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Power Couples…Activate!
by Eva Van Prooyen, M.F.T., PACT faculty, Los Angeles CA
Website: Eva.VP.com
Email: Eva@ThePACTInstitute.com
Healthy, secure relationships are a source of vital energy. PACT therapists know people feel good when they understand how to be successful partners. We are energized by a secure connection to another person. Our need to be securely attached is so powerful that it can get us through the hardest of times and help us float through day-to-day routines with ease, skill, and grace.
Secure functioning is based on a high degree of respect for one another’s experience. Interactions and shared experiences are fair, just, and sensitive. If your partner feels even slightly unwanted, undervalued, disliked, unseen, or unimportant, he or she will—quite frankly—act weird and underperform in the relationship.
Insecurity and insecure attachment negatively affect brain performance. Development can be slowed down because the brain is using most of its resources to manage being in survival mode instead of being free to move toward evolution, growth, and complexity.
In general, couples can get tripped up in creating a secure and healthy relationship and end up not liking their partners, situations, or experiences because they don’t know what to do or how to manage them. This can leave them feeling badly about themselves as well as their partner.
In line with the main treatment goals of PACT, couples are encouraged (and ultimately expected) to both know themselves and know their partner. That is, to know who they are and how they move through the world, and also to understand who their partner is, and how he or she operates. To be clear, that is not how they wish their partner operates, but how their partner actually operates, navigates, and maneuvers through the world. This knowledge, which requires a healthy dose of curiosity and attention, creates a strong foundation of understanding. It pushes forth the secure-functioning principles that “your partner is your responsibility and in your care,” and “you are responsible for knowing how to manage your partner.” Your partner then holds a sacred and honored position no one else in the world gets to occupy. That said, we often joke that actual wedding vows should probably include, “I take you to be my perfect pain in the butt.”
PACT teaches couples how to manage their partners so they can move and shift them into better states of mind and moods; lower their stress level; and decrease their sense of threat, anxiety, and depression.
The idea of being responsible for knowing and caring for your partner in this way and putting the relationship first tends to be the hard sell for some couples. When you truly understand the benefits of adopting this idea, the stance of “but it’s always about them, it never gets to be about me” loses its power as an argument.
My answer is, “You do this because it serves you and is good for you. You get your needs met by shoring up the vulnerabilities in your partner so he or she can in return do the same for you. You both get the benefits of that investment.”
Love and genuine connection create libidinal energy—life force energy that can be renewed in an instant through a simple act of friendliness, a glance, a look, a moment, and a knowing that “my person likes me.” Part of creating a secure relationship is making sure you are helping your partner perform at an optimal level. To do that, messages that communicate “I’m good at you,” “I’m good at being with you,” and “You are in my care” must be reflected every day.
If you want to put this into practice, one way I encourage that is to pay attention to everything your partner hears you say about him or her. What messages are you conveying? Another thing you can do is to introduce your partner to other people, when you are together in public, in a way that is elevating.
PACT principles help couples enjoy the experience of being loved for who they are, as well as appreciate all the day-to-day benefits their relationship brings.
Copyright Eva Van Prooyen
Red Sky in the Morning, Sailors Take Warning
by Elaine Tuccio, LCSW, PACT faculty, Austin, TX
Email: elaine@thepactinstitute.com
One of the most common complaints made by couples who come to therapy is that they feel they do not know how to communicate well with one another. The words “we have problems communicating,” or something along those lines, are often preceded or followed by a deep sigh—the signal of long-held misery and defeat.
The PACT therapist using the Partner Attachment Inventory (PAI) can obtain enough information within the first session to help a couple see that their problems are not simply communication. In fact, where couples tend to falter most is in reading signs and signals—the nonverbal cadence on which primary attachment relationships are built. Life’s forces have caused drift in their relationships. A mix of financial stress, betrayal, conflicting priorities of career and family, and addictions have thrown them into survival mode. As a result of early unmet developmental needs and attachment injuries, they find themselves at sea in their adult romantic partnership. Instead of smooth sailing, they tack too much or lean too little.
