what makes couples therapy work (part 2)

We left off with Jane and Josh. Let’s pick up there.

The problem

Both of them feel uncared for, and neither can say so in a way the other can hear.

For Josh, feeling cared for has run through sex, admiration, and shared excitement. Those have thinned out, stopped, or in some form were never there to begin with. What fills the gap is coping: drinking, pornography, sports, more hours at work. He also feels nagged by Jane’s anxious pursuit and rejected by her lack of desire. The two feed each other. The less available he is, the harder she pursues, and the harder she pursues, the more criticized he feels. Under all of it sits the feeling he cannot tolerate, which is being small, or less than.

For Jane, feeling cared for has run through being noticed and appreciated, through an even split of the domestic load, and through intimacy in the wider sense of emotional contact rather than sex alone. Those have thinned out too. Her coping: drinking, sexually charged reading, true crime podcasts, hobbies, and turning her attention toward the kids. She feels betrayed by Josh’s coping and by his absence. Under it sits anger she keeps pressed down, and the belief that she is unlovable.

So they fight about the dishes, the kids’ schedules, and the tone of a text. Those fights are the surface. Neither one can find relief or empathy from the other for what is actually happening, so the small things get charged with the weight of the big ones.

What drew them together

Josh and Jane met in college. They were drawn to each other’s looks, personalities, and shared interests, and they also felt a fit. Where Josh was strong, Jane felt short. Where Jane was strong, Josh felt short. Each experienced the other as supplying something missing.

That fit helped and hurt. It helped by generating good feeling, a sense of being completed by another person. It hurt because it let them skip the work of identifying, naming, owning, and speaking their own vulnerable needs. When a partner covers the gap, neither person has to learn where the gap is or how to close it alone.

Then life changed. Work demands, money pressure, and household logistics all went up. The old unconscious arrangement could not be sustained, and when it slipped, each of them ran into attachment pain from much earlier in life. So they coped. But coping is not adapting. It was the solution each of them worked out as a baby and a child, running again in an adult body.

Their attachment history

Both Josh and Jane had what they would call a loving childhood. Not an unhappy one. Both still carried insecure attachment, which is more common than people expect. Across normative samples, roughly a third of infants classify as insecure, so plenty of people with decent childhoods are working with it.

Attachment security gets built out of the earliest exchanges with caregivers, in the first year or two, before there is language to hold any of it. So these insecurities were never stored as thoughts. They showed up as feelings that arrived in social moments. When Josh and Jane got together, they helped each other feel secure without having to try. When that arrangement fell apart under the weight of life, the old insecurities came back into focus.

What therapy has to do

The work is to catch attachment needs as they happen in the room. Dan Siegel’s four S’s are useful shorthand: people need to feel seen, safe, and soothed, and out of those comes feeling secure. Siegel wrote that for parents and children. It carries over to adults because the need does not expire. It just gets harder to admit.

In session, that runs as a five-step sequence, repeated:

1. Help the person notice a vulnerable emotion while it is occurring.

2. Help them feel it.

3. Help them regulate it.

4. Help them speak it.

5. The partner it lands on receives it and responds.

Written out, that sounds…tidy. In the room it is anything but.

What it actually looks like

Josh was talking about something and Jane cut in to correct him.

We stopped the conversation there because the interruption was pointing at something underneath it. We got curious with Jane about what she was experiencing. We asked her to track her senses: what her eyes were doing, what she was hearing, what she felt inside her body. She noticed her vision had narrowed to a point, her chest was tight, and her shoulders and jaw were clenched.

We had her step out of that for a moment by finding three things in the room her eyes were drawn to. Then we went back inside and had her stay with the sensation in her chest until it shifted. It did. She took a spontaneous deep breath and the tension dropped. We waited until it was gone before moving on.

Then we asked what emotion was there. Anger.

We invited her to speak the anger to her husband. I worked to keep it bite-sized so he could take it in, and had him monitor his own sensations while she spoke. When he started moving toward emotional flooding (distracting thoughts, intensifying sensations in the gut, chest, throat, and face), we paused her and turned to helping him regulate. As he settled, he recognized how frightened he becomes when she is upset, which was not something he had ever said out loud. We stayed with that until he could say it to her.

That is one sequence out of many. It took most of a session.

When it goes the other direction

Another session went differently. Josh got quiet. Quieter than usual. His face closed and he looked disengaged. When I stopped the conversation to ask what he was experiencing, he had few words and seemed cold and distant.

