Most psychotherapists are on the hunt for the right words in their work with clients, whether in individual, group, family or couple therapy. The “right words” come from the clients and encapsulate and replicate an impactful, emotion-laden experience in their lives. They effectively translate a right-brain experience into left-brain language that can be communicated and shared and eventually lead to integration.
One of the best features of couple treatment is that these “right words” are instantly and spontaneously available in a couple’s conflicts. I have written about some of these in earlier posts:
- In the post last month, the reliving of “unloved” and “unloving”
- The elaborate drama created by a couple who needed to relive childhood “despair”
- The husband who expresses his pain about not being able to talk to his father during childhood by saying about his wife “I can’t talk to her”
- The husband who pounds his fists on his chair and screams “I want out!”
These special words have trauma embedded in them, and they provide the couple and the therapist with a superior window into metabolizing and integrating the effects of childhood trauma on each partner. In the last example above, as the therapist explores by asking, “You want out of what?”, and the husband insists that he is only referring to his marriage, his right brain is telling him that he is not ready to touch his childhood traumas. But the words have been spoken aloud in the presence of important relationships, and eventually the safety of the treatment will relieve the pressure on his right brain and allow him to share his historical pain.
The neurodynamic couples therapist is also aware that the words “I want out” resonate in some way with the wife’s childhood experience and goes about exploring what that might be. Some forms of couple treatment have emphasized differentiation between partners, but Neurodynamic Couples Therapy marvels at the level of similarity that exists in partners’ childhood stories. It seems that something in our brains (science hasn’t pinpointed what yet) makes us feel attracted to a partner who somehow has enough of a matching quality to their childhood traumas that nonconscious empathy is present from the beginning of an adult life partnership. The spark of this kind of attraction must first produce “crazy-making” experiences in the relationship before it can be recognized as the perfect opening to healing both partners’ losses, wounds and traumas.
Some forms of therapy purport that we can do all of the experiencing, exploring, and outing of trauma-generated brain material primarily through our bodies. Somatically experienced trauma has been well-recognized and studied. Physical symptoms, reactions and patterns can certainly be a highly useful form of accessing historical trauma, and many times that is where therapists discover the source of the words that need to be spoken, but the eminent neuroscientist Daniel Siegel emphasizes that finding the right words and helping partners speak them is the path to true integration.
Next post: The seduction of accountability