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Ep. 12: Healing Relationships: The Power of Emotionally Focused Therapy · Wellness in Today's World

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Welcome to Wellness in Today's World, where we talk about psychology, wellness, and everything in between.
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Hello, I'm Debra Kawahara, and thank you for joining us today.
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Today, we have the distinguished Dr.
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Scott Woolley with us.
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I am just so thrilled that we were able to have him agree to be on the podcast, and I wanna introduce Dr.
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Woolley to you.
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He holds the rank of distinguished professor and director of the San Diego Center for Emotionally Focused Therapy and the Training Research Institute for EFT, Alliant
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University.
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Dr.
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Woolley has done over 400 workshops in various countries that include Asia, Europe and South, Central, and North America.
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He has worked closely with Dr.
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Susan Johnson, the founder of EFT, for over 25 years.
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So we welcome Dr.
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Woolley to the program.
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I'm just so thrilled that he's here today and welcome, Scott.
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Why don't we get started?
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Thank you.
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Thank you.
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I'm just delighted to be on and it's very good to see you.
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So why don't you start off with just telling us a little bit about your background and what inspired you to become a marriage and family therapist?
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That is a great question.
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I actually didn't start off in the field of marriage and family therapy or psychology in any way, shape, or form.
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My undergraduate degree is in economics.
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I minored in statistics.
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And I was planning to go into business.
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I come from a business family, a lot of business people, et cetera.
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But I also come from a family where there were a fair amount of divorces.
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And in our second year of marriage, we...
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and now this is some time ago, because we've been married for over 39 years now.
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In our second year of marriage, I had a sister who owed us some money.
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And she said, "Let me pay you back in terms of some visits to a marriage counselor.
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If we had done that early in our marriage, I'll betcha we wouldn't be divorced now." And at the time when she first said that, which was before we got married, I thought, well,
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whatever.
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But after about a year into marriage, I thought, hmm, this might be helpful.
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So we did it.
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And that was life-changing for our marriage, super helpful for us.
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And after a period of time,
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this therapist had an old-style kind of process group that I could kind of see where he was going.
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And I thought, "I'll betcha I could do this." And I was applying around to MBA schools, and at the last moment, I applied to an MFT program.
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And I found out later every year they like to take an oddball with their six students.
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And I was the oddball
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because I didn't have an undergraduate degree in psychology.
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But once I started seeing clients, it just...
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I thought this is where I need to be.
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I had to do a fair amount of leveling up and then I went on and did a doctoral degree and it's been an amazing journey and I love doing it.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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So can you talk about maybe a pivotal moment or experience that shaped your path as a marriage and family therapist, particularly in helping couples and families?
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Yeah.
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Well, you know, I think there's, there's probably many, okay?
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And I know that as a doctoral student, I was struggling, like many students, to know where I was theoretically.
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And I had a...
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there was a four-part doctoral exam at my university and I got a conditional pass on one part
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that had to do with my clinical work.
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We had to show some clinical work and then we had to explain it theoretically.
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And the faculty said, "Oh, we love your clinical work, you're doing a good job, but you're not the theory you think you are." And they were right.
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Because I didn't know and they made me...
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To pass it, which I did, they made me write a theory of therapy paper.
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That is where I really discovered EFT, Emotionally Focused Therapy.
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That is, you know, this was in about 1993.
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I had actually read about it some in 1989 in my master's program.
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But as I was going back through and really trying to think about the way I think, that was pivotal.
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And then of course, meeting Sue Johnson and seeing her work and
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being able to work closely with her changed my life.
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And I know you're really world-renowned in EFT.
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You know for our listeners that may not be familiar with emotionally focused therapy and we know that a lot of it has attachment theory.
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Could you describe a bit about attachment theory in relationships?
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Absolutely.
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I'd be happy to do so.
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Let me start, if I can, with emotionally focused therapy.
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Emotionally focused therapy, the basis of it is really that people get together for emotional reasons and they fight and quarrel for emotional reasons.
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And they split up for emotional reasons, which means you have to have a theory of emotions.
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You have to understand the logic
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of how emotions work, okay?
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Which is critical to EFT.
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Also, you need to be able to go into emotions and use them as an agent of change.
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So that's my elevator speech on emotionally focused therapy.
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Okay?
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Let me come back to your actual question about attachment theory.
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Attachment theory underlies
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EFT.
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And by the way, on EFT, we have got a ton of research, randomized clinical outcome trials, first ones done by Sue Johnson.
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But these now have been done by lots of different clinics and research teams in different parts of the world, showing that EFT is highly effective and lasts over time.
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Let me come back to attachment now.
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And that is attachment theory is really the underlying theory on EFT.
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Attachment theory is not an intervention theory.
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It's really a theory of human development.
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And it's an explanatory theory that helps us understand the drive that we all have within us for safe connection with others.
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We know, because there's been so much empirical research on it now, babies that are not picked up and held are much more likely to die.
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Old people who are not touched are much more likely to die.
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People of any age when they get isolated they have greater health problems physically, greater emotional health problems, much more likely to develop major mental health
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problems,
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etc.
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We are designed for connection.
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We thrive on connection and we have a desire to have safe connection.
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Attachment theory helps us understand that very primal desire that we all have for safe connection and what we do when that seems to be threatened.
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Which, as it turns out,
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we all have different strategies, okay, when there's the threat of disconnection.
