Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love Read online

  What happens, though, if he can’t quiet his gut? Does he get angry, walk over to his wife, and make a cutting remark to her about flirting? Or does he throw off his concern, tell himself he doesn’t care, and go off to have another drink, or six? Either of these ways of dealing with his fear — attacking or retreating — will only alienate Linda. She will feel less connected and less attracted to her mate. And that, in turn, will only heighten Peter’s primal panic.

  A second key moment occurs after the immediate threat has passed. Partners have the chance to reconnect then, unless their negative coping strategies kick in. At the party later in the evening, Linda seeks Peter out. Does he reach out to her, letting her see the hurt and fear he felt when he saw her talking so intimately with another man? Does he express these emotions in a way that invites her to reassure him? Or does he attack her for “whoring around” and demand that they immediately go home and make love, or remain silent and withdrawn?

  A third key moment is when we do manage to tune in to our attachment emotions and reach for connection or reassurance and the loved one responds. Say Peter manages to pull Linda aside, take a deep breath, and tell her that he was having a hard time watching her talk to the handsome stranger. Or maybe he only manages to go and stand beside her and express his upset with a troubled look. Suppose Linda responds positively. Even if he can’t quite express his feelings, she senses something is wrong, and she offers Peter her hand. She asks softly if he is okay. She is accessible, she is responsive. But does Peter see this, does he trust it? Can he take it in, feel comforted, move closer, and continue to confide? Or does he instead stay guarded and push her away so as to avoid feeling so vulnerable? Does he even attack her to test if she “really cares”?

  Finally, when Peter and Linda go back to their everyday way of connecting, is he confident that she is there as a safe haven in times of trouble or doubt? Or does he still feel insecure? Does he try to control and push Linda into more and more responses that assure him of her love, or does he minimize his need for her and instead focus more on distracting tasks and toys?

  This drama has focused on Peter, but a scenario centered on Linda would reveal she has the same attachment needs and fears. Indeed, men and women alike, we all share these sensitivities. But we may express them a bit differently. When a relationship is in free fall, men typically talk of feeling rejected, inadequate, and a failure; women of feeling abandoned and unconnected. Women do appear to have one additional response that emerges when they are distressed. Researchers call it “tend and befriend.” Perhaps because they have more oxytocin, the cuddle hormone, in their blood, women reach out more to others when they feel a lack of connection.

  When marriages fail, it is not increasing conflict that is the cause. It is decreasing affection and emotional responsiveness, according to a landmark study by Ted Huston of the University of Texas. Indeed, the lack of emotional responsiveness rather than the level of conflict is the best predictor of how solid a marriage will be five years into it. The demise of marriages begins with a growing absence of responsive intimate interactions. The conflict comes later.

  As lovers, we poise together delicately on a tightrope. When the winds of doubt and fear begin blowing, if we panic and clutch at each other or abruptly turn away and head for cover, the rope sways more and more and our balance becomes even more precarious. To stay on the rope, we must shift with each other’s moves, respond to each other’s emotions. As we connect, we balance each other. We are in emotional equilibrium.

  Emotional Responsiveness — The Key to a Lifetime of Love

  A person’s “heart withers if it does not answer another heart.”

  — Pearl S. Buck

  Tim and Sarah are sitting in my office. Tim isn’t sure why he’s here. All he knows, he says, is that he and Sarah have had a brutal fight. She’s accused him of ignoring her at a party and is threatening to take their child and move in with her sister. He doesn’t understand. They have a good marriage. Sarah is just being “too immature” and “expects too much.” She doesn’t get how pressured he is at work and that he can’t always remember the “hearts and flowers part of marriage.” Tim turns in his chair and stares out the window with a “What can you do with such a woman?” expression on his face.

  Tim’s complaints awaken Sarah from a despairing trance. She announces in an acid tone that Tim is not as smart as he thinks he is. In fact, she tells him, he is “a communication cretin” who has “zero skills.” But sadness overwhelms her and she murmurs, in a voice that I can hardly hear, that Tim is a “stone” who turns away when she is “dying.” She should never have married him. She weeps.

  How have they arrived at this point? Sarah, a small dark-haired woman, and Tim, a stylishly groomed man, have been married for three years. They have been successful work colleagues and happy play partners, well matched in skill and energy. They have a new house and an eighteen-month-old daughter whom Sarah has taken time off from work to care for. And now they are sparring all the time.

  “All I hear is that I am home too late and I am working too hard,” Tim says in exasperation. “But I am working for us, you know.” Sarah mutters that there is no “us.” “You say that you don’t know me anymore,” Tim continues. “Well, this is what grown-up love is all about. It’s about making compromises and being buddies.”

  Sarah bites her lip and replies, “You didn’t even take time off to be with me when I had the miscarriage. It’s all deals and compromises with you . . .” She shakes her head. “I feel so hopeless when I can’t get through to you. I have never felt so lonely, not even when I lived alone.”

