Anyone who has done couple therapy is familiar with the patterns of behavior that partners demonstrate with each other from the moment we meet them. Some of these patterns can be pleasurable and functional, but those are not the ones that lead couples to seek treatment. We identify them as patterns because they are repeated with amazing similarity across conflict content. They contain the painful material that has brought the couple to treatment, as both partners compulsively and consistently perform the complementary roles that are necessary to maintain the patterns. Neurodynamic Couples Therapy names these patterns recycling dramas.
Understanding couples’ patterns requires familiarity with the characteristics of the patterns and the function they are performing in the relationship:
1-Both partners’ behavior is experienced by them as a logical, justifiable reaction to the other partner’s behavior, and both often believe they are the victim of the other’s illogical, unjustifiable behavior. The only imaginable solution is for the “other” to change.
2-In all conflicts, both partners experience the same feelings every time their pattern appears. These feelings are often of a complementary nature — one feels sad, the other angry; one feels entitled, the other unentitled; one is “emotional,” the other is “stoic,” etc.
3-Both partners usually feel powerless to impact the other. They are reliving the impotence of a misunderstood and maltreated child.
4-Even when the couple manages to agree on what appears to be a compromise around a conflict, their old pattern eventually wins out as their agreement breaks down. This always leads to blaming and shaming, with each partner vehemently defending their innocence.
5-Both partners’ pattern behavior is typical of a lower psychological maturity level than the one in which they usually function when not in the pattern.
It is important for the therapist to keep in mind and to reinforce with a couple that these frustrating patterns are normal and helpful. How could that be? The patterns are so exhausting and destructive, often so seemingly easy to resolve, and often so uncharacteristic of the partners’ behavior in relationships outside theirs.
A key element of theory that underpins Neurodynamic Couples Therapy is that our brains use the experiences inherent in our most intimate relationships to bring to conscious awareness previously unnamed emotions generated by historical traumas, wounds and losses. Nonconsciously, we gradually learn in our daily interactions with our intimate partners how to utilize each other’s characteristic patterns to relive our childhoods. The brain is trying to heal itself by bringing the pain of the past into the present.
In their repetitive patterns, couples may see each other as selfish, mean, hurtful, disdainful, or whatever they need to experience to give the pain of the past an opportunity to be felt and spoken — even if those experiences of the partner are distorted and inaccurate. It doesn’t matter; the brain must do its work. The therapist’s interventions guide a couple into understanding how their patterns are designed to heal.
Next post: Exposing the healing power of couple patterns