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 Psychological Services (continued)Couples Therapy from an ESM perspective There are a number of central tenets to ESM Couple Therapy which sets it apart from other theoretical approaches. Firstly, as an important part of its foundation, ESM insists upon looking at the two people who comprise the couple, as separate entities and, thus, as a part of the whole. It does not seek to treat the "relationship". In fact, it is the position of ESM that too often in treating the "relationship" the individual is sacrificed to the relationship! Thus, in ESM Couple Therapy, each couple is invited into the therapy session as two separate individuals, each separately integrating their personal selves - the parts of themselves that they don't feel so great about; the parts they are embarrassed by or don't want to feel. An exploration of each individual's understanding of what this means to them becomes a focus of the therapy. , i.e. What are my beliefs about myself? Who am I bringing into this relationship? In this way, each individual is supported in knowing and discovering important parts of who they are. i.e.: - How do I perceive myself? - What do I like? - What is my passion? - What are my fears? - What are parts of myself I like and don't wish to change even if others think I should? - What are the areas - or one area in my life I feel shame or guilt about? - What do I expect out of a relationship, in general? - What are my expectations around this relationship or partnership? The sentiment behind ESM, then, is that first I have to be O.K. with myself or I'll never be O.K with anyone else. Secondly, another core foundational truth of ESM is the recognition that WE ARE LOVE. The more real that truth becomes for each individual in a couple, the more "giving and receiving" ceases to be an issue. It is also generally recognized that when you feel loving to yourself you relate to your world differently, no matter what is going on. This perspective challenges the belief amongst so many couples that "I need to receive/give something in order to be complete. There is also no longer a need for therapy to teach partners how to support each other, which too often manifests in an unhealthy form of "emotional caretaking" or "policing". Similarly, therapists no longer need to focus upon building trust within a partnership as, from an ESM perspective, this happens spontaneously when each individual learns first to trust himself/herself and to follow his/her Internal Guidance System. We truly support our partners when we are supportive of ourselves first. Otherwise we are in neediness and we are coming from expectation. This is happening when we look outside ourselves at someone else - a partner - or something else - work - to define ourselves this is happening when we expect our partners to do something for us that we're unwilling to do for ourselves whether that's - speaking a truth of ours - being more considerate - taking a break and enjoying the sunshine - not wanting to look at hurtful parts of ourselves. Thus, whenever we see anything outside ourselves as needed in order to make us whole, we are abdicating responsibility for our lives. How can that be supportive? We are eternal and constant. We are Energy so everything that we have experienced - the belief or feeling around that experience - is right now in our cells. This includes childhood wounding. That is why we act like two year olds sometimes! Moreover, where there is a wound we are going to react from that place. Thus, when events in the present trigger childhood wounds, a knee jerk reaction is elicited rather than a thoughtful response. For example, a man in the park threatens to kick my dog and I immediately see red and prepare to attack him. Happily, such wounding can be addressed right now in the situations at hand. In ESM the Energy goes to those places of which we are not even conscious and removes the charge from such wounding. Throughout the therapy session with couples, the facilitator interfaces with the larger Energy field "sharing" the Energy with the couple. The co-creative process which ensues amongst all participants: the Energy, the facilitator and the couple, serves to create a sense of safety for the couple. Within this safety anything can be shared. Thus, the core issues of concern to the individuals/couple is brought up i.e., what is really happening and what is truly significant for the individuals present? Moreover, the sense of safety and empowerment created by the Energy supports individuals in "finding their voice". They are enabled to speak their truth in terms of thoughts and feelings, more readily. The Energy gives everyone a voice and supports each in listening. In this way, individuals who come together in relationship are supported in manifesting their authenticity. At the same time, the Energy works at the subconscious level, transmuting the maladaptive beliefs held by the individuals. Such beliefs may be brought up consciously to be identified and released or remain on an unconscious level. In either case, the transmutation reduces fear-based thinking, thus enabling individuals to move forward in terms of who they are and what they wish for themselves in a relationship. Synopsis of Other Therapy Approaches Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy (EFT) (Johnson, 1996, 2004) is an intervention directed at reducing distress in adult love relationships while creating more secure attachment bonds. Within this approach a priority is given to emotion as a key organizer of inner experiences and key interactions in love relationships. EFT uses the power of emotion to "move" partners to evoke new responses in recurring key interactions that make up a couple's relationship dance. Thus, in EFT a focus on emotion is seen as the essential transforming element in effective couple therapy. Similarly, Energetic Self-Manifestation helps couples to access their emotion as a means to guiding them in the