Most of us who become psychotherapists want to help people feel better, so we are primed to want to fix their problems as quickly as possible. It is reasonable that couples come to us wanting to feel better as quickly as possible. Most of them want to keep their relationships, although they are often afraid that this might not be possible. They are looking to us for hope, and they want us to stop the painful patterns that they have been repeating with each other. They are at the end of their own attempts and those of their friends and family to change the way they have been relating to each other, and they are trusting that our expertise will make things better.
In their painful patterns, couples have usually established who the “good guys” and “bad guys” are and determined that the “bad guy” must change or the relationship will die. Therapists who are stuck in their own fixing fantasies may quickly succumb to joining the “good guy” in working to get the “bad guy” to see the error of their ways and agree to engage in better behavior. These types of therapists play judge and convey who or what must change for the relationship to survive.
Managing our own fixing fantasies requires that we resist this temptation in favor of taking a longer view that is founded on a deeper understanding of the relationship and the historical drivers of the couple’s current conflicts. In Neurodynamic Couples Therapy, we see the painful patterns a couple has been reliving as a required prerequisite to psychological growth. The painful patterns hold the secrets to why the couple got together, and they lay out the path of curiosity and discovery that must be followed for true healing to occur.
Many types of couple treatment are based on teaching partners to behave better. The assumption of these methods is that feeding this relationship education to their clients’ left brains will automatically lead to more mature treatment of each other. Sometimes this works, if their issues are not embedded in historical losses, wounds and traumas. But most of the conflicts that couples want our help with are not the easy ones. In spite of the appearance that their issues are purely about the present, their most painful conflicts compulsively bring the past into the present.
We are all aware of the pull to stop the pain as quickly as possible, but it is precisely that pain that has been trying to expose the common feelings that the couple must dig into in order to create permanent change. Their brains “want” this to happen. I have often had clients ask, “Why do you keep dragging up my childhood?” My answer is, “I’m not–your brains are.”
The reassurance that we can give couples quickly is that their patterns are normal and that we can commit to understanding those patterns as fast as we can.
Next post: Understanding couples’ patterns