At the end of the previous post, I described couples therapists with these words: “We are the guardians of safety within the therapeutic system…. We hold the healing frame….” This blog has addressed the issue of therapeutic safety numerous times, but we cannot be reminded too often to take another look at safety.
Many of our potential clients are scared (and terrified is underneath there somewhere) of coming to treatment, and particularly couple treatment. That statement is not news to most seasoned clinicians. What are those potential clients afraid of?
*Being judged by the therapist and/or their partners; *being told the problems are all their fault; *being given a label or told there is something terribly wrong with them; *triggering their partners’ emotional outbursts or temper tantrums; *looking stupid or mean; *sounding “weak”; *having to reveal a secret.
It is certainly understandable that people considering therapy would be reluctant to have any of these experiences in a therapist’s office, but the two biggest hurdles are the fear of hurting the partner’s feelings, second only to the fear of their own feelings. They know that therapy is often about “getting to the bottom” of the problem. To paraphrase a line from the movie A Few Good Men, they are afraid that neither one of them can “handle the truth.”
Initially, the human brain cannot handle the whole truth of traumas, wounds and losses, particularly those from childhood. It protects itself by storing intolerable feelings nonconsciously, often accompanied by an internal warning that the type of relationship that produced the intolerable feelings is highly dangerous. This is “at the bottom” of what makes people afraid of couples treatment. They believe that what will be said is inherently destructive to their relationship and to the internal strategies they have obsessively maintained to keep themselves from emotionally unraveling in the presence of those old, life-threatening feelings.
Treatment safety requires consistently and patiently demonstrating to our clients that our responses in the presence of their historical life-threatening traumas, wounds and losses are going to be very different from the dangerous responses they received in early relationships. In The Power of Discord, Dr. Ed Tronick and Dr. Claudia Gold title one of their chapters “Feeling Safe to Make a Mess.” They basically state that the feelings that get tagged within our brains as dangerous and life-threatening are the ones associated with an important caretaker in our early years failing to manage their feelings when life gets “messy.” Their reactions demonstrate that whatever unwelcome event has just happened is emotionally unmanageable and potentially seriously destructive.
We want to show our couples clients that getting into the “messiness” of their lives is a manageable place to be. That familiar messiness is in fact a major motivator in choosing each other as partners and the most fertile ground available for healing and growing through their relationship. A powerful tool that can be utilized to normalize messiness is therapist self-disclosure.
Next post: Therapist self-disclosure