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Last updated 05/09/09

Introduction

These three self-help methods of relationship repair have come from researching intimate relationships. They have led to related styles of self-help and of couple's therapy. Couple's therapy begins with translating both sides of a relationship gridlock into the ordinary language of lived experience. Self-help methods allow you to hear the old stuff in a fresh way, and thus release creative problem solving from gridlock.

This requires telling it like it is with profound respect for each person. It is not theory building nor diagnosis nor apportioning blame but re-presenting the internal logic or mental map of each partner in a fresh way.

Understanding and action grow together, two steps forward and one back. It can take as many months to rebuild as years it took to build the mess.

Some folk have just carried communication habits from their family of origin, straight on into marriage without review. That's a lot of months to undo. And too many of us start building a family already charged up, like a storm set to go off with just the right set of differences.

One bloke asked me to see he and his partner because they had heard I was a 'real bastard'. They wanted a dose of straight talk. If only it were that simple, I thought. Any high EQ person could give it to them. I remember the tea lady in one of the offices I worked who wore that radical, high EQ honesty on her sleeve. She would tell it like it was from the top of the organisation to the bottom - no one was spared. Not surprisingly, she and her team were replaced by automatic machines and that refreshing, egalitarian honesty was quickly replaced by the more usual guarded, small talk next to the drink dispensers.

Some relationships in trouble get stuck in that same guarded small talk in the middle of a mine field. Walking on egg shells?

Radical, respectful and compassionate honesty invites each to breathe IN their partner's experience, undefended against the hurt and good heart behind the unhappy times. This may open to a new comprehension and pull for compassion. For the first time, making sense OUT of what had previously appeared alien. This is the same principle as tough love.

Maybe we have a choice to divorce the old wounds rather than divorce our partner?

Another client told a friend of theirs (who later became a client also) that I was 'really annoying'. The example she gave was a session where I had obviously reached my limit with she and her husband's ugly arguments and at the start of another one I said, 'this is boring and I won't go down this track any more. If you want to do this go home.'

Her first reaction was annoyance, 'dammit, we're paying you to listen.' But as she thought about it over the intervening weeks, she realised she was bored too and didn't want to do it anymore either. Many months later she 'got it!' And that moment became a turning point when she began to decide on leaving the marriage. There were other issues as well, which impelled her to that decision.

For this couple, change was a challenge she didn't want to take up with her partner. For another couple that moment might have been the turning point for rebuilding the relationship.

Here how to make the most out of couple's therapy and how to choose a therapist.

Here are my 13 observations of intimate relationships with more tips for growth.

 

3 Models of mending

Susan Johnson's EFT

Emotionally focused therapy (EFT) developed by Johnson and Greenberg is founded in attachment theory. EFT is simple:

'Forget about learning how to argue better, analysing your early childhood, making grand romantic gestures, or experimenting with new sexual positions. Instead, recognize and admit that you are emotionally attached to and dependent on your partner in much the same way that a child is on a parent for nurturing, soothing, and protection. EFT focuses on creating and strengthening this emotional bond by identifying and transforming the key moments that foster an adult loving relationship.' Source

Here is a review on psych page and an excerpt from her book 'Hold Me Tight! - Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love' and her article in Psychology Today.

The core of Johnson's application of attachment theory can be summarised as Accessibility, Engagement and Responsiveness (A.R.E.) This questionnaire from her book 'Hold Me Tight' (pages 57-58) will begin to make that clear:

'From your viewpoint, is your partner accessible to you?

1. I can get my partner's attention easily. T F
2. My partner is easy to connect with emotionally. T F
3. My partner shows me I come first with him/her. T F
4. I am feeling lonely or shut out in this relationship. T F
5. I can share my deepest feelings with my partner. He/she will listen. T F

From your viewpoint, is your partner responsive to you?

1. If I need connection and comfort, he/she will be there for me. T F
2. My partner responds to signals that I need him/her to come close. T F
3. I find I can lean on my partner when I am anxious or unsure. T F
4. Even when we fight or disagree, I know that I am important to my partner and we will find a way to come together. T F
5. If I need reassurance about how important I am to my partner, I can get it. T F

Are you positively emotionally engaged with each other?

