Emotionally Focused Therapy for Couples
L.S. Greenberg and S.M. Johnson
Focus of the article:define the general strategies of therapy and the change process engaged in by partners through nine steps.
Step 1: Delineate Conflict Issues in the Struggle Between the Partners
Includes assessment process
Partners encouraged to make statements concerning their perceptions of the relationship and their experiences of the problems in the relationship.
Therapist validates the partner’s perceptions as a natural consequence of these experiences.
Therapist focuses on the process of the interaction rather than the content of the couple’s complaints, identifying themes in the struggle between partners.
In emotionally focused therapy, psychologist focuses on the emotional responses of one partner to the other and how these responses mediate the closeness or separateness of the bond between them and the process of self-definition.
Therapist frames the problem in terms of emotional pain, deprivation, or emotional needs, and insecure attachment.
Step 2: Identify the Negative Interaction Cycle
Therapist pieces together the narrations of typical problematic interactions in the relationship described by the clients and then defines the negative interaction cycle.
The therapist must observe this cycle because a couple’s description of their relationship is often inaccurate and always incomplete.
Often the therapist will ask for a description of each person’s responses in a past fight, followed by each partner being instructed to state to the other how he or she feels about the other’s response. From this conflict, therapist can identify the cycle and the impact that it has had on the couple as this procedure can evoke a repeat of the original interaction.
The description of the cycle tends to be general and to focus on behaviors or reactive emotional responses, but it is brought into awareness and used to decrease blame and rationalize the interaction process.
As the therapist develops a clear picture of the pattern of interaction and how each partner evokes the other’s responses, then he or she can explore the underlying feelings and needs and validate them.
Step 3: Access Unacknowledged Feelings Underlying Interactional Positions
Clients encouraged to pay attention to emotional responses not normally attended to, to the description of each partner’s positions or interactional cycle.
As therapy progresses, the emotional responses accessed become more distant from immediate awareness and more central to the way the self is defined.
Significant events arousing strong emotion are focused on in this step
Basic methods used by therapists to direct the client in the accessing of emotional responses are taken from gestalt therapy and client-centered therapy. Assumption here is that, before clients can become accessible and responsive to their partners, they must reprocess and crystallize their own experience in the relationship.
Step 4: Redefining the Problem(s) in Terms of Underlying Feelings
Once underlying feelings have been accessed, the problem is redefined in terms of these newly accessed emotional experiences.
Example: One problem cycle was originally defined as the wife making requests, the husband withdrawing, the wife pressuring him for a response, and the husband blowing up. With more emotional information, this cycle was redefined as the wife lacking trust and fearing being shut out, with the husband having a sense of inadequacy and a desperate need o protect himself from his, as he perceives her, powerful wife.
The core of the emotional focused therapy approach is the redefinition of generally benevolent, biologically adaptive, underlying feelings and motivations.
Reframe integrates the client’s affective, cognitive, and behavioral experiences.
By the end of this step in therapy, the problem has become framed in specific terms that reflect emotional responses rather than perhaps blaming statements.
Step 5: Promote Identification With Disowned Needs and Aspects of Self
Concerned with the clients identifying with the disowned aspects of experience and disclaimed action tendencies in the redefined cycle.
As cycle is enacted in therapy, partners become aware of their automatic reactions and the disowned aspects of experience underlying such reactions.
In this step, clients are first helped to differentiate and identify fully with their positions and deliberately to enact behaviors associated with those positions.
Step 6: Promote Acceptance by Each Partner of the Other Partner’s Experience
Therapist encourages each partner to express his or her experience with the partner and then facilitates the partner’s acknowledgement of this experience, primarily by reprocessing interactions and exploring and blocking non-accepting responses.
Two key processes: (1) exploration, (2) expression of underlying feelings such as resentment or vulnerability.
If there is more difficulty in one spouse accepting and responding to the other’s new experience, then the therapist focuses on that partner’s view of self, his or her past learning in the family of origin, any catastrophic fears he or she is experiencing, or whatever is inhibiting that partner’s ability to respond to the other.
Step 7: Facilitate the Expression of Needs and Wants to Restructure the Interaction
The needs and wants of both partners can now be experienced and expressed in a more open, genuine, and direct fashion.
As a result of the new emotional synthesis of self and interpersonal experience, the partners also have a new clarity concerning what they require from the relationship to help them feel secure, accepted and satisfied.
Couples can now understand that when they feel afraid, they want to be reassured, and when they feel fragile, they want to be nurtured.
Partners don’t just respond to each other’s needs in exchange for having their own needs met, but instead now understand that responding to one another is crucial to their partner’s well-being and security in the relationship.
Step 8: Establish the Emergence of New Solutions
Integration of new solutions into the problem situations that precipitated the couple’s entry into therapy.
Couple can now attempt to substitute positive, self-reinforcing interactional cycles for the negative ones, while the therapist heightens and reinforces the new cycles.
Step 9: Consolidate New Positions
Concerned with strengthening and integrating the changes that have taken place in therapy.
Therapist’s role is to strengthen the couple’s sense of now being in control of their relationship and being able to handle any future problems.
Discussion Questions:
On page 97 the article says: The choice as to which partner’s experience to focus on at any moment depends to a certain extent on who is the most receptive and flexible. However, in general, the sequence that seems to evolve naturally is that the withdrawer or submissive partner is usually one step ahead of the blamer or dominant partner in the therapeutic process. Why do you think this is?
When couples are able to become more accessible and responsive to each other, then they seem to exhibit greater creativity and skills in problem-solving tasks that previously used to trigger the negative interactional cycle. Why do you think this is?