Blog Archives - Jo Ellen Fletcher, M.A., LMFT

Self Soothing in a Relationship

9/28/2015

The The solution to marital problems is not becoming more heartless or hard headed
--- its taking better care of your own heart.
Once you learn self soothing, you can apply this to everyday life when you are tolerating pain
for the sake of growth (differentiation).

Self soothing involves turning inward and accessing your own resources to regain your emotional balance and feeling comfortable in your body. Your breathing is not labored, your heart slows to its normal rate, your shoulders are relaxed, no longer hunched to ward off an anticipated blow. Self-soothing is your ability to comfort yourself without excessive indulging or deprivation.

Self soothing involves meeting two core challenges of selfhood:

Not loosing yourself to the demands of others,
Developing your capacity for self-centering
(stabilizing your own emotions and fears).

Sometimes we miss the chance to become self-centering and self-soothing because we fear becoming self-centered, selfish, self preoccupied, and indifferent to others.

Our ability to maintain ourselves in close emotional proximity to our partners
doesn't lead to self interest at their expense.

Differentiation helps us tolerate the tension in recognizing our partners as separate individuals with competing preferences, needs, and agendas.

Passionate Marriage - Schnarch

Self Validated Intimacy and Other Validated Intimacy

9/27/2015

Intimacy is the two prong process of confronting yourself and self disclosing to your partner.

It isn't just self disclosure.
Disclosing familiar and comfortable parts of yourself doesn't evoke the electricity of self confrontation and personal growth common to intimate experiences.

Intimacy also differs from meditation or solitary self reflection.
The interpersonal dimension---particularly the response you anticipate and receive from your partner
--is as critical to the process as your telling about what you are about to disclose.

How do icy, silent couples ever break through gridlock and discuss topics only one of them (or neither one) wants to face? To answer this question it is important to look at two types of intimacy.

Other- validated intimacy involved the expectation of acceptance, empathy, validation or reciprocal disclosure from one's partner.

Self- validated intimacy relies on a person's maintain his or her own sense of identity and self worth when disclosing, with a no expectation of acceptance or reciprocity from the partner.

One's level of self validated intimacy is directly related to one's level of differentiation, one's
ability to maintain a clear sens of oneself when loved ones are pressuring for conforming and sameness.
Remember, self validated intimacy is the tangible product of one's relationship with oneself.

Passionate Marriage - Schnarch

The Substance Abuser ~ Forgotten Feelings.

9/22/2015

Substance abusers require help with becoming acquainted with their feelings.

Not only will they have difficulties identifying their feelings, they are inadequate in communicating them to others. The large lesson to the substance abuser has to learn is that emotions are not only vital to self understanding, but also crucial to the understanding of others' feelings and the negotiation of all forms of intimacy in personal relationships.

Addicts and alcoholic's inability to verbalize feelings leads to the somatization of their emotional responses. Consequently, the substance abuser is confronted with sensations rather than feelings.
Such sensations are not useful as signals but remain painfully overwhelming. These painful affect states call attention only to the substance abuser's discomfort rather than the story behind the discomfort.

Many, if not all of their feeling translate into physical complaints about their physical discomfort and cravings. Alcohol and drugs are used to block the emotion, preventing the substance abuser from interpreting and attending to the signal. Thinking becomes operative, mundane and boring. The capacity for empathy is seriously diminished.

Experiences with early developmental need failures leave certain individuals with vulnerabilities that enhance addictive type behaviors, and these behaviors are misguided attempts at self repair. Deprivation of age appropriate developmental needs leave the substance abuser constantly searching for something "out there" that can be substituted for what is missing "in here."

Alcoholics and addicts are notoriously counter-dependent individuals. Autonomy is purchased at the price of alienation and the absence of mutuality in their relationships. Group therapy contains a fundamental interpersonal conception of human beings as always being situated in relations to others. Group therapy is based on the implied notion
that the essence of being human is social not individual.

Addiction as an Attachment Disorder - Flores

The Gift of Taking Responsibility

9/21/2015

Looking back at events in life, I can see that blame kept me feeling bad and trapped in a position of powerlessness. The only way to reclaim power and heal my heart was to take 100 percent responsibility for all of my choices and circumstances.

Although the tricky voice of the ego states, "It's really not your fault. You are a victim."
My willingness to look at my part, to be accountable and honest with myself gave me a new vantage point.

It was this taking responsibility that granted me true freedom and the ability to walk out of the prison of being victimized by this pattern.

Learning this lesson, I realized that if I accept emotionally based behaviors patterns that I don't or can't see, I will repeat this pattern.

Taking responsibility means taking ownership.
It means acknowledging that we have in fact participated even if on an unconscious level in the choices and actions that brought about painful event we have gone through.

