Beyond Safety: Transforming Couples Therapy with the Heart’s Intelligence
Embracing the Challenge: Expanding as Partners and Therapists by Allowing Love to Render us Fully Human
By, Katherine Young, M.Ed., RCC
Couples therapy with its emphasis on security, and connection avoids the thing it purports to serve: love. Isn’t it odd? As clients, we work with therapists who rarely talk about it. As therapists, we claim to be the modern healers of relationships, but we steer almost completely away from the most essential conversation–that of love.
Any discussion about love rightly begins with the admission that it is something that cannot be quantified or explained. But at the same time, we feel we know love, we want it, and express it to our families and partners regularly. So many imposters masquerade as love, and haven’t we all been fooled at one time or another by our own concealed need, approval seeking, sexual desire, codependent clinging, romantic longing, avoidance of pain or existential terror? Perhaps because of these convincing fakes, we fear to go into a potentially misleading exploration. Perhaps because it is difficult to talk about what we cannot define, we avoid the topic altogether. Or maybe, when we hear the word love, we tend to associate it with maudlin, sentimental softness that barely conceals the obligatory demands underneath. We rightly distrust an idea of love that misses the importance of freedom, which we all need to be ourselves. Despite these dangers and aversions, I posit that we have thrown the baby out with the proverbial bathwater, and relationship therapy, in order to be truly transformative, must include an exploration of love, no matter how nervous we may be to go there.
Why love is missing from therapy
Perhaps we leave it out for the same reasons that Irvin Yalom, the existential psychiatrist in his brilliant, if sardonic, book, Love’s Executioner, famously wrote,’The good therapist fights darkness and seeks illumination, while romantic love is sustained by mystery and crumbles upon inspection. I hate to be love’s executioner.’ It is possible we avoid it altogether because of the thankless job we take on when we carefully break the upsetting news to our clients that their addictive ‘loves’ are not the real thing. Or maybe we are afraid of being perceived as sentimental or soft ourselves when we endeavour to discuss something as undefinable while still, all-out desirable as love. It would be foolish to underestimate the power of these obstacles to a love psychotherapy. This is not a call to abandon intellectual rigor or professional boundaries in favor of sentimentality. Rather, it is a call to reintroduce the heart as a legitimate—and necessary—tool for transformation.
Crashing a client’s illusions of love, or breaking the bad news of what mature love actually demands of each of us has halted many therapy relationships. Many clients who may have continued to do good work in therapy have run for the hills at the mere whiff of the reality of what love asks of us. Many therapists as well, feeling the imposter, have steered away from addressing this unnameable topic and its frightening shadow side for fear of the shame running into their clients accidentally in the grocery store mid-tiff with their own domestic partners.
However, we miss the beauty and opportunity when we leave love out. When we assume the chimeras of addictive romantic love are too great of a risk we underestimate our own and our clients’ strength to resist temptation. When we imagine ourselves inadequate emissaries of mature love we don’t give ourselves the chance to evolve and we tragically decide there is no place for the intelligence of the heart in the therapy room.
Attachment vs. Love
Instead of talking about love, in psychotherapy circles, we talk exclusively about attachment, which can be more easily measured, categorized, even solved for. Attachment is the study of how we form connections and how we feel and behave when our attachments are insecure, read: when we are afraid. The discussion divides people’s relationship behaviour into attachment styles of either secure or insecure types, with the insecure category further breaking down into types that either anxiously pursue or avoid attaching, or some combination of the two. The evidence supporting attachment styles is robust, and exploring how people behave when feeling insecure in relationships often brings valuable insight that can foster meaningful change and greater stability. The therapies that have evolved from the attachment research have helped many people, but if the study of relationships has focused on how fear inhibits connection, it does not elucidate as to how love fosters it. We have focused on one side of the street, love’s ever-present, daunting and dark companion: fear.
I am not substituting the word love for the word attachment, but invoking it as a referent that points to something beyond itself–mysterious, indescribable, unquantifiable and beyond our control. I suppose it is in some way understandable that even the soft sciences dare not claim to know love. But, if we cannot look to research and empirical science to quantify or explain love, we can look to great literature, poetry, the wisdom traditions, the sages and pandits and our own first person experience to begin to create a relationship therapy that includes love, both the word and the felt experience.
