George Taylor MFT

An Article from Family Works Magazine

Healing A Basic Couples Argument:

How to Move From Conflict to Collaboration;
From Separation to Intimacy

Summary

A person calling me for couples counseling often says, "We are having trouble communicating."

Usually the person assigns the blame to their partner: He won't listen; she's so busy. The person on the phone doesn't realize that both partners are co-creating the repetitive patterns.

I'll describe why these painful communication dynamics occur and how couples counseling can address them. (The basic patterns: blaming, withdrawing, avoiding, pursuing, dismissing, et. al.)

Fortunately, in successful couples counseling, most people can learn new communication habits. And these new habits lead to happiness, generosity, intimacy and fun.

These habits can become a path to psychological healing, and spiritual growth, as couples learn to let go of their defenses and become more open and forgiving.

Take Jim and Carmen. In a session with me, Jim says to Carmen that he needs space when he comes home from work, but doesn’t know how to ask for it. She wants to connect with him then, and they argue repeatedly about the same issue. In counseling Jim begins to see how his anxiety from childhood about his overwhelming mother perpetuates the conflict with his wife, Carmen.

She has perfectly normal needs to connect, but she pursues Jim in a way that insures she will be pushed away. She too has to reckon with childhood abandonment issues, which underlie her bouts of anger and resentment.

Using intentions, and a model of communication I have developed, Jim and Carmen learn how to talk about their longings and their pain, instead of their conflict, which has taken up so much of their time together. They learn to be less protective and more loving. The deeply embedded pursuer-withdrawer pattern begins to change. They actually connect!

Jim and Carmen can turn their relationship into a path of transformation, by learning a few simple ideas and by working to become more vulnerable and authentic. They can turn power struggles into connection and creativity.

A Pursuer Avoider Couple—More Complete Version

Jim is a forty year old computer programmer. In couples counseling with me he says, "I come home from work. I have talked to computers and people on the phone all day."

His wife Carmen, a dark haired realtor, responds with a firm tone, "I've worked all day too. I’m tired too, but is a kiss or a hug too much to ask for?"

This is their standard argument.

I ask Jim, "What happens when you actually come home?"

"Well, for one thing," he says, and he relaxes a little in his chair. "I'm so tired. Driving, fluorescent lights, computers, phones all day. And then I'm thinking about Carmen, and how much I love her, while I'm driving home. But I also need some space, some time. Like I’m so tired."

"How are you feeling right now, telling the story?"

"I'm feeling warm, and my heart is open."

Carmen now is leaning towards Jim.

"And when I come into the driveway, I start feeling anxious," Jim continues, and he touches his stomach. "Like I'm going to mess it up and make Carmen mad at me. She’ll need contact so much."

I ask Jim, "So you feel this anxiety in your stomach when you come home. What does that tension remind you of? When might you have felt that at other times."

Jim is silent for a few moments. Then he says, "I don't know...but my mother drank a lot when I was a kid. When I came home from school, I was always afraid of her rages. I didn't like coming home."

"So somehow, this feeling of coming home to Carmen reminds you of this old anxiety," I say.

"Well. I never thought of it like that, but yeah."

I turn to Carmen, "What do you notice while Jim tells this story?"

She leans forward, and brushes back her thick black hair. "Well when he is so distant when he comes home, I know he is tired. But he makes no effort to connect. I get really annoyed. But like right now, I understand he feels all this anxiety. I have met his parents, and they can really get loaded and fight. It can be scary. We don’t take the kids there anymore."

She pauses for a moment, and says, "I also had a memory. My mother was sick a lot, and I had three younger sisters. I usually cooked for them, and I grew up independent. I used to go out with boys in college who were so distant, and I never could connect with them. Maybe I want connection, but I’m also used to the distance.”

Jim smiles at her and he says, "I want to know this part of you, Carmen. In a quiet place, when we can talk and listen. It's a relief. I can feel that you are more relaxed now." She smiles back.

I'm summarizing several conversations here, but I think you get the point. When partners share their own role in these painful patterns or defenses, then they can connect, and they can actually develop understanding for each other. When they just blame the other or withdraw, then distance and disappointment are the natural consequences. Jim learns why he needs space and feels overwhelmed by Carmen. And Carmen learns to feel connected and loved.

I’m generalizing here about men and women, always a dangerous idea. But it has occurred to me lately how often men seem overwhelmed by the level of their partners’ feelings, and women hurt by the lack of connection. Thousands of conversations I have had with couples come down to this dynamic. It’s important that each person see it as their own developmental challenge, not their partner’s fault.

Once you come to understand your own projection, true healing can occur. Through love and awareness, old habits born out of childhood conditioning can change radically. Power struggles and misunderstandings can change into opportunities for connection and creativity.

Painful Communication Patterns: Observations

The communication patterns that concern couples who seek counseling are repetitive. Some one gets blamed, judged, or ignored, and he reacts, using almost the identical language every time it happens.
Couples want to change these patterns, but they don't know how.
Typically, each person in the pattern thinks that the pattern will change if their partner changes.
These patterns reflect something in each person that needs to be healed, or changed, or loved. Each partner is bringing to the conflict an old belief or defense or communication pattern, which they learned as a child.
As soon as the couple realizes that they can help each other heal, conflicts transform into opportunities for understanding and healing.

In Jim's case, when he was a child, he expected to feel anxious when he went home, and later, the same thing happens to him when he is an adult. He thinks it's Carmen's independence which is causing the problem. And Carmen keeps playing out a similar psychodrama. She accuses Jim of distancing, because she was wrestling with her independence, and ability to be close.

The step of self-responsibility is crucial. Once we get curious, once we ask ourselves, "How am I helping to create this familiar situation?" then we can change. We can actually heal the unconscious old suffering that is driving our behavior.

One of the tragedies of the human condition is our tendency to repeat old hurts, often unconsciously. One of the miracles, though, is the love and awareness can help us heal these hurts and change our behaviors.

What Couples Counseling Can Do

Good couples counseling will bring understanding to painful patterns and conflicts. It will teach the couple concrete skills they can use. Those skills are:

Self-awareness. Couples learn to become more aware of their patterns as they arise in the course of the day. In a way, the predictable dynamics persist because we have learned to ignore them.
Self-inquiry. Couples need to learn what they are actually feeling. As we go into a reactive pattern, we need to sense our own bodies and feelings. Sensing and studying our bodies are skills which we should have learned in grade school but didn't. Self-inquiry allows us to take responsibility, to understand our own behaviors and reactions a little better.
Self-disclosure. Most of us have very little practice in saying how we feel and what our needs are. We either shut up or blame. Couples counseling is an ideal place for each person to practice more vulnerable communication. When we learn to be more truthful about our own experience and needs, we develop deeper feelings of connection and cooperation.

In couples counseling as the partners tell stories about their current issues, they start to interrupt, they sit forward or back, and they subtly demonstrate the very issues that they want to heal.

An active therapist can intervene directly in those moments, and teach the couple how to communicate about their issues in a very different way.

When couples learn to talk to each other openly, the patterns begin to change dramatically. Tension drops, and is replaced by generosity. It's no longer World War III when someone is asked to take out the garbage.