This is alarming, only if we are not standing in knowledge that we are living our intended life-- the life that brings us the experience perfectly suited to our becoming the person we have always wanted to be.

When we take 100 percent responsibility for ourselves, we take responsibility not just for the circumstances of our lives but for our emotions and our internal world as well. We cannot heal what we cannot feel. In order to take back our power and regain control of our lives,
we must take ownership of our emotions.

This requires that we acknowledge and own the depth of our hurt and pain. Our painful emotion can push us back into the small defensive resistant shell of our old emotional wounds.
The disappointments, grudges, and resignation stemming from past betrayals may come up and drive us to retreat and protect ourselves.

Once we can recognize that we are trapped in the limited reality of our hurts, we have a choice. We can choose to continue to allow our thoughts, words and actions to be driven fear or we can choose to be guided by courage.

With courage as our compass, not only do we take responsibility for our lives in the present,
we take responsibility for our futures as well.

Debbie Ford - Courage

September 20th, 2015

9/20/2015

Life
itself
cannot give you joy
unless
you really will it.

Life
just gives you
time and space.
It's up to you
to fill it.

Reclaiming Courage, Rewriting Our Story.

9/19/2015

As children, many of us create fairly tales about our lives that became the stories that limit our access to a better life. As its highest our story exists to teach us, to help us grown, to allow our souls to evolve. As we grow we make the mistake of allowing our stories to define us and dictate the course of our lives.

The stories we choose to tell ourselves about ourselves and our lives dictate who we are and what we are capable of as we live. So, to reclaim courage, we must look closely at the events that are tucked away in our unconscious. We must revisit the past and bring awareness and closure to it so that we can be released from the stranglehold of insecurity, fear, and regret.

However it happens all of us create a story about our own lives defined by the events we did not know how to digest. Unfortunately, many of the incidents buried in our story were painful experiences. Our interpretations of these events and experiences create patterns woven through our beliefs, thoughts, feelings, and especially our fears.

Although the patterns were created in the past, they do not stay there. Transporting these patterns into the present unconsciously, we create self imposed limitations and unknowingly make decisions that influence the rest of our lives. The effects of our choices are pervasive and often leave us feeling weak, shameful, and cowardly.

If we have been weak, scared and stuck,
then we continue to see ourselves as weak, scared and stuck.

When we attempt to step out of the confines of the self we believe ourselves to be, especially anything beyond the roles that we know, we get stopped in our tracks--confined by the limitations that have arisen from our very own story.

Scared, wounded and often traumatized we wrap ourselves in a false self image for protection. This false self is perfectly at home and being defined in simplistic and narrow terms. The old self image with its outdated operating manual, continues to get churned out by our subconscious mind and continuously projected into the outer world.

It is only when we wake up inside the shell
of the image we have created
and find the willingness
to step outside of it
that
a courage floods into our lives
and we are able to make conscious choice
that will further
our highest vision for a powerful life.

Courage - Debbie Ford

Development of the False Self; A Spiritual Yearning for Completion.

9/14/2015

A child's reaction to society's edicts goes through a number of predictable signs. Typically the first response is to hide forbidden behaviors from the parents.

Children instinctively observe the choices their parents make, the freedoms and pleasures the ignore, and the rules that they follow. All of this has a profound effect on children.

Whether children accept their parent's model or rebel against it, this early socialization plays a significant role in mate selection and often a hidden source of tension in married life.

The child thinks angry thoughts but doesn't speak them out loud. Parents have expressed their displeasure at anger. He/she explores their body in the privacy of his/her room. He/she teases the younger sibling when the parents are away.

Eventually the child comes to the conclusion that some thoughts and feelings are so unacceptable that they should be eliminated, so the child constructs an imaginary parent in his head to police his thoughts and activities, a part of the mind that therapists call the "superego."

Now whenever the child has a forbidden thought or indulges in an "unacceptable" behavior, the child experiences a self administered jolt of anxiety. This is so unpleasant that the child puts to sleep some of those forbidden parts of himself---in Freudian terms, he represses them.

The ultimate price of the child's obedience is a loss of wholeness.

In order for the child to hold on to his adaptive character traits because they serve a purpose, yet he does not want to be rejected for the negative traits is to deny his attacker.

"I'm not weak or needy, I'm just sensitive." The child's self protection is to prevent further wounding as the child is criticized for having negative traits. These negative traits became what is referred to as the "disowned self" those parts of the false self that are too painful to acknowledge.

Whatever the nature of the false self, its purpose is the same to minimize the pain of loosing part of the child's original wholeness.

Your "lost self" are those parts of your being that you had to repress
because of the demands of society.

Your "false self" is the facade that you erected in order to fill the void created
by this repression and by a lack of adequate nurturing.

Your "disowned self" is the negative part of your false self that met with disapproval
and were therefore denied.

