts to her husband.  We slowly took the time to be with these parts through a process of mindfully experiencing each part in the body and hearing their stories.  The reasoning parts were trying to take over because she was able to survive that way by being smart and using her brain.  She was number 2 in a family of 11 girls.  The other part that kept showing up wanting to help her husband we called the Caregiver.  This part was the one that helped her survive in her family by taking care of her younger brother who was disabled.  If she took care of Timmy then her Mom would not yell at her and she could get some positive attention (and love? )from Mom.

So by listening and getting to know these parts, Kamilla was able to see that she couldn’t really love anyone in a healthy way because all she knew to do was to Fix or Caregive in relationships.  However, she married  man who had his own issues and couldn’t really communicate what was not working for him.  But because he couldn’t communicate his feelings, she could never get clear information and that set her up to go back to her old patterns of fixing, figuring it out, or caregiving.

This information was helpful for Kamilla as she began to reconstruct her life.  She was able to identify the parts that were still not ready to give up her husband and move on, and the ones who were ready to move on.  We often have to spend some time with these younger parts we call exiles who truly attach to our partners, because they need to release the attachment trauma of being cut off again, feeling unloved and unwanted.  The reason this felt so bad for Kamilla and was so challenging for her is because she was rejected by her father at a young age and mistreated by his alcoholism.  Her “little one” did not want to be rejected again and was holding on for dear life.  This is often the cause of people jumping back into a relationship before they have processed their divorce –these “little ones” wanting comfort and connection.  Kamilla was able to identify this urge in herself and slow down the part and teach it how to get comfort from Kamilla instead of another man.

In my work, I teach you how to be the one for your “little one”.  As you learn how to be compassionate and non-judgmental towards yourself, to forgive yourself for just trying to be you, you begin to be present to the vulnerable feelings these parts feel and learn how to comfort and protect them like they have never felt before.  This is when the true spiritual healing work happens in your new and loving relationship with yourself.

Internal Family Systems Couples Therapy–What to Expect

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This is what you’ll find from an IFS (Internal Family Systems Therapy) Couples Therapist:

DISCOVER YOUR OWN ABILITIES TO SOLVE YOUR OWN PROBLEMS

Since everyone has a SELF qualities available to them (curiosity,calm, compassion, confidence, courage,  clarity, connection, and creativity), there is no need for IFS couples therapists to to teach you these things.  When they see something missing in your relationship, they look for the Managers and Firefighters that are obscuring your natural abilities.

Partnerships are better when contempt is absent, there is more appreciation than criticism, problem solving is done with connection and humor, and partners accept influence from each other. (Gottman, l999).

But IFS couples therapists don’t usually teach these skills.  Instead they ask questions about what’s in the way.  Are there reasons to criticize, disconnect, or reject input?  Maybe you’ll find out you have parts that believe that criticizing is the best way to get your partner to change, that accepting influence means losing control, or that distance is safer than engagement.     Once you understand the logic behind unproductive behavior, your natural couples skills can emerge.  You’ll find yourself being spontaneously gentle, creative, open, appreciative, and assertive.

When you formulate your own plan to change, it will be more specific, elegant, and productive than anything a couples therapist could have suggested.

IFS couples therapists want to collaborate with you to find solutions.  They are respectful of your own abilities, and do not present themselves as experts who know the answer to your problems.  In fact, you will probably find that your IFS couples therapist is willing to be wrong, and happy to be corrected or re-directed.  The answers lie within you, and your IFS couples therapist has the skills to help you find them.

NO NEED TO LABEL YOU OR YOUR PARTNER AS PSYCHOLOGICALLY DAMAGED

IFS therapist do not try to figure out how your early environment damaged you.  Rather, they focus on getting to know the Managers that developed extreme behaviors to help you adapt.  For example, IFS therapists wouldn’t usually say, “You are mistrustful because your early family interactions were too unpredictable.”  Instead, they would say, “Wouldn’t you like to get to know the part of you that is mistrustful?” How do you feel towards it?  Would you like to understand it better? Would you like to ask it what would happen if it weren’t so mistrustful?

By answering these questions, you will find out if you have a part that is trying to protect you by being mistrustful, and if there is an Exile within you that was hurt, for example, by unpredictable behavior?  Instead of “How can I help this person develop more trust? an IFS therapist thinks, “How can I help this person understand and validate her mistrusting part?”

IFS therapists see problematic behavioral problems as the well-intentioned work of Managers and Firefighters trying to do the best they can under difficult circumstances.  With the presence of Self Energy, you can get to know these protectors and help them relax.  The solutions that arise from Self-part relationships will be far superior to anything you could have imagined beforehand.

NO JUDGMENT
IFS couples therapists accept both partners unconditionally, no matter ho they act in their worst moments.  Instead of judgment, there will be curiosity and compassion.  IFS couples therapists know their extreme behaviors result from Managers and Firefighters trying to do their jobs, not from innate badness or character flaws.  IFS couples therapists will not usually see on partner as the victim and the other as the perpetrator (remember, we are not talking about physically or emotionally abusive situations).  Even though it might look as though one partner is controlling or demeaning, the other might have parts that think they need to accept victimization.  For instance, are there parts that think they deserve bad treatment, feel helpless, or feel frightened?  Once such parts have the opportunity to relax, partners who seemed like victims find new resounces to respond assertively.

(An excerpt from “Bring Yourself to Love: How Couples Can Turn Disconnection into Intimacy” by Mona Barbera, Ph.D.)