Intimate Standoffs
Are We Trying to Change the Right Things in Couples Therapy?
Are you toting around a laundry list of things you want to change in your relationship? Are you frustrated by your inability to make those changes, or confused when changes don’t produce the desired experience. In couples counseling, my clients frequently arrive with one or many changes they want to make. Couples often want to change their partners. “I need my partner to be more affectionate, less of a nag, pull their weight around the house, have sex more often, stop flying off the handle, listen to me”…etc. Does this sound familiar?
In intimate relationships, we often forget that the only person we can change is ourselves. Instead we beg, plead, prod, yell, demand,and sometimes threaten in order to “make” our partner change, to make our partner meet our needs. Inevitably, the result is what I call an “intimate standoff”. Both parties, certain of their righteousness in the conflict, dig in their heels and cover their ears. So long as everyone believes the other person needs to change, or, at a minimum, be the first to change, the relationship isn’t going to improve. I ask couples locked in this dynamic, “is it more important to you to be right or to have a happier relationship?” Pride in these moments becomes something more like self-conceit and indignation. But when asked, most chose the relationship over being right.
As a couples therapist, I know that both parties are hurting and both parties generally feel that the other person’s complaints are unfair. Untangling, loosening, and reframing the conflict is not about “picking a winner.” It's more like an excavation. I help clients peel back the layers of their complaints to see what lies beneath. It's rarely about the dishes. Changingn the surface typically do not address the feelings and unmet attachment needs beneath. This process might sound something like, “When he doesn’t do the dishes again, after you asked so many times, how does that make you feel?” The first emotion shared is rarely the root. The partner might say, “It makes me angry.” When encouraged to go deeper, other feelings like disrespected or unimportant might emerge, or even an attachment injury from the past. “When she ignores my requests to lower her voice, I feel like a little boy again, waiting for my mom to slap me.”
Witnessing our partners access the deeper meaning and feelings that our actions elicit can be incredibly powerful and create space for softening between them. Anger, frustration, overwhelm, and withdrawal create armor and hide vulnerability. Helping clients access and witness vulnerability in both partners is critical to relational healing. The new awareness creates motivation to make changes, big or small. Vulnerability can unthaw a frozen relationship and create the space for partners to choose different responses in future interactions. Does this sound like something that your relationship needs?
Accessing the emotional core of our habitual patterns in relationships is the key to unwinding the negative cycle that is unraveling the intimacy. Maybe you feel like every time you want to discuss an issue with your partner, they withdraw and give you the silent treatment. You are left feeling alone in the relationship, abandoned. Maybe you feel attacked by your partner, constantly criticized. You feel like you are never enough and so you retreat to safety. This pursuer-withdrawer relationship pattern is incredibly common. Both partners feel exasperated and misunderstood, neither understands why either reacts the way they do. Understanding the why of our habitual responses is crucial. Understanding the whys of our partner’s pattern is too. Couples therapy can create that mutual understanding and help you change the negative cycle.
Book a free consultation with me if your relationship could use a tune-up.
