Couples Counseling

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Relational Intimacy is at the center of things.

When a couple arrives in my office it can be for a number of reasons: unrelenting conflict, parenting disagreement, addictions, an affair, sexual struggles, or just a need for the couple to rekindle excitement or enjoyment in their marriage or relationship.  These various topics require different strategies and efforts to resolve, but at the core of the work in every scenario is the idea of intimacy and the problems the couple may be having with it.  First, let me define what I believe intimacy to be.  Intimacy is that deep connection between a couple where each other can look “into me” and in the midst of the relationship care for, connect, and enjoy the deeper parts of one another.  Despite the issue a couple originally comes in for, I know that likely there has been something to disrupt, sidetrack, or even destroy intimacy. This can lead to couples feeling uncared for, not enjoyed, or connected to one another.

Since intimacy is frequently involved in each issue, I often take a moment to describe how this may have happened for couples.  It cannot be assumed that each person comes into a relationship with sufficient intimacy skills.  Some families are better at modeling and teaching intimacy than others, and it is something that I believe we all can learn.  The first step in intimacy is getting in touch with our own feelings, hopes, and dreams, and being able to articulate them as they are experienced or influencing our life.  This concept is known as self-intimacy.  We can practice this on our own by just asking the question “What am I feeling?”  Then we must try to identify it and ask ourselves what this is about, or why we may be feeling this way right now.

The second step in intimacy is being able to share our thoughts and feelings with another person.  When we describe our feelings to another person, we are allowing them to look “into me.”  In addition, we are locating ourselves for them in case they may want to meet us in that place, or care for us at that moment.  This is some of the basic work that can grow relational intimacy in a couple.

Barriers to connection

However, most of the time there is a lot of work that needs to be done to get a couple to the place of growing intimacy.  Oftentimes there are created barriers that stand in the way of intimacy being able to take place.  Most of these barriers revolve around the type of environment that the couple has created around their relationship.  Intimacy requires a safe environment to be present and grow.  Therefore, one of the first steps we must take is figuring out what aspects of the environment needs adjustment or change to make it safer and conducive to intimacy.

Don’t work against your own brain, you will lose!

Our brains are designed in such a way that they will react in intimate relationship the same way they would in the presence of a grizzly bear.  Intimate relationships register this level of threat to our brain.  When the information from our environment comes into our brain, it enters the thalamus and the signal is split.  One route goes through the amygdala and limbic system and the other to our prefrontal cortex.  The signal to our limbic system gets there first and the information is scanned and cross-checked with patterns of “threatening situations” that we have stored on file.  If the information seems to match a threatening situation, your brain will sound the alarm and pump a bunch of chemicals into your bloodstream. This includes adrenaline and glucocorticoids, which turn fats into sugars for fast energy.  This will happen before your prefrontal cortex processes the signal (remember the way you jump when you think a stick is a snake or a dust ball is a spider, before your prefrontal cortex can determine what it is).  The other important thing that happens when the alarm sounds is that your brain disconnects you from your prefrontal cortex.  This makes sense because it is about fast reactions, and if you were to start thinking about why the grizzly bear has ears in that shape or whether it is the right month for bears to be in this particular environment based on the rain fall we received, it may very well kill you.  So your brain disconnects you from the prefrontal cortex and you stay in the limbic system, which is meant for survival.  This is the part of the brain responsible for fight or flight.

When this reaction happens in a relationship, you will notice the fight or flight being utilized and people tend to have their favorites.  You will notice the fight response with people raising their voice, using harsher words, standing up and getting closer, following someone around and not letting them go, etc. The flight response is typically seen in a person who first withdraws or flees emotionally and then physically.  People can do both, but usually favor one over the other.  If we can’t flee, we will fight.  If fighting won’t work, we will flee.

Why is this important? The brain is needed for effective couple’s communication.

