Please Talk To Me

How we experience our internal worlds varies considerably, and one aspect of this is the degree to which we notice an inner monologue. By inner monologue, I am referring to the awareness of an inner observer that is commenting on a wide array of aspects of our lived experience. I do not mean that we cannot be having a dialogue with ourselves that comprises multiple parts, but simply that these are reflections that are happening internally versus explicitly with another person. The degree to which we reflect on our experiences internally through language is different in every person. I say through language, because we can also reflect on an experience in other ways, for instance somatically (you might feel anxious after a conversation or opening an email but not really know at the level of language what it is about). This comes into play in relationships because often, the partner who has a busier inner monologue tends to be the one who is making overtures to engage in conversations and in particular, meta-conversations (reflecting on relationship dynamics, feelings, events etc.).

When I was training as a couples therapist in the early years, I heard an analogy that has stuck with me and bore itself out in my clinical practice. Some people, when you inquire about an experience, tend to behave like a water faucet with a lot of pressure and as soon as you turn it on, the water comes flowing out at great speed. Others are like a faucet struggling to form even a drop. There are various lenses and categories through which this has been examined and discussed, whether its extroversion/introversion, anxious/avoidant, hyper/hypoarousal, but for our purposes here, I am less interested in these binaries, as typically this is more of a spectrum than a set of opposites, and more interestingly, it presents unique challenges in interpersonal situations.

Knock Knock

What often occurs is that the partner who is more verbal, reaches for connection through a desire to talk, reflect, and engage verbally. In the jargon, we refer to these attempts as ‘bids for attachment’. It is deliberately framed as an objective act, referring directly to the instinct to get close. The reasons for this are compelling because often for the partner who has less of an inner monologue and/or does not experience their everyday life in such a manner, these attempts at putting experience into language are overwhelming, and this is where many relationships break down. What I mean by break down, is that this often innocent dance, of moving towards and moving away, gets imbued with a lot of meaning which is not entirely related to the intentions themselves.

The partner who has the instinct to want to ‘talk’ experiences a withdrawal from the other side and often attributes to them a lack of willingness to engage. Left unchecked, it builds over time and we have a tendency to fill silences with our own projections, fears and ideas akin to a Rorschach test. The partner who struggles to keep up linguistically and/or experiences the act of being prompted to reflect on their inner experience as overwhelming, begins to feel under attack and misunderstood. It is probably the most common aspect of discord in relationships that I have seen clinically and was taught to me as the most prevalent dance that couples experience, with variations of course in pattern and intensity.

You’re Running In? I’m Running Away!

It’s important to clarify that on some level, there is no ‘right’ way. For instance, if there was a burning building, it might be the right decision to head towards it with a water hose and attempt to put out the fire. Conversely, it may also be the right decision if the environment is too dangerous to run for cover before getting burned or dying in a massive explosion; at the heart of both movements, is a desire to deal with the threat in some life saving form. In couples therapy, rather than judging people’s dispositions, we are more interested in listening to what is motivating them. Learning that a partner who struggles to put language to their inner experience and tends to shut conversations down, not because they want to frustrate or show a lack of care, but rather, to lower the heat in a relationship, is useful because it reveals an act of safeguarding. Conversely, the partner who may constantly be knocking on their partner’s door to talk and who is increasingly seen as perpetually critical and unhappy, is reframed as really wanting to protect the relationship through processing and getting closer to being on the same page.

There are significant cultural differences in terms of how language is used, some cultures tend to be significantly more extroverted than others. It is less about what is right and wrong, and more about a couple finding a good enough rhythm and linguistic space for them. This is not a static phenomenon, it is dynamic in the sense that the toing and froing over time is essential for the building of trust and intimacy. Nothing is scarier in relationships than when what seemed like a beautiful equilibrium in the beginning gives way to the messiness of coming up against difference which is inevitable. This is the moment when couples get scared, and often our worst fears come to the fore.

We Are As Different As Snowflakes

While there isn’t space in this essay to examine how relationships then become fertile ground for the working through of deep fears and longings, rather than seeing them as liabilities, suffice it to say that this initial breakdown is purposive and unavoidable. We are, undoubtedly, different from each other no matter what similarities and feelings of oneness we might experience either in the euphoria of falling in love or in other moments of intense unity. Confronting and learning about these differences through the creation of good enough reparative conversations is an essential ingredient in supportive, loving relationships. While it isn’t always pretty, wrestling with our degrees of comfort at the level of linguistic reflection matters. To an extent, it’s about each partner being willing to accept where the other feels safest, and there is also a case to be made for having a certain capacity to put our internal worlds into clearer and more legible actions. In a future post I’ll do a deeper dive into how concepts such as interoception, the perception of our internal worlds, relates to child development and the learning process.

