Emotionally Focused Therapy with African American Couples

Love Heals

Paul Guillory

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367375720
• eBook ISBN: 9781000417494
• Topic: Psicología
• Subtopic: Salud mental en psicología

Emotionally Focused Therapy with African American Couples: Love Heals is an essential guide that integrates emotionally focused therapy (EFT) with cultural humility. It provides a pathbreaking, evidence-based model of couples work that reinforces the bond between partners in the face of race-based distress.

Guillory explores and brings a deep understanding of the legacy of racial trauma, and the cultural strengths of African American couples by using real-life case studies. The chapters in the book focus on several key clinical issues in the field, such as communication problems, anxiety, infidelity, depression, and porn. Each case study is enhanced by a consultation with EFT master therapist Sue Johnson.

The book is an essential text for students and mental health professionals looking to provide culturally competent therapeutic interventions. It will also appeal to psychologists, mental health workers, social workers, marriage and family therapists, and religious leaders.

1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9780429355127-1

This is a book about couples therapy with African Americans using an attachment lens. Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) is an attachment-based therapy founded by Sue Johnson. While there is a cruel and harsh history of slavery, anti-Black laws, and discrimination in the American experience; there are also the stories of attachment-based bonding among Black people—human bonding even in the face of fear, rape, beatings, loss, and sure death. Centuries ago, Africans relied on their oral tradition to tell stories, and those folktales were often stories about survival of the collective tribal community. African bonding would include Bowlby’s notion of attachment between dyads and with the tribal community, ancestral relations, and the presence of spirit; all these bonding relationships engaged Africans in comforting, surviving, or dying together. I suggest that many folktales like the following Africans-in-transition folktale written by the author were lost:

Nyjahl thought to himself that he had practiced these moves so many times in training that he was confident as he first steadied his fear and then skillfully side-stepped his charging foe with his knees slightly bent. Stepping around his foe, and with all the speed and strength he could muster, he thrust his weapon forward into his target. But he was jarred awake by the pain of his chains binding his hands, feet, and neck. “I must stop dreaming,” he admonished himself. “I must be in the present to see the possibilities.” He was lying on his side on the hard wooden floor that reeked of urine and feces. There was no light. Most of the time, the darkness was absolute. It was unbearably hot and wet where he was confined, and breathing was difficult in the thick, vile air. But breathe he must—this was central to all his training since he was a small boy; the warrior must breathe to live and breathe to stay present! He was fighting doubt, as his body felt weak. While nothing had quite prepared him to be in his present situation, chained in the belly of this floating dungeon crossing the Atlantic Ocean, it was now his turn to face “the Beast” and call on the spirits and generations of training. “Welcome the stench,” he told himself, “and stay in the moment.” It was then that he noticed her—the cracks in the wood above him offered just enough of a sliver of light to see.

Sobonfu had been hearing the stories about the people hunters since she was a little girl. In her work as an assistant planner for the king, Dahomey, she had come to know that the old stories about the stolen people were true. There really were hunters of people!! While the king had been actively engaging with nearby and distant communities for typical business, he also increasingly was concerned about their mutual protection. Sobonfu’s work was now largely guided by the ideas that war was being created for no apparent reason and that local communities had to be more engaged with one another. Because the larger communities often spoke different languages and had different customs, ambassadors were needed. While it was unusual for females to travel in these matters, Sobonfu had particularly unique language skills, as did her brother, but she was calmer and less likely to cause a misunderstanding. Together with a small group of ambassadors, Nyjahl and Sobonfu both had been on a mission to engage their neighbors. They were attacked so quickly that it was all a blur at this point. The long march that followed Sobonfu’s capture was a blur, too. For some odd reason, it did not occur to her until the dungeon doors slammed shut behind her that she now too was stolen.

Sobonfu was only aware of her anxiety. It was an anxiety that exposed her whole body to trembles, an anxiety that disrupted all thought. It was as if her anxiety was a demon/spirit that had taken over her body. This unshakable fear had taken her to the edge of sanity and the abyss of madness. Sobonfu prayed as she had never prayed before, and she called on all holy spirits to protect and return her home. After being returned to the miserable pit from the strangely stark sunshine above, she shifted onto her right side. At that moment she heard his voice. At first, it was hard for her to focus, and she couldn’t make sense of what he was saying, but something about the tone and calmness touched her. With the sound of his voice she was being drawn out of some deep dream-like nightmare. While his dialect was not her own, she understood. “Don’t be afraid,” “I know you!” “I’ve seen you at my village.” Despite the dark and the difficulty of seeing anything, she could force herself to focus and make out his face and then his eyes, because they were stacked only inches apart. Nyjahl just kept saying “I know you” until he would be shouting. Finally he could see she was focused on him. And somehow, in this moment, in this place, Sobonfu found someone familiar and found her voice and her calm.

With this fable that I wrote, I am suggesting that the “Beast” the newly arrived Africans faced in the “new world” was beyond what they could have foreseen: slaves in forced labor camps far from their homeland and their families. Yet each and every African faced this horrific situation in a uniquely human way, together—again and again.

