At Affordable Relationship Counseling in San Diego, I specialize in counseling couples for many problems, including infidelity. Recently, I had cause to reflect on the growing effects of social media on relationship functioning in today’s technologically-dominated world. In the May, 2012 issue of ATLANTIC, Stephen Marche states that “We are living in an isolation that would have been unimaginable to our ancestors, and yet we have never been more accessible. Over the past three decades, technology has delivered to us a world in which we need not be out of contact for a fraction of a moment…Yet within this world of instant and absolute communication, unbounded by limits of time or space, we suffer from unprecedented alienation. We have never been more detached from one another, or lonelier. ..We live in an accelerating contradiction: the more connected we become, the lonelier we are.
In my practice, I often treat couples who complain of the ruptured bond between them. Some people look to escape their grief and loss instead of facing it head on. In fact, research has found that a couple waits an average of six years before seeking marriage counseling.
One of the many ways that people escape their growing sense of alienation with one another is by becoming more active on sites such as Facebook. or chatting late into the nite in internet chat rooms. Marche observes that “What Facebook has revealed about human nature…is that a connection is not the same thing as a bond, and that instant and total connection is no salvation, no ticket to a happier, better world.” On the internet, one can be social while still being free of the challenges inherent in relationship functioning between truly bonded people. It can be a way to feel as if one has developed an intimate relationship with someone else and yet this is a delusion. There is no need to do more than preen one’s presentation feathers and one rarely has to deal with the stuff of real relationship challenges. It is as if one is creating a flattering mirror through which to see oneself in the eyes of others who also occupy the ethernet.
Years ago, I saw a couple who came in to therapy because one of the spouses finally relinquished a “connection” which had developed over two years on the internet. The spouse involved in the internet, emotional affair had been communicating with her for years and had, in fact, never met the object of his affection. This was a key focus of the sessions. He had finally freed himself of this escape from his grief about the fracture in his primary relationship and was now ready to work on restoring a connection to his marriage. In early therapy, the wife wanted to talk about the affair and would obsess on the who, the what, and they why of how it happened and whether she could trust him ever again. This was encouraged and allowed in order to rebuild trust as the wife could observe the husband’s (encouraged) efforts at increasing his transparency, even about a subject as difficult as disclosing the details of his affair. The husband wanted to “move on” and put the affair into the past where he said “it belonged.” Such polarized efforts to deal with an affair are common. Therapy helped the husband understand the nature of healing as a process, and the import of increasing his capacity for vulnerability in front of other instead of a focus upon covering content. I allowed the couple sufficient time to process their respective thoughts, feelings, fears, and regrets.
Eventually, I suggested that a proper focus of treatment would be to get at the factors in their marriage which contributed to the affair. It was important to key in on the affair as a trauma that required healing and that each person played a part in how the marriage become susceptible to such traumatic symptomology. Questions are asked which should generate more questions. Increasing the capacity to be transparent in front of one another and to decrease defensiveness is central. A safe holding environment is created by having each partner talk through the therapist. I asked each partner to discuss what they think contributed to the affair. I wondered aloud how long there had been unspoken (and spoken) marital tension and was this a contributing factor to each person running away from facing their part in the tension as well as the reality of the broken primary bond? In what ways did the wife look to criticize and blame her spouse, in a last ditch effort to get him to connect to her? How did the other spouse accommodate and give in when it was merely to avoid “ruffling her feathers?” Could these behaviors be fertile breeding grounds for growing resentment and alienation between them? How did the cheating spouse decide to stop the affair? How long had the other spouse ignored her part in the procrastination of dealing with the growing problem of a hardened distance and rift in the marriage? How could the couple join hands to provide future immunity from affairs? What does having an affair/ignoring one’s part in criticalness, emotional distancing or blame say about the emotional maturity of each partner’s former capacity to face their relationship challenges head on? Might not coming to therapy be an opportunity to congratulate one another on their increased emotional maturity and newfound capacity to address existing problems in the maintenance and nurture of their bond? Each partner was called upon to monitor their own “automatic” tendencies to withdraw, pursue, and/or become critical and blaming. The reciprocity of accommodation and pursuit were considered as cul-de-sacs leading to growing resentment and alientation. Over time, this couple began to grow in their confidence to at once regulate themselves as individuals while at the same time maintaining connection and safety within their relationship. The work emphasized regulating self to insure the viability of the relationship connection rather than using the relationship to insure that the individual would feel like a valid human being. The rewards of therapy led them to become increasingly confident that they could continue to insure the integrity of their relationship connection .
