The Heart Of The Matter: Perspectives On Emotion In Marital

Perspectives On Emotion In Marital Therapy

Susan M. Johnson, Leslie S. Greenberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134860371
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

First published in 1995. Intimate relationships are at the core of our emotional life. There is no other context so infused by and responsive to the ebb and flow of human emotion. A large part of human communication is emotional communication, involving minute signals concerning closeness and distance, and dominance and submission. This information is of central importance in organizing interactions with significant others. In addition, the social interactions most crucial to our senses of well-being, positive adaptation, and physical and emotional health are those that occur with significant others on whom we depend for our sense of security and belonging in the world. This book examines the role of affect in intimate relations and in the redefinition of such relationships in therapy.

PART I

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INTRODUCTION

1

Emotion in Intimate Relationships: Theory and Implications for Therapy

SUSAN M. JOHNSON and LESLIE S. GREENBERG

The purpose of this book is to expand our understanding of emotion in intimate relationships and begin to delineate different perspectives taken by theorists and clinicians concerning this aspect of experience, which Sartre described as constituting a transformation of the world, particularly as it pertains to our ability to relate to others. The goal of this introduction is then to lay out our perspective on emotion in intimate relationships (the perspective that underlies the theory and practice of emotionally focused therapy [EFT], Greenberg & Johnson, 1988; Johnson & Greenberg, 1994) and to set the scene for the chapters that follow, which present the theoretical perspectives and clinical strategies of leading clinician/scientists in the field of marriage and marital therapy.

Evidence as to the importance of emotion in marriage and marital therapy arises from various sources, empirical, theoretical, and clinical. On an empirical level, recent research into the phenomenon of marital distress has confirmed the key role that emotional experience and expression plays in the definition of relationships. Such research has found that the level of physiological arousal, particularly of husbands, during couple interactions is a powerful predictor of longitudinal marital distress and separation. In addition, facial expressions of emotion, particularly a wife's disgust, a husband's fear, and the unhappiness of both, are an excellent predictor of separation and divorce. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse for marriage have been identified as (1) critical anger, (2) contempt, expressed by one spouse, usually the wife, (3) fearful defensiveness, and (4) withdrawal by the other spouse (Gottman, 1991, and this volume). This research, which demonstrates the significance of the facial communication of emotion and physiological emotional responses, underlines the power of emotional experience and communication in the regulation of social interaction.

In addition, it has been found that it is not the number of fights, or even the outcome of the fights, that predicts whether couples stay together, but the quality of emotional engagement. Couples can fight, not resolve issues, and sustain a satisfying relationship provided they can stay emotionally engaged rather than becoming distant and defensive (Gottman & Krokoff, 1989). This kind of research presents more and more clearly a picture of marital distress in which the key elements are powerful negative affect and automatic, highly structured negative emotional responses, which elicit reciprocal aversiveness or distance from the partner, creating cycles of anger and alienation. Negative emotional experience and communication appear to become an absorbing state, which overrides other responses and takes over the relationship, making new responses more and more difficult to initiate and maintain. Such cycles may explain why outcome studies of marital therapy find extremely little evidence of spontaneous remission in marital distress. In summary, empirical studies of marital distress underline the power of emotion in couple interaction and signal the necessity for greater understanding and refined intervention techniques in this area.