As Nyjhal and Sobonfu are below deck of the Hannibal bound for American shores, they and the 700 others on the vessel thought of themselves in some nightmarish predicament (half of them would die in the darkness below); while on deck, the sailors were just a tiny apart of the very profitable transatlantic trade system of profits that would be enjoyed by American and European communities. As these separate stories of slaves and their captors unfold over time, Nyjhal and Sobonfu are sold at auctions and became two human engines for the slave labor camps in the United States. As time unfolds, slave laws are created to brutally enforce their bondage, restrict their movements, and control all aspects of their lives. The Civil War would be fought, Reconstruction would be attempted and fail, and Black laws/codes would be enshrined in the South and enforced throughout the United States. These anti-Black laws, more familiarly called Jim Crow laws, again restricted all aspects of Black lives, including education, health, employment, voting, and drinking water availability. Meanwhile, Nyjhal and Sobonfu and the others on the Hannibal would continue to view themselves as Africans and carry with them their stories of spirit, family, customs, folklore, music, and tribal communities. Their African psychology of “we-ness” psychology would eventually be blended into the survival of the “Black tribe” as they became Americanized African slaves.

The Lost Stories of African Americans

While the institution of slavery was the “original” sin of the United States, the deeper psychological traumas that it would unleash in the United States were just as assaultive and violent. That is, the American folktales and psychological justification for greed, cultural arrogance and violence were as damaging to Blacks as slavery itself. In this regard, it is the stories of the slavers that mainly survived, continually repackaged and retold over time. As a painful result, Africans/Black Americans became synonymous with the situations forced on them—that is, captured to be slaves and then stamped as if they were created by God for such treatment; barred from any academic learning and then judged/demeaned as having inferior intelligence; post-slavery, denied employment opportunities but their joblessness would come to be viewed as confirmation of their shiftless and lazy nature; forced to live in highly restricted housing, and thus poor and high-crime areas would be proof of their ghetto character; and finally, their “non-Whiteness” would be synonymous with ugliness.

In contrast, the slave labor camps became known as plantations (where currently tours are still given of the magnificent White Southern houses and grounds, devoid of the evidence of the slave camps), and the Civil War would be cast by some as “The War of Northern Aggression” and later “The Lost Cause”—both American folktales promoting a heroic attempt to protect the “Southern way of life” (where historical reenactments of battles and monuments to Southern warriors fighting to maintain slavery continue to promote the Confederate cause). The harsh treatment of Blacks became consistent with White people’s safety, fears, and values (Blackmon, 2008; Alexander, 2010).

Meanwhile, the stories of the captive Africans were mainly lost. The Africans would arrive continually, slave ship after ship, totaling 36,000 ships to American shores from 1619 to 1863 (Hannah-Jones, 2019). While most Africans were originally captured in West Africa during the transatlantic slave trade, there were many tribal communities among the captives with their own language and customs. Their human stories were effectively silenced. Who told their individual or collective stories of day-to-day living, heroism, and love? According to Ibram X. Kendi in his book Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, two main theories of African people emerged out of Europeans explorers of the African continent in the 16th century. The first was that the heat had caused intimate relationship between men and beasts and that had produced a savage, inferior human/beast. The other theory was biblical and held that enslaved Africans were God-made as “revealed” in the confabulated Bible stories of the mark of Cain or Ham, that is to say, the curse of Blackness (stamped to be slaves). Thus, Africans were stamped by God to be naturally inferior, hypersexual, childlike, greedy, sneaky, and demon-natured.

These theories produced stories, plays, and books about Africans in Europe and the Americas that were presented in theaters and in storytelling that depicted the African/Black race as a beast of burden, savage by nature, and hypersexual (Blackface continues this tradition as ritualized activity seems to be a rite of passage on college campuses). These theories also held that Africans were to be feared because of their beastly savage nature and that Blacks were created by God as inferior in all aspects of humanity, created to be the lowest of servants, and thus had to be controlled and managed. These theories laid a foundation for justifying both White superiority and Black inferiority, and thus slavery, Black laws, discrimination, and racism. These stereotypes, created over 700 years ago, also found “scientific” confirmation in the “racist science” that persisted well into the 20th century.

Stereotypes Enhanced by Academic Theories

According to Robert Guthrie, there have been four major perspectives of pseudoscientific beliefs that have promoted racist stereotypes within the academic field of psychology. He suggests that theses perspectives became the basis of academic attempts to conduct research concerning African Americans. Essentially these perspectives, while they differ in some aspects of their theories, have the following idea in common: “human differences resulted from causes within people rather than environmental forces in society” (Guthrie, 1991). As a result, Americanized Africans barely out of slavery were compared to White Americans. The four perspectives include Darwin’s notion of the survival of the fittest, which maintained that the best, brightest, and strongest would dominate others and the environment (Whites’ superior intelligence, competency, and power). Sir Francis Galton’s, Eugenics in the United States makes the case for the idea that human beings inherit superior genes for greatness and genius (thus Whites were destined by “genes” to be superior and beautiful and Blacks inferior and ugly—the order of life). William McDougall developed the notion of inborn and unlearned instincts that produced predictable social behavior (of course, for Africans that meant laziness, savage nature, childlike, hypersexual). Finally, Mendelian genetics suggested that genetic traits came to the individual in large units rather than through a blending of qualities. These large units were seen as composed of both physical traits, psychological qualities, and behavioral tendencies (and thus, bad/dangerous human traits came with Black skin and great/desirable traits came with White skin).

G. Stanley Hall, one of the founders ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• About the Contributors
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Stress and Threats to African American Romantic Relationships
• 3 Cultural Humility and Couples Therapy
• 4 Love, Attachment Theory, and Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy
• 5 Case Study: EFT Stage One Work With Trust as Central Issue
• 6 Case Study: EFT De-Escalation With Interracial Couple With Chronic Pain
• 7 Case Study: EFT With One Spouse With Serious Depression
• 8 Case Study: EFT Withdrawer Re-Engagement
• 9 Case Study: EFT Pursuer Softening
• 10 Summary: Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy With Cultural Humility
• Appendix Attachment and Culture/Race-Related Interview Questions
• References
• Index