1. I feel very comfortable being close to, trusting my partner. T F
2. I can confide in my partner about almost anything. T F
3. I feel confident, even when we are apart, that we are connected to each other. T F
4. I know that my partner cares about my joys, hurts, and fears. T F
5. I feel safe enough to take emotional risks with my partner. T F '

Understanding these three areas of applied attachment behaviour, lead to the seven conversations described in her book that build a safe harbor for a lifetime of love.

The seven conversation are summarised here as:

'Recognizing Demon Dialogues - In this first conversation, couples identify negative and destructive remarks in order to get to the root of the problem and figure out what each other is really trying to say.

Finding the Raw Spots - Here, each partner learns to look beyond immediate, impulsive reactions to figure out what raw spots are being hit.

Revisiting a Rocky Moment - This conversation provides a platform for de-escalating conflict and repairing rifts in a relationship and building emotional safety.

Hold Me Tight - The heart of the program: this conversation moves partners into being more accessible, emotionally responsive, and deeply engaged with each other.

Forgiving Injuries - Injuries may be forgiven but they never disappear. Instead, they need to become integrated into couples’ conversations as demonstrations of renewal and connection. Knowing how to find and offer forgiveness empowers couples to strengthen their bond.

Bonding Through Sex and Touch - Here, couples find how emotional connection creates great sex, and good sex creates deeper emotional connection.

Keeping Your Love Alive - This last conversation is built on the understanding that love is a continual process of losing and finding emotional connection; it asks couples to be deliberate and mindful about maintaining connection.'

You will read in the excerpt the following pattern for Conversation 3 - revisiting a rocky moment:

• Stop the game
• Claim your own moves
• Claim your own feelings
• Own how you shape your partner's feelings
• Sharing your deeper softer feelings
• Stand together
• Recognise your impact on your partner

I have put the basic principles of EFT for Couples in this way on the wikipedia article:

'Emotions bring the past alive. The past validates present day fears, blocks and styles of relating, which then fuels conflict. If there is to be long-lasting change, emotions are engaged and activated in the creation of new relationship events.

Attachment is maintained by perceived responsiveness and accessibility and by emotional engagement and contact. When those are uncertain, attachment becomes insecure and then follows protest, clinging, depression or despair and detachment. These become stuck in rigid patterns or negative interaction cycles until the underlying need for secure attachment is addressed. Hence,

1. Relationships are attachment bonds
2. Change involves a new experience of the self
3. Rigid interaction patterns create and reflect absorbing emotional states. Its systemic.
4. Emotion is the target and agent of change
5. The therapist is a process consultant
6. Partners are viewed as coping as optimally as they can given their current circumstances i.e. non-pathologizing.

The interactions of distressed couples are characterized by negative cycles where, for example, one partner pursues while the other withdraws. The therapist helps the couples reach for the underlying emotions that keep them stuck in those rigid positions and negative interaction cycles.

'When attachment security is uncertain, a partner will pursue, fight, and even bully a spouse into responding to attachment cues, even if this has a negative general impact on the relationship.' (Sue Johnson in 'EFT for Trauma Survivors' 2002)

Using the notion of transforming emotion with emotion, the EFT-C therapist guides each partner to expressing emotions that pull for compassion and connection. EFT-C promotes soothing and helps clients deal with unstated and therefore unmet attachment needs.'

Hendrix & Hunt's Imago

"Getting the love you want" now in its 20th anniversary edition, is still one of the better how to books for couples. Their website contains a range of articles and workshop offers. They introduce the problem and their process in this way:

• Falling in love is amazing – we feel complete and whole
• After a while we often feel frustrated with our partner, and have painful disagreements
• The pain is particularly acute because the frustrations with our partner usually remind us of some painful childhood experiences
• It often makes no sense to us why our partner gets upset so much over the things we argue about. We may even imagine they are just doing it to hurt us.
• The Imago dialogue is a process which makes it easier to understand our partner, without feeling threatened or under attack ourselves. And for them to understand us in the same way
• When we do understand that our partner’s experience is so different from ours, they make sense! Then we find it easier to meet their needs. And they find it easier to meet ours!
• With our new understanding, we can learn to stretch a little more to provide what our partner needs.