I just mentioned how the prefrontal cortex will shut down during times of being triggered.  The prefrontal cortex is an extremely important part of the brain that is needed for effective relating.  This is the part of the brain that does abstract thinking.  In other words, being able to put yourself in the other person’s shoes and understand what they are thinking and feeling.  When we have been triggered and enter our limbic system, this is not the time to try to engage in relationship.  There is a researcher named John Gottman who has studied this for decades and concluded that when you or the other person are in your limbic system, 95% of all conversation after this point will go poorly or make things worse. So good luck if you think you are in the 5%!  Part of the reason this may be the case is that he has also concluded through researching and analyzing thousands of couples while they were triggered that over 50% of all of the couples’ communication is misinterpreted when triggered.  In addition, how many of us say really stupid things when we are upset or triggered?  Things that we later regret and acknowledge is not what we truly think.  This is a good indication you were NOT using your prefrontal cortex and instead trying to say something to survive the moment.

This is why I teach couples to monitor where they are in their brain and if they are triggered to take a time out and calm down. This can take on average 30 minutes or so for women and about 45 minutes for men.  When the couple comes back to the conversation if it goes poorly again, it should be done in the presence of a third party, like a therapist or some other respected person.  This is because our brains will stay regulated longer in the presence of the third party.

How do we begin to avoid having our brain get triggered?

As I discussed earlier, the goal of a close relationship is intimacy.  This means exposing yourself and becoming vulnerable to the other as they look “into me” and you look into them.  This means that when a person is exposing their inner self to the other, any form of criticism would be horrific.  There is nothing that erodes intimacy faster than criticism, in all its forms.  This is like taking a big needle and jabbing it at the person as they are trying to expose vulnerable aspects of themselves.  Therefore, criticism will trigger our brain because it is very threatening, whether it is verbal critique, non-verbal criticism (rolling eyes, huffing, etc.), or giving someone the silent treatment.  Another thing that is often received as criticism is unsolicited advice, or advice that was not asked for.  Though this can be well-intentioned, it often comes across or is received as criticism.  John Gottman verifies these areas as threatening enough to begin triggering the other person.  There are other things that may trigger the brain also. This might include seeing another person triggered, or another aspect of the relationship that triggers you personally based on your own past experiences.  Some people benefit from individual work to help “de-trigger” their limbic system and allow their emotions and brain to heal because they have a past filled with hurt or difficult experiences.  Methods of therapy such as Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) or Air Network counseling can be extremely effective at this.  We may even desire to engage in some couples EMDR which allows the healing to occur and to grow intimacy as the couple learns more fully of each other’s past and the hurt and pain that has resulted.

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Other areas of therapy that are also important to be addressed with couples:

• The need for control and how this can hurt the relationship.
• How to properly repair the relationship (apologize well) which can ultimately grow the relationship and intimacy.
• Effective methods of couple communication that help the brain to stay regulated and avoid criticism, such as a speaker – listener exercise.
• How to have both emotional conversations and business conversations, and not get confused about which is which. This includes not making the other person feel invalidated.
• Understanding the couple’s love languages and how this has contributed to difficulty in the relationship. As Gary Chapman discusses in his book we usually have 1 or 2 of the languages we prefer and therefore use, despite the preference of the other person.
• Avoiding judgment (feeling superior) and not holding resentments.
• Engaging in abuse counseling when needed, and learning to avoid it in all of it forms (verbal, emotional, physical, sexual, etc.).
• Engaging in addiction counseling and healing from the impact on the relationship.
• Recovering from infidelity as a couple, when one of the members has had an affair.
• Forming proper boundaries for a marital or couple relationship.
• Counseling for sexual problems or concerns.
• Therapy to resolve parenting disagreements and conflict.
• Counseling to resolve financial difficulties and differences.
• Learning how to maintain a couple’s dating relationship when married.
• How to communicate and address the underlying primary emotion and go beyond the surface/secondary reactive emotion as described in Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT).
• How past models of relating in life are currently influencing the relationship as described in psychodynamic counseling.
• How internal thoughts and beliefs influence life and relationship as understood in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT).