Healing the Hurt Hidden Underneath Relationship Conflict: Managing Attachment Needs Effectively in Couples Therapy
It’s been my clinical experience that a majority of emotionally unraveled, destabilized couples present to treatment constrained by chronic, unresolved conflict. They articulate their destabilization in many ways, “We have communication issues,” or “We end up in the same place in conflict, nothing is ever resolved” or “We cannot agree on anything.”
Some couples teeter precariously on the cusp of separation and/or divorce. In one recent case, the couple confessed to me, “Our decision to come to therapy is a last-ditch effort to salvage our ‘war-torn’ relationship.” Sadly, I’ve observed similar desperation driving too many couples who come to treatment.
Inside the ICU in Couples Therapy
Often, in my efforts to help prevent the worst from unfolding, I’ve found it helpful to shoulder the pressures of an ICU clinical responder and lift the couple’s heavy emotional burden by conveying new meaning to their suffering. To do this, I’ll first provide deep listening, a double dose of empathy, couched in care and authority, while administering what I hope is a consolatory reassurance and hopeful, reality-based perspective on the rigorous nature of intimate relationships.
Then, if the couple appears amenable, I’ll introduce a complementary but significant, attachment-based, dialogical, experiential therapeutic, somatic framework: As painful as your emotional upheavals are, they reflect the steep price of admission to intimacy’s land of unsurpassed rewards and fulfillments, despite its rugged ride through what can sometimes be treacherous emotional terrain.
As you might expect, my preliminary therapeutic framework often requires me to periodically double back and re-apply a salve of empathy and validation to prevent any appearance of downplaying or minimizing the couple’s suffering. Then, I’ll again underscore intimacy’s unique complexities and the looming challenges that the couple surely must have wrestled with for so long and with so much accumulated frustration, dismay, confusion, and hurt.
Once the empathy appears sufficiently absorbed, I’ll ask the couple something similar to this: “Do you suspect, as I do, that your turmoil and profound emotional pain are troublesome but expected extensions of these problematic complexities and challenges that commonly plague intimate relationships? However, separate from these hurdles, here you are, willing to try to rehabilitate your relationship — I commend you!
While the couple digests my efforts to give new meaning to their struggles, I’ll ask them to carefully consider what they think fuels their conflicts. As I consider their responses, I’ll gently nudge them toward another path by suggesting this: “Thoughtfully unpacked, your emotions can provide valuable ‘grist for the therapeutic mill’ because they expose an interconnection of fundamentally valid personal needs and feelings, and importantly, your abilities to manage both.” I’ll also stress, “It’s even intimacy’s ‘job,’ so to speak, to continuously unearth — through the countless interactions you have with each other — what your individual need management patterns or styles are like, revealing those that are well-developed, or functional, and those that require further development.”
Moving forward, I’ll warn the couple that despite intimacy’s promises of incomparable personal fulfilments, one of its mysteries consists of a subtle, but sinister “dark passage” that is notoriously common for weakening, even dismantling, the individual identities of its constituents. This erosion of partner identity can easily be viewed as the direct, insidious consequence of the mismanagement of individual partner needs. Uncorrected, this loss of identity can cut deeply at the core quality of the relationship.
When Couples Side-step Conflicts
In many of my cases, I’ve witnessed the irony of partners who’ll myopically sidestep even the slightest prospect of conflict and thus sacrifice themselves by under-managing or not managing their individual needs. Done with good intentions, partners will often deploy this misguided, potentially debilitating, tactic of side-stepping conflict for seemingly the “right” reasons: To be considerate of their partner’s differing needs, or to keep from rocking the interpersonal boat by avoiding the risk of conflict sparked by divergent individual needs and the regrettable consequences of painful emotional fallout.
However, I’ll point out that partners who attempt to side-step, dance around, or otherwise evade their potentially conflict-generating differences — especially those who do so chronically — risk a backfiring accumulation of metastasizing self and partner resentment.
I have often observed that when conflict- hesitant partners opt to use this quick and easy out of conflict for the short-term gain of reducing tension, they paradoxically — and most often unintentionally — incite a downstream, longer-term escalation of couple tension. This delay pattern of conflict avoidance can diminish partner affection because it most often amplifies rather than lessens couple animosities, making them more pernicious and therefore significantly harder to manage. Left untreated, unresolved conflicts create a breeding ground of couple-crippling hostility and chaos.
Conversely, well-managed needs can reduce or even eliminate long-term tensions, even though partners are often called upon to move toward rather than away from potential conflict. Further, well-managed personal needs can cleanse the emotional atmosphere of systematic tension and lingering emotional debris by preemptively applying the brakes to dynamics of self and partner resentment that might otherwise ooze toxically into the partnership.