  Sarah’s message is urgent but Tim doesn’t get it. He finds her “too emotional.” But that is the point. We are never more emotional than when our primary love relationship is threatened. Sarah desperately needs to reconnect with Tim. Tim is desperately afraid that he has lost that intimacy with Sarah — connection is vital to him as well. But his need for connection is masked by talk of compromise and growing up. He tries to dismiss Sarah’s concerns to keep everything “calm and on track.” Can they begin to emotionally “hear” each other again? Can they be tuned in once more? How can I help them?

  THE BEGINNING OF EFT

  My understanding of how to help couples like Sarah and Tim began slowly. I knew that listening to and expanding on key emotions was essential to change with the individuals who came to me for counseling. So when I began to work with distressed couples on hot summer afternoons in Vancouver, Canada, in the early 1980s, I recognized the same emotions and how they seemed to create the music for the dance between partners. But my sessions seemed to swing between emotional chaos and silence. Very soon, I was spending every morning in the university library searching for direction, for a map to the dramas that played out in my office. The material that I found mostly said that love was irrelevant or impossible to understand and also that strong emotions were obviously dangerous and best left alone. Offering insights to couples, as some of these books suggested, insights like how we seem to repeat our parental relationships with our lovers, didn’t seem to change much. My attempts to get couples to practice communication skills sparked comments about how these exercises didn’t really get to the heart of the matter. They missed the point.

  I decided that they were right — and that I was somehow missing the point as well. But I was fascinated, so fascinated that I sat and watched hour after hour of videotaped sessions. I decided that I would watch until I really understood these dramas of love gone wrong. Maybe even until I understood love! Finally the picture began to develop.

  Nothing brings people together like a common enemy, I remembered. I realized that I could help couples by helping them see their negative patterns of interaction — their Demon Dialogues — as the enemy, not each other. I started recapping couples’ exchanges in my sessions, helping partners see the spiral they were caught in, rather than just focusing on the other’s last response and reacting to it. If we compare it to tennis, this w
as like learning to see the whole game rather than just the serve or the volley on the last ball spinning across the net. Clients began to see the whole dialogue and how it had a life of its own and was hurting them both. But why were these patterns so strong? Why were they so compelling and so distressing? Even when both partners recognized their toxic nature, these dialogues kept repeating. Partners seemed to get pulled back in by their emotions, even when they understood their pattern and how it trapped them both. Why were these emotions so potent?

  I would sit and watch couples like Jamie and Hugh. The angrier Jamie became, the more she criticized Hugh, and the more silent he became. After lots of gentle questions, he told me that underneath his silence, he felt “defeated” and “sad.” Sadness tells us to slow down and grieve, so Hugh had begun to grieve his marriage. And, of course, the more he closed down, the more Jamie demanded to be let in. Her angry complaint cued his sense of silent defeat and his silence cued her angry demands. Round and round. They were both stuck.

  When we slowed down the “spin” of these circular dances, softer emotions, like sadness, fear, embarrassment, and shame, always appeared. Talking about these emotions, maybe for the first time, and seeing how their pattern trapped them both, helped Jamie and Hugh feel safer with each other. Jamie didn’t look so dangerous when she was able to tell Hugh how alone she felt. No one had to be the bad guy here. They began to have new kinds of conversations and their narrow exchange of blame and silent distancing slowed down. Sharing their softer emotions, they started to see each other differently. Jamie admitted, “I never saw the whole picture. I just knew he wasn’t close to me. I saw him as not caring. Now I see how he was ducking my bullets and trying to calm me down. I shoot when I get desperate and can’t get a reaction any other way.”

  Now I was getting somewhere in my practice. Couples were nicer to each other. The drama of painful emotions didn’t seem to be so overwhelming. These negative patterns always started when one partner tried to reach for the other and could not make safe emotional contact. That was the moment when the Demon Dialogue began. Once a couple grasped that they were both victims of the dialogue and were able to show more of themselves, to risk sharing deeper emotions, then the conflicts calmed down and they felt a little closer. So everything was fine. Or was it?

  My couples told me no. Jamie told me, “We are nicer to each other and we fight less. But somehow nothing has really changed. If we stop coming here, it will all start up again. I know it will.” Others told me the same thing. What was the problem? As I replayed tapes, I saw that deeper emotions like sadness and straight “terror,” as one client put it, still hadn’t really been dealt with. My couples were still watching their backs.

  Emotion comes from a Latin word emovere, to move. We talk of being “moved” by our emotions, and we are “moved” when those we love show their deeper feelings to us. If partners were to reconnect, they indeed had to let their emotions move them into new ways of responding to each other. My clients had to learn to take risks, to show the softer sides of themselves, the sides they learned to hide in the Demon Dialogues. I saw that when more withdrawn partners were able to confess their fears of loss and isolation, they could then talk about their longings for caring and connection. This revelation “moved” their blaming partners into responding more tenderly, and sharing their own needs and fears. It was as if both people suddenly stood face to face, naked but strong, and reached for each other.