On a theoretical level, the desirability of a focus on emotion is highlighted by the recent applications of attachment theory to adult love relationships. At present, attachment seems to be the most promising theoretical perspective for understanding adult love (Shaver, Hazan, & Bradshaw, 1988; Johnson, 1986; Johnson & Greenberg, 1994). Attachment theory, as well as focusing on internal representation, sees emotion as the primary signal of the success and failure of attachment and as motivating attachment-seeking behaviors. This may be contrasted, for example, with exchange theory (Thibaut & Kelley, 1959), which views adult intimacy in terms of economic, rational self-interest and quid pro quo contracts. Attachment theory views adult love as an emotional bond addressing innate needs for security, protection, and contact with significant others, conceptualizing such a bond as an emotional tie in which emotional experience and expression organizes attachment behaviors and regulates closeness and distance. The emotional accessibility and responsiveness of the partners form the basis of the bond between them and facilitate emotional engagement and contact. In this framework, attachment and the emotions that organize attachment behaviors are adaptive and serve to form a secure base (Bowlby, 1969, 1988) from which the individual can confront the world. This perspective is congruent with research findings that confiding, intimate relationships buffer individuals against stress and promote mental and physical well-being. Attachment behaviors and associated emotional responses are considered to be innate, and tend to increase in intensity if the bond with the attachment figure is threatened. Typically, in the face of separation, protest and anger, clinging, despair, and detachment follow. The quality of adult attachments is considered to be mediated by strong emotional responses and working models of self and other learned in early attachment contexts. This perspective suggests that marital therapy is obliged to include affect at least as a target of change and, more significantly, to discover and explicate how to use affect in the reorganization of intimate bonds that have gone astray. Otherwise, there is a risk of focusing on more peripheral elements rather than on the central building blocks of intimate relationships; the acquiring of specific relationship skills, for example, may not lead to greater marital happiness or intimacy (Harrell & Guerney, 1976), and insight into the repetitions of past relationships may not produce change in the here and now. Specifically, from an attachment perspective, it is essential in marital therapy to address the emotional responses that organize attachment behaviors and restructure interactions to facilitate accessibility and responsiveness. Rigid negative interactional cycles of hostility and distance, which preclude secure contact and the satisfaction of attachment needs, then give way to cycles of increasing trust, intimate engagement, and the creation of a secure bond. In the early 1980s, we set out to develop and test an approach to couples therapy that focused on reprocessing of partners' emotional responses to facilitate a shift in negative interactional cycles and facilitate secure bonding. Continuing practice and further investigation (Goldman & Greenberg, 1992; James, 1991; Dessaulles, Johnson, Hotz, & Kallos, 1994; Dandeneau & Johnson, 1994; Walker, 1993) have convinced us of the importance of the experience and expression of attachment-related emotions in the creation and repair of intimate bonds.

Clinical developments in the field of psychotherapy in general, and marital therapy in particular, have increasingly recognized the importance of emotion. Generally in psychotherapy, the 1980s saw a growing emphasis on affect and an acknowledgment that a focus on behavior and cognition was necessarily incomplete. Previously when emotion was addressed, it was often acknowledged in clinical theory but glossed over as far as the description of specific affect-oriented interventions was concerned. As Mahoney (1991) has recently pointed out, intense emotionality usually has been seen as something to be discharged, avoided, or controlled, or at most perhaps understood and therefore transcended. Affect has also been described in a general global fashion, rather than differentiated into specific emotions linked to specific interventions in particular contexts. Recently, however, there have been considerable advances in considering the role of affective interventions and processes in therapeutic change in individual therapy (Greenberg & Safran, 1987; Safran & Greenberg, 1991; Stein 1991), and this in turn has encouraged marital therapists to begin addressing the role of affect in this modality.

Marital therapists in the 1970s concerned themselves with delineating marital interventions and were beginning to conduct outcome studies of their effects. However, the lack of specification of interventions, whether focused on behavior, cognition, or affect, continued to be problematic (Gurman & Kniskern, 1981) and indeed is still an issue in the 1990s (Johnson & Greenberg, 1991). The behavioral marital therapies led the field in describing interventions and validating these interventions empirically. In these approaches, affect was generally considered to be epiphenomenal, a consequence of cognition, and was often seen as an impediment to the process of change, which focused on rational processes such as behavior exchange and the learning of communication and problem-solving skills. A focus on affect was considered to be, at best, inefficient (Jacobson & Margolin, 1979) and often detrimental to therapy. Negative emotion was particularly viewed as dangerous, destructive, and distancing, and therefore the expression of such feelings was to be avoided at all costs (Waring, 1988). The main change strategies, as in individual therapies, involved the expansion of behavioral repertoires, or in the more dynamic therapies, insight into marital dynamics. These approaches tended to focus on what we have termed secondary and instrumental emotions (Greenberg & Safran, 1987; Greenberg & Johnson, 1988) rather than on the role of biologically adaptive, attachment-oriented emotions.

In the 1980s, however, there was a growing acknowledgment among cognitive and behavioral marital therapists that the problems couples brought into marital therapy were emotional in nature, and that the quality of the emotional connection between partners had a great impact on the outcome of therapy (Margolin & Weinstein, 1983; Hahlweg, Schindler, Revenstorf, & Brenglemann, 1984). Marital therapists began to question whether affect could be bypassed or controlled, and assumed to change as a result of modifications in behavior and cognition. Affect began to be seen as a crucial factor in marital adjustment that had to be addressed in therapy (Broderick & O'Leary, 1986). In addition, cognitive-behavioral researchers began to analyze the results of their interventions across studies, concluding that such interventions were less powerful than originally believed, creating improvement in only 50% of couples, and often failing to accomplish the most rigorous goal of marital therapy, that of rendering distressed marriages not only improved but satisfying by the end of treatment (Jacobson et al., 1984). They then began to consider new ways to increase the effectiveness of such interventions by including new elements in treatment.

