For colleagues already versed in working with couples, and especially for those working with an emotionally focused/psychodynamic/attachment-informed approach, adding an EMDR dimension can make a powerful difference.
If you’re not explicitly trained in working with couples, take great care when deciding whether to do so.
Working with couples is very different, as the focus of therapy shifts from two individuals to the relationship itself as the client.
This means that with more than one person in the room, you, as therapist, will need to be very careful to stay neutral, focusing on process rather than content and avoiding the beartrap of being pulled into their dynamics.
Harville Hendrix in particular explains this well in his Imago model of relationship therapy, describing how couples co-create between them what is best understood as a third entity, the whole being more than–and distinctively different from–a simple sum of the parts.
Emergent Properties
The term in physics, when two elements are combined to create something different, is “emergent properties”.
Think how dramatically distinctive the taste of cheese and grapes is when the two are put together (an analogy for which I am grateful to Little Chef in Pixar’s movie Ratatouille, as our hero rat tries to explain gourmet taste to his gourmand brother).
Or think of two atoms of hydrogen paired with one atom of oxygen, creating H2O, which in its own manifold manifestations (a solid as ice, a liquid as water, a vapour as mist, cloud, or steam) is radically different from the gases from which it is constituted.
A dysfunctional relationship can of course be experienced as rather less than the sum of its parts, especially when a couple, each diminished it seems by the experience of the other, turns up for therapy in deepest crisis.
But the point here, with the toolkit of EMDR, is to facilitate for our couple, wherever they are on their journey, a shared appreciation for how powerfully their relationship has been and continues to be impacted moment by moment by their individual pasts.
Old Stuff
John Grey (Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus) writes of how 80% of whatever we are experiencing in the now has nothing to do with the present.
That’s particularly relevant in couples’ relationships where, as Hendrix sets it out (similar ideas are explored in John Welwood’s Journey of the Heart), individuals have been drawn together by what can be understood as each other’s “ideal wound”.
After all, why, among the thousands of people we might meet, are we attracted to one person in particular?
Why does someone from an abusive childhood so often and so repeatedly find themselves attracted to partners who also carry stories of early life trauma, so often then acted out between them as adults?
One can get a touch misty-eyed and New Age about this, but we do find it helpful to be at least curious about what it was in the personal trauma stories that the couple bring to the work that drew them together, and where, therefore, their individual nervous systems are being triggered to heal.
As Solomon and Tatkin (Love and War in Intimate Relationships) emphasise, a couple is in effect the interplay of two nervous systems dancing with each other, micro-second by micro-second in intimate connection, profoundly informed by how childhood connections were experienced with their primary caregivers.
By tuning into that dance, we as therapists can help couples acknowledge where their responses to each other are implicit re-enactments of how they needed to survive in their earliest formative years–consciously and unconsciously, in behaviour, gesture, and words.
Even more than in individual psychotherapy, and before we get stuck into EMDR, we need to bring bucketloads of psychoeducation to couples work.
Bridging To The Root
Alongside trauma and attachment, couples need coaching in how to catch and name moments where the past is suddenly and often dramatically present, and in basic listening and mirroring skills for the teaching of which we’d strongly recommend explicit training in couples therapy.
Such moments are of course perfect Bridging points for AI-EMDR (best experimented first with each of them at the same time to avoid otherwise inevitable splitting and secret-sharing.)
Join us perhaps on a dedicated couples workshop (join our mailing list to be notified if and when new events are planned) to explore how to use EMDR in couples work, inviting the client whose story is waiting for the next session to be the BLS technology, as it were, for their partner, providing the physical knee taps that we as therapists would use in-person.
Note: If you feel that the issues are long term therapy for individuals or there is not enough safety for someone to do EMDR with the other person in the room, it is best to refer each individual to have their own individual therapist and you remain the couple’s therapist. Get signed released forms from the other therapists so that all therapists can work on best treatment for their clients.