The Path of Transformation

There is an oft used phrase in EFT, an attachment based approach to healing marital distress, “catching bullets”. I use this phrase in my counseling sessions with couples to help them (and ourselves) work on not being reactive to their partners negative comments. This helps couples learn to stay out of, stop or slow down getting into a fight cycle. This takes an amazing amount of restraint and self control and one most distressed couples find very difficult to do. It is very challenging to manage our impulse to self protect when we are being criticized, attacked or generally on the receptive end of someone’s fear and hate. The reason it is especially difficult in marital or love relationships is because this is the person we expect to love us, to be there for us, to understand us, cherish us, and certainly not criticize or attack us. We feel betrayed by the one we have trusted the most.

A powerful example of “catching bullets” is seeing the work of Jesus on the Cross. Richard Rohr says this:

“The significance of Jesus’ wounded body is his deliberate and conscious holding of the pain of the world and refusing to send it elsewhere. The wounds were not necessary to convince God that we were lovable; the wounds are to convince us of the path and the price of transformation. They are what will happen to you if you face and hold sin in compassion instead of projecting it in hatred. Jesus’ wounded body is an icon for what we are all doing to one another and to the world.”

This is a powerful image (what an icon is) of love, one that will change marriages, and the world. I hope you will ponder and reflect on this, that Jesus shows us a way to follow, a way to be, by “holding one another’s pain” and “face and hold sin in compassion instead of projecting it in hatred”. This changes everything in human relationships. I see it everyday in couples who are learning to see that their partner’s angry or rejecting comments are more than bullets being fired to hurt and wound and by refusing to send it back, the door is opened to reconciliation.

Why We Shout In Anger

A spiritual director who was visiting a local beach found a group of family members who were shouting in anger at each other. He turned to his disciples, smiled and asked,

'Why do people shout in anger at each other?'

The disciples thought for a while, one of them said, 'Because we lose our calm, we shout.'

'But, why should you shout when the other person is just next to you? You can as well tell him what you have to say in a soft manner,’ said the director.

His disciples gave some other answers but none satisfied the other disciples.

Finally the spiritual director explained,

'When two people are angry at each other, their hearts distance a lot. To cover that distance they must shout to be able to hear each other. The angrier they are, the stronger they will have to shout to hear each other to cover that great distance.

What happens when two people fall in love? They don't shout at each other but talk softly, because their hearts are very close. The distance between them is either nonexistent or very small...'

The director continued, 'When they love each other even more, what happens? They do not speak, only whisper and they get even closer to each other in their love. Finally they even need not whisper, they only look at each other and that's all. That is how close two people are when they love each other.'

He looked at his disciples and said:

'So when you argue do not let your hearts get distant, do not say words that distance each other more, or else there will come a day when the distance is so great that you will not find the path to return.’

What is it that distances you from the ones you love? Do you not feel understood, accepted, respected or valued? Or are you not understanding, accepting, respecting or valuing those you love? These attributes determine the distance between hearts and the volume of the voice.

What Makes Emotionally Focused Therapy(EFT) for Marriage Counseling Different

For one, it is effective, very effective. It actually helps bring about changes so that couples are able to connect with each other. It does not focus specifically on better communication skills but helps make real communication possible, the kind of communication that says: "You get me, you understand me." It does not focus on changing behavior like going out on date nights, or saying the right things, or doing desired favors. It does make right behavior possible because for maybe the first time your spouse is able to ask you for what they need in a way that makes you desire to meet their need. There is little in life more satisfying than knowing you know what someone needs and can provide it. Many, if not most, of the conflicts couples experience is because one or both partners feel inadequate to satisfy or meet their partner's needs and desires. It does not teach problem solving skills like negotiating or compromising but it does make those possible because you no longer fear your partner's intentions. You know they love you and desire to be there for you and do not desire to take advantage of you. In other words, EFT marriage counseling is different because it helps remove fear from your relationship.

Restore Struggling Marriages

What if you could save 73% of the troubled marriages that come through your door?

