How does the therapeutic relationship help couples in conflict to be able to talk it out? It’s hard to tolerate all that anger, whether we’re feeling it toward our partner, from our partner, or even being the therapist in the room. Here’s what David Scharff has to say:
“The degree to which early experiences might lead to later aggression varies. But in general, poor regulation of early aggression leads to incapacity of the growing child to regulate aggression. This is exacerbated when there is an experience of trauma and neglect early in life, leading to impaired containment, that is, a defective capacity to deal with disappointment and frustration, and a tendency to seek out more traumatic experience or traumatizing relationships in later life. When this happens, partners tend to see each other as posing danger…and they fear retraumatisation as a result of being in an intimate couple relationship.”
“Through the countertransference, we invite their excessively aggressive bond to infect us, and as it does, we work within ourselves to understand and detoxify it, and then to move it from wordless emotional experience within us to being something we can think about and therefore talk about with them. It is usually a painful inner experience for the therapist. But it is this process-using ourselves as therapeutic instruments through a willingness to tolerate, live with, and transform aggression-that we convey new possibilities to the couple.”
Scharff, D.E. (2014). Aggression in Couples: An Object Relations Primer. In Scharff and Scharff, “Psychoanalytic Couples Therapy: Foundations of Theory and Practice”.(PP. 59-70,) London: Karnak Books.