I don’t have a definition for the word love, and I don’t profess to be able to explain the mysteries of the heart, which makes love tricky to talk about at all, and maybe even trickier in therapy. Perhaps, too often we become focused on an idea of love as pure distraction from the challenges that life presents like establishing a career, raising a family and the very daunting task of creating a meaningful life. Unresolved childhood issues and past pain warp how we approach love, turning the experience into something we could not reasonably call actual love, and I think the psychotherapeutic literature has steered away from the topic altogether in order to avoid these important pitfalls.
While attachment is a natural and healthy element in relationships, it is more of a necessary foundation than an inspiring and fulfilling zenith point. The conversation in couples therapy should include love and not just ‘attachment’ because love is positive; it is bold and it is sexy. It gives us something to aim toward, a vision of who we could be together that is inspiring. The word attachment itself has connotations of bondage, dependency, fear and points to the weakest areas in the person. It can even suggest an identity constructed solely from behavioural habits. “I am anxiously attached. He is an avoidant,” for instance, are phrases I hear pretty regularly in the therapy room. If you identify as your fear, then what can you do when your fear surfaces? You will feel you are being subsumed into it, identified with it, you will feel as if your actual existence is threatened. While it is helpful to know one’s attachment style, a set of fear-based behaviours make a pitiful identity.
Risks and Reasons for Love’s Omission
As Robert Johnson the profound Jungian said, ‘One does a curious kind of insult to another by falling in love with him, for we are really looking at our own projection of God, not at the other person. If two people are in love, they tread on star dust for a time and live happily ever after—that is so long as this experience of divinity has obliterated time for them. Only when they come down to earth do they have to look at each other realistically and only then does the possibility of mature love exist.’
Perhaps, therapy and therapists are wary of their own role in this sort of relationship. They may be afraid of a client’s tendency to turn love into obsession, codependence, enmeshment, addiction or their own tendency toward this same regressive behaviour. If a therapist has reason to believe they are not able to maintain good boundaries with their clients they should be careful of course. Many are the therapists who are (understandably) struggling at home and teaching differently in the office. But love itself comes with a good dose of terror, and perhaps we err by avoiding love more because of our own lack of courage, than solely because of our professional responsibility to try to educate our clients to not fall for these false ‘loves.’ Much is lost in this oversight. I would suggest that a therapist who themself does this work and is softened and awakened through repeatedly, and vulnerably offering love in their own relationships can share a far deeper, and more settled presence with their clients than those who live their own lives shying away from love.
Consider for a moment, the idea that love is irreducible. That we cannot further extract composite elements from whatever love is. Like truth, and beauty, love is something of a substratum of reality. Consider that perhaps it has something to do with how we are with one another or perhaps even, what we essentially are. The perennial philosophy suggests, when we cease viewing ourselves through the perceptive doors of the rational mind, perhaps love reveals itself to us as what we are. Consider that perhaps all we need to do is remove obstacles that obscure love, create the conditions that invite it, and it will flourish on its own. Therapists who have glimpsed this reality beyond the matrix of conventionality will have something valuable to offer their clients in relationship therapy.
What Love Really Asks of Us
As we penetrate and loosen our unnecessary, over-used defenses, and find we are capable of feeling our ossified pain and facing our frozen fears, we soften our hearts. And when our hearts are soft we connect, naturally, both to ourselves and to others. Following the decision to drop our judgments, our righteousness, our pretend superiority and inferiority games both toward ourselves and others, empathy flourishes without much effort. From there we can extend outside of our protective egocentric bubbles and perspectives, to more deeply consider another person.
But love is not all softness and empathy. Love could be the guiding value behind the decision to end a relationship, or firmly and finally put one' s foot down about a partner’s behaviour. When we are more willing to face our fears and to feel the pain of love, we also become more brave. If we are brave enough to stand on our own two feet independently and risk speaking our truth to our loved ones, even in the face of possibly upsetting them or losing them, we gain the prerequisite skills to truly engage intimately with another person.
Love asks that we are strong enough to take our own pain and not burden our partners with what they cannot solve for us. It asks us to grant our partner his individuality. Rilke’s words from Letters to a Young Poet echo, “For one human being to love another; that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation. I hold this to be the highest task for a bond between two people: that each protects the solitude of the other. This is the miracle that happens every time to those who really love: the more they give, the more they possess.”
In therapy much energy is devoted to understanding how we have been wounded. It is important that we face any unprocessed past trauma and see how our past relationships still affect us, but we should be very careful as therapists not to promote identities in our clients as mere recipients of mistreatment. We are not how we have been mistreated. Therapists must steer their clients to both know and feel what happened to them, but not to become stuck in blame or excuse making. Here we should remember that Rilke uses the word ‘miracle,’ He says, “This is the miracle that happens every time to those who really love: the more they give, the more they possess.” It is a miracle and it happens every time! I urge you to consider that we could do well by our clients if we foster this trust. Everytime we steer ourselves away from our fearful, self-protective hoarding and clinging and toward a true generosity in love, we expand.