Josh was in freeze. Freeze carries very high activation and shows up on the outside as the least activated thing in the room, which is why it gets read as stonewalling or not caring. What he needed was help getting his physiology moving again.

I asked him to notice three things in the room. Then three things inside. Then three more in the room. He took a deeper breath. I asked him to wiggle his toes and start some gentle movement, rocking a little side to side.

Emotion started to show. He seemed less distant and more upset. I asked whether he had a sense of what he was feeling. Shame.

I asked where the shame was living in his body. His shoulders wanted to cave, his knees wanted to pull in, and there were knots in his stomach. I asked him, if it was not overwhelming, to put his attention on the sensations in his stomach, to observe them without trying to change them, and to stay there until something shifted.

After a few minutes he looked up, more socially engaged, and said the shame had subsided. What replaced it was helplessness and sadness, close to despair.

Odd as it sounds, I took that as a good sign. He was moving out of freeze and back into what he had been feeling just before he went into it. Helpless sadness of that kind is classic attachment pain. Psychoanalysts call it anaclitic depression.

I turned to Jane and asked what it was like to watch and feel this. Her eyes were wet. She said she felt open, and strangely closer to him.

Slow is fast

Work like this is slow because the core is only reachable at that pace. Defenses get in the way without anyone deciding they should. When we do get there, we find out what was never finished and never said. When those experiences can be completed with a partner who responds well enough, something shifts in how the brain holds the original material.

Bruce Ecker’s work applying memory reconsolidation research to psychotherapy argues that the old learning does not get suppressed or outgrown. Under the right conditions it gets unlocked and revised. That is the difference between managing a pattern and being done with it, and it is why this kind of change tends to hold rather than wear off. It is also what makes future assumptions and behavior more secure.

Eventually Jane and Josh could run a whole repair sequence in session without much from me. Then the repairs started happening at home, between sessions. Topics that used to create too much friction could be handled without a therapist in the room.

They needed a little over a year of weekly work. It included hundreds of ruptures and repairs, most of them small, plus a stretch of individual therapy for each of them. Those repairs rebuilt the relationship. A smaller number of tipping moments revised the memories and expectations underneath it. They recovered the marriage and built a bond stronger than the one they started with, and the whole family got the benefit of it.

Your story

Jane and Josh are invented. Both vignettes are composites, built out of many couples I have worked with, with the identifying details changed.

The pattern is not invented. If you read the fight about the dishes and recognized your own kitchen, or read Josh going quiet and knew that face, you are not looking at something rare or broken. You are looking at two people whose oldest ways of feeling cared for stopped working at the same time.

That is workable. It takes longer than most people want it to, and it asks both people to feel things they have spent years not feeling. Not every couple who starts this work stays together. Many do, and come out with something sturdier than what they walked in with.

If you want to find out whether this kind of work fits your situation, reach out to us at aaron@analogcounseling.com.

Sources

Blatt, S. J. (2004). Experiences of Depression: Theoretical, Clinical, and Research Perspectives. American Psychological Association.

Spitz, R. A. (1946). Anaclitic depression. The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 2, 313–342.

van IJzendoorn, M. H., & Kroonenberg, P. M. (1988). Cross-cultural patterns of attachment: A meta-analysis of the Strange Situation. Child Development, 59(1), 147–156.

Lyons-Ruth, K., et al. (1998). Implicit relational knowing: Its role in development and psychoanalytic treatment. Infant Mental Health Journal, 19(3), 282–289.

Ecker, B. (2015). Memory reconsolidation understood and misunderstood. International Journal of Neuropsychotherapy, 3(1), 2–46.

Ecker, B., Ticic, R., & Hulley, L. (2012). Unlocking the Emotional Brain. Routledge.

Lane, R. D., Ryan, L., Nadel, L., & Greenberg, L. (2015). Memory reconsolidation, emotional arousal, and the process of change in psychotherapy. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 38, e1.

Siegel, D. J., & Bryson, T. P. (2020). The Power of Showing Up. Ballantine.

Tronick, E. Z., & Gianino, A. (1986). Interactive mismatch and repair: Challenges to the coping infant. Zero to Three, 6(3), 1–6.

The Hidden Nature of Attachment Beliefs and Their Impact on Professional Success

Attachment beliefs are like invisible forces shaping our behaviors, often without us realizing it. These beliefs were formed before the left side of our brain—the part responsible for logic and conscious thought—was fully developed. Instead, they’re rooted in the right side of the brain, where feelings dominate and conscious reasoning takes a backseat.