Social media offers an ineffective and dangerous avenue of escape to people feeling the grief and loss borne of a growing disconnect from their most significant other. People who are disconnected from their primary significant other may at one time or another look to meet their connectedness needs on the internet. The avenue leads to a deadend. To learn more about Dr. Cunningham’s model of practice, visit her website at http://www.Cunninghamtherapy.com or call 619 9906203 for a complimentary phone consultation.
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As a licensed marriage and family therapist in the heart of San Diego, Dr. Barbara Cunningham enjoys a busy and interesting private practice. Research has shown that couples who are experiencing difficulties in their relationship wait an average of 6 years before seeking marriage counseling. The sooner a couple seeks help, the better the prognosis to return the couple to a state of harmony and mutual fulfillment and perhaps even take the couple to an even better place than they may have been before presenting problems emerged. Listed below are some quick tips to consider when choosing a couples therapist:
1. Is the graduate training of the potential counselor in psychology, in social work, or in marriage and family therapy? In contrast to many other training programs in therapy and counseling, marriage and family therapists are specially trained to see all problems in the context of relationships. It is a way of seeing how the problem may be embedded in other stories of attachment in each partner’s family system and in their current story. Looking at problems through the lens of the marriage and family therapist is akin to seeing a football game at the top of the bleachers instead of on the 50 yard line. It is a broader picture of what is really going on with the couple.
2. If the potential candidate trained as a marriage and family therapist, did they attend a COAMFT accredited graduate program?
3. Is the potential therapist trained at the masters or doctoral level in marriage and family therapy? Is the candidate a clinical intern who is collecting hours toward licensure or is the candidate already a licensed marriage and family therapist?
4. Does the potential therapist have experience being in therapy themselves? It has often been said that you cannot take a client farther than you have travelled yourself. Therapy is a kind of journey that allows you to go to emotional places that you may never have been before. This takes courage. You want a therapist who, from experience, has compassion for what you are up against in your efforts to get maxium gain from the therapy experience.
5. How long has the candidate been in practice? Do they specialize in seeing certain relationship problems? Ages? Do they have a “niche?” Special expertise?
Even after you’ve selected a relationship therapist and had a few sessions, I suggest that you evaluate the therapy you are receiving. Here are a few areas to keep your eye on:
- Skilled marriage counselors will not just sit there passively or nod their head “empathically” while you and your partner spend most of the session arguing just like you do at home; they will interrupt your unproductive fights to offer guidelines and teach new relationship principles that will help you manage yourself in the challenging context of intimacy.
- Effective therapists will not get triangled into your issues by choosing a side with whom to align themselves. They will never view one partner as the main cause of the marital problems; they will try to help you and your partner each be able to visualize your own part in the co-determined issues. When partners are most anxious, it is human nature to try to “blame” and point fingers. Good therapy work helps each partner manage themselves in a way to increase their respective capacity to own their own part and take responsibility for their own improvement rather than trying to “fix” their partner.
- An ethical psychotherapist will never directly tell you to stay married or get divorced; in fact, giving such direct advice is specifically addressed as not ethical in the code of ethics of most professional associations.
To learn more about Dr. Cunningham’s systemic model of practice, visit her website at http://www.Cunninghamtherapy.comor call her at 619 9906203 for a complimentary phone consultation.
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As a marriage and family therapist in San Diego, I practice couples therapy and individual therapy using an intergenerational perspective. I specialize in helping couples and individuals live more meaningfully in their most important relationships. Relationship counseling and individual counseling is better to seek sooner rather than later when one experiences chronic challenges in relational functioning. Research has shown that couples typically wait 6 years before seeking couples counseling. It is wiser to get help earlier and before problems fester, causing resentments to harden and become more resistant to treatment.
Dr. Murray Bowen was a pioneer of marriage and family therapy. He believed that human beings live in interdependent emotional systems. His insights are profound. I am guided, in large part, by his ideas. James Framo, another early MFT leader, observed that clinically, Bowen’s ideas address the basic question of how one can deal with one’s family’s nuttiness without cutting off from the family. Just as Socrates urged people, “Know thyself,” Dr. Bowen encouraged people to “Know your family.” Such an effort can enhance one’s ability to live in a more fulfilled way in one’s current relationships. In an early post I listed five of my favorite quotes from Murray Bowen. Below are *more quotes that typify Bowen’s deep and unique level of understanding of the human condition:
“Family systems theory is based on the assumptions that the human is a product of evolution and that human behavior is significantly regulated by the same natural processes that regulate the behavior of all other living things….Homo sapiens are far more like other life forms than different from them.”