Consider Chuck and Tina, who are committed, loving parents to a child with cerebral palsy. In therapy, Chuck voiced frustration that his wife would not talk with him. Tina listened to every word as she held back tears, bit her lower lip, and wrung her hands, then stammered out words to defend herself. Both partners were clearly expressive, but in their own learned attachment style of communication. Tina’s parents had poured all their energy into their kids, but she couldn’t recall them talking at length with one another. They divorced when she was ten. Chuck’s father left when he was two. His doting mother never remarried, and he spent a lot of time alone in front of the television. The PAI helped this couple discover that neither was raised with examples of partners negotiating. This significant finding built hope for Chuck and Tina and helped them see that both wanted to communicate but they did not know how—yet.
Old-time sailors knew to be on the lookout for atmospheric changes, to stay in constant communication with their shipmates, and to point ahead always. As young sailors, they were guided by masters of the sea and learned to expect the best but plan for the worst, and leave nothing to chance. Not everyone entering a relationship is fortunate enough to be launched in a boat rigged for all sailing conditions. PACT therapists are trained to be master navigators at the helm. We help couples help themselves on rocky seas, in and out of narrow channels, and around sandbars. We teach them to distinguish between a red sky in the morning and a red sky at night so they can avoid storms that may be brewing and instead delight in life as it is—wonderful, unpredictable, painful, loving, beautiful, and forever changing.
Copyright Elaine Tuccio
Betrayal Causes Trauma
by Stan Tatkin, PsyD, MFT,
stantatkin.com
In matters of betrayal—lying, cheating, stealing—the breach of the attachment system is acute and often long lasting and can be understood neurologically as a trauma-related problem.
Franklin and Zeynep, a couple in their early 40s with two young children, came to therapy because of a discovered set of sexual affairs. Franklin, an American-born academician, was found to have an affair with one of his students. Zeynep, a Turkish-born emergency room nurse, discovered the affair after accidentally viewing Franklin’s phone text messages. The texts were explicitly sexual and contained incontrovertible evidence of Franklin’s deceptions and betrayals. Although Franklin was contrite and desperately wanted to be let back into the relationship, he had great difficulty dealing with Zeynep’s unrelenting preoccupation with his affair. She wanted to know details. Fearful of making matters worse, he refused to give details. Zeynep would wake up in the middle of the night crying, and suddenly burst into a rage while they drove to dinner. She did not want Franklin to touch her. He was not to sleep in their marital bed. Franklin’s patience was at an end. He began to believe that Zeynep was purposely punishing him and was invested in making his life a living hell. Neither partner wanted the relationship to end, but neither could escape the strong wake of the betrayal itself.
PACT therapists will recognize that betrayal by a primary attachment figure is likely to be processed as trauma. Betrayals in adult romantic partnerships most commonly revolve around sex and/or finances, but central to all betrayals is the matter of deception. Partners who feel deceived by their loved ones suffer a particular kind of loss that can affect the historical memory of that relationship. Deceived partners will review the entire relationship in an attempt to reorganize their experiences of self and other. This review reorients the memory toward doubt, fear, and rage. In Zeynep’s case, we see that she could not stop thinking about Franklin’s betrayal and demanding details. Even though he did not provide details, her brain filled in its own details, which fed her doubt and fear. Flooded by these emotions, she would alternately withdraw from him and rage at him.
Once initiated, this review process cannot be interrupted because the brain must reorganize and adapt to the new information. As in PTSD, the brain and body must metabolize the trauma and cope with amygdalar hyperactivity as the amygdala responds to multiple internal and external triggers. However, different from PTSD, betrayal forces a hippocampal review and re-contextualization of the past with new information from the present. PTSD usually does not compel the brain to review past events; in fact, victims of PTSD commonly wish to avoid any review of the traumatic event, and their hippocampal function can be compromised by the traumatic event.
