(Where a word or phrase is underlined, you can follow the link to another Practice or Clinical Guide for a fuller explanation of that topic. Feel free to follow them as your questions arise—they're designed to help you build a fuller understanding at your own pace.)
This guide forms part of our Practice Guide to Psychotherapy, which explains the principles that underpin our work with individuals, couples and families.
Practice Guide 3
Working with Couples
This guide explains why couples who genuinely love one another can nevertheless become trapped in recurring patterns of conflict, distance or misunderstanding. You may have got to the point where you need the help and support of a Therapist, Counsellor or Psychotherapist to help you to understand and change those patterns.
You will probably be reading this because you have got to the end of your tether: I want so much to be in a loving relationship with my partner but right now I could willingly give them an unedited piece of my mind. So often I feel dismissed, unheard, unseen; I just want to shout and scream. How is it that I have ended up at this point when I had hoped for, and still so much want, a deeply loving mutual relationship.
We hope that this guide will encourage you to work with us in this complicated world of couple relationships.
Introduction
This practice guide could have been titled ‘Working with difference’. This is what we find generally underlies whatever relational problem our couples bring to us. These problems are often presented by the couple as, effectively, behaviours, e.g: communication, financial patterns, housework, parenting and many others. Most couples come to therapy because they love each other but have become trapped in repetitive arguments, distance or hurt that neither fully understands.
Sometimes these issues have taken the couple to the brink of separation; sometimes we simply help the couple to resolve specific aspects of their relationship around money, or sex, or holidays, or tasks at home. Whatever it is that brings a couple to CCRTT it is apparent that the couple are there because they want to resolve their differences. There are present, therefore, the key ingredients for resolution: hope and intent.
What, in our experience, is usually not appreciated or understood is the intensely complicated nature of the couple relationship. If you read our Clinical Guides (and I would recommend any couple coming for counselling reads our overarching Clinical Guide 1) you will understand the complicated internal dynamic that exists in every individual; much of our behaviour especially within a couple relationship, exists in our unconscious experiences, usually arising from much earlier in life.
Hope and experience – the descent into hurt and distance
Unconscious experiences affect all relationships to a greater or lesser degree. A couple relationship exists in the experiences of two unique individuals. Elements of the initial relationship exist vividly in the conscious. We decide that the physical, emotional and behavioural parts of our prospective partner are attractive to us; we date and eventually make a decision that this person is the one for us and we make the decision to be partners.
The real difficulty in relationships is that our initial presentation to our partners may not fully represent who we are and what we are hoping for; and to make it even more complicated ach individual may not know what it is that drives their behavioural responses to each other. What has gone wrong when we seemed so perfectly matched?
When our partner who seemed so right, becomes so wrong, it is painful; our partner relationships can break our lives in hurt and doubt as the relationship descends into mutual blame and shame.
At CCRTT we work with the couple to understand the patterns that exist and how they have come to exist. We explain how the initial stage of the relationship, known as the ‘fantasy stage’ (N.B: by ‘fantasy’ we do not mean the relationship was false, but that each partner inevitably sees the other through the lens of hope) may so easily misrepresent the basis of hope and turn into something that creates misery and can sometimes become abusive and toxic.
Hidden truths – unmet needs: the power of the unconscious in de-railing relationships
An irony of couple relationships is that the way we meet and form the relationship is usually based on the strategies that we have learned in order to deal with early life legacies; consideration of these patterns in greater depth can be found in our Foundation Clinical Guide here. At CCRTT our approach is to help the unknown to become known. Each individual in the relationship will bring their unconscious strategies, representing their unmet needs, to the relationship.
What we mean by this is that certain beliefs about ourselves which originated in early life created a need to keep ourselves safe in this perceived world. For example, where certain elements of our early life left us with a low sense of worth this may result in a strategy to earn and create a worth through behaviours such as being attentive, kindness, generosity; or we can be left internalised believing there is something wrong with us: we become, for example, deferential, socially anxious, defensive.