Marriage is precious. It is the building block of society. If you save a marriage, you save a family and if you save a family maybe you save a culture. This is not hyperbole, it is documented research findings. Every social science study on the affect of marriage for adults and children demonstrates its dramatic impact on health, wealth, and well being. It is virtually indisputable that a good and lasting marriage is the best investment anyone can make, irrespective that we are hard wired to connect and multiply. Married people live longer, are more likely to avoid significant health issues and they build more wealth, and their children are more likely to make life work for them.1

We have the means to restore struggling marriages, and not only restore but form lasting emotional bonds that make us safe, secure, and happy. Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) is a primary tool of restoration as the most researched and documented effective couples therapy. A meta-analysis of several studies found that 73% of couples treated with EFT recovered from their distress and 86% made significant improvement in their relationship.2 These are outstanding results for any type of counseling, much less with distressed couples who wonder if they are sleeping in the same bed with their enemy.

About five years ago, I became interested in EFT. In the past two years I have entered into a training program developed by the founder of EFT (Dr. Sue Johnson). I have been a licensed therapist for over thirty years and this certification process is the most comprehensive, demanding and effective post graduate study training I have ever experienced. This is not attend a seminar, fill out a survey and get your certificate. Dr. Johnson and her organization (ICEEFT) have “protected their brand”. You have confidence in your competency to practice EFT when you complete the certification process.

That is why I am writing you. Seven out of every ten couples you refer will find their way back to each other. Almost nine out of ten will see significant improvement. I invested the time and money to be trained in EFT because marriage is too important, especially today, not to provide the best chance possible for saving a marriage, a family, and maybe a culture.

Introduce your organization to EFT through a “Hold Me Tight” seminar.

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Is there a couple you know in crisis? A Three Day Intensive may be what is needed.

The Prism of Jesus

I am a believer in Jesus Christ so everything that touches my life is passed through the prism of Jesus. This is often a troubling or bothersome process. It would be so much simpler just to accept things like theories on human behavior, social trends, and of course lifestyle choices on their own merits without having to filter them through the prism of Jesus. It's not so much that the bother involves “what would Jesus say” like a child wondering if Mom of Dad would approve, though there might be an element of that for certain things. It is more a question of what is real and true. This can become rather complicated, and at least for me a convoluted process, especially if the subject matter involves the sciences and empirical data.

Most people might not even know what “empirical data” is much less care but it dominates much of what our society considers “real and true”. Of course this data is only able to approximate a percentage of what is real and true because everything is measured in a statistical expression so we only get what is likely or unlikely to be true. We have polling for who will be elected, how soon we might die, or when the polar cap will melt, or how effective this or that method is, all expressed as statistically significant or not. I guess it is comforting to know with a such and such certainty that this or that will happen or not, although I usually think about the fact that the unlikely can still happen. There is no guarantee with statistics so it comes down to playing the percentages. The interesting thing is how certain these things seem to become when the likelihood is greater than or less than....

We seem to have become a culture that relies on statistics to guide our lives. It is almost as if we can never really know or trust anything unless we can measure it. This is what empiricism or materialism is, only that which can be observed and measured is real and true. We can only trust our senses and our instruments and our calculations to guide our way. These are things we can be certain of because we can touch, taste and see and measure them.

My profession of counseling is of the social sciences like psychology. There are many, many theories in this field so research and statistical analysis are important to help determine which are the most practically effective. This is very helpful for practitioners like me to help decide the best practices for helping clients. The problem is that sometimes the theory that stands up to statistical analysis because it is very effective becomes something greater than a statistical advantage for helping someone, it begins to make claims that it has discovered the truth of who we are.

Take for example an approach to marriage therapy that I have been trained in, Emotionally Focused Therapy or EFT. The research results are amazing, 75-80% or couples experience a successful outcome. This is a very powerful method for helping couples stay married, and happily so. I am thankful for EFT because it has enabled me to help hurting couples bond to one another, even ones who have been unfaithful. Where I struggle with EFT and Sue Johnson, its founder, is her claim that EFT, and the theory it is based on, attachment theory, is the science of love. In other words, she is claiming to know the truth of what love is, and how it works. This is where my prism of Jesus begins to kick in.