Betrayal, therefore, usually leads to a preoccupation with the new reality-shattering information. This presents an enormous challenge to the couple attempting to recover from it. Like Zeynep, the victim cannot stop being preoccupied with the past, present, and future, nor escape the emotional volatility that accompanies this process. The perpetrator therefore must tolerate the other partner’s perseveration and emotional volatility, as well as the constant questioning, grief, and anger that come with the healing process. In this case, Franklin had to learn patience for the couple to have any chance at rebuilding their relationship. Somewhat ironically, the perpetrator is in a unique position as not only the cause of the trauma but also its solution. This is not an easy task for the perpetrator to perform. Yet, the PACT therapist takes the position that the betraying partner must provide ongoing and sufficient support to regulate disturbing states related to the trauma whenever they arise.
Copyright © 2003-2014 Stan Tatkin, PsyD – all rights reserved
The Ten Commandments for a Secure-Functioning Relationship
by Stan Tatkin, PsyD, MFT,
stantatkin.com
- Thou shalt protect the safety and security of thy relationship at all costs.
- Thou shalt base thy relationship on true mutuality, remembering that all decisions and actions must be good for thee AND for thine partner.
- Thou shalt not threaten the existence of the relationship, for so doing would benefit no one.
- Thou shalt appoint thy partner as go-to person for all matters, making certain thy partner is first to know—not second, third, or fourth—in all matters of importance.
- Thou shalt provide a tether to thy partner all the days and nights of thy life, and never fail to greet thy partner with good cheer.
- Thou shalt protect thy partner in public and in private from harmful elements, including thyself.
- Thou shall put thy partner to bed each night and awaken with thy partner each morning.
- Thou shalt correct all errors, including injustices and injuries, at once or as soon as possible, and not make dispute of who was the original perpetrator.
- Thou shalt gaze lovingly upon thy partner daily and make frequent and meaningful gestures of appreciation, admiration, and gratitude.
- Thou shalt learn thy partner well and master the ways of seduction, influence, and persuasion, without the use of fear or threat.
Tatkin, S. (2011). Ten Commandments for a Secure-Functioning Relationship. In J. K. Zeig & T. Kulbatski (Eds.), For Couples: Ten Commandments for Every Aspect of Your Relationship Journey. Phoenix: Zeig, Tucker & Theisen, Inc. Publishers.
© 2003-2013 Stan Tatkin, Psy.D. — all rights reserved
No Pain No Gain
by Stan Tatkin, PsyD, MFT,
stantatkin.com
Therapy is only useful for changing people who are experiencing sufficient distress. This is not to say that education, consultation, or brief counseling will have no effect. People often benefit from couple counseling for premarital or other short-term work. However, as a matter of therapeutic stance, the PACT therapist assumes the presence of a sufficient level of distress that can only be relieved by pressuring couples to go down the tube of secure functioning. The PACT therapist thus takes a stand for secure-functioning principles. For insecure partners, this requires a big leap of faith.
That leap of faith can be viewed as a metaphor for neuronal action potential (AP) and long-term potentiation (LTP). AP is basically a charge that is sufficient to fire a neuron. LTP is a cellular mechanism related to learning and memory. LTP involves the building up of synaptic strength between neurons, whereby several weak synapses repeatedly fire simultaneously to create a new (or reinforce an old) neuropathway. In therapy, LTP can be associated with the aha experience of “getting it.”
Insecure partners do not have any experience in their historical record that can serve as proof that a secure-functioning model would be good for them. Insecures may be attracted to the menu of secure-functioning principles, but should not be expected to know what the food tastes like or if they would like it. Remember that insecure models are fundamentally unjust, unfair, and insensitive and that relationships do not come first. Therefore, insecure partners have no reason to believe in the therapist’s belief in secure functioning. In a manner of speaking, insecure individuals, like connecting neurons, must cross a synaptic cleft of unknowing in order to forge a new neuropathway that represents new knowledge. In systems theory, this is first-order change. In Piagetian terms, this is accommodation.
So what builds LTP in the insecure partner or couple?
