Hello good people!
March 10-15, 2013, a group of us will be meeting at Esalen Institute for the fifth bi-annual Evolution of Gestalt Conference. This year’s intimate week-long gathering will be focused on couples, and we’ll spend the week exploring what happens when we bring the Gestalt relational/field model to bear on the subject of couples–how it changes our way of understanding them, working with them, being in them.
We hope you’ll join us for the fun–either in person at Esalen, and/or here on this blog. The idea is to explore together our growing edge as clinicians, thinkers, and human beings engaged in the deeply challenging, richly rewarding field of couples work. Come March, about 50 of us will spend five days together in Big Sur, inquiring, musing, experimenting, playing, and–of course–sitting in hot tubs. I mean, we can’t expect to extend the boundaries of Gestalt theory and practice if we spend the entire time fully clothed.
As a lead-up to the conference, we thought it would be great to get the conversation going now. To that end, for the next two months or so, this space will be dedicated to a discussion about couples. So even if you can’t be at Esalen in person, please chime in with your thoughts. The forum is open to anyone out there who’s interested in exploring her/his edge–whether working with couples, thinking about them, being in one, or whatever else.
One of the organizing themes of this year’s conference has to do with what happens when instead of looking at couples through the lens of the historically dominant individualist paradigm, we shift to looking at couples from a Gestalt relational/field perspective. What, then, will we see? What does that unique Gestalt lens reveal about couples that other lenses don’t–and, conversely, what can other approaches offer our own Gestalt understanding of couples dynamics?
For me, one of the intriguing questions in all this has to do what field theory can tell us about why we couple in the first place. What is the function of emotional attachments in human life? What’s the purpose of the attachment bond?
On the one hand, it’s clear that hard-wired, evolutionary forces drive us to form emotional attachments with one another. These attachments lead to increased individual security (through a greater likelihood of support and, therefore, survival) as well as an increased likelihood that offspring will receive adequate parental care. But these reasons are quite narrow, limited by individualistic assumptions–focused on me and, at best, my people (often at the expense of others). When we look instead from a field perspective, can we discern about the function of attachment bonds?
A few things come to mind. Considering for the moment that some but not all attachment bonds are sexual (i.e. parents & children seek proximity and emotional connection, good friends seek proximity and emotional connection, etc):
1) From a whole-field perspective, the drive to form emotional attachments to others may support us in moving past vestigial fears and automatic judgments of those we consider different. Attachment bonds can be seen as providing an evolutionary push towards growing out of a tribal mentality towards greater integration and fellow-feeling among all human beings. How would it change our work–with couples, or with larger systems / communities–if we looked at emotional attachments as an emergent force in nature, driving the entire field towards higher levels of complexity by mediating against the individualism that pits person against person, and leads to conflicts over differences in belief, race, ethnicity, religion, language, what have you?
2) Within an intimate couple, each partner assumes a privileged position for the intimate witnessing of the other. And we know that in a field/relational paradigm, this kind of intimate witnessing is essential for the full flowering of an individual’s inner world. The realization and elaboration of that inner world involves a vulnerable move from “inner” to “outer”–and in attached mammalian pair bonds, evolution has seen to it that vulnerability in one partner evokes gentleness and care-taking in the other. The attachment bond, then, can be seen as a critically important support for each partner in realizing her/his full potential in the world, which is to say, each partner’s potential to contribute maximally to the wider field. The attachment bond is seen here again as conspiring to enrich the whole field, not merely a lone individual or a lone couple. Of course, this situation can go terribly wrong (as when couples get caught in cycles of mutual shame, pursuit/withdrawal, etc, that restrict each partner’s inner world)–but to imagine the attachment bond’s primary purpose as creating the possibility for whole-field enrichment would have significant implications for how we think about–and work with–couples.
Intimate relationships certainly go in and out of “instrumental” phases that are designed to accomplish something important for one or both individuals (phases of “Strategic” relating, to use Sonia Nevis and Joe Melnick’s term). But in a field relational paradigm, we can see that the function of the attachment bond is not PRIMARILY to ensure the completion of those outward tasks (those are well enough accounted for by other forces which drive us to do what we need to do in order to survive). The attachment bond itself is oriented not towards the instrumental exchange of information, but towards the emotional transformation of the field.
