by Todd Sarner, MA MFT
Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist and Director of Transformative Parenting
When Michael and Sara came to my office the first time things weren’t looking good. They had been married for just over eight years and had three children whom they loved, but they were both very unhappy. Both agreed that when they met things just felt “right”. They felt that they had known each other for a long time and that they really understood each other. They got married about a year after they met and Sara became pregnant with their first child not too long after that. It wasn’t long before they started fighting. Both were often under a lot of stress — working, raising children, and paying the bills. They started arguing over everything from who was doing the dishes to how often they were having sex. There was a time when each considered the other their best friend and planned on being together forever. Right now, however, their level of frustration was so high that they spoke of the possibility of divorce. In the room, Michael seemed distant and withdrawn. He said nothing he ever did was good enough for Sara and he had just given up trying. Sara seemed anxious and scared. She said Michael never helped her out around the house or with the kids, and she was frustrated because she thought he just didn’t care anymore. They sat as far apart on the couch as they could and they hardly looked at each other.
What goes wrong in marriage?
Michael and Sara are typical of a lot of the couples I see in my practice. They came together originally with a strong sense of knowing that they were right for each other, that they were “The One” for each other. No one gets married thinking it will end up in unhappiness or divorce. So what goes wrong in marriage? There are many factors.
Part of what goes wrong is cultural. In American culture in particular we have made independence and autonomy somewhat of a religion. We place so much emphasis on our independence that we’ve lost much of the wisdom about what it means to be dependent in a healthy way. I am not arguing against our freedoms. I appreciate them as much as anyone; it’s just that we’ve taken the idea of freedom to such an extreme that we see depending on others as weak or co-dependent.
Developmental psychology has shown that true independence comes from a healthy and secure bond. When we feel secure in our relationships, we thrive. The scientific study of this phenomenon is called Attachment Theory. When we do not feel secure in our relationships, we become preoccupied with this insecurity and it affects everything we do. This is true for having a successful marriage as well as for raising children. If we help our children internalize feelings of safety and security, they will naturally move towards learning, growing, and being more self-sufficient. They can do this because they have what attachment researcher Mary Ainsworth called a “secure base” to come back to.
The same has to be true for a marriage to be successful. The problem is that our culture — and even many of our therapy models — put an emphasis on individuation. Research has shown that usually when someone seeks individual therapy for marriage problems the result is divorce. That is because most individual therapies in our culture focus on making you a more autonomous person, not on helping you to be more secure in your relationship.
Another thing that goes wrong in marriages is that we become less open and vulnerable with each other. When we begin a relationship, we share our hopes, dreams and fears. This place of open communication and sharing is critical to a relationship that thrives. Over time, as we experience hurts, big and small, with each other, we slowly close our hearts and become more guarded and less open. It’s not that we don’t care about each other; it’s that this person we have chosen has more power to hurt us than anyone else in the world because he or she is that important to us. We don’t want to feel enormous hurt, so our brain tries to protect us by numbing out and walling off our feelings.
The situation can begin to feel hopeless — but it’s not. We just need to learn how to do things differently.
Moving to “take care of” each other
One of the rules of attachment that I learned from my mentor Dr. Gordon Neufeld (“Hold On to Your Kids”) is that the attachment part of a relationship is never about being “equals”. It is about one who is taking care of and one who is being taken care of. This is easy enough to see when we are talking about parenting a young child. We understand that our main job is not to be a child’s best friend or to make him happy all the time, but to take care of him. We are meant to be in the alpha position. A mistake many parents make is that they stop being in the alpha position as their child grows older. When the parents are not in this position, the child will move to be in the alpha position himself — bossing his parents around or telling them what to do. It’s important to understand that being an alpha parent doesn’t mean being an authoritarian, it means being confident in parenting from a place of taking care of your kids.
This concept applies to marriage; it’s just a little different. There is a part of our marriage relationship that is about relating as equals. We love and respect each other as equals. However, the attachment part of the relationship is about how we move to take care of each other. This means that when one partner is in need — feeling sick or down, anxious or insecure —the other partner moves into the alpha position to take care of his or her partner in that moment. Likewise, when the other partner is in need, they reverse this position. This is meant to be a flow. When things are in relatively good shape in a relationship, it doesn’t take any extraordinary effort. It feels natural to move to take care of a partner in need.
When this is dynamic is working correctly, we learn to trust our partner. We know that we can emotionally rely on him or her. Our partner can even make mistakes, get it wrong sometimes, and that’s OK. We know that in general, when we reach out from a place of need, this person is there for us. It is when we really know this that we have a relationship that works. If we don’t know this, the relationship will not work.
