Purvi Parikh-Shah, PhD
Supervisor-in-Training and Certified Therapist, EFCT and EFIT
Often couples come to therapy seeking to repair open wounds between them. Attachment injuries include but are not limited to affairs. These injuries occur when one partner is unavailable, inaccessible, or nonresponsive to the other at a time of critical need. For example, when there’s an affair, the hurt may not only be that your partner is attracted to another, but the deception and unavailability of your partner in the aftermath of the discovery. In EFT we have a clear map for repair with the Attachment Injury Repair Model (AIRM, LB*). However, the challenge in stage 1 is to de-escalate a couple enough to start the healing process. In particular, how do we keep the attachment injury alive while de-escalating the couple’s current cycle that keeps them from repair?
In one of my couples, when the injured partner (INJ) confronted the leaning out (LNO) partner that “something felt off” in their relationship, the latter denied her affair. As she continued the affair, more evidence of it surfaced. When the INJ partner discovered that what he felt all along was true, he was “heartbroken”. When they began couples therapy, he was angry and critical, and she was withdrawn and defensive. We started discussing how he’d found out about her affair. The more he narrated, the quieter she became. I pointed out this pattern unfolding in the present. Even though it was tempting to ask about their pattern from before the affair, I stayed in the here and now. I helped him make sense of his anger, and validated his impulse to ask questions. We named the broken trust between them. We got specific about the trigger that started a landslide of emotions by beginning to get clearer about what about his partner’s affair was the dagger to his heart.
I could’ve assumed it was the betrayal itself, but for this man, the worst of it was the deception from his partner after he’d initially confronted her. Her denial told him that you “took me for a fool” and you weren’t there when I was on my knees begging for the truth, needing you to be honest with me. As we helped the INJ partner make sense of his trigger, attachment meaning and action tendency he shared these with the LNO partner. She was defensive and minimizing of his anger and her deception, we tracked this pattern between them. The more he pushed for his anger to be heard and seen, the more she minimized and defended, and the more she defended the more he pushed with questions to get to the “bottom of it”. We assembled the LNO partner’s moves in the cycle and in an enactment, she said to him – “I do defend because I’m so ashamed!”
It takes courage to name the specific injury and place it in the couple’s current cycle as a triggering event. It makes sense for us to worry about shaming the LNO partner, or rubbing salt on the wound of the INJ partner. In naming the blow that broke their bond we’re keeping their injury alive while helping partners own their moves in the current cycle. Thereafter they can begin to experience how their current cycle keeps them from repair.
Copyright P. Parikh-Shah. Please do not copy any part of this article without permission. (Ref: *Brubacher, L. AIRM, 2022)