3) The field is not only being influenced by the couples that emerge from it, but it exerts an enormously powerful influence on those couples. And here we open the whole realm of wider field supports & constraints on a couple’s experience. Given the powerfully hetero-dominant, individualistic assumptions and biases that have shaped western culture for many centuries, critical field supports are enormously impoverished when it comes to helping couples creatively adapt to the challenges of coupling. Another way of saying this is that couples who live in these field conditions (i.e. all of us) have very few supports when it comes navigating the enormously powerful feelings that are evoked when two people form an attachment bond. Field conditions that influence ALL attached couples–and can therefore be a locus of intervention–include: the breakdown of community & mutual aid, heterocentrism, widespread poverty and the unequal distribution of wealth, and many more.
OK. That’s probably enough for now. Write back and let us know what’s on your mind–what you’re struggling with when it come to couples / coupling, what thinkers and approaches you find helpful, what areas you’d like to see more theory and writing about…
Or let us know what you think about when you think about what Gestalt in particular has to offer couples work today…
Or let us know where you feel Gestalt falls short–where we need to open up our own boundaries to new learning…
Together we can bring this work to new places. We can extend its reach and dimension. And in the process, we can enrich our own lives, the lives of our couples, and–hopefully–the well-being of the wider field.
Looking forward to the conversation–
-Arch
As always Archie is wise, provocative and challenging. I like his tack, and his notes were rich enough to prompt some hard thinking on my part. Rather than respond to everything he has written I want to take a moment to consider his first point concerning the drive to form emotional attachments taken from a whole field perspective.
The drive to form emotional attachments to others may support us in moving past fears and judgments of those we see as profoundly other. Conversely, this drive can do precisely the opposite effect: it can cause us to bond with those we see as like, and to bond as a way of solidifying our current structure of meaning. Attachment bonds can also be seen as providing a push toward tribal mentality, bonding with the in-group as a means of elevating status and safety, and as a means of protection against the unfamiliar. As a practical matter both phenomena–attachment bonds driving open engagement with a broadening circle of humanity, and attachment bonds driving insular and rigid in-group relationships, whether the unit of analysis is the couple, the family, the clan or the tribe–are widely in evidence. If this is so, the relevant question is, in conjunction with what does the emergence of attachment behavior tend to drive higher levels of relational complexity, both within relationships and in the range of relationships that become available to individuals within and beyond their groups of origin?
The premise of this question is that valence and trajectory of attachment drives and the bonds they welcome and form are conditional on phenomena outside the motive itself. To take a simple example, if a person’s root experience in community provides a valid structure of meaning, a sense of safety, and a plausible prospect of viability and pleasure within these structures, we could predict with reasonable accuracy that attachment drives would be directed in service of bonds that reify this structure of meaning and toward coupling that tends to both validate and be validated by the community. By contrast, drives for meaning, safety and fulfillment that could not be satisfied by conventional coupling within a given community or by coupling of any kind within the community itself would tend to provide impetus for more complex and more deeply considered attachments. This simple illustration does not begin to answer the question, but does highlight it’s importance in exploring the relationship of attachment drives to particular bonds and to the evolution of social fields.
Thank you for this blog beginning. What a feast of rich ideas! Thank you for a stimulating set of thoughts, beautifully written as ever, Arch!
I am going to write personally more than theoretically. I would not always make that choice, but this morning, before I found this blog, I had a powerful experience of connection to my late lover, partner, and soulmate Bjørg Tofte, also a Gestalt therapist and deeply loved by those who had the good fortune to know her. She died in March, 2011, so two years will soon have passed since her leaving. In that time, I’ve experienced grief on a scale I had never before experienced or could have imagined, and while this has changed in its emotional intensity and in the degree of its being figural as time has passed, this morning I was hit by a wave of extreme grief of an intensity that matched how I felt in the first weeks after her death. And this morning, as I went through a powerful grief reaction and an experience of overwhelming sorrow that I could not reach out to touch her physically, I also felt more connected to her and closer to her than I have for several months. There’s an experiential paradox in other words, almost a strong correlation – between, on the one hand, missing her with all the tearful sadness that arrived with fierce intensity and, on the other hand, waves almost of of happiness and thankfulness in feeling her presence so vividly again – in the full joy of a flow of remembrance and heartfelt reconnection. In the language you have used, our attachment bond which has continued since her physical disappearance was, this morning, reaffirmed as an enduring given.
