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How are you going to Spend Your Emotional Currency in 2019?

Perhaps it seems odd to you to even think of emotions having an intrinsic value, isn’t it all rather cold and controlling.  However, alongside purchasing a house, a car or other valuable object our relationships will need energy and investment of time to make them work well.  

So in the next twelve months, wherever you are in the partnership process, there will be things to consider that will require the investment of emotional energy. If you are single you maybe considering looking for a partner or hoping love comes along, whichever way you approach this, a life-long partner will be one of the most important emotional investments you make. 

Although many of us go about this in a haphazard way, without giving sufficient thought to what we need to make a commitment to another person. Often we are under pressure from parents or peer group and the ever-present biological clock to get on and find someone or consolidate an existing relationship.

Some of us who are members of a religion will have priests or clergy to go to for advice and preparation before entering into a full commitment.  However, this usually occurs after the couple have met and decided to enter into a long-term relationship.  At this point the intention has been shared with family and friends, when it is more difficult withdraw, if the preparation phase uncovers areas of incompatibility in the relationship.

I have wondered, through working with couples, whether this should be done earlier in the relationship as soon as couples find they are talking about their future together.

Falling in love is an intense emotional, biological and physical experience, at times expressed as akin to madness.  Delightful though this period of time is, it does hinder good decision-making.

Couples will come after a crisis, wanting help to mend a relationship after an event or betrayal has injured the mutual trust in the relationship.  Or they come when a life event, such as the birth of the first child, loss of a job, children leaving home, retirement, illness or bereavement.  All of these events put demands on the relationship, and people handle them in different ways.  It helps to have a supportive family or friendship network around to contain and hold the couple as they navigate their way through these life-changing processes. All require the expenditure of emotional energy to maintain the relationship on an even keel.

So ideally we could envision a couple coming to relationship counselling before they finally decide this is the person they feel able and want to make this commitment to for the rest of their lives.

Dorothea Beech is a UKCP-registered Group Analyst, full member of the Institute of Group Analysis and a Training Group Analyst providing long and short-term psychotherapy to both couples and groups in Hove and Lewes.

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A Nation divided

During Brexit, there was a lot of talk about how it divided our country. So we thought we would discuss how humans are divided and how Psychotherapy can ease some of the conflicts we have with ourselves and others. A personal ‘split’ can happen when we think or act in a way that doesn’t align with our beliefs.

In this quote, Freud describes how these splits can be repressed, by quoting Nietzsche’s phrase: –

“I did that’ says my memory; ‘I cannot have done that’, says my pride and refuses to yield. Finally – memory gives way.”

What Does it Mean to Have a Split?

Experiencing an emotional split isn’t always a bad thing. A split can be a way to manage feelings that can’t be properly managed at the time. So our mind represses it. However, the repression never goes away, and it will try and come out in some other way like displaced anger or depression.

An example of this is the conflicting feelings of love and hate for those we are close to. The feelings of anger and hurt towards a person are hard to express when we also feel love towards them, as we don’t want to hurt or lose them. Although we may not show certain emotions towards our loved ones, the feelings are still there and may come out in other ways through road rage to arguing with co-workers and even shouting at the TV.

When we feel these conflicts, it can be easy to dislike these parts of ourselves and push them aside. However, it’s important you work through these conflicts with therapy, as otherwise you may experience side effects that result in damaged relationships.

How Therapy Can Help

A therapist works with their client to uncover these conflicts in a safe, non-shaming and understanding environment. The client should feel they can honestly express themselves to their therapist which, in turn, will reduce the negative effects on their own life,

During therapy, a therapist will explore these conflicts without judgement. It is through this work a therapist can understand the emotions and whether they have been enabled by well-meaning friends and family.

As Carl Jung said:

“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”

Brighton and Hove Psychotherapy is a collective of experienced psychotherapists, psychologists and counsellors working with a range of client groups, including fellow therapists and health professionals. If you would like more information, or an informal discussion please get in touch. Online therapy is available.

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A Couple State of Mind  

This is the first in a series of blog posts about couples therapy.  In this post I want to talk about what Mary Morgan from Tavistock Relationships calls a ‘couple state of mind’.

