When I first meet a couple in couples therapy, there’s often a lot that both partners want to get off their chests. This is especially common between couples who have got into a habit of avoiding conflict by distancing from one another, which of course means there are a lot of pent up feelings.
Coming to couples therapy can feel freeing, a chance to ‘let it all out’. However this can soon lead to further defensiveness, denial and blame. Couples might wonder why they came, and how can this help?
While it’s important and even valuable to allow some space for long repressed feelings to be vocalised, its only helpful in the medium term is there’s also space to reflect. This is when I sometimes offer couples a picture – literally in the form of a diagram – of what I think is going on. This is often called the Vulnerability Cycle.
Vulnerabilities in this context are the deep-seated fears we have within all of us, which we’re often quite reluctant to share with others, for fear of how they might react.
So, to avoid letting our vulnerability show to others, even those we love the most and might even trust, we turn them into something else. This can be called a survival strategy, or a coping strategy if you prefer. It’s this we might show to our partner instead of our vulnerability. This is especially the case if trust has been lost, for whatever reason.
The example shown in the diagram above is here:
Dave grew up in the shadow of his older brother who the family collectively decided was smarter and more popular than him. By objective standards Dave was also very capable, but in his own mind never quite measured up. Although he did pretty well in his career, he never really had inner confidence. His brother ended up as a CEO, Dave a deputy to a COO – never in the spotlight, often doing the thankless ‘dirty work’ of his company.
At home Dave too never felt like he was quite good enough. He felt he had ‘got lucky’ in meeting his wife Petra, but that she had compromised in choosing him. Not that she ever said this – but he was too scared to ask for fear of what it might open up. This stance led him to strive to provide for his family, but from a position of fear. When things weren’t going so well at work, he kept this from Petra, and turned inwards and withdrew.
Petra meanwhile had questions from her childhood about whether she was really loved or loveable even. Rather than being open about this, like Dave for fear of the answer which might come back, she would make demands and be critical, essentially saying in various ways ‘if you really loved me you would give me this’. This fuelled Dave’s fears about being a good enough provider. And Dave’s distancing fuelled Petra’s anxieties about being loved.
In summary, rather than sharing their vulnerabilities, they had got stuck in a pattern of responding only to each others’ survival strategies – distancing and demands.
With the help of couples therapy, gradually they were able to open up about their underlying vulnerabilities, and help reassure each other that Petra was loved, and Dave was good enough.
As with all my blog posts, this is a hypothetical example loosely based on a number of couples I have worked with