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Sometimes I tell people I'm training or my students, one way to think about attachment theory is it's really a theory of connection, as well as disconnection, and what we tend
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to do when connection gets threatened.
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People tend to go
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often into one direction or another in terms of what they do.
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The more insecure we are, the more likely we are to either kind of ramp up, get anxious, and really start pushing for connection.
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Or we try to shut it down inside of ourselves and pull back,
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calm everything down so that connection doesn't get any worse with the lack of connection.
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So in couples, we will oftentimes have a very common pattern.
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Well, you'll have somebody who is...
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when there's an argument, a fight, a disagreement or just a misunderstanding, one person may shut down as a way of trying to protect the relationship,
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as they see it, from a fight.
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And the other person, will ramp up in order to create connection to avoid the pain of disconnection.
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And couples will get into these negative interaction patterns, which are incredibly painful.
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And people don't always do one or the other.
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Sometimes people will go back and forth and do different ones.
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But anyway, that's a long answer to your question.
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Thank you.
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That was really informative.
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So, you know, as we think about attachment theory, can you describe kind of the main attachment styles that we would see?
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So the first main one is secure attachment.
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And the more securely attached we are, interestingly enough, the more independent we can be.
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Independence and secure attachment are two sides of the same coin.
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It's easier to go out and explore the world, whether it be the physical world, the world of ideas,
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the world of adventure, whatever, if our basic attachment needs for safe connection are met.
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It is much harder for us to consider new ideas, new ways of thinking, new places, new ways of understanding other people when we ourselves are feeling very insecure.
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It's harder in part because the more insecure we are, the more we tend to get caught in...
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the world becomes more dangerous, which actually focuses the mind
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on the what we see as dangerous.
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And the mind's an amazing thing.
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Part of what happens is that when we see danger, the mind gets very focused on what we see as the danger.
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The more secure we are, our partner comes home, for example, and seems to be a little upset.
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Maybe they had a bad day at work or something.
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People who are insecure in the relationship may all of a sudden, when they see the expression on the face, the way people move, they don't even have to say anything, right?
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It becomes a danger signal for them, And immediately it's like, "Oh is my partner upset with me?
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Is there gonna be a fight?
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What's going on between us?" When it actually may have nothing to do with them.
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The more secure we are, the easier it is to read those signals for what they are and be curious about them.
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And it's like, "Oh, something's wrong with my partner.
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I wonder what it is.
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Maybe my partner needs some comforting, my partner's struggling, my partner may have had a bad day." And when you're secure, it's easier to read that.
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The more insecure we are,
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the harder it is to accurately read those signals.
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If we tend to be more avoidant, so avoidance is another style, if you will.
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If we tend to be more avoidant, typically we've learned often from a young age that when there's distress, the best thing to do is to try and down-regulate ourselves.
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In other words, fancy way of just saying,
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calm ourselves down and avoid whatever the stimulus is.
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So I may see my partner come in, something on my partner's face and it's like, "Oh, my partner's distressed.
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I think I want to get busy cooking dinner or doing something out, go out into the garage, get away." On the other hand, the other style,
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main style is what we call "anxious attachment." And there is a style called "anxious avoidant" where people go back and forth.
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But the anxious style is, "My partner's upset.
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Oh, that's probably about me, danger.
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I need to go in and get reassurance that everything's okay, find out what's going on." And oftentimes it's very easy to...
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ramp up to the point where they don't really see where their partner is because they get afraid of, and they can be intrusive to their partner.
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"Boy, you look upset, is everything okay?
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Did everything go okay with you?
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Are we okay?" You know, a lot of times that kind of thing happens.
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Either way,
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we're more likely, if we're more avoidant, insecure avoidant, or if we're insecure anxious, it's harder to accurately read the signals that are coming from our partner,
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which means that in some situations, we don't react.
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Mm-hmm.
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And then there's more misunderstandings and more disconnection and people get caught up into some pretty devastating negative cycles that can really rip relationships up.
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As you were describing them, it made me think, would it be helpful for people to understand their own attachment style?
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And would it help improve the way that we are able to connect with other people?
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Certainly it is helpful to understand our own attachment styles because when we do understand our own attachment styles, it's easier to see how we may be behaving
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inappropriate in certain situations.
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Also understanding that our partner or our children or siblings or whoever, right, attachment styles is helpful.
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Because if I understand, for example, that my partner
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has a more avoidant attachment style, instead of reading my partner's getting focused on tasks and not asking me about how things are going and not connecting, instead of just
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reading that as, my partner doesn't care about me, which is where anxious people tend to go, instead of thinking, okay,
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this may be intense for my partner.
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My partner does care about me, but my partner may not be feeling very safe right now, which is why my partner's so focused on tasks and pulling away, shutting down.
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That can be helpful.
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And I can make that work because I'm anxious and it's very easy for me to start pushing
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or getting upset and complaining.
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"You never come to me when I'm hurting or I'm upset.
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Why do you keep leaving?
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Why do you go?
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What's wrong with you?" Right?
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Very shaming critical comments, which we know are very destructive in relationships.
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I know that you really utilize emotionally focused therapy as a way to help couples.
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How does EFT for shorthand for everyone, how does it help couples, you know, navigate conflict and strengthen bonds because you talked about connection and disconnection.
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Well, first of all, let me just say that all couples have misses or misunderstandings or points of disconnection, minor betrayals.
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Couples who are headed for trouble have a hard time coming back and repairing, as John Gottman would say, repairing the relationship.
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You know, they may try.