1. Pain
2. Focused, coherent therapeutic stance
3. Pressure
Pain
Without pain, the therapist’s tools are useless. No pain, no gain. Pain is a huge motivator because it opens the mind to influence. If partners are not in distress, the therapist is without leverage to convert their pain into increased complexity and neuronal growth. This alchemical process of using distress to convert lower social-emotional complexity into higher social-emotional complexity is an essential aspect of LTP, and of the neuroplasticity needed for change to occur.
The PACT therapist must locate each partner’s pain and amplify it. If one partner is without distress, both the therapist and the other partner are rendered helpless. Therefore, the therapist must locate the pain of the non-distressed partner, amplify it, and then leverage it for change. Finding and leveraging the pain creates interest, which creates AP in the brain.
Focused, coherent therapeutic stance
The PACT therapist maintains a clear, focused, and coherent narrative (therapeutic stance) that is secure functioning. The therapist maintains a clear image and set of goals that point toward secure functioning and away from insecure models of relating. This clarity is expressed through repetition of the therapeutic narrative, which creates interest and in turn creates AP in the brain. Repetition greatly contributes to LTP. Therapy, in essence, involves repetition, both in the patient’s psychobiological response to inter- and intra-relational stress and in the therapist’s focused, coherent therapeutic stance, which points the way forward on a path toward relief.
Pressure
The PACT therapist applies continuous pressure on partners to perform in a secure-functioning manner. This pressure is like pushing partners down a tube that both focuses and limits behavior and attitude. The combination of pressure, focus, and limitation also forces feelings and emotions to arise. For instance, when the therapist expects partners to demonstrate developmental complexity, they will expose their limitations, along with the pain (e.g., fears of abandonment and engulfment) that underlies their developmental delays. Pressure, support, and expectation promote interest, which creates AP in the brain and contributes to LTP.
Conclusion
The PACT therapist creates neuroplasticity through LTP and AP in the insecure couple (or partner) by locating, amplifying, and leveraging pain and distress toward a secure-functioning model of relating, and maintains persistent pressure on the couple (or partner) to move in this direction. In this way, the therapist pushes insecure partners through the synaptic cleft of unknowing to create a previously unexperienced knowing of secure function. The influence the PACT therapist can exert on partners may result in both neuroplastic and epigenetic first-order changes.
© 2003-2013 – Stan Tatkin – all rights reserved
On Being Found
by Stan Tatkin, PsyD, MFT,
stantatkin.com
A study by Nagasawa and his colleagues in Japan (2009) some years ago involving dogs and their owners found that if a dog looked into its owner’s eyes by finding the gaze first, the owner’s oxytocin levels went up. (I suspect dopamine might also be increased). However, if the owner’s gaze found the dog’s eyes first, no increase in oxytocin resulted. This finding has continued to “dog” me as I thought about infant attachment studies and adult romantic relationships. What is it about a dog, a baby, or a lover finding our eyes that leads to an increase in dopamine, oxytocin, vasopressin, or other neurochemicals related to the reward system?
During early infancy, when the newborn’s gaze is largely undirected, the catching of the mother’s gaze by the infant leads to a dopaminergic rush—a reward that is evident in the mother’s subsequent inviting vocal tone and facial expression. This excitement on her part amplifies the infant’s own interest in returning to the mother’s gaze, and thus the pattern repeats. We might imagine that if the mother chased the infant’s eyes (as in the case of the dog), the same neurochemical reaction would not occur for her. There does seem to be, in fact, a difference between finding and being found.
Find the Baby
A common maxim in the field of infant development is that, in the first year of life, the baby must lead. The baby’s mind has yet to be located; it is floating in some nether land, waiting to be discovered by an interested, attentive, and curious adult mind. The adult mind, or brain, must find the baby’s mind, and that can only be accomplished by allowing the baby to lead and the caregiver to follow. Donald Winnicott wrote about the mother’s intense primary maternal preoccupation with the newborn. She focuses attention on the nonverbal being, who can neither fend for itself nor express needs in an adult manner, and whose very life depends upon an interested other who can read its cues for comfort, food, and relief from pain. Indeed, the mother’s capacity for what Dan Siegel (2009) terms mindsight—her ability to read the infant’s needs and locate the baby’s mind—creates an external psychobiological womb-like experience for the defenseless, unhatched infant (Mahler, Bergman, & Pine, 1975).
