The task in Collaborative Couple Therapy is to construct intimate conversations by helping partners confide their leading-edge feeling, often the one that’s rattling around in their minds making them uneasy (or, as Marshall Rosenberg put it, what’s alive for them at the moment). If they confide this leading-edge feeling—figure it out, put it in words, and feel their partner understands—they often experience a sense of relief and a surge of warm caring feeling.
But is there just one leading-edge feeling at any given moment? To explore this issue, let’s consider Maya, who in a couple therapy session castigates her husband, Steve, for so frequently coming home late for dinner. Her leading-edge feeling appears to be anger. But couldn’t it also be:
- Hurt that Steve doesn’t care enough about her feelings to come home on time.
- Disappointment that he doesn’t on his own behalf want to spend more time with her.
- Fear that his love for her might have flagged.
- Shame about getting angry in the way her mother always did, which scared and embarrassed her.
- Frustration in failing to get him to understand how she feels.
- Distress at the idea that she may not be as important to him as he is to her.
A configuration of some of these feelings is generally implicit. But they’re not there. What is there is anger. So I try to bring one of these implicit feelings into the moment.
I say to Maya, “You’re angry. Do you also feel hurt?” “Oh yes, she says,” her voice softening, “I keep forgetting that stab of pain just before I lash out.” Her demeanor has changed and, with it, her leading-edge feeling. A moment before, she was unaware she felt hurt. Well, actually, she didn’t feel hurt. Now she does. My question sparked a resetting of her mind, bringing the “hurt” out of the realm of potential feelings and up on the stage.
In suggesting “hurt,” I made a guess. If it didn’t feel right to her, I hope she’d correct me by saying, for example, “It’s not hurt. It’s fear that he’s losing interest in me.”
Instead of guessing, I could have explored more broadly by:
- Mentioning several alternative feelings, saying, for example, “You’re angry, Do you also feel hurt or afraid or disappointed, or something else?”
- Leaving the nature of the feeling open, saying, for example, “If you weren’t feeling angry, what would you feel?”
- Bringing her in on the principle I’m using, saying, for example, “Within a complaint is often a wish or fear or other vulnerable feeling. If that’s true in your case here, Maya, what would that wish or fear be?”
A conflict-filled couple exchange typically involves repeated resettings of each partner’s mind. Sean slides into his chair in a couple therapy session and says, “I think we’re doing well.” He sneaks a look at his wife Gloria, sitting next to him. His unspoken leading-edge feeling is, “I’m worried you might say we’re not doing well since you’ve done that here before.”
Until the moment that Sean spoke, Gloria’s unspoken leading-edge feeling had been, “Thank God we’re finally here. I could hardly wait to talk about our awful fight.” Hearing what Sean just said, however, Gloria experiences a wave of loneliness (“How could we be living in such different worlds?”) followed by a surge of anger (“He doesn’t know me at all. I could be anybody. All he’s interested in is himself”). Her mind has reset twice. She says sharply, “What relationship have you been in? Did you forget Wednesday already?”
Hearing Gloria’s complaint, Sean’s mind resets. If he were to express his leading-edge feeling, he might say, “Oh, I really screwed up. I’m in trouble now.” Instead, he says, “We’ve had much worse fights. I hardly remember that one.” He’s trying to convince Gloria that the fight wasn’t a big deal. Glancing over at her and seeing her look of disgust, he slips into the “I’m a failure as a husband” frame of mind and then into the “She’s a bitch” frame of mind. His mind has reset twice. He says, “Are you ever happy with anything I do?”
As their therapist, I try to come up with a comment that might turn their argument into a conversation:
- It looks like you’re caught in the struggle we’ve talked about before. Do you see it that way, too?
- In what ways is this argument useful and in what ways is it not so useful?
- Do I have it right, Sean, that you feel unhappy with yourself and unfairly attacked by Gloria and that you, Gloria, feel alone at the moment, discouraged about the state of things, and angrier at Sean than you want to be?
I hope that whichever question I choose will enable them to step back and look, together, at what is going on between them. I hope my question will reset their minds.
Or I might make a stab at tracking the sequence of leading-edge feelings.
Dan: I’m going to make a bunch of speculations about what you guys might have felt in the session, and you can tell me afterwards whether any of them are accurate. Okay, Sean, I imagine you felt disappointed that Gloria didn’t share your view that it was a good week, and then felt bad that you didn’t remember the fight, and then felt attacked, perhaps slipping into that feeling you’ve talked about of being a little boy with an angry mother. And you might have gone back and forth between “Gloria has reason to be upset” and “She doesn’t have reason and she’s being unfair”—perhaps worrying whether she really likes you. Gloria, I imagine that you felt disappointed when Sean didn’t see the significance of the fight, and then felt alone, and then angry—getting into a state in which you felt frustrated by practically everything he says and forgot that there’s anything you do like about him.
The purpose in this short paper is to question the Collaborative Couple Therapy notion of leading-edge feeling—the idea that at a given moment there’s a single such feeling rather than a nexus of feelings or, in psychodynamic terms, conscious feelings underneath which lurk hierarchies of unconscious feelings.
