Here is an excerpt from my forthcoming eBook, Grownup Love: How to Create it and Keep it.
As a Marriage and Family therapist I do my best to stay informed about the latest findings in my field. Therefore, a number of years ago, I attended a class at a local university called “Quarreling.” Apparently the Sociology department had done a number of studies in which they examined and videoed couples as they quarreled.
Their most amazing discovery was that every committed couple fights the same three or four fights during the duration of the relationship. Whether it lasts a few months or many years, the couple comes back over and over to their disagreement about the same things. And they rarely resolve them! Unfortunately, that class did not offer solutions, but I continued to apply this information in my work with couples.
I pondered these findings and realized that this premise held true in my own marriage and in the relationships of couples I have counseled over the years. At times the smallest thing can set you or your loved one off, and it turns into a violent war where you each react to the other in ways that you realize later were out of proportion to the situation. Yet you keep doing this repeatedly.
Scientific studies of the brain now allow us to understand what creates these reactions. Why do well-meaning couples keep triggering each other over the same topics? Trauma specialist, Robert Scaer, MD has explained it very simply. He maintains that the primitive part of the brain has only one goal, not to die! The brain is constructed to keep us alive at all costs. Therefore, when your partner is acting his or her “craziest” it is because there is a part of them that feels threatened and doesn’t want to die. They feel as if something you are doing or not doing is threatening them with death. This behavior that drives your beloved crazy is a pattern of response to danger that they have developed.
This is true of all of us. The good news is that we now have methods like the Phoenix Effect Process that can enable us to heal the old wounds that keep reopening when we keep fighting the same fights year after year. You don’t have to be a psychotherapist to use it. Couples can help each other to rapidly defuse negative emotions and beliefs that tear relationships apart.
I recall an incident a few years ago when my husband went into a moment of “craziness” over something that seemed very unimportant to me. He became furious and no amount of reasoning with him helped until I suggested using the Phoenix Effect Process.
He told me that the emotion that was triggered was betrayal. He used this simple focused imagery method for less than five minutes and became completely peaceful as the emotion disappeared without a trace. Later, he shared that as the feeling of betrayal disappeared, he got in touch with memories of loss of trust and loving connection with his unloving and critical mother. I was simply her stand-in.
The Phoenix Effect Process offers the possibility of new life to individuals in unhappy relationships as well as couples just starting to build a loving relationship that they want to last.
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