What is it that creates human psychological growth and development? To borrow from Winnicott, it takes “good enough” relationships, the type that all therapists strive to have with their clients. Children must feel sufficiently mentally and physically safe in the relationships with their caretakers for their brains to proceed with a natural flow towards useful growth and development. In a sufficiently safe environment, they are allowed to explore that which naturally interests and excites them. Their good enough caretakers know, accept and enjoy the persons they are becoming. Limitations on their behavior are in service of gently enforcing safety, rather than shaming with judgments. Acceptance and understanding from caretakers naturally lead to the development of an authentic and productive self.
Children are not helped to grow by pointing out their deficits. Growth is encouraged by helping children master the natural ups and downs of life without judging themselves or others as broken. Encountering challenges and emotional struggles during development is best met with understanding and empathy, but couples who did not experience this empathy during their early development cannot give it to themselves or their partners. Couples who have been experiencing long-term, intractable, painful conflicts usually are judging themselves and each other as broken. Their natural developmental flow has been interrupted and “clogged up” by lack of safety in their childhoods.
Going through the Neurodynamic Couples Therapy process frees couples from the blame and shame that has accompanied not-good-enough, unsafe parenting histories. Instead of seeing conflicts between partners as arising from some form of immature relating, they are viewed as natural, neurobiopsychologically-driven avenues of potential healing. The right-brain processes of this method that help partners give voice to affective material coming directly out of the nonconscious stores of unmetabolized emotions “unclogs” the flow of development, allowing the partners to return to their own brains’ normal developmental process of mastering the natural ups and downs of life with acceptance rather than judgment. In this way, we see growth and development as byproducts of the therapy rather than consciously targeted goals of treatment and outcomes of direct instruction.
Direct instruction and interpretation are left-brain processes. Neurodynamic Couples Therapy trusts the right brains of the partners to generate precisely the correct material that will get them back on a normal developmental path, rather than the therapist identifying what they should be doing and talking about. The therapist’s primary focus is promoting safety during treatment to create space for exploring, discovering, verbalizing and accepting the full range of all of the partners’ past experiences and the emotions accompanying those experiences. The connected and safe curiosity of the therapist models empathy and understanding and gently guides both partners toward experiencing their own version of genuine mutual empathy, a developmental triumph.
This can take a lot of time and faith in the process, but sticking with it is rewarded with profound change and growth in both partners individually and as a couple.