My belief, built out of ideas from Bernard Apfelbaum, is that people shift among states of mind (Richard Schwartz’s “parts”), each of which is associated with a leading-edge feeling. A feeling that is absent and unavailable in one state may pop into awareness and, in fact, form the centerpiece of the next state. When Maya was angry, she was unaware of being hurt. The feeling of hurt wasn’t there anymore. In response to Gloria’s look of disgust, Sean shifted first into the “I’m a failure as a husband” frame of mind in which anger was totally absent and then into the “She’s a bitch” frame of mind in which anger was the defining element.
In couple conflict, each partner’s mind continually resets in response to what her or his partner has just said. As a couple therapist, I seek by my interventions to reset partners’ minds—to lift them out of their adversarial and withdrawn interactions and up on a joint platform from which they can track what is happening between them and confide their experience.
Very wise, as usual, Dan.
I think your work is brilliant. And one thought I had was that when you are asking if one spouse might be feeling this or that, I think it might be good to just ask one question and not give lots of other choices right away. If asked if she was afraid, she might say, no, I’m hurt. I think too many choices of emotions can cloud it a bit. If she can’t come up with what she is feeling, then it might be helpful to offer some other emotions she might be feeling. Just a thought…
Thanks for your amazing perspective on marriage therapy.
Another great blog which is both theoretical and practical.
What I think you do better than anyone, Dan, is show the multiplicity–rather than simple unity–of feelings/thoughts that can be evoked by a single action of a spouse.
Well done!
Hi Dan. I’ve been reading about peace studies lately. It seems to me that the kind of education you offer your clients about how we flip around among very different, even opposing mind states could be a fundamental part of peace education. Learning to anticipate that both we and our partners (or adversaries) are probably going to shift to different perspectives and feelings may help us feel less inclined to judgment, punishment and winning, and more inclined to inquiry, understanding and collaborating. Awareness of the variability of perspectives undermines self-righteousness and promotes humility and tolerance for uncertainty. Personally, I’m working on trying to hold different perspectives in mind at the same time–a more realistic, but also a bit disconcerting, way to live. I think your article is a beautiful contribution.
Dan, in what way is Gendlin (the way I read him) consistent (or at odds) with your viewpoint?
G contends that feelings are a boundless background that exceed any and all words. But when we speak our feelings, the words we use, focus or limit what we feel. i.e., a certain feeling becomes foreground. Yet, as we hear what we have said (including what others present have said) the center stage feeling may swiftly exit, replaced by another circumscribed sense.
I’d suggest we think of the mind-stage as having any number of entrances and exits from which and out of which feelings come and go. So, start anywhere, and, sooner or later the feeling you are looking for appears.
Our society often equates single-mindedness with strength and confuses ambivalence with weakness, even though reality is complex and being in touch with it requires responsiveness on many levels. Further, people divide themselves into identity camps according to their opinions, such that openness to other viewpoints is experienced as threatening identity itself. Dan, your approach is an antidote to all this. By inviting diverse reactions, you teach that mixed feelings are not only normal, they also may be essential for getting stuck situations unstuck, for melting the armor that blocks reconciliation and for facilitating empathy based on actually resonating with the other’s point of view. Over time, the education you offer can teach people to respect but not identify with their current and changing takes on reality. One can feel a great deal more secure if one understands that changing one’s mind does not mean losing or betraying one’s identity.
Dan,
I wonder if the ability of couples to recognize these passing states also helps them feel less entrenched in any one of the states? Which could even encourage more meta-level discussion of what’s happening for them, to them. Just one more perspective that might help couples (or therapist) remain more flexible, open minded and able to climb onto your “platform.” Thanks for a great article.
Buddy
Hi Dan,
Thank you or your blog. This reminds me of what you have said about a conversations being like an airline terminal, with many flights leaving and coming almost simultaneously, and that if we could have a computer-type print out of what goes on in the minds of each partner, it would be helpful and eye-opening. Our task as therapists is, to use your phrase, to become “guardians of the conversation” via helping partners “reset” inner and outer dialogue into collaborative mode.
Thank you for occasionally helping us reset our own thinking.
A literary perspective as usual Dan: The German philosopher/literary theorist Wilhelm Dilthey talks about the gefuhlter Eindruckspunct, the artist’s intended “impression point” around which the whole gestalt of a work is organized. Frank Kermode, in The Genesis of Secrecy, uses the temporal “moment of interpretation” for the critic’s, as over against Dilthey’s artist’s, special impression point—and adds that a given work may have as many such moments or points as it has interpreters.
It seems to me that your couple therapist tries out various impression points or moments of interpretation on the co-analysands until he/she and they stumble upon the “leading edge” that sounds right to, is more or less agreed upon by the couple. The major difference between the literary and psychological contexts is that at some point, at least in theory, there is some closure for the couple, while in the ongoing history of literary interpretation there need not be such closure (except perhaps for the individual reader?) in a continuing cultural “resetting of mind. “ Think, say, of the ongoing history of Hamlet criticism.
And it would be important for the spouse to be able to show understanding/be empathic to any one of the feelings. Most of us have trouble doing that,even after a reframe, because we don’t feel the same way.