The essence of their approach to mend and grow is in their imago dialogue.

John & Julie Gottman

After 30 years of research into marriage John Gottman has shown that healthy couples almost never listen and echo each other's feelings naturally. Whether miserable or radiantly happy, couples said what they thought about an issue, and "they got angry or sad, but their partner's response was never anything like what we were training people to do in the listener/speaker exercise, not even close." [Source: Gottman, J The Marriage Clinic: A Scientifically Based Marital Therapy (Norton, 1999)]

"Such exchanges occurred in less than 5 percent of marital interactions and they predicted nothing about whether the marriage would do well or badly. What's more, Gottman noted, data from a 1984 Munich study demonstrated that the (reflective listening) exercise itself didn't help couples to improve their marriages. To teach such interactions, whether as a daily tool for couples or as a therapeutic exercise in empathy, was a clinical dead end." Source and a polite dispute between Gottman and a colleague about the futility of active listening archived here.

On site are 8 popular articles on their marriage research. Here is their web site. This is their model:

• Move Gridlock to Dialogue - teaching the couple to use basic compromising skills, avoiding crazy buttons that instantly escalate the argument ("You are just like your mother!"), and using video review of the couples' arguments in the office are all important. However, since over 60% of marital problems are not solved, but managed, start talking about ways to manage these issues in the future, just like you manage a chronic illness like diabetes. The conflict is not about the topic they are discussing; rather, the real problem is some underlying or symbolic meaning, tied to a dream or fantasy of their future, that they feel they simply can not compromise on without invalidating their dreams.

• Teach recovery after a fight - Gottman has found in his research that fighting in and of itself is not the problem. In fact, couples who do not fight at all are more likely to end up divorced. You may not be able to teach them to avoid fighting anyway, and reflective listening skills ("What I hear you saying is...") likely won't help since no one uses them in a fight. Instead, the best bet is to teach them how to recover after a fight.
• Teach six basic social skills recognizing (and avoiding) the 4 Horsemen: softening startups; accepting influence (especially for men); soothing physiological arousal (relaxation techniques can help partners calm down during heated arguments, but once they are upset, it may take over 20 minutes for the body to slow itself down to calm levels); recognizing (and responding to) repair attempts; compromise.

• Effective repair is easier to accomplish when there are Rituals of Connection, or standard and every-day ways the couple connects and feels bonded to each other. This means decreasing negativity during and after fights, as negativity is the best predictor of divorce over six years (85% accuracy), and effective repair skills increases prediction accuracy (97% accuracy), as among even highly negative newlyweds, 85% of those who effectively repair stay happily married.
• Fade out the therapist - Gottman starts with 90 minute sessions, then eventually moves to once every two weeks, then month, and finally to "therapy checkups" to help the couple function on their own without the therapist, and avoid relapsing into previous problems.

• Women are more likely to begin with Harsh Startups - an abrupt and negative introduction of an issue, while men are more likely to become Flooded and Stonewall, and to rehearse stress-inducing thoughts. Some (such as Rampage) criticize Gottman for not realizing that gender differences in most relationships make women less powerful, and thus more likely to begin an argument more harshly as a way to communicate "I can't take it any more"; however, such criticisms often ignore why gender differences that leave men feeling they have to "Buckle down and take it" when arguments become emotionally overwhelming or even abusive to them. Quoted from this site where there is more.

More on Gottman's research

Gottman emphasis is on distinguishing the masters of matrimony from the disasters, learning the elements of successful wedlock from those folks who are getting it right. He has tested newlyweds, couples in their first seven years of marriage, forty- to sixty-year-old couples, and those in violent marriages. What he found was surprising and sometimes counterintuitive.

The presence of anger, he deduced, did not indicate an imminent divorce or marital unhappiness, indeed, some of the most happily married couples went at it hammer and tongs. Nor was repression necessarily problematic, as long as both members of the couple abided by a tongue-tied approach. Instead, he found that the best markers of a bad marriage were certain familiar, and often gender-linked dynamics in marital disputes.