Find Your Partner
Unlike the baby, your partner’s mind should be fully formed (we hope), and therefore not in need of being found in order to survive in the world. Nonetheless, it could be argued that both you and your partner need to be found to thrive in mind, body, and spirit if life together is to be worth much. Do you know how to find your partner? Have you been found?
The Eyes Have It
We are animals that function optimally by regulating our nervous systems (and emotions) interactively with others. The means of interactive (or mutual) regulation is primarily through touch, vision, and sound, in that order. Though touch has great power to down- and up-regulate another person, eye contact comes in a very close second. Indeed, when it comes to finding and being found, the eyes have it.
When we gaze at our partner (or baby or dog, for that matter), we are in real time. By gazing I don’t mean staring or looking through or looking inward; by gazing I mean being fully present in the eyes of our loved one. If we maintain presence—something our partner can see—we also become anchored in real time, in the present moment. If we look into our partner’s eyes, we can see him or her think, feel, and change before us.
Finding, Losing, and Finding Again
In case you think finding and being found is a one-time event, you’re dead wrong. The process of finding and being found is a series of losing the other and being lost. It’s an error-filled process of attunement and misattunement, of error making and error correction, of injury and repair. It’s not being found for good that is most important; rather, it is the continuous interest, as demonstrated by the other, in refinding you over and over again!
Our focused gaze and interest in finding our partner over and over again not only cultivate a feeling of love and excitement (dopamine), but also reintroduce us to the strangerness that is our partner—his or her uniqueness, unpredictability, and complexity. Our sense of self and other becomes refreshed, new, updated, and novel. When our partner gazes attentively, he or she can find us despite our attempts to hide or remain unknown and unfound. Couples who rely on interactive regulation, which is really close-up play, benefit from the moment-by-moment experience of finding and being found.
Of course, we must have an interest in finding our partner! Some partners are as disinterested in finding each other as were their parents in finding them as a baby. Some partners are overly interested in finding but not in being found, as happened in childhood with their caregivers. Always turning away toward the self as a masturbatory exercise in self-finding is as lonely as always turning toward another person in a perpetual search for the other who may one day find us. Finding and being found must be interactive, mutual, and effortful. Otherwise, just stick with the dog.
Mahler, M. S., Bergman, A., & Pine, F. (1975). The psychological birth of the human infant: symbiosis and individuation. New York, NY: Basic Books.
Nagasawa, M., Kikusui, T., Onaka, T., & Ohta, M. (2009). Dog’s gaze at its owner increases owner’s urinary oxytocin during social interaction. Hormones and Behavior, 55, 3, 434–441.
Siegel, D. (2009). Mindsight: The new science of personal transformation. New York, NY: Bantam.
© 2003-2013 Stan Tatkin, PsyD – all rights reserved
Folie à deux
by Stan Tatkin, PsyD, MFT,
stantatkin.com
As a species, we are more herdlike than we are hermetic. Both tendencies exist in our society, but we tend to be happier and healthier when we herd as a group together than when we isolate ourselves. In fact, it has been established that even individuals without a history of mental illness are more likely to develop symptoms if they experience too much isolation, loneliness, or withdrawal from social connections.
Not only do isolated individuals become sicker both in body and mind than do connected individuals, but the same applies to couples. Couples can become isolates who are cut off from social engagement outside their tiny, exclusive orbit. These couples, I have found in my practice, become crazier and crazier the longer they isolate themselves. Sometimes one partner is crazier than the other; however, when they become socially isolated as a couple, both descend into madness together. This is known as folie à deux,* or shared psychosis—a psychiatric syndrome in which symptoms of a delusional belief are transmitted from one individual to another.
