Couples therapy is fascinating. If you sit with couples, as I do, you start to attune not to the content (who said what, who dropped the ball, whose libido is too high or too low) and more to the energetic patterns that keep replaying over and over again. It becomes really obvious that the couple is actually replaying one core dynamic or argument. It’s like watching a dance where each participant keeps repeating certain movements or steps. But because the content is often different it’s not immediately obvious that it’s the same dance being performed.
Realizing you’re having the same argument may feel depressing but it is also liberating. Instead of getting stuck in the details of today’s exchange, you can actually work on the underlying patterns by changing the steps of a dance.
An Example of Slowing Down The Dance
Having arguments in slow motion in couples therapy can be a bit agonizing but it’s also massively rewarding. Why each person is responding with certain steps gradually becomes very clear, as does the work that’s needed to change the dynamic long term.
Keen for an example of how this looks? Here’s one very common dynamic:
She says something that implies he did something wrong. He can’t tolerate being wrong so he gets louder and energetically bigger. She reads his behavior as anger (underneath it’s actually fear of abandonment and overwhelm) and responds by getting smaller, taking up less space, going quiet, walking on eggshells and feeling silently trapped.
His New Steps: He needs to bring awareness to how energetically scary he gets and must work on self regulating in the moment (moderating tone and body language is key). This means retraining his instinct to get reactive or defensive. The job at hand is training himself to become super curious and ask more questions whenever his partner gives difficult feedback. To be able to welcome his partner’s feelings he will need to do the inner work of realizing he doesn’t have to be “all good” or “perfect” to be lovable. He gets to make mistakes and still be worthy of love.
Her New Steps: She needs to strengthen her backbone by learning to share her thoughts and feelings without shrinking or leaving. She practices staying energetically solid even if her opinions are causing a negative reaction. With time she’ll learn to stay firm whilst also staying soft (at the beginning most of us stay firm by getting cold and frosty). She learns to allow her partner to have his big feelings without needing to change them (and without needing to minimize or negate her own feelings to “smooth things out”).
How Childhood Dynamics Get Weaved Into The Mix
When we look closer at the slow motion dance a lot is going on. It doesn’t just involve the two people in the room. The parenting they received from mom and dad, and their childhoods, are very much in the mix. A good book on how we tend to recreate childhood dynamics in our intimate relationships – because we’re drawn to “love” that feels familiar – is Harville Hendrix’s Getting The Love You Want.
There’s Lots of Individual Work Within Couple’s Work
So back to the example. Perhaps he responds poorly to criticism because he historically had to be “good” in order to get his depressed mother’s attention. Or because he was the “golden boy” and the Jungian archetype of “the hero” in his family. He learned as a kid, and on some level continued to believe as an adult, that there was no room for getting things wrong or mis-steps. That old belief system around being “good” in order to be lovable means it’s virtually guaranteed that he’d shut down, minimize or dismiss his partner’s feelings if she gives him negative feedback. He’s actually doing that because he’s trying to avoid experiencing himself as “bad” which feels intolerable – but to his partner it may feel like he’s controlling or a narcissist who can’t make room for any of her feelings.
Meanwhile maybe she had a father with a booming voice who wielded authority fiercely. Or a mother who was volatile and dismissed any feeling she was having as ridiculous or crazy. She needs to address the automatic shrinking and cowering response she developed in childhood – not easy if there’s some trauma work involved. And she might need to notice when she’s projecting her parent’s behavior or intentions onto her husband. Our brain’s predict the present on the basis of what happened in the past – it’s easy for our minds to create a story about our partner’s behavior even when that’s inaccurate. And more often than not our communication skills aren’t good enough to truly check out what’s really going on for our partner and what they really meant.
One Person Can Change the Dance
Even if you’re not in a relationship with somebody who’s interested in slowing down the dance and changing the steps, the good news is just one person changing does change the dance. If you respond differently the dynamic will change also.
In my 20s I was lucky enough to have the late psychologist John Welwood as my therapist. He was a big proponent of integrating psychological and spiritual work and very much saw intimate relationships as a spiritual path. We don’t need robes or a guru or even a therapist to stay conscious and awake. Relationships themselves are the gateway to psychological growth because they will mirror all the edges we’re not looking at in ourselves. An intimate relationship, if you choose to use it in that way, can keep you on your toes and force you to be conscious instead of sleep walking into old familiar neural pathways, and ways of being, that no longer serve you.