Intimacy from the Inside Out

Courage and Compassion in Couple Therapy

Toni Herbine-Blank, Donna M. Kerpelman, Martha Sweezy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781134613649
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Psychopathologie

Couples in distress enter therapy holding two goals that they now experience as mutually exclusive: to feel loved and to feel understood. Toni Herbine-Blank's powerful new brand of couple therapy, Intimacy from the Inside Out (IFIO), offers a comprehensive conceptual map for achieving both goals. In a tour de force of elegant case illustrations wrapped around clear instruction, this book shows the IFIO therapist working with the natural subdivisions – or parts – of the human mind in a dyad, guiding and supporting couples to understand how they project childhood injury into current relationships and then, feeling threatened, frustrated and angry, lose track of their underlying needs to feel safe, connected and loved. With a focus on generating internal attachment stability to sustain each partner through the moments when the other is unavailable, couples in IFIO therapy reconnect with their essential needs, change their conversations and learn to make requests that invite rather than threaten in order to get those needs met.

1 PHASE 1

BEGINNING

1 The Origins of Intimacy from the Inside Out Therapy

DOI: 10.4324/9781315886145-2

Intimate relationships form the core of our social connections, helping us to grow, love deeply and tolerate loss (Bowlby, 1969; Coan, 2006; Johnson, 2004, 2013). When couples enter therapy in a state of disconnection, anger and grief at the loss of intimacy, they often hold two goals that feel like opposites: to feel safe and to reestablish intimacy. The IFIO approach offers a map for achieving those goals. In the following chapters we focus on how to create intimacy and explore what gets in the way, especially shaming and feeling shamed, as we illustrate how to work with the natural subdivisions – or parts – of the human mind in a dyad.

Since IFIO borrows concepts and a model of mind developed by Richard Schwartz and articulated in IFS, a review of those concepts is in order: Let’s begin with parts. All models of mind that work with intrapsychic conflict deal in some form of mental multiplicity (see Freud (1961) on the id, ego and superego; Jung (1969) on archetypes and complexes; Assagioli (1975) on sub-personalities; Watkins and Watkins (1997) on ego state therapy; and various inner child approaches, among others). According to Schwartz, our parts think, feel, have beliefs, carry out everyday actions and are relationally sophisticated (1995). Each part has its own set of experiences. If left to manage their experience without guidance from a reliable parental figure, parts can become flooded with emotion, cognitively confused and burdened with intolerable beliefs. At this point some parts don a protective role and launch survival strategies that fit both the moment and the person’s developmental age. These strategies, while useful in the moment, often prove far from optimal for quality of life and long-term growth.

No matter how dysfunctional their behavior looks once the crisis is over, these protective parts will endorse (for we can speak to them) altruistic motivation. They act in the service of survival, to the best of their ability, and the goal of treatment is to free, not to control or dismiss them. Luckily we can help our vulnerable, conflict-prone parts because we also have a Self. The Self in every one of us is capable of healing injured parts and leading our internal system with courage, wisdom and compassion (Schwartz, 1995). The concept of the Self aligns with Buddha mind, the soul, inner light, the Tao and being in flow as described in various spiritual and philosophical traditions. Although the Self is an energetic state available to everyone that cannot be wounded or damaged, it can be difficult to access, especially under troubled circumstances in childhood. The IFIO approach helps couples access the Self of each partner, extending this powerful resource, along with the concept of parts, into the relational setting as a vehicle for the growth and healing of both the individual and the couple.

Parts

So what are parts? Beyond subjective experience, we don’t know. But when belief systems (including various religions, psychotherapeutic and self-help models) view parts as undesirable negative impulses they encourage people to ignore, shame or expel them from consciousness. Schwartz reports that his clients taught him to do the opposite: to welcome and listen to all parts. Our parts help us to survive; they enrich our lives with their intellect, gifts and talents; and they respond in kind when they are heard and valued.

Although we don’t know what parts are, we can find them by paying attention internally to our thoughts, feelings, sensations and action urges. In doing so, we can notice that they shape our self-identity and motivate our behavior. And if we talk to them, they talk (or in some way communicate) back. Parts can describe how they absorbed interpersonal relationships as lessons and how they exist in relation to each other. From them, we hear that one part accepting relational injury as identity (I am unlovable, I am bad) motivates other parts to step into a protective role. Schwartz calls the former class of part exiles and the latter protectors. Further, he divides the tactics of protective parts into proactive (enacted by managers) and reactive (enacted by firefighters) (for more on the IFS vocabulary, see the Glossary).

IFS gives us a framework and language to know each part, regardless of its role in the internal family, and to understand the relationships between parts. Working with couples, as with individuals, we validate the choices parts have made given their circumstances, hear the ways in which their efforts were well intentioned, and assure them that we will not kill them off in the process of therapy. According to the tenets of the IFS model, which has been well confirmed in our experience, all parts have an inherent gift to offer the system once they have unburdened. This therapy welcomes all aspects of us, especially those parts who have been banished, and reunites them in the whole.

