The stories that bring us to therapy
In her book Rising Strong, Brené Brown recounts the story of swimming with her partner at Lake Travis. She shares her happiness with him, but he is short and curt. She concludes he is feeling something negative towards her, and she starts to get angry and feel rejected. When noticed she was assuming this, she checked it out with him. He tells her he’s feeling terrified and preoccupied about something else, so he didn’t actually hear her because he was so anxious. His responses had nothing to do with how he felt about her. She didn’t know it, at the time.
There is value in recognizing our own stories and interpretations of other’s behaviors, because those beliefs shape how we feel. Brown offers the phrase “the story I’m making up is...” as a way of checking your narrative with those around you. She shared it with her husband, so he could offer a different more accurate story of his experience, compared to the one she made up.
I see it all the time in the couples I work with, it is such a human thing: we gather the evidence based on what we have available, and we come to a conclusion. Whatever we conclude, has huge impact in our experience or ways of being in the world. The story we create influences how we then react to our partner, in the moment, whether our story is accurate or not.
Many examples can be found looking back in history, when humans have come to false conclusions with what they knew at the time (e.g. the earth is flat, lobotomies will cure mental illness, etc). I believe people were doing the best they could, with what they knew, to make sense of the world. We still do it today. Who knows what we are believing now that we will one day see in a completely different light, with new information.
When a couples walks into my office, they are often in a state where they have each gathered evidence about their partner to make sense of their behavior in the best way they know how. Common conclusions are things like “he doesn’t care about me” because “he says nothing when I talk to him,” or “he keeps trying to fix the problem without listening to me.” Or “I’ll never get it right with her” because “she is always telling me what I haven’t done or did wrong,” or “she’s never happy.” In these moments I can see very clearly, how these conclusions do make so much sense with the information they have!
As an experienced couples therapist, however, I have learned a lot about human behavior and have gained a lot of information about why people sometimes do the things they do. Things that the partners may not recognize just yet. Information they don’t have, just yet. It is my job to help couples offer to each other the information needed that their partner does not yet have, in order to see what the true story is. I help them share “the story I am telling myself is...” to the other, and then help the other share what is actually happening.
This is important to recognize because every couple I have met to this day has started (and sometimes ended) their relationship with the same narrative: I am doing the best I can to make this relationship work. And they often don’t believe their partner is too, even when their partner insists. So what is the missing information to get a shared reality of this narrative? What is it we are not seeing yet? There is a way out. That’s what couple therapy, and Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) in particular, does. To learn more about EFT, visit the ICEEFT website.
Please see my short post here on how the stories we tell ourselves often affect infidelity recovery.