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They may try to fix it, but oftentimes these, you know, different attachment styles will get in the way.
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They feel unsafe and...
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it leads to more problems.
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So oftentimes they'll stop.
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Couples, by the way, that are headed for a good, long, happy relationship, tend to be very good at repairing.
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What we do in EFT is there are kind of three stages to the therapy.
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And in the first stage, we do what we call deescalating or stabilizing the couple.
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And a lot of that is we help them understand the negative cycle.
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And then we work on accessing those attachment-related emotions, such as longing for safety and love and care.
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And we get, we access those and get them to start sharing them.
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And we help, we help couples see that really what's going on here, you know, couples fight about all sorts of things, right?
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Yes.
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the biggest ones tend to be children, sex, money, in-laws.
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But really underneath, a lot of this has to do with how much do I really matter to you?
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Mmm.
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Do I matter?
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If you know that I strongly prefer that we squeeze the toothpaste from the bottom up and you don't do it, what does that mean about how you see me?
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You must not care about me.
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And we laugh about it, but those fights happen.
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They do.
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They can grab us emotionally, which is...
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you know, which can be very, very painful.
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And a lot of times people will, they'll have, sometimes they'll call them, there's these "nothing fights." We're fighting about nothing, but they really are fighting about
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something.
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Typically what they're fighting about is, do I really matter to you or how much do I really matter to you?
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So we work to stabilize them by helping them understand the negative cycles.
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Sometimes we'll draw it out for them and help them really see it,
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become aware of it, and have them start fighting against the cycle, not each other.
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And couples will learn how to go, "Ah, I think we're going into the cycle together.
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Let's see if we can do this differently." And they'll learn how to stop it.
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And when couples particularly have had experiences seeing that underneath,
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the other person's either anger, blaming, criticism, you know, or shutting down, going away is actually a longing for safe connection.
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Once people start seeing that, it gets a lot easier to try and really work on stopping the conflict
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Mm.
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and finding safe connection.
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And then in stage two, we work on helping people reach for safe connection from a position of vulnerability.
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And we have what we call "bonding events," which really help redefine the relationship as safe, loving, and secure.
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Part of what happens when things go wrong with couples is they tend to point out what the other person is not doing or is doing that is destructive.
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What they don't do is learn to ask at a time and in a way that the other person is going to be able to understand
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from a position of vulnerability for change.
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When they learn how to do that, it actually can be incredibly powerful.
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And then in stage three of EFT, we just work on helping them consolidate the new patterns.
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And the research shows most of our couples continue to improve after they terminate therapy.
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The thing that I was thinking about as you were talking is being able to go deeper than the actual things that they may be fighting about superficially, but really going to that
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place of what is it tapping into; that I may not be feeling safe or connected or any of those things.
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And what a way that you're able to do that with EFT.
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Yeah.
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So, you know, I always think that giving a story or example is so powerful.
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So I want to ask you if you could share maybe an example of the use of EFT and how a couple has transformed going through this therapy.
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Absolutely.
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I am going to change some of the details just for the protection of the couple.
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The story I'm going to tell you is true.
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A number of years ago, I got a call from a man and he was a bit anxious when he called.
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And he said, "Do you work with Vietnam vets?"
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And I said, "Well, I have, you know, it's not an area of specialty." "Okay, good, good.
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And you work with couples, right?" And I said, "Yes." And he said, "Well, my wife has just left me.
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She is divorcing me and it's all my fault.
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And I think it has something to do with Vietnam.
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Can I come in?
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And do you have room for me?" I said, "I do have an opening, but do you think she'd be willing to come with you?
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And if she just left,
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and because I'm a couples therapist, right?
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I want to get both people's perspectives on this." He said, "No, no, no, no, no, I just need to talk with you." So he came in alone.
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Basically he tells me a story, his story, okay, that they had not had...
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they'd been married about 27 years and they had not had sex in 21 years.
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He said, "And I'm the one that doesn't want to have sex."
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So I checked for, gosh, are there any other sexual outlets?
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Is he using porn, masturbation?
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What's going on here?
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And he said, "No, no, no, I've not done any of that.
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I'm just shut down sexually.
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I don't understand why.
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And my wife has been so angry and upset for a long time, and she's just finally had it." And I asked, I tried to get some kind of sense of how this happened.
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And, you know, all the normal things about, did you have bad experiences in bed?
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"No, no." You know, there's a lot of assessment questions.
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But he said, "I think it has something to with Vietnam." And I said, "Okay.
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But you know, it would be so helpful if your wife would come in.
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If you'd like, with your permission, I'd be happy to call her." And he said,
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"No, I'll see what I can do." Next session, she comes in, she sits on my couch, and she says, "I just want you to know that I've been dealing for 21 years with this man who
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doesn't wanna have sex with me.
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And I am out of the house.
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I'm leaving him, I'm starting a new life.
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I just want you to know that I'm here to help you fix him." Folds her arms.
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I said, "Okay, okay." I asked a similar set of questions just to understand.
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And this couple had gotten together, they were in their kind of mid 20s or something by the time they got together.
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They lived together for a short period of time and the sex life was pretty good.
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And then everything changed the day they got married.
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Oh, interesting.
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And I said, "What happened the day you got married?" And they both said, "Oh, it was an amazing experience.
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We were so in love." And they were both Catholics.
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And, you know, they had lived together before.
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And I thought, okay, is there guilt here about the premarital sex?
