92 52
JULY 8, 2021 | The Jewish Home OCTOBER 29, 2015 | The Jewish Home
Dr. Deb
Is It Possible to Get Quick Results in Marriage Therapy? By Deb Hirschhorn, Ph.D.
“O
h, I don’t know, Dr. Deb. I don’t see how it is possible to change my whole marriage around in 13 weeks. “After all, we’ve gone to therapy for the last 3 years (5 years? 10 years?) and we still don’t have results. “I got a lot out of my individual therapy. But you know, I’m a kind of stubborn person. I don’t make changes too quickly. It took two years of weekly work to overcome my ____. So how can I change things around so fast in my marriage?” I have one answer to each of these concerns: You used the wrong vehicle. Let’s dive into the particulars so you’ll see what I mean.
Wrong Vehicle #1: Behavioral Change Behavior modification works beautifully with young children, prison inmates, and institutionalized adults. Why? Because you, the parent or the supervisor, have control. You can dish out reinforcers, you can punish, you can increase the reward ratio (how much of the desired behavior you expect before you give the reinforcer), and so on. You’re in charge. When you find the right incentives, little kids eat it up. But what happens in a marriage? Who holds the reinforcers? Do you think you do? Think again. Here’s a true story about yours truly. When Covid hit, I had been a regular attendee at the gym. I loved the classes because someone was barking at me to do this or that,
niques manage that? They can’t.
Wrong Vehicle #2 Emotional Change
and I did not have to exercise any self-motivation. Suddenly, all that came to an end. My favorite teacher had a live online class and….I’m sorry to admit the truth, but at the last minute I always found something “more pressing” to do. See, in the past, picking myself up and getting out of the house (which was fun in itself) to go to the gym got the process started. The teacher did the rest. So mid-way through Covid, I got the bright idea of telling my friend that I would tape a class and then we could “meet” by each, separately, doing the class at home. Knowing that she was expecting me to “attend” was the motivation I needed. Here’s the funny part. To this day, if she does her workout, I do mine. If she has an appointment elsewhere, doggone if I don’t miss my workout. We simply can’t expect ourselves to be in charge of our own reinforcement schedule, generally speaking.
(Yes, there are people who quit smoking on a dime and all that. I’m saying generally speaking.) But there is an even bigger problem with behavioral change: How do you change that which is emotionally driven? The limbic system – where emotions are catalogued, activated, and connected to the rest of our brain – is quick, unconscious, and driven by neurotransmitters that act more quickly than you can think. As an example, slow-acting neurotransmitters like dopamine and serotonin take seconds to minutes to transmit messages. The fast-acting ones like glutamate (present in 90% of brain synapses, or spaces) take one-thousandth of a second to move from synapse to synapse in the brain! As people often complain, “I go from zero to 60 so fast I don’t know what’s happening.” So how can behaviors, even well-intentioned behavioral tech-
It is specifically because of the limitation of behavioral change that therapy focused on emotions was developed. This is a major step in the right direction. Yet, examination of therapies based on tuning into your own and your partner’s emotions doesn’t necessarily lead to controlling them. Here is what Sue Johnson, the founder of Emotionally Focused Therapy, told an interviewer: One lady said to me recently: “Nothing has changed on one level, but everything has changed. I get that my whole life – even from the time I was very small, and now I’m 60 years old – has been an incredible fight. A fight between longing for closeness, feeling empty, alone and deprived of love, and being terrified of closeness. I feel that the only closeness I have known resulted in someone taking me over, me being powerless, me being hurt all the time. I’ve just bounced between those two things my whole life.” And now that she can make sense of her emotions, she finds a way to navigate. The client made sense of her emotions. That is excellent. But the question is: Could she change them? Could she, to use her own words, no longer feel powerless? Could she stop bouncing between extremes and overcome her fear of closeness? Johnson explains, “What we do in couples therapy is to help people accept those longings and fears and to find ways to ask for what