“One of the most important aspects of family dysfunction is an equal degree of overfunction in another part of the family system. It is factual that dysfunctioning and overfunctioning exist together. ..An example would be the dominating (overfunctioning) mother and passive father.”
“The more a therapist learns about a family, the more the family learns about itself; and the more the family learns, the more the therapist learns, in a cycle which continues.”
“The overall [clinical] goal [is] to help family members become ‘system experts’ who could know [their family system] so well that the family could readjust itself without the help of an outside expert, if and when the family system was again stressed.”
“Relationships are cyclical. There is one phase of calm, comfortable closeness. This can shift to anxious, uncomfortable overcloseness with the incorporation of the ‘self” of one by the ‘self ‘ of the other. There there is the phase of distant rejection in which the two can literally repel each other. In some families, the relationship can cycle through the phases at frequent intervals. In oher families, the cycle can stay relatively fixed for long periods.”
“The basic building block of any emotional system is the triangle. “
“Important changes [between the couple] accompany the birth of children.”
“The problem of the ‘triangled’ child presents one of the most difficult problems in family psychotherapy.
Dr. Murray Bowen was one of the important pioneers in marriage and family therapy. As a clinician who specializes in relationship counseling, I am guided, in large part, by his ideas. To learn more about my model of practice, visit me at http://www.Cunninghamtherapy.com or call 619 9906203 for a complimentary telephone consultation.
* Quotes are cited from FAMILY THERAPY IN CLINICAL PRACTICE by Murray Bowen (1978)
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At times, the pain of separation seems more than we can bear; but love and understanding can help us pass through the darkness toward the light. And in truth, grief is a great teacher, when it sends us back to serve and bless the living. . . . Thus, even when they are gone, the departed are with us, moving us to live as, in their higher moments, they themselves wished to live. We remember them now; they live in our hearts; they are an abiding blessing. ~Jewish mourners’ Kaddish (Central Conference of Rabbis, 1992)
Dr. Barbara Cunningham offers insightful counseling to survivors of homicide, specializing in helping sibling survivors move through their grief and their loss (read about her model of practice at http://www.Cunninghamtherapy.com).
According to the U. S. Department of Commerce (1991), almost 2 million children from birth through 18 years of age become bereaved siblings each year. Although homicide is the least frequent form of violent dying, it may have the most profound and lasting impact on surviving family members (Rynearson, 2001). Since the mid-1980s, the rate of murder committed by youth has doubled, increasing by 102% (State Legislative Responses to Violent Juvenile Crime, 1996-1997). Homicide survivors are defined as significant others who are left behind to mourn victims of homicide. While society recognizes that the violent loss of a child is one of the most devastating experiences a parent can confront, there is little societal recognition of the impact of such a loss upon surviving siblings (Fanos, 1996). Despite the large number of adolescents and young adults who are faced with this catastrophic personal and family crisis, there is a lack of theoretical constructs and systemic treatments from which to generate a theory of sibling bereavement (Walsh & McGoldrick, 2004).
The loss of a brother or sister has a lasting effect on the overall development of the surviving sibling and the family system, and it is extraordinary that so little attention has been directed at understanding the impact of loss in young adulthood upon both individual and family life cycles (Carter & McGoldrick, 1999). The role and function sibling relationships play in identity formation is becoming recognized as a powerful force in personality development (Provence & Solnit, 1983).
Complicated grief is often part of the clinical picture with sibling survivors of homicide (Rando, 1993). In this blog, complicated grief is defined as involving an intensity of symptoms that affect people over an extended length of time or as barriers to daily living caused by grief (Weiss, 2000). Green, Lindy, Grace, and Gleser (1989) found that the experience of surviving the homicide of a loved one frequently led to complicated grief reactions. Rynearson (1984) pointed out that “the manner of dying rather than the event of death determines the meaning of death, which in turn influences the form and cause of bereavement” (p. 1452).