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"No, no, that's not it." But she said it just started like, you know, two or three days into the honeymoon and he didn't seem to want to have sex.
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I finally said, "You know, that is kind of what honeymoons are for, you know?" "We had sex, but he just didn't seem very interested in it.
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And then finally, after the birth of our second daughter, he just didn't want to have sex with me at all.
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And I was tired of trying to pursue him for sex.
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You know, it was very painful." This guy, by the way, was very bright.
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You know, he, at the time, I think he was head of an organization with like a thousand people underneath him.
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Very successful in his work.
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He said, "I don't know what it is, but I think it's Vietnam.
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I think it has something to do with Vietnam." So one thing you should do is you learn to just let clients lead you.
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So I went back to Vietnam.
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And there was a lot there which I won't go into; I will just say that, you know, as a young man, he was in love with science.
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He loved science and he took his chances.
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He could have gone in and become an officer, but he took his chances with the draft and he ended up being drafted.
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And he went over to Vietnam and fought in the jungles
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with one of these platoons where 80% of the men in his platoons were killed.
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His best buddy died in his arms.
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You know, his foxhole buddy, you get close.
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At first, when he's talking about this, he's talking about it in a very kind of mechanical way,
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but I'm an emotionally focused therapist, right?
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So I'm working on opening him up emotionally.
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One of the things that trauma does is it often freezes off and disconnects emotions from images, from sound, and they get very compartmentalized and, you know, a story or a
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narrative of how it goes.
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I'm working on accessing the emotions and the pain of it.
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It is huge.
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He himself was shot up several times and ended up in a MASH unit and sent back into the battles.
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Finally, after a year, 'cause he only had to do a year if he, you know, didn't become an officer, if he just went in.
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Finally, he came back to California, that was enraged at the war,
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calling Vietnam soldiers "baby killers" and everything else.
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It was horrible.
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uh, it takes several sessions to unpack Vietnam.
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Okay.
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Three or four sessions to unpack Vietnam.
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And then at the end of one of his sessions...
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and I'm having almost some secondary trauma.
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He said, "It's taking me two or three days to recover from this, these sessions, because we're unpacking stuff that had been frozen for 30 years, or more, more than 30 years.
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35 years." At the end of one of the sessions, I think it was the fourth couples session, he said, "You know, as traumatic as Vietnam was, I'm not sure it was as traumatic as the
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death of my mom."
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Now, he couldn't access that before.
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Mm-hmm.
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So we spent a couple of sessions going over the death of his mother.
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As a young man, he was off at college before he went to Vietnam.
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His mother died instantly one morning.
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She had a brain aneurysm.
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She was walking across the kitchen and just collapsed and died.
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And his father was shocked.
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He himself wasn't in great health and
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was depressed and he and his brother got together.
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He said, "I became angry.
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I became angry with God.
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I was raised Catholic in a very Catholic area and I just became angry." And then of course he went off to Vietnam.
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So we spent a couple of sessions going into detail with that.
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All this time I'm wondering, I wonder what this has to do with sex and I wonder what this has to do with the day they got married.
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So after a couple of sessions on this, I went back to the day they got married and asked...
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And part of what had happened, she was a pursuer, he was a withdrawer.
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And I did intersperse looking at their interaction patterns, but I kind of, because of her reluctance at first, I had to be careful.
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She kept coming back.
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So this was all together.
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This was all done together.
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And instead of sitting like this, she starts to open up and she is saying, "I've never, I've heard about some of these incidents, but I've never seen this.
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He's opening up in an amazing way.
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You have never shared this with me." And she's going, "This is amazing!" And they start spending some time together.
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Come back to the day they got married.
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I go through the day.
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"How did you feel at this point?" "I was so excited.
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I was so happy." And he said, "I was just so about during the marriage ceremony itself?" "I just remembered feeling so happy." And he's much more in touch with his emotions now.
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I said, "Anything else?"
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He says, "Yeah,
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fear.
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You know, she represented all of the happiness that I had in my childhood that I lost when my mother died.
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All of a sudden, I became afraid that I would lose her."
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I thought, okay, we're getting some place now.
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He couldn't come up with that before we unpacked all that trauma, right?
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I asked, "You weren't afraid of losing her before?" And he said, "Before we got married, I didn't feel like I really had her.
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Once we got married, I felt like I had her.
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And the sun had come out in my life again.
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And then I became terrified of losing her." I said, "Well, how do you think that got connected with sex?"
29:05
And he said, "Well, she'd had, you know, a couple of other boyfriends before me.
29:10
And she told me that they had, you know, been sexual.
29:13
And I had not.
29:15
And I just felt like I must not be very good in bed.
29:21
Just not enough."
29:22
And she's looking at him like, this is news to her.
29:25
And she had said a few times, "Gosh, I wish you could do this or wish you could do that." And of course that's important for any couple.
29:33
They have to be able to communicate about sex, right?
29:36
They have to be able to talk about this works better for me and not, all of that.
29:39
But being a withdrawer and being kind of shut down, he would hear that and it's like, ah, not enough.
29:44
You make it into not, "I need to learn how to do this and this is great.
29:48
I'm not enough," right?
29:50
So I asked him, this was in the seventh couples session, I asked him, and I went back and looked at my notes to make sure I got this right.
29:59
Okay, because sometimes stories like these can grow and change.
30:03
I asked, "Well, do you feel that now?
30:06
That you're not good enough in bed?
30:08
Because I think at this point, neither one of you are very experienced.
