In secure relationships, emotions are vehicles for communicating and solidifying
attachment bonds. Couples come into therapy with narratives about their problems that often cover a deep well of disowned emotions, unmet dependency needs and emotional pain. When deep core emotions are inaccessible, and emotional needs remain unmet, powerful dysregulated feelings often interfere with the ability to self-regulate or repair injuries.
As we witness growing numbers of people seeking therapy for relationship problems, it is clear that many partners fail to give and receive the very things that are essential for maintaining a secure attachment - empathy, listening, touching, dyadic resonance, a sense of seeing and being seen by each other, and ultimately, an opportunity to be in touch with core emotions while remaining present with each other.
The brain is a dynamic, connective, and socially seeking organ. There is a neurological need for secure relationships, from the time we are born and through out life. Attachment bonds provide a sense of safety and emotional availability in times of distress. Arousal, emotional regulation, and awareness are all organized through an interactive process that helps to solidify emotional bond and enable safe exploration of the environment.
In every subsequent relationship throughout the lifespan, feelings arise without
conscious awareness that influence the process of reasoning and decision making.
When negative feelings come up around repeated, unresolved attachment failures, defenses against emotional pain become locked in, while exploration and new behavioral
repertoires feel unsafe.
The neural circuitry underlying emotional bonds is now being mapped out as
clinical psychologists, developmental experts, and neuroscientists increasingly
collaborate and integrate the important knowledge that is rapidly becoming available. In
recent years, neuroscience has given us knowledge of the brain’s plasticity and the
transmitter circuits that can be altered and redirected by our thoughts, feelings, beliefs,
relationships, and external life conditions (Doidge, 2007; Siegel 2007).
Based upon knowledge of how the circuits in the brain affect and are affected by past experiences, coloring perceptions of current relationships, it is possible to understand why people who meet, fall in love, and get married, can later come to see each other as the cause of anxiety, distress and danger. New situations reengage old memory patterns. In milliseconds, subcortical processes merge past and present emotional reactions. Feelings arise that can influence the processes of reasoning and decision-making.
Intimate relationships can create growth and change, or alternatively can become
locked into destructive patterns of interaction. There are ways to recognize, explore,
and change locked-in, painful interactions between partners, and regulation of emotion
--or lack thereof-- play a role both in the dysregulation and the healing of these patterns.
Current research uncovering ways to reengage mind, brain, memory, and cognition informs t clinical interventions that can help intimate partners perceive and respond to each other’s emotions and behaviors in new ways. Relying on an understanding of the interplay of brain, mind, body, and emotion in the dynamics of human relations, we explore how current neuroscience research findings can inform clinical interventions.