identification and expression of what they feel and need relationally. An important principle underlying Imago Relationship Therapy (Hendrix, 1988; Hendrix & Hunt, 2004) is that our choice of romantic partners is not random. Rather, we are drawn, unconsciously, to people who share positive and negative characteristics with one or both of our parents. Our relationships, therefore, are believed to offer us a second chance to visit the same issues we dealt with in childhood (i.e. childhood wounding) only this time with the hope that we can get our needs met through our partners! The initial focus of Imago Therapy was to teach couples how to "give love" to each other because it is believed that when you begin to love your partner more fully, you begin to heal those places in yourself that were initially wounded in your relationship with your parents. According to Harville Hendrix Ph. D. & Helen Hunt Ph.D. (2004) "it turns out that loving your partner is the best way to facilitate your own personal and spiritual growth" (p. 5). However, more recently it has become apparent that many partners have difficulty in "receiving" love. A related issue highlighted by Hendrix & Hunt (2004) is that a balanced capacity for separate (i.e. logical, analytical, rational) and connected (intuitive, emotional, empathy) knowing is directly related to the ability to "receive" love. Observation suggests that most people are not balanced separate and connected knowers. At the same time, separate and connected knowers are often attracted to each other. For this reason, Imago Dialogue represents a tool for helping each partner to experience and strengthen his or her joint capacities for both separate and connected knowing and, as a result of this increased balance, become better able to "receive" love. Energetic Self-Manifestation (ESM) similarly recognizes the role of the relationship as both a vehicle and a catalyst for couples to overcome childhood conditioning as a means to realizing their innate wholeness. In ESM the process of working with the Energy may also be conceptualized as the recognition that we are love. Growth in an individual's self-acceptance and self-love is instrumental to personal evolvement and transformation. As part of realizing our innate wholeness (or the fullness of who we are) ESM restores the balance between "connected and separate" ways of knowing. Thus we are able to process information utilizing our capacity for logical analysis and intuitive understanding - thereby operating from our heads and our hearts! Collaborative Couple Therapy (Wile, 1981, 1993 & 2002) focuses upon giving each partner "a voice" so that they are better able to communicate and share their experience with each other collaboratively rather than repeatedly slipping into withdrawn and adversarial cycles. The central therapeutic task is to move couples out of their spiral of alienation and into a cycle of connection. In order to do this, the therapist creates intimate conversations by bringing out the leading - edge thought or feeling of the moment that each partner struggles with alone. More specifically, by acting as a spokesperson, scriptwriter and advocate the therapist gives words to a partner's thoughts or feelings which he is unable to do on his own due to a feeling of shame or lack of entitlement. A greater sense of entitlement to whatever one is feeling or thinking is born out of a letting go of shame and increase in self-compassion and self-love. ESM is a journey of self-love. It is a highly collaborative approach to therapy in which the individuals involved are supported in co-creating the type of relationship which they wish to have. To this end, the Energy empowers each individual in identifying and speaking their truth as well as in listening to the truth of their partner. In their classic text, "In Quest of the Mythical Mate: A Developmental Approach to Diagnosis and Treatment in Couples Therapy", Ellyn Bader, Ph. D., and Peter Pearson, Ph. D., present a conceptual framework for understanding the evolution of a couple's relationship as a dynamic unit. They utilized Margaret Mahler's pioneering work in child development and the model of infant developmental stages as theoretical underpinnings for their developmental approach to understanding couples relationships. The Bader-Pearson model maintains that: Couples' relationships go through a progression of normal developmental stages which parallel the stages of early childhood development. Early childhood development therefore significantly affects couples relationships. Each couples stage has specific tasks to be mastered. Each state is more complex than the preceding one and requires new skills based on the integration and transformation of what existed previously into a new form. When individuals are unable to progress through these stages in order, difficulties will emerge in their relationship. A primary source of conflict and division in a relationship occurs when one or both individuals are not able to master the developmental tasks necessary to facilitate movement to the next stage. The stages of couples development can be diagnosed. Therapeutic interventions can be tailored to the specific developmental stage. (1988, p. 3). In their more recent book, "Tell Me No Lies" (2001) Bader and Pearson describe the four stages of marriage - The Honeymoon, Emerging Differences, Freedom to Explore and Together as Two - and the classic lies couples tell each other during these stages. Their focus is on how everyday deceptions erode intimacy and how facing truth builds a marriage in which intimacy is based on trust. The most significant difference between ESM and Bader and Pearson's therapeutic approach is that ESM does not focus upon the couple's relationship as an entity in and of itself. The focus is upon two separate individuals who choose to come together as a couple. Moreover, according to ESM, there is no such thing as stages in a couple's relationship. The issue has to do with where we