30:11
21 years." And he said, "Oh, I'm sure she wishes she had married one of those other men." And then he just sinks down in shame.
30:24
"After 21 years, after all this pain, I'm sure she wishes she had married one of those men."
30:29
"Have you ever asked her if she wishes she had changed, that she had married one of those other men?" "No."
30:38
And she is looking at him in a loving, caring, kind of amazed way with all sorts of compassion.
30:45
I said, "Could you turn and just ask her?" And I scooted my chair away.
30:52
I tend to use a rolling chair and I moved away.
30:55
And he's looking down and finally he looks up at me.
30:58
He's white as a ghost.
31:00
And he said, "Right now?" And I said, "Yes." I moved back in and said, "Yes.
31:05
You have believed this for so many years.
31:08
I think you need to know the truth, whatever the truth is.
31:11
Could you just ask her, does she wish she had married one of those other men?"
31:16
He's looking down in shame and he finally kind of turns and looks over at her and says, "Well, do you?" And he went right back down, looking down, terrified.
31:30
And she says, "Of course not!
31:34
Yeah, the last 21 years without sex has been rough, but no!
31:39
I haven't.
31:40
And in fact, I just heard from one of those people, I just learned something about him and he's had a terrible life.
31:46
You've been so much more of a good provider, a good husband, a good father than either one of those men would have been.
31:55
No, I've never wished." And then she starts to go off into something and he says, "Wait, what did you say?"
32:01
I had her repeat it.
32:02
And I could just see things changing.
32:05
And actually he said, "This changes, this changes everything."
32:08
Mm.
32:09
They both came in the next session all lovey-dovey with each other.
32:13
Oh.
32:13
"Anything special happen this week?" I asked.
32:17
Ha ha!
32:17
And they said, "Yes, we had sex." And they had sex twice that week.
32:23
And I said, "Who approached whom?" And she said, "Well, the first time he approached me.
32:27
And the second time we kind of approached each other." He said, "You know, after all these years, I was afraid, 27 years, I was afraid that the plumbing wouldn't work, but it
32:39
worked!" They were so happy.
32:42
They were so happy.
32:44
It's a bit of a long story, but we had more work to do.
32:48
You know, I didn't want to leave them, but that was a huge breakthrough.
32:53
And that couple, five-year follow-up, just to see how they were doing.
32:58
I mean, I saw them for another, I think, six sessions.
33:03
And then they said, "Can we just come in once a month?
33:06
Just, we've made so many changes." She moved back in, got rid of her apartment, dropped the divorce.
33:11
And every time I'd see them they're lovey-dovey.
33:13
I'd always ask them, "How's your sex life going?" Once she said, "You know, he's pulled away,
33:19
but he's under enormous stress at work.
33:23
And I'm not worried.
33:24
I know him."
33:25
And the next month, things are going great.
33:27
Five-year follow-up after that just to see how they were, just
33:30
happy as can be, having sex, everything's great.
33:33
Now not every case works out that way but you know who would have guessed after all these years of no sex—27 years, no sex—okay, it's like who would have guessed?
33:47
Powerful, powerful story.
33:50
Thank you for sharing that.
33:52
The work was amazing.
33:53
I know one of the areas that you're really an expert in is infidelity.
34:01
So I want to spend a little bit of time talking to you about your expertise in this area.
34:07
And, you know, in your opinion, what are common
34:11
factors that you have seen in your practice that lead to infidelity?
34:18
That's a very good question.
34:19
Yes, you're right.
34:20
I am into infidelity.
34:22
I had a very traumatic case, my first private practice case many, many years ago that involved infidelity and it involved a gun and having to talk somebody down from shooting
34:33
her husband.
34:35
And it was my first private practice case that terrified me.
34:38
And so I have done a lot of research
34:41
and just trying to understand it.
34:43
And what ends up happening is you start working with infidelity and then other people refer you.
34:47
So I've done a fair amount in that area.
34:49
It's actually important to understand why infidelity happens.
34:53
And the way I'm defining infidelity, by the way, is when people have made an agreement
34:59
of romantic or sexual exclusivity and somebody breaks that agreement.
35:05
I'm not talking about open marriages or relationships.
35:08
I'm talking about people who are breaking the rules, cheating, okay?
35:12
Infidelity can be extraordinarily painful.
35:15
There are multiple reasons.
35:17
People have infidelity for different reasons, but I'm going to go into
35:20
three broad areas.
35:22
One is there are relationship factors and there's always insecure attachment.
35:27
There's always insecure attachment.
35:28
In the area of the relationship, people at times are either angry and maybe going for revenge or looking at leaving a relationship because they're burned out.
35:40
Or at times they may be trying to use getting involved with somebody else as a way of getting their partner to spend more time with them.
35:50
It never works.
35:51
It's, you know, bad strategy, but sometimes people will give up.
35:56
So it's really the relationship dynamics.
35:59
Infidelity is always a decision.
36:01
But the relationship dynamics have a pretty good
36:05
Another category is couples who just become distant and then the unfaithful partner
36:12
typically is under a lot of stress, life stress, and getting involved with somebody else becomes an escape.
36:19
Usually those are romantic.
36:21
Those are not one-night stands.
36:23
Those are romantic escape affairs.
36:26
And sometimes those will go on for many years where, you know, somebody will have a kind of sometimes even a family in one place and then another, you know, men typically
36:37
will have a family in one place and another.
36:39
Sometimes the affairs will go on, you know, not necessarily having a family, but I don't know.