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I’m curious what you may have to add to these dynamics from your experience and if the dance I describe resonates? If so, feel free to send me a note.

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The click of the keyboard

I recall a family case where I had to insist that they let the child continue to play the multiplayer online game Fortnite throughout our therapeutic sessions. I remember fostering conversations with the young man alongside the sound of the typing of his keyboard. At the time, I wasn’t entirely sure I was correct, but it felt intuitive to let him inhabit the world that seemed highly regulating and social for him. It was as if I had to weave myself into his world, all the while maintaining an attitude of wonderment around how he connected and made sense of his universe.

When I watched The Remarkable Life of Ibelin, I recognised something of that instinct—to trust that the virtual landscape could possess an attachment dimensionality that was not immediately apparent from outside. Tears streamed down my face. I felt such incredible compassion for the oft misunderstood social power it affords, especially for generations who have grown up leveraging its newfound capacities for social contact.

Worlds within worlds

The film chronicles the online world of a disabled young man in Norway who, because of a degenerative muscular disease, became increasingly limited in his movements. A custom-built computer interface gave him the capacity to continue participating in an online world. While his parents feared that he was living an increasingly isolated life, there was much they could not see. After his death at the age of 25, a hidden world (to them) was revealed to the family, and the creators of the film decided to reanimate, both literally and figuratively, his life; it wasn’t just that he had an existence online, but had thrived, loved, lost, and helped others heal.

The film’s power, beyond the remarkably touching story of this man’s life, is its challenge to superficial appraisals of both the shifts in how advanced technologies have become a part of our everyday experience and the quality of relationship that can be fostered and inhabited in virtual environments.

The relationship is the relationship is the relationship

Online gaming and its technological ecosystems are often casually referred to as toxic and antisocial, and typically employed in arguments for a return to ‘real’ relationship or eros in our professional jargon. Such appraisals can obscure more than they reveal. One must think critically about the function of any technology and whether it is part of a pathologically defensive structure or integrated into a good enough relational whole (or somewhere in between).

Too often, particularly with an inherited tradition in psychoanalysis that values meaning making in what might be considered analogue environments (the setting of the physical office, the couch, meeting face-to-face), we dismiss constantly evolving forms of communication as a dilution of our superior ‘technologies’ and/or as contributors to dis-ease and general malaise. I have often argued for a more open-minded consideration of what is essential in relationships, and this film showcases the incredible power of technology to connect, repair, and facilitate human contact.

This does not mean that every online environment affords the same possibilities, or that concerns about children’s use of technology are misplaced. It does ask us to consider more carefully what is taking place within a particular world, and what that world means to the person inhabiting it.

Just because it’s foreign to you…

When working with children, maintaining a sense of curiosity about how technology factors into their attachment landscape (i.e., who do they lean on, how do they connect with friends, what meaning is ascribed to the worlds they have libidinally invested in?) is crucial. Ruptures can occur when caregivers are reductive and dismissive of the intricate and meaningful layers that are woven into the fabric of these technological universes.

In a sadly ironic twist, attempts to protect children from the ‘online world’ can themselves become a source of hurt when they disregard the relationships and meaning children have found there. We must find ways to connect before we redirect when it comes to our attempts to forge alliances with children, lest we simply disregard the three dimensionality of their inner worlds and, more specifically, how they have invested their attachment needs.

My concern is that in the name of ‘protecting’ the next generation, we may also play out the archetypal patterns of negating what is both anxiety provoking and foreign to us. Akin to the analyst struggling to attune to the world of a patient, metabolising myriad attacks from without and within all the while trying to return to the therapeutic position, so too is there a remarkable demand on the older generation to try and ‘think’ the value of disruptive technologies.

Ibelin’s world presents a rich metaphor for the aliveness that often exists beyond the limits of our comprehension.

You never know what you’ll find

In closing, I recall one of the responses to the then remarkable technologies Jung and his colleagues were availing themselves of, the galvanometer amongst other tools, to evaluate and measure the physiological consequences of complexes in the word association experiments. Peterson (1907), in an address to the British Medical Association, said of Jung’s methods, “It is like fishing in the sea of the unconscious, and the fish that likes the bait best jumps to the hook”.

This comment has always struck me as possessing an almost childlike excitement at the prospect of what was being discovered and the potential these new technologies possessed. Similarly, The Remarkable Life of Ibelin may change how you look at what is humanly possible in the oft maligned online world of gaming. It is a world certainly worth entering.

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Peterson, F. (1907). The galvanometer as a measure of emotion. British Medical Journal, 2, 804–806.

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Stop Right There

One of the first things couples often say after our initial meeting is how important it was to finally find time to slow down and talk. There is usually, at this moment, a little smile that creeps onto my face. As one of my beloved teachers and a pioneering voice in the field, the late Alison Lee, used to say: We couples therapists are bossy in the beginning. What the couple often senses, and it can be implicit, is that I am working hard to interrupt them and focus the conversation. The heart of the process relies on listening to and interfering with old patterns of responding to sometimes difficult emotions.

Imagine a child who sees the ice cream truck in the playground. Their body is filled with endorphins and excitement and they jump off the swing and run full speed ahead towards the sweet man selling sprinkles and goodness. Somewhere in the background they hear a loud booming voice: “Get back here right now! I made you dinner, and you’re not going to ruin your appetite.” In these moments, we absorb specific emotional responses to our desires. It is not about whether we get the ice cream or not, it is how that specific drama unfolds and how we experience ourselves in the eyes of another.

Holding Difference

Everyone has some version of their own Internal Working Model (IWM). We have deeply ingrained beliefs and sequences of appraisals about ourselves and others, and while we can sometimes be flexible and consider other points of view, under stress, we typically fall back to our most basic patterns.[1] That is why many couples, for instance, end up seeking help after their first child or when dealing with loss. It is in these overwhelming moments that we are the least flexible and most protective, which has a material impact on intimacy.

The notion of secure attachment has entered into popular language and I overhear people routinely putting themselves into various categories, whether anxious or avoidant or perhaps thinking about themselves as relatively stable. The truth is, secure attachment is not a state of being or something we possess, but it is the hallmark of how we encounter and resolve interpersonal difficulties.[2] When I begin interrupting a couple, literally in the first meeting we have, it is to prevent ingrained, rigid and historical responses from ossifying the conversation happening in the present; when a partner rolls their eyes or pipes in and says “that’s not true” I zero in and ask: “I know you have another perspective, that makes complete sense as there are two of you here, but could I have some space to fully hear what they are trying to say and I promise I will come back to you and understand how you see things.”

Letting the Oxygen In

I am creating the conditions for an important process that allows one to become more embodied in what they are trying to communicate. The point isn’t that the other partner will necessarily hear it or agree, but rather, when we can hold complex and competing emotions and have the space to move as fully through them as we can, we are more regulated, understandable and it has a regulating and calming effect even if what we are inhabiting is challenging and even unbearable.[3]

What this accomplishes is that it doesn’t just rely on the couple having “space” to finally listen and talk to each other, but rather, they are getting out of their own way. I am providing an important stop sign when these habitual anxieties interrupt the thoughts and feelings that are trying to unfold. This doesn’t mean of course that we are not allowed to have opinions about what our loved one says or that we cannot speak up if we hear something that hurts us or that we consider to be untrue.

What I am managing at this point is something referred to as the “Window of Tolerance”. This notion was coined by Dr. Dan Siegel, and it alludes to a safe enough emotional state where we are able to hear another person, and be flexible with our own responses.[4] At its most basic form, when something bothers us too much, we either become defensive by growing bigger and louder, or smaller and quieter to protect ourselves. While this is good for our independent survival, it is terrible for intimacy for the very reason that we become less and less social and receptive the more we feel we are under attack.

I Think I’ve Been Here Before

Many couples come in and frame why they sought couples therapy in terms of wanting to improve their ‘communication’ or because they are ‘growing apart’. While these things are true and quite understandable, what I immediately begin asking in my head about each partner is ‘how have you managed your deep needs for closeness in your life and what is it that you would want known about who you are that would make you feel better’.

Whatever chemistry or compatibility brings two people together, our IWM goes with us wherever we are and romantic relationships are exquisitely positioned to offer a corrective experience. It is true that if a couple comes in after 40 years of marriage and has never examined a pattern that has repeated tens of thousands of times, it is harder to shift the narrative.

Neurophysiologically, there is a common shorthand for Hebbian learning: cells that fire together wire together.[5] It is not that our emotions live in these discrete parts of our brain and nervous system, but rather, our responses depend on sophisticated arrays of connections throughout our brain and nervous system that get reinforced with experience. That is why you feel certain physiological responses to words, thoughts, music, dreams and memories because these states of being live throughout our bodies in comprehensive and significant ways.