are in the integration of Self, i.e. how we feel and see ourselves in relation to the world around us. This process of integration is a natural unfolding of who we are. The concept of stages is based on the belief that time is linear. However, this is time as we have been conditioned to know it, which is false. Findings by the New Biology and Quantum Physics validates the new perception that Everything is in the NOW and that we are all multisensory and multifaceted human beings. This is why our childhood wounds live in the NOW, calling out for attention. While Bader and Pearson encourage couples to focus upon the kind of partner they aspire to be in order to build the kind of life and relationship they want to create - ESM encourages individuals on a journey of personal transformation, recognizing that the self-acceptance and self-love generated serves to simultaneously nurture the couples relationship because it is grounded in the authenticity of both individuals which creates sacred space/safety. Terence Real in his book, How Can I Get Through To You?: Closing the Intimacy Gap Between Men and Women (Real, 2002) offers an excellent discussion of the ways in which men and womens' qualities, and thus relational skills are affected by gender dynamics through the process of "psychological patriarchy". Psychological patriarchy defines the relationship between two sets of human qualities. On the "masculine" side lie such qualities as strength, logic, aggression, antidependence, goal orientation, and insensitivity. On the "feminine" side lie such qualities as weakness, emotion, yielding, dependence, process orientation, and oversensitivity. (p. 73) Real describes the cultural dance of "masculine and feminine" that saturates each of us from birth. He goes on to describe the intrapsychic version of this cultural dance wherein the relationship between the two halves of our being is characterized by contempt. The great paradox for girls is that their ticket into relationships is silence, overaccommodation, indirect expression. How can one maintain genuine relationships while not being genuine in them? The paradox for boys is that in order to be worthy of connection, they must prove themselves invulnerableÑbuttoned-down warriors in the world's emotional marketplace. In the world of boys and men, you are either a winner or a loser, one up or one down, in control or controlled, man enough or a girl. Where in this setup is the capacity to love? Sustaining relationships with others requires a good relationship to ourselves. Healthy self-esteem is an internal sense of worth that pulls one neither into "better than" grandiosity nor "less than" shame. But the essence of psychological patriarchy is the nonexistence of such middle ground. (pp. 83-84) The second ring of psychological patriarchy is a relationship between the two halves of our being that is characterized by contempt. And contempt is why so many men have such trouble staying connected. Since healthy self-esteem - being neither one up nor one down - is not yet a real option, and since riding in the one-down position elicits disdain, in oneself and in others, most men learn to hide the chronic shame that dogs them, fleeing into the better-than position or else simply fleeing, running from their own humanity and from closeness to anyone else along with it. The relentless internal architecture of grandiosity and shame, better-than, less-than, is nothing less than the dynamic of psychological patriarchy itself played out inside our own skulls. (p. 84) In this regard, Real identifies the ways in which womens' socialization has impaired their sense of entitlement in asking for what they need and want, relationally. According to Real, One of the few observations about female psychology shared by both Freud and current feminist theorists is the understanding that disassociation is the central disorder plaguing troubled women, a disorder of knowing but not knowing. And both psychologies see dissociation as related to trauma. (p. 101) Real goes on to note that the very essence of female development, according to such writers as Carol Gilligan, Judith Herman and Dana Crowley Jack, is induction into the shadow world of knowing but not knowing, seeing but not speaking the truth one sees. (p. 102) Moreover, women disassociate because there is no safe place for them to stand in the truth of their own experience. (p. 102) In contrast, he describes men as suffering from "traumatic socialization" which causes their emotional disconnection. To quote Real: When I first began looking at gender issues, I believed that violence was a by-product of boyhood socialization. But after listening more closely to men and their families, I have come to believe that violence is boyhood socialization. The way we "turn boys into men" is through injury. We sever them from their mothers, research tells us, far too early. We pull them away from their own expressiveness, from their feelings, form sensitivity to others. The very phrase "Be a man" means suck it up and keep going. Disconnection is not fallout from traditional masculinity. Disconnection is masculinity. (p. 78) In summary then, Terence Real's approach to couples therapy involves teaching women the tools of relational empowerment and men the tools of relational re-awakening. In his latest book, The New Rules of Marriage: What You Need To Know To Make Love Work - A Breakthrough Program for 21st Century Relationships, Real provides a curriculum of exercises and skills which couples can use to become "relationally fit". In speaking of this book, Real states "its deepest ambition is to introduce you to a a whole new way of life I call full-respect living, an artful way of handling yourself that allows you to assert your truth and your needs while at the same time honoring the truth and needs of each person with whom you interact - especially those you love". (2007, pp. xv - xvi) ESM addresses the wounding of Real's "psychological patriarchy" as a natural part of its process. More specifically, in ESM the transformational process which restores our connection to our innate wholeness involves the individual reclaiming of all of our human qualities, not just the culturally sanctioned "masculine" or "feminine" qualities. To this end, we are empowered to rise above the tribal roots of this bifurcated way of experiencing ourselves in the world. Instead, ESM, through the transmutation of fear-based maladaptive beliefs, enables us to embrace all parts of ourselves with love and to know and walk our truth independently of the beliefs and judgements of others.