At the same time, other clinician/researchers were delineating emotionally focused interventions in which emotion was reprocessed and used to change partners' interactional positions in marital relationships (EFT; Greenberg & Johnson, 1986, 1988; Johnson & Greenberg, 1985a, b) and increase intimacy. These investigations suggested that affect was a powerful agent of change in this approach to marital therapy, and also provided some explanation as to why this might be so (Greenberg & Johnson, 1988; Johnson & Greenberg, 1988). In the last part of the 1980s and the present decade, different kinds of interventions focusing upon affect have been included in cognitive-behavioral approaches, including teaching the skills of affective expression (Baucom, Sayers, & Sher, 1990), helping couples label the emotional consequences of their partner's behavior (Jacobson, 1991), including emotion as part of an insight-oriented change strategy (Snyder & Wills, 1989), and more recently (Koerner & Jacobson, this volume) creating an emotional acceptance of differences. In addition, systems theorists have begun to recognize the importance of including emotion in their work. Napier (1988) has included working with emotion as part of family-of-origin work, and Guerin, Fay, Burden, and Kautto (1987) have recognized the destructive role of negative emotions and offer ways of dealing with emptiness and bitterness in marriage.

The process in the field has been one of a growing recognition of the crucial role of affect in intimate relationships, paralleling the recognition of the crucial role of affect in individual functioning and adaption (Greenberg & Safran, 1987; Mahoney, 1991; Frijda, 1988) and an acknowledgment of affect as an essential target of change in marital therapy. In addition, a growing technology of affective interventions has emerged, either as primary interventions or as additional elements in marital therapies that focus primarily on cognition and behavior. The process of specifying and testing different affective interventions has begun, and theoretical formulations of affective change processes have begun to be delineated. Let us now turn to a summary of these theoretical perspectives.

THEORIES OF EMOTION

In the last decade, views on emotion within psychology have changed dramatically. Most broadly, emotions are currently viewed as arising in the course of human action, especially interpersonal interaction, and as providing biologically based solutions to human problems that cannot be managed by cognition alone (Oatley & Jenkins, 1992). Emotion is beginning to be seen as central in understanding both interaction and cognition in that emotion is, first, attentional, influencing the salience of information; second, motivational, influencing goal setting; and third, communicational, regulating interaction with others.

The Nature of Emotion

Emotions are best viewed as involving action tendencies that arise as a function of automatic appraisals of the relevance of situations to an individual's basic concerns (Arnold, 1960; Frijda, 1986; Lazarus, 1982, 1991). Emotions start with the detection of some notable change, often in another person, which acts as a signal to continue processing the input for its personal significance (Scherer, 1984). The continued processing involves first appraising the interpersonal event in relation to one's concerns and then to one's ability to cope with the event.

Emotions, in addition, are seen as being adaptive (Izard, 1979; Frijda, 1986). They govern goal priorities within people, and communicate intentions between people, in ways that promote survival and positive adaptation (Greenberg & Safran, 1987; Greenberg & Johnson, 1988; Oatley & Jenkins, 1992; Safran & Greenberg, 1991). Emotions are best understood as complex syntheses of elements including motivation (in the form of needs and concerns) and cognition (in the form of appraisals), as well as being primary organizers of action and interaction (Greenberg, Rice, & Elliott, 1993; Lazarus, 1991a, b). Discrete primary emotions such as surprise, happiness, anger, sadness, fear, and disgust (Ekman & Friesen, 1975; Izard, 1977) have been shown not just to be internal experience, but also to be action dispositions (Arnold, 1960; Frijda, 1986; Lang, 1984) biologically related to survival and adaptation. These basic primary emotions have, in addition, been shown to be universal, with associated characteristic facial expressions, neuroendocrine patterns, and brain sites.

Emotions have also been shown to influence information processing in higher cognitive areas of the cortex in a variet...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• CONTRIBUTORS
• PREFACE
• PART I: INTRODUCTION
• PART II: AFFECT IN COUPLE RELATIONSHIPS AND THERAPY
• PART III: CONCLUSION
• NAME INDEX
• SUBJECT INDEX