The beautiful thing about this is that when I interrupt the pattern in a couple’s speech, reactions and perceptions, that same gravitas of consideration that lives in the body also witnesses the shift. It’s akin to watching a great movie where you find out an aspect of the plot at the end that changes the entire narrative. You do not need to rewatch the movie to understand it through a new lens, you get goose bumps immediately because you can put it all together in a different way.

Reimagining the Past

Imagine a couple who has stuck it out and survived adversity, raised children, moved countries, and then sits down and becomes curious about aspects of their past that caused them distress. You witness your partner reveal that one of the reasons they worked hard and came home late for years was because they were afraid of being a failure. That before you get into an argument, the therapist interrupts your frustration and resentment, and you finally see your partner tear up and talk about their biggest fears. They can finally put into words the shame they felt as a child never living up to their parent’s expectations, and rather than getting into a fight, you hold each other and give comfort to that part of your partner they could never show. While this can be overwhelming and the grief that emerges can take your breath away, rather than negating all those years together, it gives them meaning and purpose and the fear that you held all those years is replaced by a sense of optimism because if you can talk about your experiences in this way, you will have not only deepened your connection, but shifted something fundamental in the relationship.

We call these moments corrective experiences because they offer in real time a different response than the couple was expecting.[6] While it isn’t reparenting in a simple sense, it is accessing the primary longings we have to be seen and understood. It’s a ground clearing of sorts where we examine how our perceptions might have been interrupting the capacity for the relationship to listen to historical resonances that are understandably difficult to hold when we are in the day-to-day, going to work, trying to get in our exercise and surviving.

I always say that couples therapy is not that you come to my office and talk about that relationship over there, but that the session is the relationship; it becomes just as much a part of the daily life of the relationship as brushing your teeth or going to see a movie. I have been inspired, touched and encouraged by the hundreds of human beings I have met over the years daring to reveal how they want to be loved and where they have felt misunderstood and alone. Feel free to let me know what, if anything, touched you here and I’d be glad to consider it for my next piece in this series.

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Clinical examples are composites drawn from patterns encountered in practice, and identifying details have been altered to preserve confidentiality.

Notes

1. John Bowlby, Attachment and Loss, Vol. 2: Separation: Anxiety and Anger (Basic Books, 1973).

2. Mario Mikulincer and Phillip R. Shaver, Attachment in Adulthood: Structure, Dynamics, and Change, 2nd ed. (Guilford Press, 2016).

3. Susan M. Johnson and Paul S. Greenman, “The Path to a Secure Bond: Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy,” Journal of Clinical Psychology 62, no. 5 (2006): 597-609.

4. Daniel J. Siegel, The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are (Guilford Press, 1999).

5. Donald O. Hebb, The Organization of Behavior: A Neuropsychological Theory (Wiley, 1949); and Carla J. Shatz, “The Developing Brain,” Scientific American 267, no. 3 (1992): 60-67.

6. Franz Alexander and Thomas M. French, Psychoanalytic Therapy: Principles and Application (Ronald Press, 1946).

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Between Signals

When I was a kid, we had a huge antenna at the cottage and when we went to watch television, inevitably, my father would end up outside while we yelled at the top of our lungs for him to stop turning the antenna when the signal was just right. Sometimes you had to settle for a good enough image, where the signal was just in between the sweet spot and noise. It’s easy to imagine this scenario in black and white, as if we have moved on from that analogue technology, but if you think about it, we haven’t moved an inch. Wifi cutting out, your favourite movie buffering, not being able to access your streaming service because you’ve forgotten the password or there is some issue with the platform or a cyber attack.

There is a space in between that has persisted and I believe it always will.

If you think about it, while we endeavour to experience our identities as seamless and constant, they are anything but. We experience moments of anxiety and distraction. Thoughts and feelings come zooming in when we hear a piece of music or smell a familiar smell; we are constantly creating the moments we experience anew. In Proust’s masterwork In Search of Lost Time, he spends considerable time in the first volume exploring the moment we wake up and have to remember who and where we are. This is a daily affair as we put ourselves back together and face another day.

Living in the Cracks

I am preoccupied with how this affects us in relationships, both within ourselves and with others. Within ourselves, it means that we are constantly exerting considerable emotional and intellectual labour trying to form a composite of who we are, one that we can not only live with, but experience the full range of emotions that we have access to in our lives. I have been amazed looking at thousands of dreams of my patients and my own where the imagination is trying to bring together parts of our lives, past present and future so that we can wake up and have the best shot at feeling integrated.