I saw one couple who remained isolated from outside social influence for more than 15 years. Individually, they looked perfectly normal, but together both were as mad as Hatters. Another couple remained isolated from outside social influence for more than nine years. No one knew of their existence as a couple. As individuals, they were both hugely successful, but as partners in a couple they were a huge mess. In each folie à deux case, the partners became sicker and crazier over time.
A literary example of folie à deux is George and Martha, the iconoclastic couple at the center of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Fused together in a hermetically sealed dyadic system, their private fantasy world was like a cancer in their psyche. Another example is found in David Cronenberg’s nightmarish film, Dead Ringers, about identical twins in a folie à deux.
Famous cases include Leopold and Loeb; the Papin sisters; and more recently, Randy and Evi Quaid. Discussing how the Quaids reinforced each other’s “bizarre hold on reality,” Stuart Fischoff, a senior editor of the Journal of Media Psychology and an expert on celebrity psychology, sheds light on the dynamics of folie à deux: “So long as you stay with each other and you stay insular, it’s a siege mentality. You’re not open to contradictions from the outside world.” University of Pennsylvania psychiatrist Dr. Christos Ballas says the disorder only becomes apparent when one off-kilter person gets involved with another; then everything spirals downward. “Independently, people with folie à deux might not be delusional, but because they have another person to reinforce it, it becomes quasi-real,” says Ballas. “Finally, he [Randy Quaid] met the right person who shared his proclivity for wackiness, and off they went.”
In a previous blog post on partner vetting, I discussed the importance of social networks in determining partners’ appropriateness for a long-term relationship. Although nature and biology are enormous influences on pair bonding and surely are responsible for the outcome of the first stage of courtship, the social vetting process is necessary to weed out inappropriate partners. I worry about couples who avoid this social inspection, evaluative process. I worry even more about couples who create a folie à deux and maintain an isolated stance that prevents them from receiving feedback. I suppose the same problem exists for any individual or group that cuts itself off from social interaction, discourse, criticism, or debate. A pathogenesis ensues. Individuals, couples, and groups, living within their own echo chamber, under their own influence, become weird.
* (fȯ-lē-ä-ˈdœ); from the French, meaning “a madness shared by two”
© 2003-2013 – Stan Tatkin, PsyD – all rights reserved
Partnering Up: Falling From Space (or Grace)
by Stan Tatkin, PsyD, MFT,
stantatkin.com
click for larger view
I realize this is a rather lax stage theory of courtship, so forgive me in advance for using a rocket analogy to describe how relationships get off the ground. But understand, I’ve had rockets on my mind for several years while thinking about success and failure in courtship.
Helen Fisher, a brilliant biological anthropologist, expert in the neurobiology of courtship and romantic love, and all-around lovely person, has written extensively on courtship. Please read her articles and books for more on this subject. Others have written on this topic. Harville Hendrix (another wonderful person) comes to mind for his early writings on Imago and stages of coupling. And of course John Gottman, another friend and great guy, has talked about the deleterious effects of testosterone on new lovers’ judgment. So, without further delay, I give you my rocket analogy of courtship.
During the first stage (booster) of partnering, we’re on drugs: dopamine, noradrenaline, oxytocin, vasopressin, and testosterone (to name a few). Nature (biology) does much of our work for us. The phenomenon of novelty (the brain loves strangerness); the process positive projection (“I love who I think you are, and I love who you think I am”); and those endogenous love drugs (“You look, sound, smell perfect to me”) make us want to be together despite our natural inclination to be insecure, shy, judgmental, or contact averse. For many yet-to-be couples, the booster stage marks the end of that particular ride. For others, it’s on to the second stage.
Sadly, the sense of novelty doesn’t last, and nature soon pulls out, ending the booster stage of courtship and leaving us alone with our inherent attachment expectations, which can include fear of being smothered or fear of being abandoned or both. Positive projections give way to negative ones and to a more reality-based knowledge of each other. Good times.