Friendos of mine, who lost their 30 year old daughter through cancer and who have been the friends most able to understand my journey of grieving, also opened my understanding to an important discovery – one that affirms the field aspects of deep connections to those whom we love. Her discovery, or ‘Law of Grieving Lost Ones’, is that ‘the person may die, but the relationship continues’. By this she did not mean just that we speak to the lost ones, and imagine, or feel, or experience their continued presence – as widely reported by the bereaved as a phenomenon that happens, (and is interpreted in different ways, according to one’s metaphysics), but something else: that the field of the loved one continues, and changes, and can develop in new directions, long after the person seems to have left. Thus, through so many of their daughter’s friends coming together and sharing in the final days and funeral of their daughter, the parents got to know them well, and relationships were formed with a whole group of their daughter’s young friends. The result is that the whole field of connection and attachment has flowered, with new friendships forming. Their daughter is thus present continuously in the field not as an absent or spent force but as the central energiser and continued field-focus.
And I have had a similar experience of a deepening and growing field of connection, in that Bjørg’s closest friends and family members in Norway have become close friends of mine since her dying, and I have been unofficially ‘adopted’ into her family. You could say that she brought us together after she had left: we found comfort in each other’s company; there was so much to share. We reported news of ‘visitations’, we remember and honour her, laugh and smile with memories we share and have a field of connection we would not have had, probably, at least in the same way, had she lived.
The Law of Grieving Loved Ones needs, then, to be understood in field terms, as an example of the durability and liveliness of powerful fields of love to change and grow. Mourning lost ones, ancestors, and others who have gone before is not some spooky and weird process to be lightly dismissed or explained away or pathologised. Rather, it could be regarded as an example of how when love flows, and a strong attachment forms and deepens, an energetic field of connection gets set up which has its own momentum – enriching the lives of others even beyond the grave.
There are many other thoughts sparked by what you wrote. I look forward to other contributions.
Malcolm
Thank you, Malcolm, for this very moving piece.
Your thinking and feeling are–as usual–so full and stimulating that we could spend many an afternoon walking through the various spaces opened up here… At the moment, though, I want mostly to thank you for the generosity of this contribution… In writing so openly, so personally, you’ve introduced a level of feeling that I hope will infuse the conversation going forward.
And to highlight just one of the many fertile ideas you opened up here, this one in particular grabbed me:
“Mourning lost ones, ancestors, and others who have gone before is not some spooky and weird process to be lightly dismissed or explained away or pathologised. Rather, it could be regarded as an example of how when love flows, and a strong attachment forms and deepens, an energetic field of connection gets set up which has its own momentum – enriching the lives of others even beyond the grave.”
This notion is going to take some unpacking–but I have little doubt that the “energetic field of connection” which “gets set up and has its own momentum” plays a central role in couples dynamics. The “Setting up” of that energetic field of connection is of special interest to me, since we know how initial field conditions exert a powerful influence on the developmental trajectory of the system they give rise to. And then the reach of the maturing field–always bearing in some way that initial imprint–extends far beyond the couple, as you show so vividly.
I’m also wanting to hear your thoughts about how that field can be tended in order to “enrich the lives of others even beyond the grave.”
Marc–your clear eyed thinking here reminds me to temper my teleological tendencies. It’s good and well to believe as I do that field consciousness is evolving in the direction of greater inclusivity, but as you remind us, the facts aren’t always so cooperative. This is one of the reasons it’s helpful for me to air these things out–I get smart correctives for my own sometimes-too-sunny hopefulness.
For me, the very helpful reminder here comes in the form of your question “… in conjunction with what does the emergence of attachment behavior tend to drive higher levels of relational complexity?”
That question is a specific instance of a larger class of questions that are immensely valuable to return to again and again when making interventions informed by field theory. Such questions remind us that, when considering how best to effect change, we do well to include the wider field conditions which can “tilt” the field in favor of one outcome or another. And we can then target these conditions themselves as a locus of intervention. This is sometimes daunting because it can dramatically extend the scope of our behavior and our impact as agents of change–but at this moment in history, I don’t that we have much choice.
