I recently attended a conference on what to do when psychotherapy feels stuck–when it feels like you are talking about the same material over and over again and partners keep presenting the same subjective distress. I was sitting in the audience thinking that therapy gets stuck when the therapist and clients are not dealing with the “right” pain.
Allow me to quickly clarify that I am not implying that there is such a thing as the “wrong” pain, and my meaning of the word “right” in this context is more about “correct” than “right-brain.” As we know, the presenting pain that couples talk about at the beginning of treatment is a metaphor for the right pain. Partners are nonconsciously compelled to keep hurting each other the same way over and over in order to get the right pain into conscious experience. They are experiencing the right pain, but the language they are using to talk about their pain is stuck in present-day conflict. The repetitions are the brain’s way of saying, “Nope–not the right words yet!”
Finding the accurate words to express the right pain usually requires extensive curiosity and exploration. I was treating a couple composed of a wife who is a therapist and a husband who was intellectually defended and not particularly psychologically minded. Almost three years into their treatment, we were gently but persistently pursuing a deeper understanding of an incident from his childhood history that we had discussed many times before. His brain was finally ready to deal with the right pain as he gave voice to his feelings about this incident with the word “despair.” The floodgates of change opened as his wife shared her childhood experiences of despair, and they both realized that this was the precise feeling they had relived in the conflictual incident which had originally brought them into treatment.
It is important to note that the word despair came from his brain–not mine; not his wife’s. When he said it, all three of us knew it was the right pain because of the sense of awe, surprise and elation that filled the room when the correct word was finally released. Their brains had spent many years recreating the despair of childhood, but once they spoke together the right pain, it was as if their healing went into hyperspeed. They were successfully launched into a process of working together on the despair they had both been fearing as they aged, and their repetitions could retreat because they had successfully completed their purpose.
The intersubjective system of couples constructs the right experiences for reliving all the unmetabolized pain of childhood losses, wounds and traumas. We join with them on a journey to carefully and as slowly as necessary invite their brains to mutually discover the correct words for voicing the right pain. The growth and development that is then released is the beautiful byproduct of speaking the right pain.