Relationship Retreat
Does Couples Counselling Work?
Brain Scans & Relationship Insights
How many relationships do you know of that you would regard as high functioning and responsible for bringing out the best in each person?
Neuroscientist Bianca Acevedo and her colleagues took brain scans of people in long-term relationships and discovered that only 10% were fulfilling and happy.
Most people struggle to nurture the conditions necessary for a flourishing relationship and maintain interactions that result in passionate coupledom, which the researchers dubbed as ‘swans’.
As with so many other areas of life, our childhoods set the framework for our attachment style, schemas, anusayas and other blindspots which sabotage our chances for optimal connection and leave us in the ugly duckling stage of development.
The poet Rafiq Kathwari captured the common experience many of us felt as children in his one-line poem, On Receiving Father at JFK After His Long Flight From Kashmir:
“As I open my arms wide, he extends his hand.”
We could speculate on the reasons why the father opted for a handshake but suffice to say it takes maturity to realise most parents did the best they could and it takes a lifetime to realise that feeling loved and complete is ultimately an inside job.
Phil Stutz grew up with a violent father who up and left him as a child. After so many years of being battered his mother concluded that all men were worthless. From a young age, Stutz was repeatedly told he would be worthless unless he became a doctor.
He gained a medical degree and then trained as a psychiatrist blending science with intuition to develop his own theories.
Stutz claims that there are some unavoidable aspects of reality we must accept before we can move forward in life. The first step he offers patients is to accept the Aspects of Reality - being pain, uncertainty and constant work.
From the perspective of Carl Jung, within our psyche our ego identity is far more developed than our self is.
Constant work, pain and uncertainty are all anathemas to the ego.
Is it any wonder the Disney, or fairytale picture of love is so appealing to us?
Being primed to think the right relationship will be smooth sailing and constant magic has become the mirage of our times.
The Surprise by Jean-Antoine Watteau
In his fictional work, The Course of Love, philosopher Alain de Botton captures our infantile tendencies when it comes to relationships:
…though so much about Rabih will alter and mature over the years – his understanding of love will for decades retain precisely the structure it first assumed in the summer of his sixteenth year. He will continue to trust in the possibility of rapid, wholehearted understanding and empathy between two human beings and in the chance of a definitive end to loneliness. He will experience similarly bittersweet longings for other lost soulmates spotted on buses, in the aisles of supermarkets and in the reading rooms of libraries. He will have precisely the same feeling at the age of twenty, during a semester of study in Manhattan, about a woman seated to his left on the northbound C train, and at twenty-five in the architectural office in Berlin where he is doing work experience... He will need to learn that love is a skill rather than an enthusiasm.
Constant work, pain & uncertainty.
Despite his devotion to self-awareness, Stutz speaks of his inability to find lasting love.
Unfortunately, the imprints from his childhood have won out, although he acknowledges he makes for a far better partner now than during his younger years.
At 74, during the filming of a documentary about himself, he accepts the challenge of engaging fully in a relationship opportunity which he was half invested in.
The Lovers, by René Magritte
Barry Michels is a fellow psychotherapist who has co-authored books with Stutz. Michels holds that the defining factor in whether a relationship is strong or not is how competent a couple is at creating an emotional environment where they feel close, trust each other, and here’s the big one: where each person wants the other to get the most out of life.
Whereas our ego identity is self-serving by nature, our self, or soul is other-oriented.
As we dedicate ourselves to our individuation or self-actualisation, we move away from an over-dependency on a relationship to fill the void that only our higher purpose can meet.
There are a plethora of impactful tools and theories that can improve our relationships but without tending to the soul aspect as well as the ego it is unlikely couples therapy will be successful.
Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem, Love Song, illustrates how becoming whole acts as a bridge.
Self-actualisation takes us from the ego’s loneliness and into the connectedness that arises from developing the self and coming on stream with the collective consciousness.
When my soul touches yours a great chord sings!
How shall I tune it then to other things?
O! That some spot in darkness could be found
That does not vibrate when’er your depth sound.
But everything that touches you and me
Welds us as played strings sound one melody.
Where is the instrument whence the sounds flow?
And whose the master-hand that holds the bow?
O! Sweet song
The poet begins by sharing his worries about being in love.
If pain is one of the core aspects of reality then to experience love, we have to open ourselves to potential loss and heartache.
Uncertainty is another aspect of reality. Who knows how we will cope when we become vulnerable and allow our wounds and frailties to be exposed?
There is a burgeoning tendency towards avoidance in relationships where people seek to shelter their soul “O! That some spot in darkness could be found, That does not vibrate when’er your depth sound” far away from their partner.
Overcoming these challenges and doing the constant work has a profound effect, facilitating the union of souls Rilke speaks of in the second part of his poem.
We may bemoan the Disney image of soul mates appearing to be a modern idea, but it stretches back to Plato’s Symposium, where the philosopher Aristophanes discusses the concept of mirror souls.
In Greek mythology, Zeus, split androgynous human beings into two separate parts, male and female, and they spend their whole lives in pursuit of their other halves so that they could become whole again.
Two human beings in love can come together to create one whole relationship and still maintain their distinct individuality and not lose sight of their own unique purpose in life.
If we wish to fully experience the sweet song of union then we are tasked with refining our egoic nature, confronting our shadow selves and moving into a greater soul orientation.
The Birthday, by Marc Chagall
The musician Steve Winwood expressed the yearning we each have to experience higher love in his song of the same name, saying:
Bring me higher love
Think about it, there must be a higher love
Down in the heart or hidden in the stars above
Without it, life is wasted time
We might all want it but very few of us grow into readiness for it.
As T.S Eliot remarked:
Between the potency,
And the existence…
Falls the Shadow.
Francisco de Goya: Self-portrait with Dr Arrieta
Alain de Botton affirms 3 essential qualities for cultivating high-functioning relationships:
1) Kindness: seeking (and being) a partner who is gentle with our imperfections and can good-humouredly tolerate us as we are.
2) Shared vulnerability: someone with whom we can be open about our anxieties, worries and the problems that throw us off balance: someone we don’t have to put on a good front for; someone around whom we can be weak, vulnerable and honest – and who will be the same around us.
3) Understanding: someone who is interested in, and can make sense of, certain obscure features of our minds: our obsessions, preoccupations and ways of seeing the world. And whom we are excited to understand in turn.
Our couples counselling retreat draws on conventional approaches to improving relationships while exploring the larger themes of shadow aspects, core wounds and individuation.