Hello Archie!
Although I disagree with you fundamentally about field relational Evolution, Complexity and the evils of Individualism, what comes across powerfully in your blog is your warmth, good will, humanity and optimism, and I admire that. It exemplifies why you are so respected within the Gestalt community.
Having been happily married for 21 years, I fully endorse the transformative love you speak of within a couple. However, I had to chuckle at phrases like the “evolutionary push towards growing out of a tribal mentality towards greater integration and fellow-feeling among all human beings” as being a purpose of evolution. As though “evolution” endorsed our liberal sentiments and was gently shepherding us towards this utopian collective omega point. “With God on your side” has become “with Evolution on your side” – (presumably because the Republicans have a prior claim on God).
More seriously, I am concerned that this “push” towards a collective higher order, which demonises individualism is also a form of liberal imperialism. Jonathan Haidt in “The Righteous Mind” makes the point that we tend to see our own moral foundations as being righteous, and the standard every good person would converge towards, once they come to their senses! This is often reinforced by our homophilia, confirmation and consensus biases.
I suspect therefore that “field relational” evolution is a way of recreating the world in our own image. What comes as a shock is not only that not everyone shares our vision, but that others who oppose us may be just as “righteous” – indeed we liberals are the outliers among world cultures (Haidt’s term is “WEIRD” – Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich, Democratic).
I also felt concerned at the anti-individualism in your blog. I do see the logic that anything that contributes to the collective “higher order” is good, and anything that is selfish and individualistic is “lower order” and bad. Hence couples cannot get together only for their own good – that would be “individualistic” and bad, they must also be contributing to the wider “relational field”.
This sounds like an extreme version of the evolutionary “new group selection” (called Multi-Level-Selection) of D.S.Wilson and others, which sees evolution as operating at “higher” and “lower” levels in a hierarchy. However, as Stephen Pinker wrote in his excellent 2012 Edge.org essay “The False Allure of Group Selection”:
“Many questionable claims are packed into the clustering of inherent virtue, human moral intuitions, group-benefiting self-sacrifice, and the theory of group selection. One is the normative moral theory in which virtue is equated with sacrifices that benefit one’s own group in competition with other groups. If that’s what virtue consisted of, then fascism would be the ultimate virtuous ideology, and a commitment to human rights the ultimate form of selfishness.”
Enthusiasm for the new human evolutionary “super organism” might also be dampened once it is realised that such group selection has not produced the “Global Village”, but multinational corporations, terrorist networks, secret societies, authoritarian nation-states – and groupthink!
Personally, I find these global utopian visions deeply scary. A cursory survey of history shows how easily utopian visions become dystopias. For me, it is precisely the hard won Enlightenment “individualism” of people like John Stewart Mill, who famously declared that Governments should only intervene to minimise harm, and the enshrinement of those individual liberties and rights in (for instance) the US Constitution that have served to guarantee our freedom to hold diverse philosophies of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
That we naturally care more about ourselves and those close to us is demonstrated by the fact that we spend far more on our pets, than on foreign aid to other starving humans. That is not to say we are incapable of altruism, but evolution has selected us to care more for our own. Orgel’s second law: evolution is cleverer than you are.
So, evolution leads me to conclude the opposite. The world is a complex dynamic “dancing landscape” from which conflicts of interest will always spontaneously emerge. Unless we care enough to protect and preserve what we value, we will lose it. Caring deeply about someone, with a subsequent legacy of our own offspring to protect, is as likely to make us fiercer in our determination to protect them, as to tolerate outsiders who seek to take over their place in the sun.
Therefore, I have a different vision – pluralism. Let us choose governments who govern for the benefit of the individual. Increase taxes to provide good welfare – most certainly, but beyond that, allow us the freedom to be diverse – as “individualistic” or community minded as we feel. If my relationship helps the “relational field” then so much the better, but allow me just to fall in love for its own sake. And from that rich tumultuous diversity of competing ideas and values will emerge – from the ground up, the solutions we need in an increasingly complex, fast moving and unpredictable world.