The problem I see over and over again in my couples work manifests in two different ways. In one, both partners in the couple are in a position of need and no one is moving forward to take care of the other. This can be because they are both tired and stressed by the responsibilities and pressures of being parents. The other problem I often see is where one partner in the couple is always in the “taking care of position”, often because that’s where he or she feels most comfortable. These partners may not even be aware that they are doing this, but they don’t feel comfortable being taken care of themselves because it makes them too vulnerable. And then, over time, they feel burned out and resentful because no one is taking care of them.
How marriages are saved
Marriages are saved when we get past the surface content of arguments and get to the heart of the matter — when we focus on creating a secure bond between the two partners. We could spend months or years trying to work on the behaviors, the symptoms, we see in the marriage — he won’t do the dishes, she is being critical — but we would never get to the underlying disease.
When couples are able to have a secure base of a relationship that they can trust, a partner they know is really there for them, they are able to be the very best versions of themselves. They are not enmeshed or co-dependent. They know they can be close with their partners; but they also know they can go do their own thing, have their own friends and interests, and always have their primary attachment relationship to come home to.
Emotionally Focused Therapy for Couples
The most established attachment-based couples therapy is called Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) for Couples. This is not to be confused with an energy based healing technique also called EFT. The co-originator of EFT for Couples, Dr. Susan Johnson, is a Canadian therapist who created a three-phase, nine step system of couples therapy that is very effective and relatively short-term.
In clinical studies, EFT for Couples has been shown to have an outstanding success rate. Over 90 percent of couples report significant improvement and 70 to 75 percent move completely from distress to recovery. Perhaps the most impressive statistic is that when a two-year follow up is done with these couples, they report that their situation is actually better than when they ended therapy.
Instead of focusing on content, the EFT therapist focuses on identifying the negative cycle the couple has entered into, repairing damage that has occurred within the relationship, and helping facilitate a more positive and lasting bond between them. Couples who were constantly in conflict stop fighting and arguing all the time. Furthermore they report feeling a closeness and connection greater than ever before.
How Michael and Sara went astray
In the first couple session with Michael and Sara, we uncovered many clues about what was not working in their marriage. Growing up, they both had difficulties with their parents, and it was clear that these difficulties were carrying over into their current relationship. We also uncovered clues about what each of them needed and where each of them was feeling insecure in their marriage.
It seemed clear as day to me that these two were meant for each other and that they truly loved each other, but that the negative cycle had become so prominent in their relationship that they were operating most of the time from a place of fear and insecurity — not from the feelings of “knowing” that brought them together. In fact, it was the intensity of how important they were to each other that made all of the ways in which they were not tuned into each other’s needs seem much, much worse.
Sara became tired and stressed from the work of being a mom and felt that she needed more help and support from Michael. She thought he would rather surf the Internet or stay late at work than help her out around the house. Michael started to feel criticized and thought nothing he ever did was good enough for Sara. He became more emotionally withdrawn from the relationship. The more he withdrew, the more angry and anxious (and critical) she became. This made Michael withdraw even more. It was a vicious cycle and neither one of them could find a way out.
As we began what turned into a six-month process of weekly therapy sessions, I let Michael and Sara know that I was certain we could not only stop the vicious cycle, but that it could be replaced by a truly positive and secure bond. It was clear to me that this is what they both wanted, and they wanted it from each other.
“Aren’t you just encouraging co-dependence and enmeshment?”
No. What I am advocating is a healthy attachment bond, something every single one of us needs. As I teach in my parenting courses, there is no such thing as too much healthy attachment. Co-dependence and enmeshment are things that happen when the bond is unhealthy and insecure.
When you have a secure bond in your love relationship, you are able to be truly autonomous and independent. This may sound counter to what we are taught in our culture, but it’s true. When you have a healthy bond, you feel more secure in doing your own thing. You can have your own friends and interests and still know you have your “secure base” to go home to. You can do this because you trust your relationship.
When you are insecure in your primary relationships nothing works quite right, and it affects all aspects of your life — including your health and your work. It’s as if you have a really big computer program running all the time in the background that you’re not even totally aware of. It makes all of your other programs run slower or perform poorly in other ways. This is because attachment needs are the most important needs of all human beings.
“But what if we just aren’t right for each other? Things haven’t been good in a really long time.”