36:44
FDR, you know, had a mistress, and in fact he was with her at Camp David when he died.
36:51
And Eleanor was such an amazing woman.
36:53
Those were long-term and oftentimes they'll go back from one relationship to the other.
36:59
It can be tricky to end, but there are ways of ending them.
37:02
The third category
37:04
are those that are more rooted kind of in personality characteristics.
37:09
You'll get people who, for example, are very insecure and they really don't have a belief that relationships will last.
37:18
And at the sign of trouble, they start developing another relationship so they don't have to be alone.
37:23
Serial affairs.
37:25
I once worked with a couple where she had been married four times and every marriage had ended with an affair with the next husband, including the one I was working with.
37:34
There's also people, and we'll see this more in men than in women, who are into power and control.
37:41
It's like you'll see politicians who are into power.
37:44
Those tend to be short-term, one-night stands, those kinds of things.
37:50
One of the leaders, Frank Pittman, would say that oftentimes for men, they are associated with kind of gender insecurity, kind of the definition of manhood tends to be around being
38:04
able to bed women.
38:06
And they gain a sense of power and competence.
38:09
I once worked with a man who had had over 300 affairs during his 10-year marriage.
38:13
Very destructive.
38:15
And she only knew about eight or nine of them and she was pretty angry at those.
38:21
But he was on the prowl every week, you know, and that also had a kind of an addiction feel to it as well.
38:29
And so there is also another area is like compulsive sex.
38:33
You know, we call it sexual addiction or compulsive sexuality, hypersexuality, and different terms.
38:39
For those type, oftentimes they'll start with porn and masturbation and then move into, you know, massage parlors or, you know, various things.
38:50
And then they start to move into one-night stands, you know, prostitutes, et cetera.
38:56
Research has just shown that most of the time, it's men in these; they just they feel like they have a hard time stopping.
39:03
They don't know how to stop themselves and hence the compulsive or addictive.
39:07
But you'll have personality-driven issues.
39:09
For those, I mean, the treatment is very different than for somebody who is...
39:14
mad at their partner is going to show their partner or maybe try to get
39:19
their partner to pay attention to them.
39:22
Very different, or somebody who's escaping, you know, the relationship, you know, or the pressures of the world; it's not the relationship.
39:29
They may end up loving both people.
39:31
And you can have men and women that will do it for this reason, you know, both of them.
39:36
You know, oftentimes the long-term romantic can be male, but female too,
39:41
they'll do it.
39:42
You know, typically they don't have children with both or at least the other person doesn't know it.
39:46
I was just going to say, you know, as I think, you know, 'cause it's so painful and such a complex issue.
39:53
If couples choose to try to recover from infidelity, I guess what would that process, that healing process be?
40:05
It is, there's several factors.
40:07
First of all, the affairs have got to end.
40:09
If somebody is compulsive or into power, you know, that oftentimes involves a fair amount of, you know, individual or group therapy for that person just to try to get the affairs
40:20
to stop.
40:21
There are lots of couples who don't want to divorce, you know, or split up.
40:26
There are lots of couples who want to try and repair, and many of them do, and many of them don't.
40:32
We've actually done research on factors related to those who successfully do, you know, about what the process is like for them and learned a lot from that.
40:42
First of all, one of the big blocks is shame.
40:45
Typically, the person who has the affair feels very bad about what they've done to their partner.
40:51
They feel bad about all the lying, because it inevitably involves lying, the deception.
40:56
And they have a lot of shame.
40:59
Shame's a tricky emotion because it's very focused on self.
41:02
It's not relational.
41:04
They have to be able to hear the pain of their partner and not go into shame and not go into blaming.
41:10
One of the things I try to do is I try very hard to separate out who people are from what they've done.
41:16
Good people do bad things.
41:18
And oftentimes they feel bad about what they've done because they are good people.
41:24
You know, I often remind them of that.
41:27
It's like you're feeling so bad about the pain you caused your partner because you're a good person deep down inside.
41:35
It conflicts with your values.
41:36
It conflicts with who you are, what you did, but that's what you did.
41:40
It's not who you are.
41:42
When people can start feeling that, feeling their own inner goodness, they can stay out of the shame.
41:48
And then it is easier to see their partner's pain as a reflection of how much their partner loves them and how deeply hurt their partner is by the behavior, not how bad they
42:01
are.
42:01
Because part of what we know from our research is that in some of this...
42:06
I mean, I've done some and, but Sue Johnson and her colleagues did a bunch of research on attachment injury repairs, we call these attachment injuries.
42:13
The process of how it gets better is that the injuring partner, the unfaithful partner in this case, is able to see
42:23
and understand the pain of the injured partner.
42:27
And that injured partner needs to be able to express the pain.
42:31
It's pretty overwhelming, you know, for many, many people.
42:34
It's just so devastating for them and traumatic for them.
42:39
It's like a bomb has gone off in the middle of their relationship and their life, and they have to be able to
42:46
really have that pain organized, a tie to the attachment bond, have it validated and understood.
42:56
We do that in emotionally focused therapy a lot.
42:59
They need to have their partner understand that pain, feel that pain with them, and show genuine regret for their pain.
43:08
Not for their partner's being a bad person, because that's about self.
43:13
Essentially, kind of the secret sauce of real repair tends to be connecting around the pain of disconnection.
43:23
Finding your partner was in bed with somebody else, something you thought was sacred and special to your relationship.