I’m sorry I won’t be joining you at Esalen, though my other and better half will.
However, I have to add the disclaimer that my views is not necessarily her views. Vive la difference!
Hi Jim–
What an introduction–I love it!
Makes me so wish that you were going to be joining us in March…
You raise so many important points. I don’t have time to cover them all, but let me me briefly address what I take to be one of your primary points:
“More seriously, I am concerned that this ‘push’ towards a collective higher order, which demonises individualism is also a form of liberal imperialism.”
I take this concern seriously, and share it. I may have been unclear in what I wrote, but my intention here isn’t to demonize individualism. I do, however, want to examine it critically, and want others to examine it critically. Mostly, I want to explore alternatives to what I see as a dramatic imbalance in today’s world, influenced as it is by the individualist paradigm.
You wrote:
“However, I had to chuckle at phrases like the ‘evolutionary push towards growing out of a tribal mentality towards greater integration and fellow-feeling among all human beings’ as being a purpose of evolution….”
This is one of the places where my writing may have been unclear, but my whole sentence was:
“Attachment bonds CAN be seen as providing an evolutionary push towards growing out of a tribal mentality towards greater integration and fellow-feeling among all human beings.” [Emphasis added here]
… I went on to ask how our work as therapists/consultants would change IF we looked at emotional attachments as driving the field towards higher levels of complexity, not that those bonds ARE driving the field toward higher levels of complexity. One of the reasons Gestalt appeals to me is that it’s less interested in an idea of the “Truth” than in the truth that obtains when action is taken in the world–for good and ill. So what I hoped to offer in my post is a series of “as if” experiments: “what would things be like if we…?” “What would change if we…”
This interest in action (and the results of action) is one of the things that links Gestalt with William James, Charles Pierce, John Dewey, and the other early American pragmatists. In my mind, Gestalt owes as much (or more) to that group than to the European existentialists, and even to eastern philosophies & practices. And you seem to be in a similar lineage. This sentence of yours reads to me like a beautiful melding of James’s Pragmatism and Goodman’s Decentralism:
“…from that rich tumultuous diversity of competing ideas and values will emerge – from the ground up, the solutions we need in an increasingly complex, fast moving and unpredictable world.” Here, here.
I think we need individualistic impulses if we’re to find those solutions that emerge from the “rich tumultuous diversity of competing ideas and values.” A good part of my interest in examining individualism critically comes from my own self-interest: I would like to live a long and healthy life, and I believe that my chances will be greatly increased if we develop some credible correctives to the kind of lifestyle that today’s rampant individualism supports.
I’m also interested in what kind of world we leave behind. So, for me the question is: what sorts of phenomena & experiences does a given paradigm support, and what sorts of phenomena & experiences does a given paradigm obstruct? It seems to me that we in the west are living our lives under the strong influence of unexamined assumptions of the individualistic paradigm. And it also seems to me that we in the west are living our lives in such a way that we’re at real risk of driving our planet over the falls in short order. When I look at the trajectory our species is on, I get alarmed–and that makes me mighty itchy to explore some correctives to the dominant paradigm.
This doesn’t mean that all individualistic impulses and ideas are “evil” or destructive. Many are noble. And many impulses associated with field theory can indeed become destructive (as you pointed out in your reference to fascism as a kind of collectivism / field theory run amok). It seems to me that we all stand to gain when instead of demonizing “the other” paradigm (whichever is our definition of “other”), we explore the advantages and disadvantages of each, in a given time and place, in relation to a goal.
So. Here’s to pluralism–even though that, too, has it’s advantages and disadvantages.
Jim–
After-thoughts:
“…As though ‘evolution’ endorsed our liberal sentiments and was gently shepherding us towards this utopian collective omega point. ‘With God on your side’ has become ‘with Evolution on your side’ – (presumably because the Republicans have a prior claim on God).”
Love it… That brought a much needed guffaw out of me… And I think you’re pointing to another very valid concern here. There does seem to be a kind of religious fervor that often attaches itself to many debates surrounding evolution. Both the “individualists” (e.g. Dawkins) and the “Group selection folks” (e.g. Wilson) each sometimes sound a bit too much like the converted for my comfort level…. Evolution is of course one of the most impressive theories we’ve ever come up with. It’s explanatory power is enormous, and to my mind it accounts for the what we observe in nature better than any of its competitors. It just helps us think about so, so much. But we all need to remember that, in the end, Evolution is a tool, an attempt to make sense of things that are beyond us. It’s a theory. And, as Erik Erikson said, “All theory is a stab at mystery.”