Allen (1991) noted that surviving the homicide of a family member was detrimental to the survivors’ psychological well being because homicide is “stigmatizing, unnatural, especially burdensome, and unexpected” (p. 18). Parkes and Weiss (1983) empirically supported their belief that the mental health effects of homicide on survivors were more pronounced than those experienced by individuals who lose a loved one because of an anticipated death. Furthermore, Allen (1991) noted that “the closer the survivor and the victim were, the more difficult the bereavement” (p. 20). Raphael’s (1983) summary seems the most appropriate to conceptualize the severity of the grief experienced by relatives of a homicide victim: “First degree family members are the ones who are the most impacted by the death, and the greater a family member is involved with the deceased, the more deeply the loss is felt” (p. 67). Kubler-Ross’s (1969) stage model of grieving has not been useful in helping these forgotten grievers to feel validated in their need to remain spiritually and emotionally connected to their deceased loved ones and to surviving family members (Walsh & McGoldrick, 2004). Instead, a model of treatment that has a deeper perspective and that examines multigenerational and emotionally interdependent functioning is needed (Bowen, 1976; Walsh & McGoldrick, 2004).
In addition to therapy focused upon issues of grief and loss, especially in the context of violent crimes, Dr. Cunningham also specializes in couples counseling, marriage counseling, and individual counseling/psychotherapy. To learn more information about Dr. Cunningham and her systemic model of practice, visit her website at http://www.cunninghamtherapy.com/ or call her at 619 9906203 for a complimentary telephone consultation.
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Achieving a vibrant and fulfilling marriage over the longterm is one of the greatest developmental triumphs known to our species. At Affordable Relationship Counseling: Dr. Barbara Cunningham, MFT addresses marital challenges from a Bowen Family Systems Perspective (to learn more about this model, visit her website and click on model of practice at http://www.Cunninghamtherapy.com). In this blog, you will find some introductory remarks about the model.
At a Bowen Family Systems Theory (BFST)conference in San Diego on March 10, Dr. Dan Papero, faculty member at the Bowen Center for the Study of the family, quotes an old Mennonite woman who says, “Perfect relationships exist only in heaven, where there is no need for them.” Relationships may be thought of as open laboratories to work on regulating oneself and focusing on one’s own part in the face of relationship challenges. One learns to think systems, which is easier when calm. When one is stirred up, it is very challenging to think systems. Therapy aims to help each client achieve greater mastery in his/her ability to do so.
Many people mistakenly believe that love should be easy and that it is ”not meant to be” if it takes too much work. Wrong! Couples often make the mistakes of trying to “fix” the other person. The only person you can truly change is yourself–how you perceive what is said or done and how you may consider the myriad ways you could respond to “other” and bring out a different result. In this sense, marriages are people-growing machines. To stay separate from your partner at times and know that you CAN is one facet of building the muscle to stay together over the long haul without cutting off. People cut off when they feel smothered or the threat of incorporation. Other people, often in response to the distancer, feel their partner is blocking access, putting up walls, or even planning to leave them. Providing this frightened partner emotional safety that distance is temporary and that he/she is not being abandoned helps the pursuer tolerate the occasional distancing dance in the other. It is in this tension between needs for togetherness and separateness that people appear troubled in their relationship in my office. Getting to a the family of origin context of what each partner learned to do in their respective families-of-origin when anxious in close relationships is part and parcel of the therapeutic effort. Developing a research attitude as one looks back over one’s family legacy in the context of BFST helps people get more objective about how they came to be who they are as marital partners and as individuals.
Bowen Family Sysgtems Theory, which in many ways guides my practice, was developed by Dr. Murray Bowen. In the late 1950′s, Dr. Bowen observed that schizophrenic patients he treated relapsed soon after discharge from inpatient treatment programs (Bowen, 1978). After observing this outcome, Dr. Bowen decided to experiment by hospitalizing the entire family along with the schizophrenic patient. Obtaining more favorable results, Bowen came to conclude that the FAMILY, not the INDIVIDUAL, was the proper unit of treatment. He viewed families as interdependent emotional systems. Where there appeared a change in one person, it was predictable that there would be compensatory changes in other members of that family system. Bowen formulated 8 interlocking concepts, all of which had to viewed in relation to one another, much like problems people bring to therapy have to be viewed within a broader context. This view is broader and is known as a systemic view: how are one’s problems embedded in the context of their multigenerational family legacy, their nuclear family and larger society?
To learn more about Dr. Cunningham’s model of practice, visit her website at http://www.Cunninghamtherapy.com or call 619 9906203 for a complimentary consultation.
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