In his book, Mindful Loving: 10 practices for Creating Deeper Connections (2003), Dr. Henry Grayson provides a framework for understanding relationships which is comprised of psychology, spirituality and science (i.e. quantum mechanics and particle physics). Utilizing this framework he contrasts the ownership of one's True Self and the path of the spiritual marriage/relationship with ego-based relationships. To quote from Grayson (2003): As we have seen, the basic cause of our relationship problems has nothing to do with money, sex, our gender differences, or whether we replace the toothpaste cap. It is not even about who has control. Instead, the cause of all conflict, pain, and suffering in our relationships stems from our basic confusion about who we are. We think we are just the little "I," the ego, or just a body with all its limitations. It is the voice of the ego part of our minds that creates all our conflict and suffering. Yet, if we do not learn to recognize this enemy, how can we create peace? If we do not know what is causing the pain in our relationships, how can we attend to it creatively and make different choices? It is, therefore, of utmost importance that we know just what the ego is, and how to recognize its voice. That way, we learn how to deal with it constructively by differentiating it from our True Self. How can learning to control the thoughts in one's mind be superficial when all creation begins at that level? (pp. 89-90). While Grayson does not speak about the Energy or in energetic terms, he is aware that we are interconnected and that we co-create through our thoughts. According to ESM, the basic cause of relationship problems is, indeed, our relationship with Self and not being in touch with who we are. In ESM there is no such thing as conflict. Conflict is resistance to something we are feeling whether consciously or unconsciously. Rather, we see contrast. Contrast reveals to us that we have the opportunity to make a choice to accept or change what is present, i.e. what we want something to be or look like or feel like. Conflict represents when we are afraid that we are not enough to make the changes that we want so we project our fears onto the other person, objectifying them and attempting to make them responsible for our perceived inability to move forward. When we become aware of and consciously become attuned to natural law, we see our essential interconnectedness. And when we take complete responsibility for every aspect of our lives, we learn to exercise our choices consciously in every moment. Thus the power that created our suffering becomes the same power we can use consciously to create joy in our lives, and especially in our relationships. (p. 50). In ESM, what we see as pivotal is an effective and transformative process which brings us to the awareness of the beauty and the power that we embody. Again, ESM sees the solution in the resolution and integration of Self in contrast to the application of techniques for policing and erasing our thoughts. BIBLIOGRAPHY Bader, Ellyn & Pearson, Peter T. In Quest of the Mythical Male: A Developmental Approach to Diagnosis and Treatment in Couples Therapy. Bristol, PA: Brunner/Mazel, 1988. Bader, Ellyn & Pearson, Peter T, with Schwartz, Judith D. Tell Me No Lies: How to Stop Lying to Your Partner - And Yourself - in the 4 Stages of Marriage. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000. Grayson, Henry. Mindful Loving: 10 Practices for Creating Deeper Connections. New York: Gotham Books (Penguin Group U.S.A.) Inc., 2003. Hendrix, Harville. Getting The Love You Want: A Guide For Couples. New York: Harper Perennial, 1988. Hendrix, Harville & Hunt, Helen Lakelly. Receiving Love: Transform Your Relationship By Letting Yourself Be Loved. New York: Atria books, 2004. Johnson, Susan M. The Practice of Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy: Creating Connection, Second edition. New York: Brunner - Routledge, (1996, first edition) 2004. Johnson, Susan M. Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy With Trauma Survivors: Strengthening Attachment Bonds. New York: The Guilford Press, 2002. Real, Terrence. How Can I Get Through To You?: Closing The Intimacy Gap Between Men and Women: New York: Fireside book (Simon & Schuster)., 2002. Real, Terrence. The New Rules of Marriage: What You need To Know To Make Love Work. New York: Ballantine Books, 2007. Shapiro, Francine. Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing: Basic principles, Protocols and Procedures. Second Edition. New York: The Guilford Press, 2001. Wile, Daniel B. Couples Therapy: A Nontraditional approach. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1981, 1993. Wile, Daniel B. After the Fight: Using Your Disagreements to Build a Stronger Relationship. New York: the Guilford Press, 1993. Wile, Daniel B. Collaborative Couple Therapy. In Gurman A. S. & Jacobson, N. S. (Eds.). Clinical Handbook of Couple Therapy, Third Edition. New York: The Guilford Press, 2002, pp. 281-307. Other Books Relevant to Psychotherapy and Couples Therapy Siegel, Daniel J. The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are. New York: The Guilford Press, 1999. Siegel, Daniel J. The Mindful Brain: Reflection and Attunement in the Cultivation of Well-Being. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2007. |
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