You also wrote:
“So, evolution leads me to conclude the opposite. The world is a complex dynamic “dancing landscape” from which conflicts of interest will always spontaneously emerge.”
I smiled at this one, too. Beautiful. Appeals to my Taoist sensibilities, and my nagging belief that the world’s drama is exactly as it should be, and that we all must play out our own parts, and that none of us has a God’s eye view on what’s unfolding, or on the “best way forward.” Our assessment of “good” and “bad” almost always changes over time… Reminds me of what Zhou Enlai said in response to a Western reporter in 1972 (I seem to be in a quoteful mood tonight). The reporter asked whether Zhou thought the French Revolution of 200 years earlier was a good thing. The first premiere of the People’s Republic supposedly paused thoughtfully, then replied, “It is too soon to tell.”
What a beautifully elegant response Archie.
I love Zhou Enlai’s comment! I also found myself agreeing with you wholeheartedly in much of what you say.
It does occur to me that words like “individualism” may have different nuances in the US and UK. Niall Furgeson in the 2012 Reith Lecture put the blame for our (UK) lack of community/ relational spirit squarely on over-dependence on “Big Government” citing examples of individualistic enterprise as the solution (not the problem). Here the “Big Society” is of course an initiative of the Tory centre right, who wish to replace the “socialist” welfare state with individual citizens taking on more responsibility through the voluntary sector. Cynically, it’s all to save the government money of course…
With that in mind, I can only applaud, and share your willingness not to demonise, but to examine the advantages and limitations of each paradigm, in its embedded context. In Stephen Hawking’s “The Grand Mystery” I read he has now abandoned his lifelong search for a single unified “Theory of Everything”, and proposes instead a patchwork quilt of often incompatible theories, and of making progress within each theory. I like that – it shows a proper humility that we may never capture reality in a single theory or paradigm. I only hope we are wise enough to do the same in the social and psychological realms as well – to be content with making piecemeal progress on the problems in front of us. I think I hear you saying much the same.
So, I’m sorry I won’t get to meet you at Esalen. I do hope it is the thoroughly enriching experience it fully deserves to be.
While making some notes in preparation for the conference, I came across an email from a colleague in Colorado asking if I knew any good, systematic approaches to teaching “communication skills” to couples who are already pretty sophisticated.
It got me thinking.
Communication skills are good and well, and for many couples learning a few of them can make a real difference. The only problem with teaching “communication skills” is that, to my thinking, it puts the cart before the horse. We all know (from our own lives if not our practices) that when couples get into repetitive or toxic fights, “what we’re fighting about” is rarely what we’re fighting about. It seems to me that underneath the fights that couples bring to therapy are situations having to do with unmet attachment needs and the activation of attachment fears. These trigger emotions which create such a sense of urgency in us that they’re extremely difficult to manage, and usually get acted out instead of experienced, expressed, and held.
And when we’re in the grip of these intense emotions, we’re in a state of high SNS arousal—fight-or-flight territory. Skillful communication goes out the window. John Gottman’s research shows with real clarity the step-by-step process in which our higher faculties are overcome when visceral affects are triggered in the couple relationship.
Which leads me back to my colleague’s question about communication skills. Many couples (especially “sophisticated couples”) already know how to communicate—except when they don’t, i.e. when attachment-triggered, primary-process emotional energies hijack their nervous systems. At that point sophisticated couples are on the same level playing field as everyone else.
So it seems to me that the question isn’t how to teach couples “communication skills.” Those skills will be unavailable to them at precisely the moment when they’re most needed. I think the question is: how do we help people regulate their emotions in ways that will allow them to communicate effectively? How do we help people reorganize deeply embedded, deeply embodied, attachment-driven affective/cognitive sequences that flood them & derail them despite their best intentions, and despite them already having the greatest “communication skills” around?
I’ll give you my initial sense of it if you give me yours.