This makes attachment beliefs tricky to recognize and even harder to change. When we think about our attachment behaviors, it’s easy to focus on situations where we’re consciously aware of our choices and actions. However, to truly understand and work with attachment, we need to shift our focus to those moments when we don’t notice anything wrong at all.

Imagine being in a conflict where you’re utterly convinced of your perspective, yet others around you question your behavior. Their doubts might leave you feeling confused or even defensive because, in your mind, everything makes perfect sense. This disconnect happens because attachment beliefs operate on an unconscious level. They’re so deeply ingrained that they influence our actions and reactions without us being aware of it.

In a professional setting, these unconscious patterns can significantly impact team dynamics, communication, and overall company success. If left unchecked, attachment beliefs can lead to misunderstandings, hinder collaboration, and create an environment where employees may feel disconnected or undervalued.

Understanding this is key for leaders and team members alike. By becoming more aware of these unconscious patterns, we can start to see where our beliefs might be holding us back or causing misunderstandings in the workplace. This awareness is the first step in making changes that lead to healthier, more authentic connections with others.

For a company to thrive, it’s essential that team members feel seen, heard, and understood. By learning to recognize and address attachment beliefs, leaders can foster a more inclusive and supportive environment. This not only improves interpersonal relationships but also enhances productivity, creativity, and overall job satisfaction.

In the end, working with attachment beliefs isn’t about fixing what’s broken but about shining a light on what’s hidden. It’s about being open to the possibility that there’s more going on beneath the surface than we realize—and that by exploring these depths, we can unlock greater potential for both personal growth and professional success.

What Are Attachment Styles?

Attachment styles are ways people connect and relate to others based on their early experiences with caregivers. John Bowlby, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, developed Attachment Theory, sometimes called the science of love, after studying relationships between mothers and troubled teenagers. He wanted to understand how early relationships influenced later behavior. Along with his colleague Mary Ainsworth, who studied interactions between parents and young children, they identified different attachment styles based on how children responded to connection, separation, and reconnection with their caregivers.

Ainsworth's research led to the creation of "The Strange Situation," a study that helped categorize four main attachment styles.* These styles are learned behaviors developed in response to early experiences of distress and are not meant to label someone as good or bad. Instead, they show how a child felt they needed to behave to feel emotionally safe with their caregiver. These unconscious patterns often continue into adulthood and influence romantic relationships, parenting, friendships and professional life. People tend to form relationships with bosses, co-workers, friends and partners who have similar attachment styles to one or both of their parents.

The Four Attachment Styles

1. Secure Attachment
Children with secure attachment felt listened to and trusted that their feelings would be respected. They grow up with a healthy ability to handle emotions and feel good about themselves.

2. Anxious/Ambivalent (Preoccupied) Attachment
These children experienced inconsistent attention from their parents, leading to prolonged anxiety. They learned to keep their parents' attention by being pleasing or entertaining, but this created a sense of low trust and a need to control. As adults, they might seem clingy, angry, controlling, or critical, stemming from a deep fear of abandonment and insecurity. Often they have to dissociate negative emotions like anger for fear it would cost them the relationship.

3. Dismissive/Avoidant Attachment
Children with this attachment style learned that expressing big emotions would be ignored, so they turned down their anxiety and disconnected from their feelings. They often come off as self-sufficient, preferring solo activities over team or emotional ones. They might appear uninterested in close relationships, masking low self-esteem with an inflated sense of independence.

4. Anxious/Avoidant (Fearful Avoidant) Attachment
These children experienced both pain and comfort from their parents, often due to abusive relationships. They couldn't develop a stable coping strategy, leading to a mix of needy and avoidant behaviors. This "come here/get away" approach causes high anxiety and difficulty regulating emotions, resulting in low self-esteem and low trust in others.

Understanding Attachment Styles

Attachment styles are patterns of feeling, thinking, and behaving around emotions and conflict. They can change over time with effort and can vary with different caregivers. Recognizing your attachment style can help you understand your behaviors in relationships and work towards healthier connections.

I like this free Attachment Style assessment outside of an officially administrated test: https://www.attachmentproject.com/blog/four-attachment-styles/

*There are good critics that these initial assessments were not done with a broad enough sample size. There have been many follow up studies to work to validate the categories across cultures. However, I think it is still a working theory (as most things are) and worth holding in tension with diverse norms. People want to grab these studies and use them to dictate health/unhealthy and I think that can be tricky at best and dangerous at worst. I find this especially happens when religion or morals are superimposed onto them.