God is love and I know the love of God and it cannot be reduced to attachment. We humans love to explain things and believe we have the power to understand everything, if not now at some point in our progression. Attachment, while integral to human development, is primarily about how humans need and care for one another so attachment as love is a safe haven, a place of soothing comfort where someone is there for us. This is vitally important and certainly love includes a haven where we are cared for, accepted, and understood. But this is not all love is and it is not all that we need, which is what Sue Johnson seems to believe. This is humanistic reductionism that does not account for a Creator God. In her perspective, we are all there is; no wonder fear is considered the primary emotion of attachment.

So what else is love if it is more than attachment? It is transformational power that says “Behold I make all things new”(Rev. 21:5). In the words of C.S. Lewis in his book Miracles: “ In the Christian story God descends to reascend. He comes down; down from the heights of absolute being into time and space, down into humanity; down further still, if embryologists are right, to recapitulate in the womb ancient and pre-human phases of life; down to the very roots and seabed of the Nature He has created. But he goes down to come up again and bring the whole ruined world up with Him.” Love is the power of God moving in and through us to lift us up out of muck and mire of fear based living: “There is no fear in love. Perfect love casts out all fear for fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.” (1 John 4:18). This love is more than the love which humans have for one another, our human love is but a shadow of the power in the love of God that not only makes us feel safe, accepted, and secure but transforms us into different beings, something real and true.

Unity Sand

I attended a wedding of one of my wife's co-workers this past weekend and I do not know how most wedding ceremonies are conducted or even if there is a “usual” wedding ceremony. This one took place in a church that I assume is a traditional Christian church and so this one is probably similar to most Christian wedding ceremonies. This couple included a “Unity Sand” ritual that I was unfamiliar with but similar to the “Unity Candle” ritual my wife and I used in our wedding. The ritual is simple with each mother of the couple pouring one of the different colored sand into a larger glass container to symbolize the uniting of two families and the couple pouring the rest of the sand in so that a pattern of alternating colors is evident. Christian weddings are all about uniting two into one and I assume most weddings have some symbolism that emphasizes the same thing. The advantage of unity sand over a unity candle is that the couple gets to take the mixed sand home with them as a reminder.

As a marriage counselor who sees couples that are having great difficulty staying united I could not help but wonder how much power these rituals have. Of course by itself ritual has no power unless it has meaning so how important is it to the couple to stay united is the question. There are so many other forces during a life that compete for unity like making a living or having a successful career and mostly plain old selfishness. I like this image of sand pouring in to make a new and different entity because it makes one think about two people pouring their lives into each other to make something other than just themselves. This image of mixing lives together is obviously something that makes marriage unique.
We must be willing to give up something, and sometimes a lot of our self in order to stay together. That is often really hard to do.

I hope this couple makes it through a lifetime of staying together and as we all know divorce is more common, somewhere between 40-50% even though there is a lot of disagreement over this number (Scott M Stanley, “What is the Real Divorce Rate”). And the point for each one of us who are married is not what the divorce rate is but how important and meaningful is your marriage? Do you really believe uniting two lives into one is essential? Is this something you really want to do? Does staying together mean enough to you to do it? Do you know what it takes and how to do it?

One of the great things about attending a wedding is the witnessing of two people making a commitment to be together and the ceremony is all about making promises to each other to do just that; it is a moment filled with hope. I wonder if a wedding ceremony reflects more than just the hope for two people remaining joined together. Maybe it is a metaphor to remind us of what we must do as a larger community. Maybe it reminds us that we must pour and mix our lives together, that we cannot keep our sand separate from theirs. There is a great amount of discussion in this country about how we have become a divided nation. It has become very difficult for our governing bodies and political parties to agree on much of anything. We are hardly able to accomplish much of anything together; unity seems to have become an elusive goal. So many social issues divide us from gay marriage to abortion to income distribution that it seems unresolvable. Many of us do not want to pour any of our sand in with their sand. I do not know if there is a connection between becoming and staying united as a couple and being united as a nation but I suspect there is. Maybe our country needs a unity sand ceremony to remind us of what it takes to be “one nation, indivisible.”

