Couples often come to us wanting to ‘resolve their differences’.
They instinctively know that these differences have within them the power to create chasms that can pull them apart, so it makes sense that their goal is to resolve their differences and once again feel as if they are on the same team. When I invite them to consider that the differences can be dissolved rather than resolved they often can’t see the difference.
For them resolving something is about arriving at the place where they can both agree on a way to look at a particular issue and in agreeing will receive the gift of connection again.
Dissolving issues means that the stories we attach to any given issue dissolve and we are invited into a new place where two opposing realities can live together harmoniously.
One way i.e.: resolving can promote enmeshment and the other, i.e.: dissolving can promote differentiation.
This is ,to my mind, a subtle but important difference.
Intentional dialogue regulates reactivity through mirroring and allows for the experience of connection, which integrates the brain and integrates the self. This thought came out of some notes from a conference and it struck me as very true – and yet!
How often have I supported a couple in one mirroring another only to find that the insights and information flow don’t seem to bring about much long standing change. It seems that more is needed then just the practice of mirroring and I call it mirroring with heart.
What do I mean? Mirroring with heart is an intense form of mirroring that slows down to give both the person being mirrored and the person mirroring the chance to consciously feel the effect of the words, emotion and energy in the space. Given that science tells us that it takes 7 times longer for words to hit the emotion centres than just understanding the meaning of the words themselves, then it makes a lot of sense to slow down the whole process.
In this way a remarkable amount of implicit memories can surface and be integrated into the hippocampus thus becoming explicit and lost parts of ourselves come back online.
This is, I think, what transformation looks like!
“…Love in its fullest form is a series of deaths and rebirths. We let go of one phase, one aspect of love, and enter another. Passion dies and is brought back. Pain is chased away and surfaces another time. To love means to embrace and at the same time withstand many endings, and many, many beginnings - all in the same relationship.”
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
For quite a while I have been interested in and studying informally EFT (Emotion Focused Therapy) as I am interested in the similarities as well as the differences between EFT and Encounter Centered Therapy. It seems to me that both are trying to create the conditions for more compassion and acceptance between couples and to slow down and invite them to softer, more emotional responses.
Perhaps one of the differences is that EFT, coming from Attachment theory, sees the absence of a safe emotional bond as the thing that causes distress and emerges as conflict. While I think this is certainly part of it, I add that the couple have been attracted to each other in the first place in order to recreate these moments. Implicit in the seeds of that distress is the hope of experiencing that safe connection so that whatever got ‘stuck’ in early history might be resolved and a new sense of integration experienced. One thing EFT and Encounter Centered Therapy both offer is a useful map or structure to guide both therapist and clients through the murky waters of change. This combined with an open curiosity promises a more hopeful outcome.
What then are the implications for therapy if we truly understand and respect this oscillation between the self and the relational paradigm?
Relational healing is shifting from looking at individuals as relational beings to seeing being as relational. Given this, then when we sit with clients or a couple we sit with the profound understanding that in every moment our ‘self’ is being formed fluidly moment by moment - what potential for change!!
We now know so much more about how this is actually happening in our body-brains through things like mirror neurones and Limbic resonance and the Brain Bridge. It seems that it is not just our conceptual selves that are being formed minute by minute but our body states too. Which affects how we experience things… and then what stories we make up about the moment to make sense of it … and so what feelings we have about it … and then what actions we do…well, you get the story!
So thinking a little deeper into this oscillation between the concepts of the individual paradigm and the relational paradigm, the article I was reading goes on to say that for some people the self doesn’t exist as a separate entity that can be studied on its own. Now that I can agree with!
For me the self only comes into focus through the lens of the relationships it is embedded in. And likewise the relationship only comes into focus through the lens and co-creation of the individuals – back to two sides of the same coin!
I think Africa captures that exactly in a proverb saying:
‘I am, because we are.’ This is a fundamental philosophy of African Ubuntu.
I was reading an article on the relational paradigm and how it is developing conceptually all over the world when I came across this thought that we should acknowledge the fiction of the ‘self’ – that this concept of the individual is no longer relevant to therapy. I found myself agreeing and yet uncomfortable with the statement and it’s taken a few days to put my finger on what it is that makes me uncomfortable, and it is this:
The wording to me implies the abandonment of one concept, ie: the individual in the favour of the concept of the relational paradigm. I see it more as a spectrum oscillating between the individual and the relational – two sides of the same coin as it were. To abandon one of those indivisible sides in the favour of the other puts us surely right back at square one which is a concept, rather than concepts in relationship to each other…just as we can be seen as individual humans rather than humans experienced in relation to each other!
