One of my goals in Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy (EFCT; Sue Johnson) is to help partners learn to make repairs more quickly and effectively so they can get back to feeling connected. Making repairs is in fact the secret weapon of emotionally connected partners (John Gottman). Notice that the secret weapon here is not about never having conflicts. We’re humans, we’re complicated; we get into conflicts with each other when we feel some form of attachment distress, and we exhibit adaptive coping strategies related to feelings of fight or flight. These individual coping strategies, however, can often make things worse and lead to dysfunctional communication cycles. Understanding how these cycles develop and learning effective ways to repair and reestablish connection is vitally important.
When our oldest daughter was first learning how to ride a bicycle, a friend of ours shared some simple advice: teach your child how to fall off the bike before teaching them how to ride. Learning how to reach out more and repair ruptures in our relationships is a bit like this. We know we’re going to let our partner down sometimes; it’s what we do after we fall into conflict that’s important so we can get back to the connection that we want.
Repairs come in all sizes. Small verbal repairs, comforting gestures, positive humor are all types of repairs that can heal a rupture. Larger types of repair might include formal apologies and expressions of deeply felt remorse. These repairs can happen at any time, during, before, or after the disconnection.
The Attachment Injury Repair Model found within EFCT provides a roadmap for making larger repairs and a rough guideline for making smaller ones. Here’s a shortened version of the road map to repairing ruptures that I often use in my practice:
- Allow the “injured partner” to identify and express hurt feelings, to the extent that they feel truly heard;
- Provide an opportunity for the “injuring partner” to express remorse in a heartfelt way;
- Develop an understanding as to how the injury could have happened in the first place.
The order here is important. If we start with the last step, it might feel like the injuring partner is making excuses instead of a repair (i.e. “You were so mean to me this morning, I didn’t want to say anything nice to you.”). Instead, we start with listening to and truly hearing the “injured partner” share their pain, fear, and sadness. When the this partner feels really understood, then the “injuring partner” can express the remorse they feel and repair. At that point, we can work to understand how the injury might have come to be in order to prevent it from happening again. Returning to an emotionally connected place is the goal for repairing miscommunications, ruptures, and attachment injuries.
Further reading
