– The Difficulty of Being with An Other thru Couples Counseling Nashville

By: Chris Roberts, MACP, LPC-MHSP (Masters of Arts in Counseling and Psychology.  Licensed Professional Counselor with Mental Health Service Provider designation) Two Trees Counseling Nashville.  Relational Psychodynamic Therapy Certified Therapist Trainer and Consultant.

THE DIFFICULTY OF BEING IN RELATIONSHIP WITH A LOVED ONE

There are many difficulties in trying to create and form a healthy relationship with a loved one.  Obviously, I am speaking about the time after falling in love.  That typically comes so effortlessly.  How we can fall in love so easily, but have so much difficulty staying in love is for another day.  But in this article, I am going to attempt to tackle one of the difficulties of being in love, and staying in love, with another person.

In a surprisingly deft article about love by a psychoanalyst, Gabriele Cassullo takes foundational and formidable analysts such as Suttie, Freud, and Bowlby and makes a strong case for how love should and must enter a psychotherapy treatment in order for it to be effective and lasting for a client.  I will take one of his arguments and apply it to loving our children, our spouse, or any significant loved one, and the difficulty therein.

Cassullo writes, “…Suttie, observing the reciprocal attentions and responses between mother and baby, had also focused precisely on that kind of bond, which he termed “organic sympathy.” In fact, Suttie went even further by stating, “The child does not want an emotional response in the mother which is identical with its own feeling . Thus a response of ‘confidence’ to its ‘fear’ is comforting provided the child feels that its anxiety has been fully appreciated (though not strictly ‘sympathetically’) by the mother, i.e. that it has ‘gone across’ and met with full response” ( 1935 , 64). 11 (see source below)  In a dense, but beautifully poignant paragraph, Cassullo says a lot!

In simple terms, what Cassullo is stating is: We must hear what the other person speaking, but we must also feel the essence of what they are trying to communicate.  We must catch the feeling of their expression in a way that the speaker knows we understand on an emotional level what their experience has been like.  Then, beyond simply communicating our empathy or sympathy, we must be able to respond in a way that doesn’t strictly mirror their experience, but provides them with a response of our own.  Sounds simple enough, right (insert-rolling eyes emoji).

HOW COUPLES COUNSELING CAN BE HELPFUL IN NASHVILLE, TN

To unpack my last paragraph a bit, I’ll start with my first sentence.  In order for another person to actually “feel” heard by us, we need to have our own emotional experience of what the person might be going through.  For instance, if our spouse is telling us about an anxious experience, we must, on some level, be invested in their story enough that we feel some notion of anxiety ourselves.  This usually happens whether we want to feel it or not!  Anxiety, or anxious moments, are almost always contagious. This is a good thing.  Unless, of course, we feel too much anxiety in ourselves.  In this case, we won’t be of much help to our spouse, because we will be spinning out in our own fear and stress.  As a side note, this is one of the main reasons we don’t listen to our spouse, or significant loved one: we don’t want to feel the intensity of their experience within ourselves, and so we close off emotionally to them.  Of course, our spouse is going to have the experience that we “don’t care, but ironically, it is just the opposite.  We care so much, that we catch and feel too much of their experience.

WHEN WE GET STUCK WITH OUR PARTNER, WE NEED A THERAPIST TO SHOW US A BETTER LISTENING EAR

A good couples therapist in Nashville, Tennessee will understand this principle, and be able to model for us how to take in another person’s experience, without becoming overwhelmed by it.  Because, if we fear (even unconsciously) becoming too overwhelmed by our partner’s experience, we won’t listen at all as a way to protect ourselves.  Cassullo connects this idea to the way a mother must feel some of their child’s distress, but not succumb to the overwhelming experience their baby might be feeling.  Babies, as best as we can tell, since they can’t talk, do seem to be consistently overwhelmed by their daily experiences in living.  They are, after all, just living and breathing impulses and stimulations and reactions.  Infant research has taught us that caregivers aren’t simply there to soothe a baby in totality.  In fact, what Cassullo is stating, through Suttie, is that a mother’s “best way” of soothing an infant is by not just calming the child, but showing the child that she has felt the intensity of the baby’s experience.

If you feel overwhelmed by the complexity and difficulty of just doing this part, then you are reading this article well.  As such, you are catching on to why being a good partner, parent, or friend can be so difficult.  If you have ever tried to soothe an upset baby and you aren’t successful, you also know the feeling of terror or stress that can wash over you so fully and so quickly.  We want our child to be okay. And we want them to be okay so badly, that when we can’t lower their intensity quickly, our brain starts to meltdown.

WHY COUNSELORS DON’T OFFER ADVICE, AT LEAST IN THE BEGINNING

One of the first principles Cassullo notes is that the mother’s soothing, shushing efforts won’t be successful unless the child believes the mother “feels that its anxiety has been fully appreciated.”  If a therapist, or any of us, moves too quickly to offering advice, often the upset person hasn’t felt that the therapist has “fully appreciated” the heightened state of their emotions.  So, the upset person rejects the advice not necessarily because it is wrong or unhelpful, but precisely because the upset person hasn’t felt known or understood in their distress.

RELATIONSHIPS ARE HARD; COUNSELING CAN HELP

Whether your relationship is in a difficult place, or you are just wanting a little help to get to a thriving experience, couples counseling in Nashville, TN with Chris Roberts can be effective.  Chris has over 15 years working with individuals and couples in helping them achieve more of the good stuff in life.  Chris can be reached 24 hours a day at: chris@nashvillecounselor.net, or at (615) 800-9260.

 

 

Source: by Cassullo, Gabriele. Back to the Roots: The Influence of Ian D. Suttie on British Psychoanalysis. Published in:American Imago, 2010, PEP Archive

    11. Source: Brown , J.A.C. 1961. Freud and the Post-Freudians . London: Pelican , 1964 .