Mine is informed by my study of Gottman, and my training in Sue Johnson’s “Emotionally Focused Therapy” as well as Diana Fosha’s “Accelerated Experiential-Dynamic Psychotherapy”—and then folding all that into a Gestalt relational/field model of contact and meaning-making.
My sense is that we help people do this by (temporarily) becoming each partner’s safe place—the “secure base” right there in the room—that receives and holds and co-regulates experience—with and for them— when their partner is unable to. In recurrent fights, partners are often unable to be that safe place because they’re too busy dealing with their OWN primitive feelings—feelings that were triggered by the same fight…
As Sonia Nevis says, things will be OK as long as only one member of the couple goes crazy at a time. But it’s precisely those issues which trigger BOTH members simultaneously that lead couples to our door.
Thanks Arch for this.
Before responding to your invitation I want just to say that I love your description of the futility of teaching “communication skills” in the face of those intense and often primal responses. It think it’s often this very experience that has therapists thinking that couples work is not for them, or worse still has them scrabbling for better, more effective communication strategies for their clients. But it’s a zero sum game… no one wins.
Therapist as ‘safe space’ that begins to build the ground for the possibility of co-regulation is, I think, a very valuable way to conceptualize the work we do with couples, especially in these kinds of situations. But this is easier said than done, and I find myself wondering what this experience can (and often does) evoke for the therapist.
Many of us, me included, come to being a therapist out an attachment history that is threaded through with loss, disappointment, abandonment or shame. We bring our own vulnerabilities, and while this is true of therapy generally, I think there is something about the couple constellation that evokes this in some very particular ways.
For some therapists I’ve supervised, the sense of being one step removed from the conflict and tension acts as a support, enabling them to hold a very grounded and supportive presence for the couple. For others though, the emotional turmoil undoes this capacity, pulling the therapist into fray with an urgent sense of needing to fix something. For myself I know that in these moments it can be hard to shake off my childhood experiences of desperately trying to rescue or save the fatally fractured relationship of my parents. In such moments I can struggle to regulate my own anxiety, and any hope of being a secure base for the client vanishes. I’ve learned the hard way that my nine year old self does not really make a very good therapist.
Understanding this, and really coming to appreciate the impact of my own attachment history has been critically important in me developing and extending my capacity as couple’s therapist. The same is true for other therapists I have supervised, and it’s one of the things I most appreciate about a field/relational approach… we’re always paying attention to the ways in which our location (social, emotional, cultural and historical) shapes how we engage and connect with others, be it clients, friends, family or lovers.
But where my attention goes is to how the therapist manages this space.
Leanne–
Yes yes a thousand times yes… Becoming (and remaining) that safe place is simple to say, difficult to do! Our own history of attachment is the stuff of the work–our vulnerabilities, our wounding, our strength… It seems to me that those points at which we stop listening, those points at which we stop being present–those places are where our work as therapists begins… Where we need to strengthen our own supports in order to buttress our ability to remain present…
And then, of course: how to return and attempt to heal those breakdowns, those ruptures. Because that kind of active attempt at repair–maybe more than anything else–is what can establish safety in the connection, and new possibilities for growth.
Like Winnicott says somewhere, “Therapy begins when the therapist fails the patient…”
Such a feast of longing and satisfaction is evoked by this thread! Way back Arch, you said, in field relational Gestalt, (in this view that everything including the therapist is influenced by and influencing everyone else ongoingly,) intimate witnessing is essential for the full flowering of the individual’s inner world. Certainly it is developing that quality of intimate safety for allowing oneself or one’s coupled relationship to be witnessed in vulnerable moments that characterizes my hope when I sit down either with a couple-in-pain or with an individual client who is longing to develop an intimate couple relationship in his or her life! This describes the ‘safe emergency’ or ‘safe space’ which is our clinical relationship supporting deconstruction of past meaning-making that no longer serves. I am looking for those intimate recognitions with each member of the couple that indicate I’ve seen, heard, felt their longing in the face of the expectation of being missed yet again! Sometimes that longing is for freedom from primal responses evoked by the other and this whole painful dynamic — sometimes it is to re-find an easier remembered intimacy.