Our first big fight may happen in the second or in the third stage of courtship, but it will happen, and many will not make it beyond this point and will fall back to Earth. We may worry that we’re with the wrong person, and we may be, depending upon the attachment values revealed during and following that fight. We may discover that we cannot effectively regulate each other during distress. Often, the first big fight is the same fight we’ll have in the ensuing years ahead. Poorly done now, and poorly done 5, 10, 15 years from now. Relationship failure at this point can sting more than at other stages because enough fantasy and lack of authentic knowledge still exist between partners, causing them to idealize the relationship beyond what is real.
But it’s only when the relationship becomes more permanent, at least in our minds, that our early attachment expectations (especially those that are unpleasant) really begin to surface. This is the third stage of courtship, and in the case of insecure partners, it sometimes continues into marriage, though it should not. By now, strangerness is fully replaced by familial-arity. That is, we think we know each other, even though we probably don’t. We know what we recognize, what is familiar to us, and much of that knowledge is derived from remembered experience prior to the start of the relationship. In other words, we become deep family.
Relationship failure at this stage generally results in a slowish return to Earth because we’re already too far out of Earth’s atmosphere and gravity exerts less of a force. We may circle reality for a while, orbiting somewhere between anomie and full recovery with readiness to begin again. Insecures may rue the day they ever allowed themselves to get this far and may even consider giving up love relationships altogether. I recommend they remember the words from Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem In Memoriam:27, 1850, “‘Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.”
The real test of the third stage of courtship—and what I’m calling “on the way to mature love”—is our ability to form a secure-functioning relationship. Under secure-functioning conditions, we have resources to spend on other things, such as our career, our extended family, our children, our personal development, and ourselves. Insecure conditions, on the other hand, draw resources from us. We become preoccupied by our relationship status. Partners who are insecure use most of their internal resources to handle their moment-by-moment feelings of being untethered, unloved, and unwanted.
We could say that no one looks very good when they feel insecure in their relationship. When we feel insecure, we don’t perform well. The worst of us comes out. Our negative attributes become amplified and obscure our positive ones. If we are insecure and what PACT therapists call wave-ish (ambivalent, angry, resistant), we may threaten security by over-focusing on our partner’s signs of distancing, insensitivity, and avoidance and by over-focusing on our fears of abandonment. If we are insecure and island-ish (avoidant, dismissive), we may threaten security by over-focusing on our partner’s physical, psychological, or intellectual flaws and by over-focusing on our fear of being smothered, intruded upon, or co-opted.
Whether we are waves or islands, we are likely to create insecurity in the third stage (and beyond) by having only one foot in the relationship, while holding out for something or someone better. In doing so, our partner falls from grace, and so do we.
If you want to avoid this, I suggest you keep the rocket analogy in mind. To soar into space, the first two stages have to fall away completely. Launching is just the beginning. The third stage must inaugurate a process of principled relating, with each partner behaving in a secure-functioning manner. Partners must form a couple bubble—an agreement to provide mutual assurances and reassurances of absolute safety and security—and protect it at all costs. This, and other secure-functioning principles, are what you will need throughout your long journey ahead. Safe (and secure) travels!
* For more information about secure functioning, take a look at Wired for Love and listen to Your Brain on Love.
© 2003-2013 – Stan Tatkin, PsyD – all rights reserved
Attraction to Psychological Approaches
by Stan Tatkin, PsyD, MFT,
stantatkin.com
I’m an avid lover of theory, all kinds of theory—psychoanalytic, systems, humanistic-existential, and so on. I think my appreciation of theories grows as I age, as does my appreciation of people, relationships, music, art, and politics. As I grow older and hopefully wiser as a clinician and educator, my appreciation increases for the various approaches to psychotherapy available today, just as the illusion decreases that my particular approach to couple therapy is better than the other ones out there. In the couples arena, I greatly admire the work of Sue Johnson, Ellyn Bader and Peter Pearson, David Schnarch, John and Julie Gottman, Esther Perel, Dan Wile, Harville Hendrix, Marion Solomon, Terry Real, Rob Fisher, and many others. These are not only master therapists, but enormously creative producers of inspiration to couple therapists worldwide.