We too, go through life truncated, cut in half. We cover our wound with healing ointment and gauze in an attempt to heal ourselves, but despite our efforts an emptiness wells up inside us. We try to fill this emptiness with food, with drugs, with relationships and activities, but what we yearn for is our original wholeness, our full range of emotions, the inquisitive mind that was our birthright, and the Buddha-like joy that we experienced as young children.

The spiritual yearning for completion that finding the right person --- that perfect mate --- will complete us and make us whole, we believe. This special person can't be just anyone.

"This is the one! This is the one," we say,
that will make up the wounds of the past!

This person is invariably someone who has
both the positive and negative traits of our parents!

Getting the Love You Want - Dr. Harville Hendrix

Unaddressed Means Unresolved.

9/12/2015

Problems that adults face in real time
always have the potential
for satisfactory resolutions.

When two partners engage in mutually respectful
negotiation and compromise,
they feel valued and allied.

In contrast,
if problems from the past
--- the Child--
remain unaddressed and unresolved,
they tend to be perpetuated in one guise
or another with any subsequent partner.

The same issues,
perhaps clothed in new garb
and diluted to some extent from experience
and with maturation,
nonetheless will keep coming up.
The adult's opportunity to became
an Adult
is then further postponed.

There is a successful relationship process
by which both partner's
join together to resolve their conflicts.

What happens if only
one partner wants to change?

Then that person must discontinue
his/her role in the conflicted dance
and learn to develop new responses to the powerful,
old stimuli coming from the partner.
By not taking the old bait, he/she can keep off the old hooks.

Understanding the role each partner played
but no longer heeding the call
to continue with old patterns means that
the past is actually past
and no longer
interfering with the present.

The changed person can now
live fully in the present,
although unfortunately
it may be without the old partner.

We reach a crucial juncture in our psychological growth
when our spouses are unwilling or unable to join us in the process.

With the recognition that we can be
the Adult with Wants
and no longer a
Child with Needs

comes another vital realization:

Having no relationship
may be better
than continuing
a bad one.

Breaking Free _ Kardener & Kardener

Unresolved Issues ~ Don't Rock the Boat

9/10/2015

People often comment they don't have problems with other people, only problems with their spouses. "Of all the guys I dated, I never had the difficulty that I have with you," a wife proclaims.

That is all well and good to say, however the fact is,
that she chose not to marry the people with whom she got along.

Women may say that they can speak to and be understood by everyone else except their husbands. Some men allude to having had no difficulty with feelings of sexual inadequacy with other women, but with their wives they are impotent.

They fail to appreciate that we are always most conflicted with the very people to whom we are the closest. Who else would it be if not our most emotionally intimate partners?

Major unresolved issues commonly manifest themselves in our marital relationships.

However, continuing conflict requires that both partners collude in maintaining the problems, rather than solving them. Such relationships may be deep and meaningful, but in the troubled ones, the partner compromises what each of them desires in order to avoid
"rocking the boat."

The greater the emotional distance from the epicenter of unresolved issues a couple maintains, the more contented they may appear ---
a connectedness paid for by accepting superficiality.

Either or both may seek a deeper sense of satisfaction through some emotional investment outside of the marriage, such as an affair with work, hobbies, sports, or another person.
The person sees the affair as an environment in which he can let down his defenses and experience a closeness not found with his mate.

The closeness is only an illusion made possible because the issues he has with his spouse do not exit in the affair---that is, unless those who participate in the affair marry.

Breaking Fee - Kardener & Kardener

The Heart of the Matter

9/7/2015

Seeking and maintaining contact with significant others is an innate, primary motivating principle in human beings across the life span. Dependency, which has been pathologized in our culture is an innate part of being human rather than a childhood trait that we outgrown.

Attachment and the emotions associated with it are the core defining feature of close relationships.

The fear of isolation and loss is found in every human heart.
There is no such thing as complete independence from others or over dependency. There is only effective or ineffective dependency. Secure dependency fosters autonomy and self confidence.
Secure dependency and autonomy are then two sides of the same coin, rather than dichotomies.

Research tells us that secure attachment is associated with a more coherent, articulated, and positive sense of self. The more securely connected we are, the more separate and different we can be. Health in this model means maintaining a felt sense of inter-dependency, rather than being self sufficient and separate from others.

Contact with attachment figures is an innate survival mechanism. The presence of an attachment figure, which usually means parents, children, spouses, and lovers, provided comfort and security, while the perceived inaccessibility of such figures creates distress.

Proximity to a loved one tranquilizes the nervous system.
It is the natural antidote to the inevitable anxieties and vulnerabilities of life.

For people of all ages, positive attachments create a safe haven that offers a buffer
against the effects of stress and uncertainty and an optimal context
for continuing the development of a personality.

Sue Johnson
The Practice of Emotionally Focused
Couples Therapy