However, what happens when partners trend in the opposite direction and mismanage their needs by strong-arming their partner’s non-negotiated demands, manipulations and cajolery, or in some other manner coerce, blame, criticize or pressure their partners into gratifying their needs? For example, I frequently hear partners protest that they don’t feel heard or understood, often voiced as, “We don’t communicate,” or, “He/she never listens to me,” or some fault-finding alternative of this complaint-driven, non-constructive relationship critique.
While the need to have one’s partner’s sensitive, respectful understanding is unquestionably valid, when frustrated, it is easily mismanaged with angry accusations and demands, which then pulls the targeted partner’s attention away from the legitimacy of the needs. Or very often because of a need’s primary legitimacy, its gratification can be taken for granted, meaning it’s not actively or effectively managed at all. Partners mistakenly assume that their need for understanding will be met, especially when it’s perceived to be most needed.
I’ll reiterate that poorly managed or non-managed personal needs often become a couple’s crossroad. For instance, a partner’s infuriated accusation, “You never listen to me!” most often immediately activates the accused or “non-listening” partner’s defenses, which can then lead to an exasperating and fruitless spinout in an emotional cul-de-sac of counter-attacking allegations.
Managing Attachment Needs Effectively in Couples Therapy
In contrast, managing needs effectively can look like this: “Your efforts to listen and understand me leave me feeling respected and cared for…thank you…this means so much to me…and I could sure use a dose of it now…that is, if you have a moment.” Here, both partners are dealt an equal degree of respect. And while far less economic in terms of time and/or energy, this investment in good need management can pay off in big emotional dividends, since it tends to pull partners toward one another.
Happily, neither partner is likely to be defensive. Instead, good need managers deliver a respectful compliment to their partners which, in turn, helps create a safe atmosphere of mutual respect. Conclusively, partners who respect one another are more likely to gratify each other’s needs.
Now moving ahead in a consciously concrete fashion, I’ll encourage the couple to examine their shared history for healthy considerations — that is, to search for instances when they may have effectively managed their personal needs and the feelings surrounding them. I’ll instruct the couple to methodically and sensitively reference these remarkable times, calling their attention to how they felt during this important personal obligation to themselves and to the quality of their relationship, especially when it was done with little or no ruffling of feathers.
I’ll encourage the couple to take a moment to reflect and comment on any residual glow of relational health they may now feel while recalling those moments of good personal need management. Equally important, I’ll ask the couple to try and identify the specific conditions which may have made these promising relational exchanges possible for the clear beneficial advantages of reinforcing or embellishing them.
Equally, my hope is that this type of positive intervention will resuscitate at least a brief moment of optimism in the couple. I’ve also discovered that periodic, well-timed infusions of hope and connection can be an especially beneficial method of intervention. I’ve also found it helpful to offer frequent reminders that effectively managing some individual needs may pose a temporary threat to the equanimity and stability of their relationship. I’ll frequently coach the couple to practice in session using a courageous conversational method called dialogue with practice follow-ups at home. Utilizing courageous dialogue entails activating the courage to vulnerably enter the terrain of the emotional lion’s den. I’ll promote this important process as key to effective personal need management, highlighting that it’s intimacy’s lifeblood — I risk and therefore I am intimate.
Nonetheless, I’ll repeat that intimacy’s unparalleled collection of far-reaching, personally fulfilling developments are achieved in direct proportion to the couple’s efforts to acquire greater “intimacy intelligence” by fearlessly sharpening their skills of effective need management. Specifically, I’ll point out that these highly desirable rewards take form in a gratifying increase of self-esteem. Also, this increase in self-esteem is usually accompanied by a sympathetic bonus — a commensurate boost in their partner’s esteem.
I’ll describe how applying the idea of effective personal need management deepens the connection, or the integration, partners have within themselves, which is possibly a necessary precursor to a deep, meaningful connection between relating partners. I’ll be no closer to my partner than I am first close to myself. Again, I’ll stress that personal needs and feelings that are effectively managed ensure that partner identities are well-embroidered in a need-by-need, feeling-by-feeling approach, a well-knit structure of the self. I like to emphasize that the quality of the intimate relationship is a function of the quality of the partners who inhabit the relationship.
As each session draws to its end, I’ll send the couple home with a helpful recap — “clinical love notes,” as it were. I’ll often remind the couple that the art of loving is rarely, if ever, perfected but it can be improved upon by taking on the lifelong prescription to hone the personal skills of effective need management which unquestionably stabilize the relationship. My intent here is to keep the work that we do in treatment fresh, alive, and well-practiced at home where it counts the most.
Keep nurturing your partnership’s roots through vulnerability and empathy, listening generously and speaking kindly. Let these be the building blocks of a masterpiece relationship under eternal construction. Tend persistently to cracks as soon as they appear so that what you cement now endures for future generations mounted by love. Know that with care and courage there is always potential for positive change and deeper relating.
Thank you for reading.
Peace and blessings this holiday season,
Dr. Paula