A "harsh start-up" (the abrupt and negative introduction of an issue) by the wife was associated with bad outcomes, for example. In response, men tended to become physiologically "flooded," closing down emotionally and physically as a self-soothing mechanism.

Ultimately, Gottman found that four behaviours (which he termed "the four horsemen of the apocalypse") were most associated with long-term unhappiness: criticism, defensiveness, stonewalling (retreating into silent unresponsiveness), and contempt. Contempt, he found, was especially corrosive and highly predictive of marital disintegration.

One of Gottman's most widely publicized conclusions was also one of his most widely satirized, the "yes, dear" hypothesis. For a marriage to work, he concluded, the husband had to be willing to accept the influence of his wife when it came to working out marital disagreements. Women, whatever their other problems in relationships, had little trouble allowing themselves to be swayed by their spouses, but men sometimes did, and male recalcitrance doomed a relationship to disintegration. Source

'The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work: A Practical Guide from the Country's Foremost Relationship Expert' by John M. Gottman, Nan Silver. (Amazon reader's reviews)

Web based workshops

There are lots of great pages on the web for working on yourself and as a couple at home. Today, I like The Illuminated Life® Workshop and the Six Steps of Focusing.

How to end a relationship with dignity and love

Go to my article here. Here are some articles on incompetent couples therapy.

Knapp's Model of Relational Development

Retrieved from sh4rd.blogspot.com September 15th 2009

"There are ten stages in two phases:
1. Initiating
2. Experimenting
3. Intensifying
4. Integrating
5. Bonding which come under the Escalation Model

6. Differentiating
7. Circumscribing
8. Stagnating
9. Avoiding
10. Terminating which come under the Termination model

The first stage is the initiating stage. This stage is very short. Subjects involved in this stage try to make a favorable first impression and observe the other subject through their mannerisms and body language.

The second stage is the experimenting stage. Subjects involved in this stage try to find out more about each other. They ask questions about their backgrounds, personalities and culture. If they have that special chemistry, they move on to the next stage. Otherwise, they remain in the second stage as acquaintances.

The third stage is the intensifying stage. The relationship becomes more friendly and personal and disclosure of feelings to the other party becomes more prevalent. There is also a heightened expression of affection between the subjects involved. It is in this stage that people begin to further their relationships from "just friends" to something more romantic and committed. Methods to further their relationships include subtle hints and asking the other party for approval to take their relationship to the next level.

The fourth stage is the integrating stage. This is the stage where two become one. The two individuals come to be seen as a unit than two separate individuals. There is a more physical display of affection and there may be a public declaration of how far the relationship has gone.

The fifth stage is the bonding stage which basically is the stage where the relationship becomes legalized and formalized. Subjects may engage in public rituals such as marriage and engagement. Few relationships ever make it this far.

The sixth stage is called the differentiating stage. This is the first stage of the termination phase. The integrated unit of two individuals begins to fall apart due to the differences they have. It may also be due to one of the parties refusing to compromise about their partner's negative aspects. A large amount of differences may be caused due to a relationship that has developed too fast.

The seventh stage is called the circumscribing stage. I personally call this stage the lovers' quarrel stage due to its qualities. Conversations are restricted to small talk and necessary conversations. Commitment and interest in relationship becomes diminished due to the effects of the sixth stage. And there is a degree of avoidance in topics of discussion. Mostly ending with the words, "I don't want to talk about it." At this stage, attempts to return the relationship to a more positive state is still possible.

The eighth stage is called the stagnation stage. Subjects avoid discussions of the relationship as they feel that they know what their partners will say. Emotional detachment begins and others around them begin to notice that there is something wrong with their relationship. Subjects persists the relationship and they go through with it just to avoid the pain of termination.

The ninth stage is called the avoiding stage. There is a significant increase in emotional detachment that it becomes a withdrawal of both physical and emotional. Communication becomes very minimum, only doing so if it is an absolute necessity. If it were a married couple, divorce will be considered during this stage.

The final stage is called the terminating stage. The relationship ceases to exist and parties move on to another relationship." Source

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