We should be encouraging clients to go beyond past wounds by connecting to their capacities, their deeper values, meaning, their creativity, their choices, inherent responsibility and ability to move forward. Love asks that we are generative. It asks that we are new, creative, and boldly facing what we need to face to stay open. This commitment to self reflection and self responsibility is the true basis of commitment in a relationship. We cannot honestly promise that we will be with our partner in the distant future, but we can commit to do what we can, to look at ourselves, to heal, change and grow. And then we can trust the likelihood that this commitment will foster a deepening and satisfying love.
Looking through a lens of love means admitting that we don’t truly know what love is—or even what we ourselves are—and likewise, we must accept that we don’t fully understand what we fear, beyond the unknown and the feelings of fear, pain, or discomfort. We begin to accept the unknown as inevitable. You may feel terrified when your partner isn’t available, but it is not actually a life and death situation. The great unknown we live with is that we don’t know what we are, and so we continually fill in that blank with provisional identities. These provisional identities are constantly being updated because they are not able to last in time. Our social roles are continually changing, they do not go deep, they do not satisfy our intuition and longing for something more, which we instinctively feel we are. We are not just a sister or a father or a lawyer, there is something more essential, more enduring to what we are than a limiting social role. All the little deaths of the ego, prompt us to grow, to realize that what we fear is just the ending of something known. Then, fear may be viewed as simply a set of sensations in the body that one can feel and that will soon pass away. A great love will threaten all our petty identities and this is so wonderful, because our petty identities are simply beliefs about who we are that keep us small, afraid and feeling powerless.
People are so much more capable than they realize of putting aside their egoistic tendencies toward self-preservation and self aggrandizement, and reaching beyond themselves in incredible and surprising ways. Love asks this of us: to recognize that the love we want is within us and not something to get from another. We must be looking beyond the reach of our isolated and insular selves in order to know it. When we begin to find this source within, we can stop trying to resolve something that happened in the past because we connect to something great in ourselves. Seeking love from others, especially if the love you seek is in the past, creates increasing dissatisfaction and frustration. Giving love leaves us resilient and satisfied. And at some point, it is that simple. You choose to go forward and give something that was never given to you and in so-doing you feel all the pain and hurt you have avoided. In spite of your hurt and your fear you dig deep and let go and discover. Because love means reaching beyond the confines of one’s self; love is novel. It is exciting. It is where the repeated machinations of the insular mind are struck moot, and someone or something truly new can be encountered.
When we love love itself, together with our partner, then we no longer need to turn them into an object. If that idea boggles your mind, then you got it.
How Therapy Could Shift to Include Love
A relationship can be seen as a third entity that is greater than the sum of the parts. This dialectic provides a container and a context for a broader vision. The relationship itself has requirements, it has needs. The relationship requires both connectedness and freedom for love to flourish. Seeing the relationship as the reason for becoming more responsible or for doing one’s inner work frees us from the dilemma of me vs. you. Often in relationships we get hung up on giving something up for the benefit of our partner because it is seen as a zero sum, your gain is my loss type of equation. It can be freeing to see that the relationship itself may require something from you. Each person must give what is required of them for the relationship. This mutual giving is what strengthens both the bond and the freedom; the individual and the couple.
When we feel we have touched love, there is something indescribable in words, it unifies without reducing, and goes beyond apparent opposites. Eckhart Tolle famously said, “love has no opposite.” Apparent conflicts, divisions and incompatibilities are metabolized in love. It cannot be made into a transaction because transactions are not love. We cannot objectify our partner in love. We can only love them as a subject, which we can never know. We can only freedive into the waters of subjectivity together. We can hold hands and jump.
Relationship therapy that includes love should focus on the here and now. The opportunity to give and express love is in the present. So many times in group therapy I have seen a participant struggle for the first days with their irritation, or competitiveness or judgmentalness. They really suffer with their closed heart, their repressed feelings, or their acting out with challenges to the group that are never received well. And then time and again, something happens during a meditation, or someone says something to them, a kindness they weren’t expecting, and they just open up. They connect with the heart and then they are so happy, so in love with everything and everyone. These moments are common, an everyday lovingness and they are available in relationship therapy in the most surprising moments. This choice to open, to offer from the heart is far more possible than we as therapists tend to promote. Many times I prompt a client in the moment they are struggling with their own need toward their partner, to simply reach out, to extend instead of contract, to drop the bone they are chewing and offer something. And they are so relieved because their partner responds naturally with the love and softness they were wanting.
