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COUPLES THERAPY
Couples come together in a relationship for both conscious and unconscious reasons. There is a normal tension between each individual’s needs and what the couple needs. The aim of the treatment is to access what areas of the couple are unnecessarily painful. Couples that live with a constant drone of friction, blaming, shaming, fighting and projecting are without appropriate tools to make sense of and manage that pain. They know how to create a relationship but are stymied by how to manage it. A Blame model on one end of the spectrum to the other end where couples are distant and aloof from each other and themselves that they virtually live as roommates. What links these two examples is the absence of a capacity to contain their feelings and ideas. Despair, guilt and hopelessness rule this space.
Relationships driven by these rigid forces are based on models of attachment theories. Fear of abandonment and hatred of dependency and vulnerability are at the core of these types of connection systems. Love, warmth, understanding and curiosity are dangerous to this couple. These couple’s strain under any threat of change. The couple can’t use their relationship for necessary protection and support we all need in our lives. These are especially complicated and unpredictable times. Global pandemics, economic confusion leaves us all vulnerable to despair. Hope, love, connections to others and the goodness of life are an antidote to despair.
CREATIVE COUPLING is about relating with a sense of respect and a knowledge of the difference between each partner.
This is based on the concept of the THIRD SPACE- which is the understanding that two people together are stronger than the individuals in that relationship. Understanding that all human beings regardless of their strength, talent and intellectual prowess need CONTAINMENT. Containment refers to the experience we have as infants where a parent figure manages our internal state by giving up their own normal self involvement to think and react to protect that infant from being overwhelmed by their own helplessness.
This clinical work is based on the contributions of clinical working models developed in the UK at the Tavistock Relationship training program. Contributors to this theoretical treatment models include Mary Morgan, Ron Britton, Chris Clulow, W.D. Fairbairn, Wilfred Bion to name a few. They combines their understanding of the theoretical contributions of Freud and Klein to expand a working model of attachments.
This theoretical model assumes that the most important experience for children is to develop a relationship with at least one primary caretaker. This is based on the fundamental understanding that children cant be alone and require adults for normal social and emotional development.
Attachments styles are as follows: SECURE ATTACHMENT- wherein that child feels a basic sense of safety and trust. The childs normal hostility and self involvement is understood as an essential aspect of childhood that gets worked with by the adult to over time transform that childs primitive organization of the world and themselves into a model of two people. INSECURE OR ANXIOUS ATTACHMENT- the child presents as overly clingy or aloof. They handle separation as a threat of abandonment. When the parent/partner returns they are handled with anger for the assumed abandonment. Feel worthless.
DISORGANIZED ATTACHMENT-because the parenting was so inconsistent the child cant make sense of their inner world or the world outside. They live feeling an inability to make sense of reality.
Couples copy: Services
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