Author: lisashapirolcsw

How does talking with a couples’ counselor help? Here are thoughts from some great theoretical writers, Wilfred Bion, Jill Scharff, and Virginia Goldner.

“From Bion, we take the concept of containment. While listening and observing…we are sitting with anxiety without reacting, jumping in, interrupting, or ending the session early. We are learning to hold anxiety and give it back to the couple in a more manageable way so that they have the experience of using thought to transform distress.” Jill Savege Scharff, 2014

Goldner says it well: “The containing, regulating, soothing, educative, ethically instructive aspects of good-enough psychotherapy, traditionally backgrounded in individual treatment, are here foregrounded to the relief of all parties…”

“…Relational distress is ultimately caused by breakdowns in other and self-regulation of affect (especially anger, sadness, fear, and shame.) Bearing and working through these states in the presence of the partner is at the crux of the work…misfires can miraculously get a do-over, affects can be calmed, affect tolerances enhanced, complex messages translated, ruptures painstakingly repaired, and the emotional consequences of attachment injuries worked through…” Virginia Goldberg, Romantic Bonds, Binds, and Ruptures: Couples on the Brink”, Psychoanalytic Dialogue, 24: 402-418.

“Get over it.” “Just move on.” “Put it behind you.” If you can, you do. Of course. And it works well. But if it doesn’t work, it’s not that there’s anything wrong with you. It’s basic human dynamics.

“Denial certainly works to feel better in the day-to-day, but ultimately, it gets in the way of having a good life. That’s basic Freud on ‘repression,’ Clark University Lectures, 1909. Here’s how the theory goes: let’s say you have a stream and you put a rock in the middle of it. The water can’t flow through it anymore, so it will flow around it. Currents of energy just find another path.” Sheftel, Luiz, 2013.

Sometimes you just have to dig out that rock…and make a sculpture from it. Sometimes you pulverize the rock…and use it just like Hansel and Gretel did to find their way out of the woods. (Pebbles work better than breadcrumbs…birds…remember?) But the rock isn’t “bad.” It has its uses. Just not in the middle of that stream maybe. Whatever you do, don’t try to get rid of that rock. You’ll knock yourself out, because you  can’t really get rid of it. It’s a teacher, there for a purpose.

Counseling is a relationship. I’m there and so are you. We talk. It is through this discussion process that change takes place. Some theorists say that change happens through the relationship. How?

We strive to create healthy emotional interchanges in the office setting, and we respectfully identify the unmet developmental needs that might cause our patient to stumble in co-creating this healthy dialogue.

Sidney Love stated (1991) that “the goal of modern analytic family therapy is the emotional maturation of all members of the family” and that emotional education is a vital aspect of psychotherapy. She viewed personality as actually being formed through emotional interchanges.

I like Virginia Goldner’s statement that marriage counseling “requires ongoing, unwavering acts of containment and recognition…” (for ref., see other blog entry…)

If we can create healthy emotional interchanges in the psychotherapy office, and have you take that home to your family, “what a wonderful world it would be.”

It is important for us as therapists to “tune in” to our patients on a level that results in a rapport in which the patient feels deeply and powerfully understood.

Don Jackson, one of the founding fathers of family therapy wrote, ” Perhaps our therapy should be called homeopathic family therapy since we proceed on the notion that the particular communication devices the family uses can in turn be used with them for therapeutic purposes, as in the homeopathic idea that “like cures like.” D. Jackson, 1958

I’m not convinced that homeopathic medicine works on the body so well, but I do agree that our patients cannot achieve anything in psychotherapy without first feeling connected to us.

People often ask me what the psychotherapeutic process consists of, particularly when it comes to Psychoanalysis. You might appreciate these quotations from a class that I recently took:

“The principle of working to produce verbal communication shortcuts the goal of making the unconscious, conscious…When the patient is trained to convert the ingredients of internal speech into spoken words, insight emerges as a by-product of the connections established between impulses, feelings and words.” H. Spotnitz, 1969.

Sidney Love commented on this: “As questions and requests are studied, repetitious behavior is often transformed into repetitive feelings which then are verbalized. These verbalized feelings are listened and responded to as symbolic descriptions of earlier difficult family life experiences.” S. Love, 1991.

I’ll be posting quotations from some very interesting readings on couples, communication skills, listening to your family members, dealing with stress (relaxation quickies), meditation, and trauma. I look forward to sharing them with you and hearing from you about your reactions.