Please think about a time when you lost control of a session. Were you too caught up in your own discomfort, anxiety, or discouragement to contemplate specifically how it happened?
Couples sessions spin out of control when clients are angry. They escalate rapidly. Their emotional brain starts running the show. Rational thinking is gone.
When upset, everyone has the capacity to be primitive, prickly or pessimistic. However, these reactions will trigger reactions in the limbic brain of the spouse. Then, anger, blame, and criticism can hijack your session. And the more threatened a client feels, the more aggressive the attacks become and the harder it is to calm their limbic brain.
Sessions also devolve when clients get angry with you. They think you don’t understand their distress, you are not reacting quickly enough to their demands, or they fear you are not competent. They are not certain that you see their spouses’ contribution to the problem.
They are frustrated and depleted. They attack you. They are impatient and want you to create big changes before they risk much themselves.
Common things angry partners say:
It’s not easy to respond skillfully when anger is coming directly at you.
To prevent angry escalations and manage these challenges artfully requires assertion, interruption, and containment. Skillful therapists come to expect these challenging moments and have many ways to parry the thrusts of their clients’ attacks or defenses.
Unfortunately, therapists unwittingly handicap themselves and inadvertently create problems for themselves. We are taught to:
These traits cripple our flexibility, creativity and assertiveness. Not wanting to create tension, we yield control of sessions too easily and fail to help the partners calm themselves and reach a higher level of prefrontal cortex processing.
The more confident you are that you can prevent sessions from erupting into angry fights, the more you will enjoy your work.
And the more uncertainty you feel, the more you will fear that you are responsible for your clients not getting the help they seek.
In these blog posts I shared with you why losing control happens sooner than you think and how to take charge when couples fight.
When you take charge sooner, you will become more fluid in moving a couple along the path of satisfying collaboration, communication, and connection.
Let’s be honest. Have you had this happen to you? Have you felt helpless in the midst of triggered reactions from your clients? Please comment below on how you have felt and what you tried that was either effective or very ineffective in this situation.
If you would like to learn more about the limbic brain and how to effectively manage couples spinning out of control, please click here to read more about our online training program.
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“Hi, Petunia” My mother leaves voicemails that begin like this often. “Hi, Petunia, it’s me.” There is something in that voicemail that is so quintessentially
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