43:30
Finding out that your partner has been cheating is massively painful because it's immediate disconnection.
43:38
"My partner's lied to me and my partner has betrayed me.
43:41
I can't trust my partner, et cetera." We know that the cheating partner, the unfaithful partner needs to be able to do things like rebuild trust.
43:52
And that means they have to be open.
43:55
No more secrets.
43:56
Secrets are incredibly dangerous and destructive and corrosive.
44:01
When the injured partner can feel like
44:04
the injuring partner really gets their pain, has genuine remorse, is able to apologize in a vulnerable, attuned way, they can begin to forgive them.
44:16
And forgiveness tends to be a process.
44:18
That doesn't mean they fully trust them.
44:19
But the more trusting behaviors, I've seen people, I remember a man who was, you know, had...
44:28
He was president of a company and he had an affair with the secretary.
44:31
It's kind of the classic thing, right?
44:35
He felt so bad about it.
44:36
One of the things he did, he couldn't fire her.
44:39
I mean, that would have been sexual harassment.
44:41
That would be illegal.
44:43
But what he did, it took him a few months, but he actually left the company.
44:48
He got a job with another company so that he didn't have to be around her.
44:52
I mean, for his wife, that was like so helpful.
44:56
"You really do want to repair.
44:58
You really do want to be with me." Because that was a big thing for him.
45:01
People turn on GPS and don't have a problem.
45:04
They give them all the passwords, things like that.
45:07
And there's no more of this kind of trying to hide or have secret things, right?
45:11
That, and then they need to be able to have those bonding events where they reconnect and they can feel each other and they can be together again.
45:21
Real genuine connection around the pain of the disconnection is what heals.
45:25
It brings very powerful healing and I've seen it happen.
45:28
It happens and it's beautiful.
45:30
And then one other thing I would say, and that is they do need to have the reassurance that it's not going to happen again.
45:37
And part of that, you know, by trust-building behaviors, but also part of that's understanding why it happened in the first place.
45:43
Because it's not uncommon for people to...
45:45
I cannot tell you how many people I've heard that I've worked with that have just said, "I never thought I would do something like this.
45:53
I always thought people who did this were terrible." And that's, of course, what this person is thinking about himself, or herself.
45:58
I've worked with both.
45:59
Understanding why it happened and why it's not going to happen again is an important element of the healing process too.
46:05
Yeah, it's all part of that safety and trust that build our relationships and maintain them.
46:12
So let me ask you, because I guess I've been thinking about this.
46:16
Are there indicators or any red flags, signals
46:20
you as a therapist have seen over the years that kind of say to you, there's a high risk that this couple, in the long run, is not going to be happy?
46:32
Absolutely.
46:34
Absolutely.
46:34
Yeah, there's a number of them and let's talk first.
46:38
I'm going to talk first about in the realm of infidelity, since we were just talking about it.
46:43
And then I want to make it broader.
46:44
When I get a couple where somebody's been unfaithful
46:47
and they're not committed fully to, I mean, it takes a little bit, but, you know, again and again, they're showing that they still want to keep secrets.
46:55
They are not willing to completely open up and do trust-building behaviors.
47:04
And you know, even worse doing it again, et cetera.
47:08
And they're not really committed to change.
47:10
That's a very bad sign.
47:11
For couples who have a hard time actually being able to repair when there's misunderstandings.
47:20
All couples have misunderstandings.
47:22
But if couples don't learn how to repair, and you can learn how to do it, but if they don't learn how to do it, they're headed for long-term problems.
47:30
They really need to learn how to do it.
47:32
When couples don't learn how to attune emotionally with each other
47:38
and accurately read the signals and respond.
47:41
And again, these things can be learned.
47:43
There's a logic to how emotions work.
47:45
There just is.
47:47
And when couples learn how to understand and see that logic, it can make a huge difference for them.
47:53
But when they're not, it is something that is dangerous.
47:58
There's also things like what the Gottmans have found in their research, things like
48:03
being critical; criticism in many ways is contempt, and contemptuousness is cancerous to relationships.
48:13
And it actually predicts a lot of different things in families as well as couples, you know, criticizing, stonewalling, shutting down all the way, pulling away.
48:23
There's just a number of kind of behaviors.
48:27
You know, John Gottman got extraordinarily good at being able to predict divorce based on some of these things.
48:32
Not developing a shared identity.
48:35
Couples who tend to be happy long-term are much more likely, in talking about their relationship, to just use the term "we" rather than "I."
48:44
"Our kids," not "my kids" kind of things.
48:47
And we think that represents people who really develop a shared identity.
48:53
And that does mean that each partner is a self in the shared identity.
49:00
Somebody doesn't just have their identity subsumed into their relationship.
49:05
It means that they develop, it's an extension of their identity as being a couple.
49:11
That's a very positive thing.
49:13
So anyway, and I could go on, but those are a few.
49:16
Well, thank you for that.
49:18
You know, it makes me want to ask you, we talked about couples, you know, all couples have their struggles, right?
49:26
What advice would you give to a couple that, you know, may be going through a rough patch, for lack of a better word, or just struggling, but you know, they're still committed to
49:37
each other, they still want to grow with each other together.
49:41
What advice would you give them?
49:43
Yeah, good question.
49:45
Number one is don't give up.
49:46
All couples have rough times.
49:48
When we look at couples over 30, 40, 50 years, all couples struggle at times, okay?
49:55
And there's stressful things in life.