My wife Carolyn and I try to get away to be with each other every three months or so. These “getaways” often coincide with a birthday or anniversary but not always. We usually arrive around noon and leave the next afternoon. We always hope to arrive sooner but necessities and demands prevent that. This does not sound like much time away and we would prefer longer but we always seem to leave feeling refreshed, renewed, and reconnected; not a bad outcome. The place we visit is a retreat house called “Quiet Place” in rural Garrard County near Lancaster, Ky. We have been doing this for several years now and we are so thankful for this place of retreat that Rick and Teresa Jenkins provide for ministers, pastors, and other Christian care givers. Rick and Teresa serve the servers. I don't know where they retreat but Quiet Place has become an invaluable tool for reconnection with the Lord and one another.

While visiting there this time I read from Conversations (www.conversationsjournal.com), a Christian journal about spiritual transformation. They provide a forum of “spiritual accompaniment and honest dialogue for authentic transformation.” Living in a culture that offers mostly sound bites of phantom promises that disguise other agendas something solid like real change is appealing;we all hunger for the real. Consider the woman in the Gospels who met Jesus at the well; with several relationships she obviously struggled with figuring out who she was and what she wanted and when she encountered the real she immediately changed her life, now that is transformation.

An article by Michael Glerup, who writes on “ancient christian wisdom for a postmodern age”, discussed change as defined by Gregory of Nyssa, an Orthodox Bishop from the fourth century who lived in what is now Turkey. Gregory said that change happens in one of two directions, for good or for ill. Change for ill is that which is cyclic and repetitive so that nothing really lasts or satisfies. We reach a state of temporary satisfaction that depletes, like eating food, and we have to do it all over again and again and again. Change for good is that which helps us progress in capacity, in our ability to grow and receive more. It is something that satisfies, that brings a fullness that lasts. Change for ill leaves us always hungering for more, change for good leaves us satisfied knowing that there is more, and so we are content.

While there is much more to Gregory's view on transformation (Conversations, Vol.8.1) his understanding of the cyclic, repetitive, empty change is what we see in struggling couple's arguments (not to mention the stock market and economic cycles). Their argument cycle is a repetitive one and it is the same over and over again. They keep coming back to it because a deeper hunger is never satisfied, it is like playing a roulette wheel, the ball gets thrown and you watch it spin hoping it lands in the right place. It rarely does and with repetitive cycles it never does. The insanity is that we believe we are going to win next time.

Becoming aware of our deeper hunger(s) is critical to orienting our selves toward what is Good. The difficult thing for most us is to begin to trust, to believe that their really is something solid and real and good that can meet our deepest longing. Receiving an experience of that, whether during a counseling session or a meeting at the well gives hope that real satisfaction is possible. Couples that become aware of their own and their mates true longing and move to meet that is what breaks the repetitive argument cycle and brings peace to the relationship.

While the time at Quiet Place is never quite long enough for Carolyn and I and we leave yearning to stay in a place of rest and quiet and connection, we know this peace is real and we can experience it again. I think that is something like the hope of heaven.

Place of Pain, Place of Hope

Every week couples come into my office facing a crisis in their marriage. They are typically at the end of their rope with each other and are often ready to separate. They are asking the question would I be better off if I were not with this person. They are wondering if their life would be more full to have their partner out of their life, to no longer be joined and responsible for being with their mate. The marital relationship has become something to avoid and get away from; it has become a place of pain. Marriage counseling is often a last gasp effort that hardly seems worth the trouble. It is hard work and requires the facing of our failures, another place of pain. For any couple to go through this there has to be the hope of a good marriage.

Most of us have an idea of what marriage is supposed to be like and many have a marriage that is full of love, commitment, safety and companionship. The good marriage is that picture of two people facing the challenges of life together and enjoying each other physically and emotionally. We see that picture in romantic movies, novels, and love songs. For those distressed couples sitting in my office this picture does not match their experience. I regularly hear them say that they are ready to give up on the idea of marriage believing that they have somehow been duped into entering into it in the first place: "If I had known how bad this would be I never would have gotten married and I will not make the same mistake again." I believe many people have had a similar thought even if never acted upon.