  Moments like these were amazing and dramatic. They changed everything and started a new positive spiral of love and connection. Couples told me that these moments were life-changing. They could not only exit from the Demon Dialogue, they could move into a new kind of loving responsiveness, of safety and closeness. They could then create a new narrative and plan, in an atmosphere of easy cooperation, for how to care for their relationship and safeguard their new closeness. But I still didn’t understand exactly why these moments were so powerful!

  I was so riveted by this series of discoveries that I persuaded my thesis advisor, Les Greenberg, that we should do the first study to test this approach and call it emotionally focused therapy, or EFT. We wanted to stress how certain emotional signals changed the connection between lovers. The first study confirmed all my hopes that this way of working with relationships not only helped people step out of negative patterns, it also seemed to create a new sense of loving connection.

  During the next fifteen years, my colleagues and I did more and more studies on EFT, finding that it helped over 85 percent of the couples who came to us to make significant changes in their relationship. These changes also seemed to last, even in couples who faced terrible stressors, such as a seriously and chronically ill child. We found that EFT worked for truck drivers and lawyers, for gays, for straights, for couples from many different cultures, for couples where women called their men “inexpressive” and men called their mates “angry” and “impossible.” In contrast to other approaches to couple therapy, a couple’s level of distress when they came into therapy didn’t seem to make much difference in terms of how happy they were at the end. Why? I wanted to find out, but first there were other puzzles to solve.

  What was this emotional drama all about? Why were the Demon Dialogues so common and so powerful? Why did those moments of connection transform relationships? It was as if I had managed to find a way through a strange land, but I still didn’t have a map or really understand where I was. I had watched couples move from threatening divorce to falling in love again, and even found out how to encourage and direct this. But the answers to these questions eluded me.

  Small moments end up defining our lives, for couples in love relationships and for struggling therapists and researchers like me. When I answered a colleague’s question, “If love relationships aren’t bargains, deals about profit and loss — what are they?” I heard myself say, casually, “Oh, they’re emotional bonds. . . . You can’t reason or bargain for love. It’s an emotional response.” And suddenly my mind slid into a new place.

  I went back and looked at my tapes, paying particular attention to the needs and fears people talked about. I looked at those dramatic moments that transformed relationships. I was looking at emotional bonding! Now I understood. I was seeing the emotional responsiveness that John Bowlby said was the basis of loving and being loved. How could I have missed it? It was because I had been taught that this kind of bond ended with childhood. But this was the dance of adult love. I rushed back home to write and bring this insight into my work with couples.

  Attachment theory answered the three questions that had tormented me. Very simply, it told me that:

  1. The powerful emotions that came up in my couples’ sessions were anything but irrational. They made perfect sense. Partners acted like they were fighting for their lives in therapy because they were doing just that. Isolation and the potential loss of loving connection is coded by the human brain into a primal panic response. This need for safe emotional connection to a few loved ones is wired in by millions of years of evolution. Distressed partners may use different words but they are always asking the same basic questions, “Are you there for me? Do I matter to you? Will you come when I need you, when I call?” Love is the best survival mechanism there is, and to feel suddenly emotionally cut off from a partner, disconnected, is terrifying. We have to reconnect, to speak our needs in a way that moves our partner to respond. This longing for emotional connection with those nearest to us is the emotional priority, overshadowing even the drive for food or sex. The drama of love is all about this hunger for safe emotional connection, a survival imperative we experience from the cradle to the grave. Loving connection is the only safety nature ever offers us.

  2. These emotions and attachment needs were the plot behind negative interactions like the Demon Dialogues. Now I understood why this kind of pattern was so compelling and never ending. When safe connection seems lost, partners go into fight-or-flight mode. They blame and get aggressive to get a response, any respon
se, or they close down and try not to care. Both are terrified; they are just dealing with it differently. Trouble is, once they start this blame-distance loop, it confirms all their fears and adds to their sense of isolation. Emotional edicts as old as time dictate this dance; rational skills don’t change it. Most of the blaming in these dialogues is a desperate attachment cry, a protest against disconnection. It can only be quieted by a lover moving emotionally close to hold and reassure. Nothing else will do. If this reconnection does not occur, the struggle goes on. One partner will frantically try to get an emotional response from the other. The other, hearing that he or she has failed at love, will freeze up. Immobility in the face of danger is a wired-in way to deal with a sense of helplessness.

  3. The key moments of change in EFT were moments of secure bonding. In these moments of safe attunement and connection, both partners can hear each other’s attachment cry and respond with soothing care, forging a bond that can withstand differences, wounds, and the test of time. These moments shape safe connection, and that changes everything. They provide a reassuring answer to the question “Are you there for me?” Once partners know how to speak their need and bring each other close, every trial they face together simply makes their love stronger. No wonder these moments create a new dance of trusting connection for couples in EFT. No wonder they make them stronger as individuals. If you know your loved one is there and will come when you call, you are more confident of your worth, your value. And the world is less intimidating when you have another to count on and know that you are not alone.

  With the first study of EFT, I knew that I had found a path to lead couples from desperate distress to happier connection. But once I understood that all the issues and drama revolved around attachment bonds, I realized that I also had discovered a broad map for love and could systematically plot out the steps of the journey to a special kind of loving connection.