49:57
The more couples can pull together around those stresses as opposed to pull apart, the better.
50:03
But even if they're pulling apart, figuring out how to honor where the other person is
50:09
is huge.
50:11
Getting some help.
50:14
We know so much more now than we did 30 years ago about how to help couples and how to help them through rough patches, how to help them be able to find connection with each
50:28
other rather than disconnection.
50:31
Understanding that people have different attachment styles, that's okay.
50:35
And understanding and honoring where you are and where your partner is and working to create greater security.
50:45
One of the things we know is that going through a course of emotionally focused therapy actually helps couples become more secure in their personal attachment styles.
50:55
Attachment styles do change over time.
50:58
And couples who are connected, safely connected,
51:02
become more secure, getting some help.
51:05
Most couples wait way too long.
51:08
They wait way too long to get help.
51:11
And so we end up seeing them when they're on the verge of divorce.
51:14
And yes, sometimes we have some major dramatic turnarounds like the story I told you, but oftentimes people are so hurt that they don't want to give it another try.
51:25
And so, being willing to get help
51:29
early from somebody who really knows what they're doing.
51:33
Emotionally focused therapy is, you know, a leading model.
51:37
We've got a lot of research behind it, but you want somebody who...
51:41
It's kind of like, most therapists will say that they do couples.
51:44
But this is your relationship.
51:47
This is your relationship.
51:48
It's precious and important.
51:50
You really want to go to somebody who knows what they're doing and has a specialization in this area.
51:55
And you know, there are certifications in EFT and other models too, but EFT is the one I know the best.
52:03
And finding somebody who has
52:05
gone through the pretty rigorous process to become certified can be helpful.
52:10
But I would say get help.
52:12
And then the final thing I'm going to say is related to the first thing, but I'm going to add a little caveat of research in there.
52:18
Don't give up!
52:20
In two national polls, five years apart,
52:24
over 90% of couples who were very unsatisfied in their relationship, five years later, were either happy or very happy in their relationship, if they didn't split up, okay?
52:37
So it's like, you know, relationships can go through difficult times and good times, but keep on trying.
52:44
Do not give up.
52:45
Now, there may be times when you...
52:47
it's clear your partner is gonna keep being unfaithful to you or violence or other kinds of things.
52:54
I've even seen violence stop and people be happy, but in those cases, it's always because the person who's being violent is highly motivated to
53:03
Hmm.
53:03
willing to do anything they can to stop.
53:07
There's no blaming of the other person.
53:09
So I've seen those things turn around, but in general, you know, hang in there.
53:16
Long-term, as long as the relationship gets happy, you're gonna be better off.
53:21
Your kids, your family, your coworkers.
53:24
Divorce, as well as marriage, are both contagious.
53:28
And that we're highly influenced.
53:29
If you're around a lot of couples that are splitting up, you're more likely to split up.
53:33
If you're around a lot of couples who are long-term, you're more likely to be a long-term couple.
53:37
Thank you for that.
53:39
I've asked you a lot of questions, but your key takeaway from today of everything we talked about or that we didn't, what would that be for our audience today?
53:52
It's a good question and I kind of said some of those key things, but maybe I'll summarize on some of those things.
53:59
Number one:
54:00
We can heal.
54:02
Relationships can heal.
54:03
And they often do.
54:05
Bad relationships can become good.
54:07
And good relationships can become better.
54:10
And it's absolutely worth it.
54:12
Emotions are logical in that when you understand their context, they make sense.
54:19
When you
54:20
learn and understand your own emotional world and the logic of how they work, they become less scary and easier to understand and process.
54:31
You don't have to block them off so much.
54:33
You don't have to be so scared of them.
54:36
They are logical and they can, strong emotion can be tamed,
54:41
so to speak, you know?
54:42
If there's a lot of, if you're the type of person that flies off the handle, et cetera, that can change.
54:48
Come in, let's get some, do some work on it.
54:51
You can change.
54:52
Massive amounts of research has shown...
54:55
like 70-year studies, the Harvard study, for example, on what's most important in life.
55:00
The number one factor is our most precious relationships are family relationships, couple and family relationships.
55:07
They are most important in terms of having a happy, satisfying life.
55:12
And you can, even if things are not going well, you know, as long as your partner is willing to come in and work with you, things can get better and they generally do.
55:23
You know, what I heard, some keywords: healing,
55:27
change, and growth, that they're all possible.
55:31
Nothing's written in stone.
55:33
Right?
55:33
Absolutely.
55:35
Absolutely.
55:36
And when you make mistakes, it's not who you are.
55:38
It is what you've done.
55:39
Look at your inner value system.
55:41
Look at the desires of your heart.
55:44
When you're in good shape, that's much more about who you are.
55:48
When you've made mistakes, you can change.
55:50
That's what you do.
55:51
It's not who you are.
55:53
You have value and worth.
55:55
Let's not let false ideas about who you are get in the way of you working to both heal as a person and also help your most important relationships heal.
56:06
Beautiful!
56:07
You know, I just want to thank you for your wisdom and your expertise and for all your work in getting people to be able to connect in ways that kind of fulfill their life.
56:24
That's so important.
56:26
Thank you for being here and sharing everything that you have today.
56:35
I want to thank all of you for joining us today and remind you that wellness is a journey, not a destination.
56:39
And I want you all to take care and we will see you the next time.
56:43
Thank you, Debra, and I just wish the best to your audience.
56:49
Thank you.
56:50
Thank you.