According to recent research conducted by the George Barna Group (www.barna.org) four out of five adults have been married; that is 78% of adults have been married and only 22% have never been married. Also, of those who have been married, one third or 33% have experienced at least one divorce. In spite of this rate of divorced individuals, marriage is a choice most make, even a second or third time. Marriage is obviously something people regularly do. So is divorce. As George Barna says: "There no longer seems to be much of a stigma attached to divorce; it is now seen as an unavoidable rite of passage… Interviews with young adults suggest that they want their initial marriage to last, but are not particularly optimistic about that possibility. There is also evidence that many young people are moving toward embracing the idea of serial marriage, in which a person gets married two or three times, seeking a different partner for each phase of their adult life."

The "idea of serial marriage" is a scary thought. Serial marriage means serial divorce and that brings to mind "serial murder". If you have ever been divorced or witnessed divorce as a child of a divorced couple, images of murder are not far off the mark. The emotional and material consequences of divorce have been well documented. Few divorces end amicably and they all involve, at the very least loss, a painful experience. No divorced person I know has ever denied that ending their marriage was painful.

It is ironic that couples who divorce are attempting to get out of a place of pain only to most likely enter into a more painful experience of divorce. Of course, pain can be all consuming and the present experience of pain is not dulled by a future promise of greater pain. We want the pain to stop now and getting away from a marriage that has become a place of pain dominates our motivation. If George Barna is right that there is a trend toward serial marriage (and divorce) it raises several questions, not the least of which is how well you are able to tolerate emotional pain. Maybe this trend of serial marriage is a dysfunctional way of coping with pain? Maybe many of us have don't know how to tolerate emotional pain so we run from one painful situation to the next.

What kind of pain are you willing to tolerate; the pain of a distressed marriage or the pain of separation and loss? Do you really think running from one marriage and divorce to the next marriage and divorce will solve your pain? Why not consider tolerating the pain, the frustration and the challenge of repairing a distressed marriage? Marriages can be repaired and restored. It is hard work and it does involve pain. A good marriage is not a false hope; you have not been duped into believing in and hoping for a good marriage. Your marriage can be good.

Real Help for Marriages

I am experiencing the privilege of having conversations with Dr. Sharon Hart May, the author of books on safe haven marriages. Her latest book, How to Argue So Your Spouse Will Listen is one I give to every couple I counsel. My conversations by teleconference are focusing on EFT or Emotionally Focused Therapy, an approach to marriage counseling developed by Drs Sue Johnson and Les Greenberg. A substantial body of research outlining the effectiveness of EFT now exists. Research studies find that 70-75% of couples move from distress to recovery and approximately 90% show significant improvements. The only situation in which EFT is not indicated is on-going violence in the relationship. EFT is being used with many different kinds of couples in private practice, university training centers and hospital clinics and many different cultural groups. These distressed couples include partners suffering from disorders such as depression, post traumatic stress disorders and chronic illness. I have found this approach to be remarkably effective with couples I see and can affirm that my experience with EFT is consistent with the research results. This method really helps couples.

I have over twenty-five years of experience with couples and marriage. I am a clinical member of the American Association of Marriage and Family Therapy and have taken numerous courses and workshops on how to help couples stay married and most of them have a documented success rate of around 35%. (One notable exception is Dr. John Gottman's work). I cannot express how frustrating and sad it is to watch couples make a decision to separate and divorce. I almost quit seeing couples who were in distress because I knew how unhelpful traditional marriage counseling was with true and meaningful results. I no longer feel that way and am now confident that with God and this method I can help any couple who desires to stay together or reconnect.

I do not make this statement lightly. I know it is bold. The couples that find their way to my office are in significant distress. There typically has been an affair or some other major betrayal or traumatic experience that severely stresses the relationship bond. There is great emotional pain present but the tools and means are available to help them restore, redeem, and transform their relationship and grow into loving union. I am humbled and grateful to participate in such a thing as this. Please tell any couple who is experiencing marital difficulties that real hope is available.

May Blessings Be in Your Day