Why if our partner is ‘right’ for us don’t they understand us completely? There are limits to how much we can ever fully understand or know another person. As we move from away from the early stages of being in love or infatuation it can be disappointing when our partner doesn’t live up to our expectations, ‘You aren’t the person I married!” or “You’ve changed since we first met.”. What we mean is “You haven’t become the partner I imagined you would be.”

When we become a couple we are two separate people with our own ideas of what it means to be a couple and what each of us should be prepared to offer and can expect to receive. These ideas are likely to be based on how we experienced our parents’ or carers’ relating to each other, as well as the community and culture we grew up in. As a couple we will inevitably be sharing psychic space as well as physical space, the tension between wanting to be held and close and wanting our own space and freedom can be challenging.

At times, we might find our sense of our self and our reality is threatened by our partner’s version of what is happening. For example, we might feel our frequent phone calls and texts show how attentive and caring we are but our partner may feel overwhelmed and claustrophobic. One of us may feel it is important to regularly spend time apart to not become tired of each other, but this might make our partner might feel rejected and isolated. These polarised positions highlight the difficulties of holding two perspectives on what it means to be in a couple relationship.

Couples coming to therapy often do not have a sense of themselves as a couple. Thinking about what your relationship needs is not the same as thinking about what you need. This may sound obvious but it is easy to lose sight of when you are finding life is a struggle. One role for the couples therapist is to help partners contain or tolerate their differences long enough to create a shared space to think, a couple state of mind. A couple state of mind can be understood as a third perspective, a position which gives a couple a chance to step back, look at their relationship and explore what they could hope for and create together.

Couples therapy also gives each of us the chance to see our partner relating to the therapist, showing ways that two people can think together in a close and trusting way. Seeing someone as familiar as your partner connecting with another person can be surprising, they can be revealed in a different light. The therapist offers a safe and supportive environment where a couple can think together and explore a couple state of mind, to see if they can continue to develop as individuals whilst enjoying the closeness and intimacy of being a couple.

Morgan, M. (2018) A Couple State of Mind: Psychoanalysis of Couples and the Tavistock Relationships Model. London. Routledge.

Angela Rogers is an Integrative Psychotherapeutic counsellor working with  individuals and couples in Hove.

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Relationship Issues

Apparently January is the month when more couples file for divorce than any other.  The reason given for this?  After what is often a stressful festive period, couples spending extra time together suddenly realise that they don’t have nearly as much in common as they once did.  Whilst this may well be true, I wonder if there is more to this story than meets the eye.

Being in a relationship is hard.  There are no ifs and buts about it.  There is no such thing as the fairytale relationship.  There are plenty of reasons for this but some of the most credible come from anthropological and neuroscience studies which support each other in suggesting that the things that bring us together and then keep us together are different.  And those differences are largely down to the different chemicals our brains emit during those processes – dopamine vs oxytocin.

Add to the mix the paradigm shifts in the place relationships take in modern life vs that of our distant and much more recent ancestors and we can get a real sense of why life-long pair-bonding (or even long-term monogamy) is a challenge.  Consider for instance that marriage has only relatively recently – the last couple of hundred years – become an institution based on romance.  As odd as this may seem, this was never the case and marriage has a much longer history of being associated with financial gain, land rights, lineage, convenience and convention.  It was generally assumed that the role of marriage was not one of romance or passion.

From an anthropological perspective us humans are also living significantly longer than we did only a couple of hundred years ago.  How does this apply to relationships?  Well with a lifespan of perhaps forty of fifty years, we would live just about long enough to raise kids.  Now we can potentially be with the same person for 40, 50 or 60 years.

Lastly there have been significant changes to how we live in terms of community.  Few of us now belong to tribes or live communally with our families.  For many of us, we are geographically distanced from many in our families and no longer part of strong local communities.  This puts further pressure on our primary relationships to meet all our needs.

Relationship, couple or marriage counselling can be an extremely beneficial environment in which to explore how we can find our own way to balance our need for excitement and novelty with our need for safety and security, within the context of a single romantic relationship.  Contrary to what many people think, couple counselling does not mark the end of a relationship, but can in fact be a conduit to a new beginning.

Perhaps the best definition of a perfect marriage or relationship is one that I came across as a virtual bumper sticker which read ‘a perfect marriage is just two imperfect people who refuse to give up on each other’.

Mark Vahrmeyer

 

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