Exceptional Relationships

“Why are we together?” Most couples in long term committed relationships will eventually confront this very challenging question. Indeed it is often the central motivation that compels couples to seek help. It is precisely this query that has directed the two of us to our life’s work. In this book we hope to open you to new possibilities in your work with couples, possibilities that arise from expanding your perspective on this fundamental question. This book is meant as an introduction to our approach to helping couples invigorate their relationships. It is directed primarily toward therapists and counselors who work with committed partners. It is designed to offer both practical information on how to work with couples in a more “embodied” and transformative way, and to inspire you to stretch your limits and bring more creativity and aliveness into your work. If you are like most therapists “in the trenches,” you work with couples at all levels of development and individuation. Our approach can be effective for most couples, and is particularly effective when partners are looking for more than the abatement of conflict or pain. Twelve Guiding Ideas The problem seems to be that the work that couples do often does not challenge them to evolve into uncharted territories with each other. There are a number of crucial factors that the two of us have identified as essential to the work we do with couples. Some of these factors fall outside the norms of conventional approaches to couples therapy. We will briefly identify them here and go into greater detail in the body of the book. 1. Emotions are fundamental to a growing, maturing relationship. Central to our work with couples is the support for and elicitation of the entire range of human emotions. We believe it is essential for couples to not only become aware of their respective emotions, but to “embody” them. By embody, we mean that emotions need expression, not just to be witnessed, but to be released, (as every child knows intuitively.) While the prevailing approaches to emotional work stress a mindful consciousness of our feelings, we have come to the realization that there is a place within the committed relationship where feelings such as anger, hurt and fear need to be openly and passionately expressed – in communion with an observing “witness self.” Losing a degree of control, for many couples is experienced as liberating. The relationship is, after all, built for passion. 2. A relationship is an evolving organism. Yet, most couples quickly fall into habits of interacting that are designed to maintain a status quo. Change is experienced as threatening. But in order to evolve, each partner must become the other’s guide. Your partner has the privileged position of seeing aspects of you that no one else is privy to. In our couples work we seek out the wisdom each person has to offer the other. This wisdom comes in the form of the capacity for empathic connection, “entrainment” of each other’s energies and an evolving resonance between each person’s limbic brain. Partners can learn to challenge each other to come out of hiding and show up in newer ways. Evolution requires an ongoing reorganization of each person’s identity. Thus each will go through many “deaths and rebirths” of an evolving self over the course of a long term relationship. This is both frightening and humbling and therefore typically avoided. 3. Couple’s therapy is generally limited to a mostly passive interchange between the two partners and the therapist. To sit and dialogue for fifty minutes severely restricts the possibilities for deeper connection. What couples reveal in this format does not resemble the real-life interactions that are part of their existent world. In the EMM approach we typically have the partners out of their chairs and relating to each other in a myriad of forms. Communication occurs on multiple levels. We attempt to create adequate space and a safe holding environment for two human beings to meet each other in various ways. Couples are invited to work with breath, sound, movement and energetic expression in novel ways. We utilize equipment (from large foam cubes to stuffed animals) in order to support the work couples are here to do. 4. In the Exceptional Marriage approach there are occasions when we support one of the partners in “losing control.” There is such a taboo around getting out of control in this culture that most couples live under the hegemony of rationality where intensity is frowned upon. Under the right conditions, as you will learn, it can be profoundly important for one of both partners to allow their bodies to thrash, kick, shout, tremble, vibrate, and open up to non-rational, uncontrolled movement. This helps to create neuro-muscular connections for spontaneity, greater passion, and creativity. 5. Couples move through time in their interactions with each other. Sometimes they are operating from one or the other’s history, sometimes from the vibrant reality of a present moment, and sometimes from their future potentialities that are longing to be expressed. Thus at any given moment one partner may be operating from a “regressed” consciousness, a very present adult space, or through tapping into a wisdom that seems to be emerging from a “higher self.” While therapy by its very definition focuses on evaluating what is not working and taking corrective action, EMM creates space for each partner to, in C. Otto Scharmer’s words, “learn from the future” (32), by releasing emotions which block access to our creative source. 6. Most therapies offer a “heart up” form of intervention. That is, the goal is to bring the hearts and minds of both people into deeper contact. Or, conversely there is an exclusive focus on sexuality when it becomes problematic (as it frequently does). There tends to be a split between sexual connection and heart and mind connection. The two of us have seen that many couples, over time, build a larger and larger divide between compassion and passion – ultimately weakening both. Sexuality is one of the most fundamental means of communication and it is too often relegated to a secondary status behind verbal communication problems. 7. The goal of our work is to help each person in a committed relationship discover a radical acceptance of the other’s “otherness.” Most of us (consciously or not) are ceaselessly trying to get our partners to change. It is a very difficult challenge to surrender this impulse and begin to see the other exactly as she is. To get there, each partner must uncover the immature need for the spouse to provide something that is a leftover from childhood experience. One person cannot accept the other when she is unconsciously seeking a partner who isn’t there. 8. It is not simply the lessons we learned in our families that need to be understood or healed, it is our complete cultural conditioning which teaches us to seek approval and external acceptance rather than to be spontaneous, playful, sensual, emotionally honest and curious. Couples are often in struggle because they have sunk down into life-denying habits that cannot be overcome by the same cultural consciousness which created them. Couples need help in breaking away from these spirit-crushing routines that are reinforced everyday by the prevailing culture. Our approach supports partners in liberating themselves from the deep conditioning to “be good” and to claim their individuality. In doing so, curiosity trumps approval-seeking. 9. Instead of adhering to a particular therapeutic modality, all of which have their benefits and limits, the therapists we train are encouraged to utilize their own particular gifts to help the couple find their own way. While there is a large body of research which can guide therapists in helping couples, there is also the creative unknown which exists beyond the frontier of a scientific body of knowledge.