In the former case we present a person that hides the internal shame; in the latter we perhaps live in hope that we may one day be noticed. In both cases the experience of early life leaves each of you hoping that someone will love you. The tragedy of early life, of which this is but one illustration, lays the foundation of hope and expectation that our partner will meet these unmet needs.
It becomes only a matter of time before those unconscious strategies and hopes crumble into the hurt of early life and are re-played in the adult relationship. What is also true is that neither individual wants or intends this pattern to happen, to hurt the other.
The Psychotherapy of Couples relationships
One of the principle task of the couples therapist at CCRTT is to help each individual to understand themselves and their patterns and for each to understand how this becomes played out in the relationship; you may also be interested in our Practice working with individuals and can find more information that Practice Guide here.
A core Psychotherapeutic principle is to make the unknown, known. Bringing our unconscious early experiences, which drive many of our feelings and behaviours, into awareness; we summarise this developmental process in more detail in our Foundation Clinical Guide here.
This is as true for the couple relationship as it is for individuals. A couple is simply two individual minds relating in the present; two individual lives that may have been shaped by unhelpful pasts. Understanding each other and those past hurts and the way in which they unhelpfully play out in the relationship is at the heart of the work of the Therapist.
The way in which this plays out tends to be represented by patterns within the relationship that results in the war of blame and shame as each ‘projects’ their unmet needs onto the other (blame) and the partner responds from their world which has been threatened (shame) and attacks back (blame) and is then perceived as the attacker (shame).
Neither intends this seemingly deliberate behaviour to exist or to harm the other. The relational consequence is that inevitably both end up feeling unheard and unseen (generally described by couples as communication problems). In this pattern early life wounds are replayed, endorsed and unhealed.
The way in which CCRTT works to heal, strengthen and deepen the relationship
At CCRTT we work with our clients to understand their own underlying patterns, to become more self-acceptant and to be able to take responsibility for their part in this unhelpful but understandable relational pattern.
At the heart is this work can lie the development of greater compassion and empathy for each individual for themselves and one for the other. We also suggest the practice of enquiry of and between themselves: what is actually going on here?
The underlying individual patterns will almost certainly have been around for a long time and old habits can die hard. CCRTT believe that there lies within each individual a deep desire for a rich mutually loving relationship. We work with each couple to help them to understand each other at greater depth. This can include talking about early life experiences with the other present so that the individuals and therapist alike can develop this understanding.
In working towards this goal the intent is that greater trust and less fear can exist. In trust we can take the risk to develop our true self, to learn that we can be ourselves without risk. And so to be accepted, seen and heard for who we are.
The journey towards a true depth of relationship between the individuals embraces the journey to becoming the true self which became marooned on the rocks of past experience.
Understanding difference – Uniqueness, authenticity and transparency
We are all born as unique individuals. We are shaped in early life relationships. We bring that developmental self into our adult relationships. A self that may not have had a secure early attachment experience.
Rather than being left with a sense of our own worth at the centre of our own world we are left to create a worth from and through others. In this way of being we become trapped in the same flawed hope in our relationships.
In working with our couple clients we seek to help them to understand this powerful and tragic dynamic. As the trust of one to the other grows through greater understanding and acceptance so each can take the risk to become this fully unique person.
Each can risk being fully authentic and relate in full transparency without the fear that they are somehow unacceptable. Rather than creating our worth from being acceptable to another, to blend to someone else’s way of being, we value our unique self for who we are and who we want to be.
Difference, rather than being a threat, becomes a way of being that truly represents us and is to be treasured. Difference in the couple relationship is not divisive but is at the heart of authentic attraction.
This is hard work. This does not happen without trial and error. The therapeutic space is where all these experiences are processed by the individuals with the therapist in a therapeutic relationship of support and mutual intent. Why not start the journey towards whole partner relationship by making an enquiry through our contact form.
Related Practice Guides
To see how these principles are applied in our Practice please see the relevant guide below:
