Excerpt from New Book
Excerpt From Our Latest Book for Professionals
In EMM, the embodied approach has a number of key objectives.
- 1.Support each partner in becoming more aware of what is occurring somatically and energetically in the moment.
- 2.Normalize all inner states (memories, images, thoughts, feelings, and sensations.) Help each partner to accept that nothing is taboo.
- 3.Respect the dignity of each person in their need to protect themselves and in their desire to grow.
- 4.Help each partner to actually embody what her/his experience is as it wants to emerge.
- 5.Convey a deep sense of trust that each of the partners can “open” to powerful emotional states that were shut down early in life.
- 6.Support partners in deepening their awareness of the present moment and in conveying what is happening in simple, clear language.
- 7.Assist a partner in being able to receive the other’s strong feelings and to see the value in making space for the emergence of such feelings.
- 8.Encourage the couple to loosen up the predictable, rigid and avoidance-oriented patterns (CP’s) of interaction so that energy flows more openly and spontaneously.
- 9.Bring greater consciousness to the implicit memories that are held as somatic responses to present relationship interactions.
10. Serve as a “caring provocateur”, or catalyst to help the couple release the stranglehold of their formalized interactions (CP’s), challenging them to bring forth forbidden or disavowed parts.
11. Support greater access to sexual energy that often constricts over the course of an extended relationship.
12. Help couples move from fear-based sympathetic nervous system reactivity to the expression of more tender and vulnerable states.
In our experience, nearly all couples are frightened by strong intense energies. Powerful emotions are withheld, sexuality is frequently inhibited, laughter is not fully released, pleasure of all sorts is kept in check, and need, longing and desire are swept away from awareness. The challenge in couples work is to help partners feel and express these energies.
What normally happens is that couples begin to react unconsciously to the energy exchanges that occur in such a way as to keep out of awareness disowned parts within each person. What you are working with then is not really separate experiences but a shared energetic expression. Within this shared energy field there are several key factors to keep in mind.
- Collusion – how are couples mutually avoiding unsafe areas?
- Balance – energy will seek to find a release, so what one partner suppresses the other expresses.
- Multi-dimensional – energy flows freely, therefore there is no first cause of any problem or conflict that couples engage in.
- Modulation - couples will regulate the flow of energy so as not to allow for too much intensity. Thus frequently one partner will pull back when the other is open and loving.
- Embodiment – the experience of connection is felt, not thought. The energy in any given moment is best accessed through the body.
- Protection first – energy flows from most defended to most vulnerable when it is freely received. As partners make contact energy naturally will release toward eventual pure love.
- Equal exchange – energy likes to be met with equivalent energy. Release into pure love happens when each person senses that powerful emotions can be held and matched by the partner.
- One’s history often shows up in the body as “implicit memories.” That is, not remembered as an scene in one’s mind but somatically as patterned responses and deeply felt primary feelings.
The SEF is not just some esoteric construct of a world that exists beyond factual, scientific understanding. More and more as we learn how the brain and the body function we see that the interchange of energy goes to the very core of what it means to be human. The bias toward explanation and neo-cortical comprehension has created a flatter more two dimensional world where some of our essential nature has been boxed up and codified.
Couples often seek counseling with a desire for answers that speak to their cognitive propensities. They want to know what is going on and what to do about it. This is the result of a lifetime worth of enculturation into a world of logic, abstract thinking and action-oriented “solution-focused” consciousness. The underworld of murky emotions, taboo impulses and unclassifiable sensations is often foreign terrain. The tightly wrapped stories or narratives constitute the bulk of what they share with each other. Yet with most couples there is an often unarticulated longing for something deeper.
In EMM we redirect the focus of each partner’s awareness toward their own lived experience. Transformation is largely a “bottom up” experience. That is, intellectual understanding usually needs to take a back seat to what is experienced on a “gut level”, or what might be called an uncensoring process. The mentor brings a great deal of attention to energy that shows up in the form of emotions, sensations, impulses and through the build up and release of tension. So much of what is occurring between partners is implicit or beneath the level of the conscious, linguistic neo-cortical brain, or what Ballas has called the unthought known. Neural traffic flows “upward” from the limbic brain to the neo-cortex at a much greater rate that the reverse. As a result, John Nelson, M.D. tells us, “So the domain of reason can exert only limited power over its emotional forebears. This anatomical shortcoming corresponds to the troublesome human experience of having greater awareness of our fiery emotions than ability to control them through higher reason.” Emotions and implicit experiences are apt to dominate the landscape of the relationship far more than the intellect would care to believe.
Thus it is often a bit uncomfortable for couples new to this work to begin opening up to a different way of relating. It can feel awkward for partners to just look at each other, or to pay attention to their breathing, or to bring awareness to a rapidly tapping foot. Most couples would rather just talk about themselves than inhabit themselves. But as David Wallin aptly points out, “The pursuit of meaning may short-circuit the deepening of experience.”
Many of us emerge from childhood with an inviolable belief that “My feelings are too much.” And so we lock them down. Yet the reality is the opposite – not that our feelings are too much but that the container or the capacity to experience them and share them has become too small. There is an undeveloped inner container to hold our potent emotions. In other words, there is a sizable fear that certain emotions will overwhelm or flood our capacity to remain intact. “I’ll cry forever.” or “I’m afraid I’ll tear this room apart” are the kinds of things partners will say in a session when invited to make contact with emotions that are on the edge of showing up. The grave concern is that “I won’t be able to control my feelings.” But the mistake we make as a culture is that certain emotions are too big or too destructive to be fully experienced. The emotions are always absolutely right-sized. The challenge is to make room for them and to trust that the higher self or witness is capable of holding it all. To reclaim our full capacity to feel with an abiding comprehension that we can handle ourselves is at the heart of the EMM approach.
The wonderful Irish scholar and author John O’Donohue writes “In contrast, in the west we insist that understanding must precede healing. We first rehash and rationalize how our mother or father was not emotionally available to us before we can embark on change. In luminous healing, the mind can have its insight after the energy field and the body change, but true transformation can never be preceded by the intellect.” Or, as Lewis, Amini and Lannon, MDs put it, “Because most people are aware of the verbal, rational part of their brains, they assume that every part of their mind should be amenable to the pressure of argument and will.”
The SEF invites couples into an exciting new world of authenticity, emotional availability and profound intimacy. The reason that most of us resist change is that we have come to mistrust our instinct, impulses, and inarticulate emotions. We stay stuck in our controlled styles of interaction because the leading edge of change is always irrational. Once we try to intellectualize what troubles us we avoid stepping out into the netherworld of uncertainty. Yet this is precisely the place where couples need to go if they want to grow. “Analysis,” as O’Donohue points out, “is always subsequent to and parasitic on creativity.”
Energy-dynamic couples work is ultimately an evolutionary model. It stresses that relationships can and need to evolve. We work with couples to help them achieve the “high-end” of intimate relationship. In this model couples can move from Eros to pure love. Along the way they must traverse the difficult times where they will struggle to release the hurts and control patterns stemming from childhood and confront the breaches to human attachment that make it so difficult to remain emotionally open.
Comments
RSS feed for comments to this post