Obviously I can’t address your particular relationship in this article, but my belief and my experience are that the majority of the couples I have worked with were right for each other; they just got off track at some point. We are usually drawn to a person for the right reasons; but as they become more and more important to us, the potential becomes greater for our old patterns and issues to surface. We are drawn to this person because we have wonderful feelings of being known, of being “home”. But at the same time, our closest intimate partners will bring up everything in us that is unhealed from our past. This unhealed material can contain within it the keys to our personal transformation if we are open to it and willing to do a little work.
The key is for both partners to be willing to get beyond the surface issues to what is underneath. This process has an amazing track record, even with tough cases and couples who haven’t gotten along in years.
How things changed for Michael and Sara
I worked with Michael and Sara for about six months, meeting weekly for about an hour and a half. We spent time at the beginning understanding more deeply the negative cycle they had created together and how they had created it. We got to know more about the roles each of them played in the cycle, roles that were partly due to their histories and partly due to their own unique ways of coming together in relationship. Michael and Sara came to see fairly quickly that they were not each other’s enemy, the cycle was.
Over time, we uncovered the places where they had inadvertently wounded each other in their relationship. This is what we call “attachment injuries”. These injuries are sometimes obvious, but often they are hidden. One partner may have no clue that something they said or did years before was affecting their relationship in the present day. Such events often plant the seeds of mistrust and insecurity in a relationship.
What’s helpful about identifying these events is that they usually hold big clues about what the partners need from each other. We used these clues to help Michael and Sara build new, more secure ways of relating with each other. Often this takes time, but it is remarkable when it happens. The good news is that with EFT for Couples, we have an exact roadmap of the process by which this change can occur.
By the time we were nearing the end of our therapy process, Michael and Sara were not the same couple that had walked through my office doors those many months before. They smiled more, they held hands, and they were clearly no longer distressed. They said they still had arguments from time to time, but the arguments didn’t seem as extreme and they recovered much more quickly from them. Sara said that their fights used to feel like a matter of “life or death”, but that now they both understood that this was just the old cycle making an appearance. Michael reported that usually these days when they were getting close to “going at it”, one of them would make just the right remark, usually a funny one, that would deflate the situation right away.
It was clear that these two had escaped their negative cycle and were on the road to a much more secure and fulfilling life together. I couldn’t help smiling, thinking about how courageous they had been to make this change together, and what wonderful benefits it would have not just for them, but for their children.
Summary
Today, marriage (like parenting) is much harder than it should be. Cultural forces, along with our emotional wounding, conspire to keep us from the deep and loving connections we all need to thrive.
Also similar to parenting, marriage can be one of our greatest catalysts for personal growth. Whatever is unhealed in you, whatever needs to grow, will be brought up by these closest of relationships.
The key is to be open and vulnerable about your feelings, to get out of the negative cycle and take conscious action to create a secure bond. This is impossible when we are acting out of fear. Creating change requires courage and integrity.
I have come to believe with all my heart, personally and professionally, that a person’s husband or wife or love partner has 1,000 times more ability to heal the wounds of the other than I do as a therapist. That’s why I am so passionate about attachment-based couples therapy. When you can get both partners in the room and help them create a more secure bond, things that seemed impossible can start to happen. This is one of the greatest gifts you can give yourself and your children.
Some next steps
1- If it feels right, share this article with your partner and schedule some time to talk it over. If that doesn’t feel possible yet, share it with a close, trusted friend first.
2- Consider purchasing Dr. Sue Johnson’s book Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love. The first few chapters are a much more thorough explanation of the ideas in this short article, and the remaining chapters are outlines of suggested conversations to have with your partner.
3- If things feel too difficult or complicated to handle on your own, consider finding an attachment-based couples therapist in your area — such as an EFT for Couples practitioner. You can find them at www.eft.ca. It can always be helpful to have a safe guide through this most important of journeys.
Todd Sarner, MA, MFT is a licensed psychotherapist and Director of Transformative Parenting, a Parent Consulting & Education practice in Mill Valley, California. He did his original EFT for Couples training with founder Dr. Susan Johnson as well as completing a yearlong advanced training. In addition to his couples work, he does individualized parenting consulting and education in person and on the phone as well as conducting live and online parenting classes and courses. Todd was asked by leading developmental psychologist Dr. Gordon Neufeld (“Hold On to Your Kids”) to be one of the first interns in his professional training program, and he is currently a Faculty Member of the Neufeld Institute. You can reach Todd by emailing him at todd@transformativeparenting.com or by calling him at (415)289-6515. His parenting website is: www.transformativeparenting.com