The Relational Options of Parts: Blending and Unblending

Because the relationship between parts and the Self fosters clarity and heals traumatic or just difficult experiences, developing that relationship is the principle goal of IFS therapy. Anything that interferes with it is seminal to the treatment, and the principal interference, true for couples as well as individuals, is blending.

Blending refers to a part taking over consciousness. Say you are driving home from work on a beautiful spring day, your window is down, the radio is on; you’re singing along and looking forward to spending the evening at home. Suddenly a car pulls around from behind and cuts in too close. You slam on the brakes and swear, you’re fuming and you notice an urge to chase the guy as he speeds away to give him a piece of your mind. From the point of view of IFS, an angry part has just taken over, or blended. Where did those carefree feelings go? Are they gone for good? Schwartz would say those feelings came from a part who has, for the moment, been supplanted in your consciousness. When the angry part calms down, the carefree one can edge back in and spread more joy.

This describes the natural activity of parts. They blend and unblend. They exert influence over consciousness and fade back in a practice similar to de-centering as described in mindfulness literature (Kabat-Zinn, 1990). When all goes well, parts share time and space with ease, receive support from the leadership of the Self and lend their support for the optimal functioning of the whole system. But when concerns for safety are uppermost and there has been little experience of Self-leadership internally or in role models, protective parts use what they have learned – often the very tactics to which they were unhappily subjected – to navigate and reestablish safety. The first phase of IFS therapy is devoted to befriending our protectors and showing them that they can unblend safely. If a part will not unblend and allow the client’s Self to lead, then the Self of the therapist, which always models being Self-led in the therapy, can stand in for the time being.

The IFS Protocol with the Added Dimensions of IFIO

IFIO is an experiential model of couple therapy that was born over the last ten years as I applied the concepts of IFS to intimate relationships as a vehicle for the growth and healing of both the couple and individual. My model of couple therapy is designed to uncover the strengths and resources in each partner as well as in the couple in order to heal wounds that are current, that hail from prior relationships, or that occurred in childhood. And my goal is to nurture a healthy, intimate connection between partners as defined by them.

Guiding two people and their parts to interact in an open hearted, satisfying way when exiles are chronically triggered and protectors are hypervigilant and highly reactive is no small feat. As we illustrate throughout the book, couple therapy sessions encompass more parts and more people all at once than do therapy sessions for individuals. While individual IFS sessions differ, they generally involve going inside with one’s attention to scan the body, listen for a voice, and/or see mental images. This internal focus tends to bring on a quasi-meditative state in which sensations, feelings or thoughts reveal a part or parts in need of attention. Since our job is to cultivate the cooperation of these parts and help them transform their modus operandi, we find various ways of asking them to unblend and be in relationship with the Self throughout the process. IFIO couple therapy makes use of IFS techniques and adds more to meet the needs of the larger relational system.

Healing the Intrapersonal and Interpersonal in IFIO

Because external relationships mirror internal relationships between parts and the Self, we integrate the interpersonal with the intrapersonal. While individuals from the couple do the interpersonal work of examining, healing, and reconnecting with their partner, they also do internal work, healing injuries and transforming toxic internal relationships. These two levels of process are mutually reinforcing and supportive. Intimacy is created from the inside out and vice versa, with an aim of generating loving and authentic yet adaptable, evolving relationships, both inter and intrapersonal.

As the introduction to this book explains, IFIO is organized around three phases of treatment. In the first phase, I meet the couple to assess their level of differentiation (their ability to accept being different from each other), inquire about their hopes and goals, and offer them my view of the possibilities. In the broad middle phase, I focus on helping the couple to differentiate, inside (from their parts) and outside (from each other), which in my view is key to their loving and being loved and to me helping them create the relationship they long for. This involves several actions that fall into one of the following categories: assessing patterns of behavior, teaching new skills (including new ways of communicating and making requests), and doing the individual work of unburdening.

To assess patterns of behavior, I start by tracking and understanding the vulnerability that motivates their fights in order to help them differentiate. Internally this means distinguishing the Self from parts, or unblending, which helps them regulate their autonomic nervous systems. I do this by asking them each to speak for rather than from their parts, which compels a significant measure of unblending. I also support them in understanding their emotional needs and being more skillful about getting those needs met. When we get to individual work, I help them to heal childhood wounds by unburdening shame. Throughout, regardless of which of these categories of action I find we are in, I work experientially to get them into their bodies, and I promote relational unburdening, healing that occurs between the couple that restores inner as well as outer relationships.

We reach the third phase of treatment when they are capable of seeing each other as a resource rather than as the one who wounds or the redeemer and engaging in repair. This renewed feeling of connection frees the couple to create the next chapter in their relationship, one that sees them consenting to (or embracing) difference and connecting in love.

Identifying Negative Cycles: Understanding the Fight

In IFIO we track how the emotional responses of young, frightened parts (called exiles in IFS) drive the responses of protective parts in the system. In other words, the therapist invites individuals to understand how what they do, or say, to their partner in an argument is driven by vul...