Someone will dream that a grandmother, perhaps no longer here, is making their favourite dish in their current kitchen, even though she lived her entire life in another country. Someone else will remember their first boyfriend or girlfriend decades later and the feelings will be as real as the day they met them. It’s as if we have to continually survive the myriad memories, experiences, intrusions and imaginations that make up our daily experience and create a good enough landscape to inhabit.

With others, we then need to be able to not only bear our own fragmented experience, but manage that next to another, especially in love, parenting, work and friendship. As the essayist Adam Phillips says about therapy, what we usually discuss is quite ordinary, in the sense that we spend a lifetime going over and over these important relationships in our lives, but they are firmly in the everyday. While it’s a cliche to think about therapy as a place where we discuss our mothers and fathers, why not?

Why wouldn’t we come back again and again to the most profound and intimate relationships of our lives? Intimate not in the sense that we always feel close or loved, but in the reality that it is how we came into the world, even if we for whatever reason did not get to meet our biological parents; these are the foundations of our existence and the fact that we are continually evaluating our sense of self, no matter how disturbing it can be, simply makes sense.

And if we add that three dimensionality to the people we love in our life, or people that we need to interact with in professional or social settings, well then no wonder things can get extremely complex. Think about raising a child, and not having felt a certain feeling since you were child. Next thing you know, it’s 2am and your child is crying, and that experience unlocks a memory in you, whether conscious or not. Now, you not only have to process that experience in some way, but also be a parent to the child, and all too often, those two separate tasks get muddled and we get overwhelmed.

We Need Every Instrument

I often think of the therapeutic process as if we are conducting a symphony with myriad instruments, and the more tuned into and familiar we are with each one, the more options we have to experience the day-to-day. The thing to keep in mind with the symphony is that it can both play the most exhilaratingly beautiful music, and it can also bring us to our knees in despair. That is the point, the power is not in the ability to be happy and optimistic, but to be able to move through feeling states with a flexibility, richness and openness in the sense that an orchestra musician is tasked with playing the music at hand, even if it represents some of the darkest experiences known to us.

As my teacher would say to me “Success and failure in life are in equal measure, we hope for success, but it can go either way”. There’s a great story about the late psychoanalyst James Hillman. A friend met him for lunch, and after paying the bill, the waiter said “Have a nice day!”. James, without missing a beat, quipped “What if I don’t want to?”. This could at first glance seem like a cute anecdote, but it points to something much deeper. Safety is profoundly misunderstood, whether it’s the safety of our minds, or the safety of an intimate relationship.

The Intensity of Safety

Rather than thinking about safety as an ideal we aspire to so we feel calm and resolved, we would be better to think about it as the lever that opens the most intense floodgates. Just think about states of being where you are absolutely connected to yourself, the 40th km of a marathon, the moment you have to bury a loved one, often in these moments, we live out the most intense and transcendental experiences of a lifetime. Safety opens portals to other worlds in us, and while that might be the intense joy of experiencing a lifelong accomplishment, or looking into the eyes of your child as you sing them to sleep, it might also be the recognition of a new insight that brings you to pieces, or a goodbye to someone you love where you cannot bear another second.

I do not write this from the standpoint of assuming that we can acquire a knowledge that makes these experiences more bearable. While it might be true that developing and having a deep curiosity evokes a sense of recognition in us that we are undergoing a profound change, and there may be a small part of us winking from a distance as we are torn apart, the nature of transformation is that we are uncertain of its outcome and who we will be on the other side. The fragility, fear and awesomeness of this should never be underestimated. It is akin to how I often feel when working with a couple where they recount countless stories of hits and misses in their life and lament that things were not cleaner, or that they could have navigated things better. While this might be true in certain cases, I never imagine that the therapeutic process will somehow tame this ambition or the possibilities of more lived life, quite the opposite, I celebrate the desire to kick their world larger and throw themselves into ever increasing possibilities. This will, as previously mentioned, demand more capacity to deal with the fragmentation and existential questions that will surely come up, but why else live?

I’ll give the final word to the great Jacques Brel:

Et plus le temps nous fait cortège

Et plus le temps nous fait tourment

Mais n’est-ce pas le pire piège

Que vivre en paix pour des amants

And the more time accompanies us

The more time torments us

But isn’t the worst trap

For lovers to live in peace

-Jaques Brel, La Chanson des vieux amants

What are your in between spaces? Feel free to let me know.

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