by David Mars, Ph.D.
In treating couples, the more avoidantly-attached partner often shows a lesser capacity to perceive, receive and express emotion than their anxiously-attached partners. This “deficit” area can be a shaming experience for that couple member if we hyper-focus the therapy on emotions, especially after years or decades of failing the partner in the area of being able to feel or name emotions. Hyper-focusing on emotion can create a thwarting and or even re-traumatizing bottleneck in treatment for both partners. Especially early in treatment, the avoidantly-attached member of the couple often finds that connecting to emotions, especially in the presence of their attachment figure, is so threatening as to become nearly impossible because of how quickly dissociation (dorsal vagal response) or defensive reactivity is triggered. This frustration and irritation is not a core affect, but is a frequently encountered pattern of complaint.
In the AEDP for Couples model, we bridge to other channels of bodily experience in order to open and validate alternate pathways as being also “real” and true and valuable, so connection can be made in whatever channel of experience it can be perceived, received and expressed in each evolving moment. Part of the strategy of AEDP for Couples is for each partner to attune and then receive on the channels on which his or her partner broadcasts. Then couple members cross-train with each other to receive the channels of experience that are available as a larger repertoire that is built over the course of treatment.
For the above stated reasons and more, in AEDP for Couples, treatment moves forward through moment-to-moment tracking of the co-created intersubjective field. Because in work with couples we have more than one person to track, by involving the seven channels of experience, we include more of the precious epiphenomena in the room. This is what Allan Shore calls the intersubjective somatic field. The channels of experience include: sensation (including warmth, tension and tingling), energetic phenomena (expanding and contracting, filling and draining, brightening and dimming) emotion (joy, sadness, anger, fear, surprise and disgust), movement (including micro-expressions, and subtle gestures), auditory (voice tone and timbre and verbally conveyed meaning), visual (visible signs of expression, especially of love and caring) and imaginal (all of the other six channel of experience that appear as imagined that spontaneously or intentionally are called into awareness). For example: imaginal sensation, imaginal energetic, imaginal emotion, imaginal movement, imaginal auditory and imaginal visual experiences.
The intention in AEDP for Couples is to model and to assist each member of the couple to develop deep skills in holding an evolving witness consciousness that leads to a growing awareness and appreciation that a range of modes of experience and expression are valid and necessary within the growing culture of the couple. This process is about tenderly and respectfully bridging to the experience of each partner to go toward that which is longed for in a mutually welcoming connection. The natural flow is toward “uncrimping” all of the formerly defensively excluded channels of experience, including emotion, in a step-by-step process accompanied by affirmation and safety.
