One of the assumptions I have when I work with couples is that their call to healing and wholeness has been in the making for many generations.I tell couples that we fall in love with the person who carries both positive and negative characteristics of our significant caretakers and/or those who influenced us the most growing up. This person also carries a temperament that will evoke the emotional struggles of our past.
During our romance, the stages of childhood play out a second time and we are compelled to relieve these deficits (right the wrongs). We can’t grow up completely until those needs are met, one way or another.
So when we enter into marriage or a committed relationship, we get a second chance to confront what went wrong in the past, to wake up out of our unconscious state in the relationship and live fully in the present. In the present we can attend to what is current and living.
But how do we know when our interactions with each other are coming from our unconscious state?
- The romantic feelings slowly dissipate (or they have completely faded away) and we begin to stir up repressed feelings and behaviors in each other.
- We discover something that our partner does that arouses strong memories of our childhood.
- Then we attack and blame and say things like, “Why don’t you…?” or “Why do you always …?” or “How come you never…?”
- Then we start hurling negative tactics at them such as criticizing or withholding affection as a way of forcing our partners to be more loving toward us.
Some of us continue to struggle in these kinds of conflicts and the arguments become about “who’s right and who’s wrong” until we recognize that what is fueling our unconscious behaviors are events that occurred long ago and far away.
Without putting conscious awareness on the childhood wounds that fuel our pain or frustration, we will continue to set ourselves up because we never get below the surface of the pain of the moment to get in touch with our real desires and needs.
When we are not able to tell each other what we need and want and constantly criticize each other instead for missing the boat, the spirit of love and cooperation in the relationship disappears.
Then we become emotionally starved! This is really win-lose for couples because if one of us loses, we both lose.
Unless couples are in connection with each other, their frustration and pain escalate into fighting all the time, which leads to disconnection.
And when we are disconnected we will do anything from acting out with affairs to working all the time to medicating ourselves legally and recreationally. The pain of feeling disconnected is at the core of the “marriage crisis” today and by extension at the core of the current crisis in our society.
I get really excited when couples have an “aha” moment in my intensive sessions. One “aha” moment is when they can shift away from the pain of the moment and see it as a historical pain.
The second “aha” moment is when they come to see that, underlying all the fighting and arguing, they essentially want the same things: they are trying to find their way back to each other … to feel the love, caring, attentiveness, and closeness that they felt in the beginning of the relationship. They learn how to be in connection without resorting to the default position of fighting or fleeing.
When they realize this, everything shifts. It’s like realizing the world isn’t flat … it’s round.
One of the profound effects for me of working with couples in this way is that, prior to using IMAGO and ECCT, couples would come in and talk to me about their partner in a series of complaints and negativity. I would let them know that I understood them and the sense of what they were saying, but nothing would change when they got home. And we would do this week after week and month after month. For some folks, this would go on year after year until they either got divorced or stopped therapy.
What I love about the way I work today is that I am teaching couples to connect with each other and not with me. Today, the healing and wholeness that has been generations in the making happens between the two partners with me in the role of facilitator/teacher of the process.
To read more about how I do this in my One and Two Day Private Couple Intensives click here.
May you grow from strength to strength,
Paula M. Smith, M.Div., MFT
Certified IMAGO Therapist & Teacher