In contradiction to a focus on our wounding alone, when we focus more on Love in therapy, we invite a pro-active conversation. What do you want? And also, what can you give to your relationship, in this moment? A discussion about love invites a larger vision for the individual and for the couple.
I am in favor of this sort of inspiration and growth. I prefer to hold a vision for most couples I work with that theirs could be a great love, adventure, an inspiring risk. For any endeavour to be truly transformative, we must break the container of our known worlds, challenge our thought structures, our views of ourselves and of our beloved and venture forward. Great figures in history are remembered for acts that went beyond themselves whether because of their great courage or creative vision. Those acts reverberate beyond the limits of space and time. In the face of everything we will lose, in spite of our own limited and feeble bodies, we can love.
I encourage that the relationship therapy session is a terrifying improvisation where all three people are invoked to plumb the unknown depths of their capacity for love. Instead of only focusing on knowing one’s fear-based patterns, the client can be invited to speak to their beloved from their heart, to express their love in their own words, in their own way but without shying away from deep vulnerability. And the therapist is also implicated in this love. There is an alive and evolving relationship between the therapist and the clients that includes the heart of the therapist.
Ultimately, Love is important to include in any meaningful conversation about couples therapy because it is what people desire. The desire for love brings them into the room, motivates them to work hard, face themselves, let go of immature fixations of clinging or avoidance and ultimately to evolve. Love could help someone become kinder and more empathetic, and it could also help someone to become braver, more decisive and responsible.
A Vision for a Love-Based Therapy
A love-based therapy should add on to therapies that are empirically validated to foster connection for couples. Attachment theory, and object relations therapy are good starting points. Love-based therapy goes further by including the following:
The therapist can act as a representative for the relationship, speaking, guiding and acting in the interests of the relationship between the two partners. Ideally the therapist holds a transmission of love realization in their own being.
As long as the clients need it, the therapist is like a transitional object holding virtues of love, genuineness, compassion, equanimity, etc who is available to and accepting of both clients.
The therapist can interrupt either client, while avoiding taking sides. The therapist intervenes to and stop damaging words and to foster the kind of communication that invites love.
The clients are asked from time to time to feel their (metaphysical) heart and communicate from that center in their body.
The client is invited at times when they are stuck in ingratitude, jealousy, competition, or other forms of self-reifying suffering to offer something to their partner or to the relationship instead.
The therapist protects the solitude of each client from their partner’s conscious or unconscious bids for dependency or transaction. The therapist does this by bringing a call for responsibility and accountability to each individual.
The therapist encourages each partner to hone their skills for deep, accurate listening and reflection as well as clear, concise sharing.
The word Love is used as a referent to point to something real but undefinable beyond the word.
The third consciousness is fostered by continually bringing attention to the entity that is beyond the sum of two individuals. Each partner is encouraged to serve the third entity to the extent that they are each individually capable of at any given time.
Each partner is encouraged to take complete responsibility for their feelings and their ‘triggers’ in the moment by feeling in their own body whatever sensation is coming up for them.
Compassion for the other is encouraged.
An element of sacredness can be encouraged through the use of an object that is passed like a talking stick where the one holding the stick has the floor. The object can be invited to be something that represents the relationship.
Love can be spoken about as deliberate action, with prompts such as, ‘feel your heart and speak to your partner from there,’ ‘put (a person) in your heart,’ or ‘allow love to teach you.’
Sexuality is seen as a form of love that may be deeply vulnerable and to be introduced as a subject for discussion especially if the clients do not raise it themselves.
These are not tools or techniques per se and love is not a goal.
At the End of the Day…
Love is mysterious; we cannot possess, control, or fully understand it, yet it remains profoundly vulnerable and quintessentially human. It is what couples long for when they enter a therapeutic relationship and what we want them to be able to experience long after the therapy is over. If we endeavour to facilitate a couples therapy that includes love, therapists must enter that field with them, open, alive, brave, afraid if necessary, and discover how love teaches us.
Katherine is a therapist and seeker of the human heart’s deeper truths, she writes from the intersection of psychology, spirituality, and lived experience. Her work is an invitation to therapists and clients alike to risk the mystery of love as the real ground of healing.