The very act of touching oneself vulnerably in the presence of an intimate witness/caring other does raise the stakes and can change everything! The therapist witnesses but also affects the quality of vulnerable sharing possible for members of a couple in this new configuration that includes the therapist. When sufficient intimate history allows and is rekindled in the clinic, through the recognition of significant reaching out for each other, the intimate partner is a support for sustainable growth in the couple and our work involves coaching them in new perspectives and practices for honoring and strengthening the relationship. Here is where the much maligned “communication skills” can help. Of course, jumping over the habitual woundings, any ruptured attachment bonding, the emotional trauma history, to teaching communications skills, i.e. putting cart before horse, represents a heinous misattunement and will not work so well!
Other reflections include where does the couple find support for all the ways the larger culture teaches that the coupled other is meant to meet all our relational needs? — and on I ponder … thank you, Arch, for starting this up! and each of you for getting me thinking about my and my clients’ relationships!!
I LOVE it, I finally feel like I can come in and contribute to this amazing thread of discussion. These are the couples I work with, the once who . The topic of marrying Gestalt and Neuroscience (pun intended) has been something I have worked on for a few years now, even focusing my dissertation on the issue.
My training in this area comes from Somatic Experiencing (Peter Levine), training with Bessel van der Kolk and reading books upon books. (Just to give you the context.)
When I ponder upon the evolution of Gestalt, my attention go away from the head, “below” the muscles and to the nervous system, and the seat of attachment, which to me is very much about self-regulation. How do we incorporate all the new knowledge of the nervous system into our framework of Gestalt? We have our knowledge of the field and phenomenology, but how does a dysregulated nervous system change the way we perceive our field? Especially if it is a chronically dysregulated nervous system. And how do we incorporate the new developments in neuroscience into how we work with couples, especially the ones who would be diagnosed with developmental trauma? I realize I have more questions than answers at this point.
When we talk about attachments and safe place what do we mean? If I ask the couple I might get the answer of “when I know I won’t be yelled at” and I go on to ask, “So how does it feel in your body, what are the sensations which would tell you that you are safe?” When I talk about a safe place I talk of it in the notion of a regulated nervous system where the individual isn’t in a hyper-aroused state, the fight/flight or the hypo-aroused freeze state. How the individual perceive his/her field is very much dependent on their current nervous system state, as well as their old neurological pathways.
So in my work I go to that deepest (as we know of it at this point in time) layer, the activation/deactivation cycle, helping the couple learn how to speak Neuro, explore first how the activation level feels in their body, how they can regulate it (and in some cases that is such a big task that it is better done in individual therapy before or in conjunction with the couple’s work) and how their relational field shifts with their arousal level. Then we can start to play, using the barometer of the sensations to lead the way. The communication skills become about being able to report on my arousal level, and what tools both I and my partner have in that moment when one or both of us are activated.
I could go on and on, and might come back to this blog. And if I don’t get the chance there will be the Esalen conference and a workshop one of the afternoons where I will expand on this topic with some actual playing around with it.
That sounds GREAT, Lena… Looking forward to spending time in Big Sur, comparing notes, and exploring this stuff together in depth… I like your exploration of the embodied experience of secure attachment / safe connection as a way of grounding things and pointing a chronically activated body towards a more supported state…
Your focus on bodily arousal certainly dovetails with the last two decades of research in neuroscience–research that reinforces Gestalt’s traditional emphasis on awareness of here-and-now embodied experience. And as you point out, there are lots of new ideas and insights that we can make use of in our own work and theory-making.
The ideas that seem to me most exciting are coming out of research in the neurobiology of attachment (Allan Schore, Richard Davidson, Alan Fogel) and in affective neuroscience (especially Panskepp & Porges)… Such an abundance of new insights to explore through the lens of the Gestalt field/relational perspective… By trying to integrate these developments, we can not only add to the richness of our own theory, but we can also fruitfully contextualize the developments themselves…
Very glad to have you there with us–exciting stuff!
Thanks Lena! — your own trauma work and Peter Levine’s constructs, so helpful and accessable in sorting the intensity of trauma responding. And thank you, Arch, for Alan Fogel, another forgotten yet urgently useful resource in sorting this work in terms of understanding the psychophysiology of the always unfolding relational field! Thank you both!!!