Regaining A Couples Allegiance
Couples often enter therapy when they feel under acknowledged. They feel unloved and unseen by their partner. This is why they come for therapy. Couples feel stuck in unhelpful ways of relating such as blaming, name calling, belittling, needing to be right, stonewalling and reaching out to others to hide from each other.
Commencing Therapy
When a partner contacts a therapist for help they are often in crisis and fear losing their relationship. This is a powerful motivator to help repair the partnership. There are a range of relationship dynamics needing emotional holding and encouragement.
For example, one person withdrawing and the other being verbally expressive. A partner that withdraws feels frightened of being vulnerable and worried they could be rejected.
Therapy is useful in the way we get to see and understand that both partners share the same fear of loss and abandonment.
It’s just that they protect themselves in different ways. Hiding from showing their vulnerability and their need for connection. But wanting the same thing safe relationships.
Goal For Couples Therapy
The therapist opens up a safe space for the couple to tolerate their anxiety for growth and transformation. As Ellyn Bader says, “couples are able to tolerate their anxiety for growth … and live in tension while they’re trying to figure out solutions to things that are not easy to figure out.”
As therapists, it’s a joy and pleasure to find people overcoming fears and learning to see themselves through the eyes of their partner and feel loved once more.
Couples therapy requires a lot of work to help couples not to give up on each other and themselves. Valuable skills learnt are having a curious attitude towards your partner to be able to actively listen and respond with empathy to create a soothing moment of connection between the couple.
S/he may have much more of a voice to be seen and regain a loving romantic connection. Stan Tatkin couples trainer agrees, it is really the partner that is the key to soothing and calming the partner with the fearful or collapsed emotion that tips and tilts them to not caring. They learn what incites the other and what calms the other to create an effective union.
References:
Stan Tatkin, Couples Therapist Trainer; Your Brain On Love 2013. Ellyn Bader, Author and Couples Therapist
In Quest of the Mythical Mate: A Developmental Approach to Diagnosis and Treatment in Couples Therapy; 1988