In general, people tend to have higher expectations from those they feel close to. We can list the expectations that arise toward people we feel close to as support, love, passion, friendship, loyalty, or respect—and we can expand these examples even further.
The increase in expectations along with a sense of closeness can create beautiful and meaningful sharing, but it can also lead to negative situations. As a result of expectations grounded in a sense of closeness, couples may find themselves in a deadlock and may turn to couples therapy.
Between couples, problems may arise due to time and many factors that exert influence within that time. Couples’ inability to communicate in a healthy way, experiencing issues related to the emotional closeness they feel toward one another, and encountering sexual problems in their relationship are situations that may seem inescapable but can be overcome with couples therapy.
What Is Couples Therapy?
Couples therapy aims to reveal the sources of conflict that cause problems between couples and, in the same direction, to address and evaluate the outcomes produced by these sources of conflict. By going to the root of the problems between partners, it is evaluated on what foundations they are actually based and what kinds of effects they create.
Couples therapy consists of practices carried out to reconcile couples who are in conflict and at an impasse at emotional or sexual crisis points.
Modern couples therapy determines its course today by drawing on many schools. Nourished by various approaches—systemic, behavioral, and psychoanalytic—couples therapy has also been influenced by communication studies conducted by the Palo Alto school since the 1960s.
What Is Analytic Couples Therapy?
Analytic couples therapy addresses the psychological dynamics within each partner regarding the problems that arise or the situations perceived as a deadlock. So, what is psychological dynamics?
Human beings have a tendency either to maintain behavioral or psychological processes or to change/correct them through feedback and prediction. This functioning is called consciousness. However, as the fundamental element that directs behavior and at the same time reflects a complex system, unconscious processes emerge. Unconscious processes lie at the core of problems and conflicts, yet problems are generally resolved consciously, hidden, distorted, or repressed.
Analytic couples therapy examines and evaluates whether there are unconscious processes that either partner has developed without awareness. The situation called psychological dynamics refers to unconscious imitations that one of the partners carries out and maintains without realizing it. Each partner may unconsciously imitate parental models or certain interactions they experienced in childhood. Yet these unconscious imitations that continue without awareness can form the basis of the problems that couples find themselves stuck in today; and unless this psychological dynamics carried over from the past is brought to light, conflicts may continue. The main aim of analytic couples therapy is to bring these unconscious interaction imitations from the past to light and thus resolve the conflicts experienced in the present.
How Is Analytic Couples Therapy Applied?
Analytic couples therapy follows a past-oriented route and aims to bring unconsciously imitated past interactions to light. Accordingly, in analytic couples therapy, personal life stories are expressed. The unconscious roots behind destructive and conflictual behaviors discovered through talk therapy evoke intense emotions and provide psychological healing. When a person verbalizes the situations they have been repeatedly experiencing unconsciously, therapy is considered to have achieved success to a large extent. After this stage, resolving the issues that will be addressed at the conscious level proceeds in a much healthier way.
In the process of analytic couples therapy, insight is gained into childhood experiences and behavior patterns built on defensive foundations formed in early childhood. Change in the couple dynamic through these imitations brought into consciousness can become possible only through repeatedly experiencing these insights at the relationship level, under the observation of the therapy process.
Through analytic couples therapy, couples can become consciously aware of their unconscious imitations from the past and, by seeing how they are triggered in their current relationship, can take action so as not to repeat them.