Having developed an approach myself—in part, a result of having been personally influenced by other approaches—I have come to understand that the success of any approach hinges not only on its utility in providing clarity and organization for the therapist, but also on its ability to inspire personal meaning. In other words, therapeutic approaches are first “sold” (wholesale) to clinicians, who “buy” its organizing principles because it speaks to them, fits their personality and style, and works for them in a deeply personal way. The clinicians then sells (retail) this template for organizing experience to their patients (consumer). Theory and approach are for the therapist directly, and therefore only indirectly benefit the patient.
I think it is fair to say that people who are attracted to PACT are attracted to my particular thinking about the problem of adult romantic relationships. With EFT, students are attracted to Sue Johnson’s epiphanies about relationships. Same with Gottman, Schnarch, Hendrix, Perel, and so on. Interesting, to me at least, is that the people I mention here agree with one another more than they disagree, although it may appear differently at times to others. We’ve all put our finger on something that rings true about relationships, and many of our ideas are similar, give or take some terms and nuances.
John Norcross, a specialist in psychotherapeutic approaches and their effect on behavioral change, has collected compelling evidence that what changes people is not any particular therapeutic approach or theory per se, but rather the relationship that develops between clinician and patient. He argues for integrative approaches that allow therapists to tailor interventions to respond with flexibility to the unique demands of each patient or situation in a manner that best fosters change. The matter of effectiveness in psychotherapy, therefore, may be as elusive as is our understanding of the complexity of the human mind, and more mysterious still, the phenomenological, intersubjective nature of human relationships.
© 2003-2013 – Stan Tatkin, PsyD – all rights reserved
Each Romantic Partnership is Unique
by Stan Tatkin, PsyD, MFT,
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Much like a fingerprint, every romantic partnership is unique. The intersubjective, phenomenological system formed between two separate nervous systems can never be exactly replicated, nor is it likely to be fully understood by the participants.
If the notion of human cloning seems unimaginable, the cloning of a relationship is ridiculously inconceivable. The process of human pair-bonding is enormously complex, mysterious, and perplexing. Two individuals create what I imagine to be similar to Thomas Ogden’s “intersubjective analytic third,” whereby two people give birth to a distinctly novel third entity that is their relationship.
Although the notion of unique pairings may seem intuitively obvious, it is sometimes denied or dismissed by couples and couple therapists. For instance, one-person psychological approaches tend to focus on the individual in a dyadic relationship as if that individual were elementally static and predictable. On the one hand, a therapist may say, “If you don’t change your ways, you will be doomed to recreate the same relationships over and over again.” On the other hand, the individual may assert, “I can start over with a new person and everything will be better.” Both ideas may be true, but they lack complexity and are misleading. It is also true that “Your ways can change depending upon this pairing as opposed to that pairing.” Or that “I can start over with a new person, but it will be different in ways I cannot predict.”
Does denial of the uniqueness of each relationship lead to devaluation of relationships? And can denial be a contributing factor to the repetition compulsion common to some personalities, or to the casual switching out of pairings that is common to other personalities? For that matter, can denial of romantic pairings as irreplaceable lead to increased divorce rates?
Both the denial as well as the acceptance of relationships as unique and irreplaceable can present a fundamental problem for the grieving process when couples split through dissolution or death. Denial can interfere with regret, which can interfere with learning from our mistakes. Acceptance can lead us to profound grief, anaclitic depression, and even broken heart syndrome (takotsubo cardiomyopathy).
At this point, my wife is reading over my shoulder and complaining that this diatribe is too depressing. So I should mention that denial of the uniqueness of relationships can allow us feel more independent; less vulnerable to loss; and if need be, to move on like Scarlet O’Hara in Gone With the Wind. Acceptance also has a positive side: it can endow our relationships with value, meaning, and an ephemeral preciousness. Ultimately, I suggest we learn to celebrate the truth that each love relationship exists as a separate life form, one that is irreducible and magnificently inexplicable, and therefore should be regarded as it is: something to be cherished.
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