In this post, the meaning of making connections is not what you might think it is. I am not referring to the connections between partners that we would like to see develop through the process of couples therapy. I am writing about brain connections — not only those connections between one person’s right brain and another’s — but also those within an individual’s brain.
Our brains are constructed to protect us from mental disintegration by nonconsciously keeping apart material that is too dangerous or life-threatening to be connected. We are able to disconnect — i.e., dissociate — pieces of experiences that our brains correctly interpret as too frightening or dangerous to process. For example, the brain of a physically abused child will keep separate the visual images, sounds and bodily pain, and especially the emotions attached to the abuse, from the recording their brain is making during an abuse incident. As I have written before, their brain is automatically saving them from “the truth.”
A significant part of couple attraction is that potential partners nonconsciously feel an uncanny similarity in the material that both of their brains have kept disconnected, even though their strategies for maintaining disconnection may often appear as opposites. The content of their conflicts is repeatedly putting them in the perfect conditions to experience the disconnected memories and affect, but the natural fear that caused the disconnection when it was initiated reasserts itself to prevent making new conscious connections. They back away from new awareness and blame each other for their pain.
The well-known neuroscientist Daniel Siegel writes about integration as a primary goal of all mental health treatment. One of the ways of describing integration is the process of putting back together the material that has been disconnected within our brains. Disconnected experiences stored within our brains cause anxiety, depression, addictions, and often physical ailments. Our brains are naturally driven toward the whole-body wellness that requires re-connection of experiences our brains disconnected to keep us alive.
In Neurodynamic Couples Therapy, it is the therapist’s job to facilitate this re-connection. As described above, couples’ conflicts are created by their two brains trying to bring previously disconnected experiences into consciousness. Their own words that we are helping them search for through following threads — as described in the previous post — are the signposts to speaking connections between historical experiences and the present. The therapist’s skills of listening, remembering and synthesizing the partners’ stories gently prompts the conditions that lead partners into spontaneously using their own words to re-connect previously disconnected memories, feelings and self-experiences within them and between them, bringing these connections into conscious awareness for the first time. We are helping them experience the integration of previously disconnected parts of themselves in a space where their brains feel safe to let it happen.
We believe that couples need each other to make this integration occur. They are the “experts” in each other’s brains and the eventual source of safety and continual comfort that need to accompany the integration process.
Next post: How integration changes relationships