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Facilitating Transformance for Couples - 14th June 2021 View online at https://aedpinstitute.org Facilitating Transformance for Couples A Comparison between Structural Family Therapy and AEDP By Gil Tunnell Abstract. The author compares the similarities and differences between Structural Family Therapy and Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychology applied to couples, and then discusses how he incorporates principles of both models in his work with couples. Bowlby’s attachment theory is described, with an emphasis on the importance of balancing both the need for connection and the need for autonomy with couples. A clinical case illustrates how he integrates Minuchin’s concept of complementarity with AEDP’s emphasis on experiencing core affects, resulting in a healing experience for the couple. Diana Fosha (2008, 2013b) has defined “transformance” as an individual’s innate drive to be transformed, to self-heal, to right one’s self, to grow, to be authentic and be known, connected, and recognized by the other, even in the face of misfortune and trauma. Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy (AEDP; Fosha, 2000) is a model of individual treatment that sets up conditions for transformance to unfold. From family therapy, Salvador Minuchin (1974) also believed that couples desire to heal and grow with one another, even in the face of relational conflict, and his model of treatment is designed to help them discover their own “hidden resources” to accomplish that (Genijovich, 1994). I have been very fortunate to have been trained by both Fosha and Minuchin. Not only are they master clinicians, they are creative theoreticians with very different ideas about the conditions required for transformation and growth. In brief, Minuchin believes people change when they are challenged and made to feel anxious; Fosha believes people change when they feel safe. Despite this striking theoretical difference, they share several therapeutic similarities, the key one being: Making something happen in the session. Both are highly “active” therapies. Minuchin challenges and confronts couples to change their behavioral interaction in the here and now of the session, whereas Fosha empathically and affirmatively supports the individual to feel deep affects in the safety of the session, pushing the usual defenses aside. This paper focuses mainly on the differences between the two models, expands the definition of “transformance” to include couples, and then presents ways of adapting individual AEDP to more traditional couple therapy. Structural Family Therapy Structural family therapy is a systemic therapy that focuses on the interpersonal context of behavior. In initial sessions the structural therapist maps out the interactional dance of the couple and delineates what is dysfunctional. After a period of “joining” with a new couple, in which the therapist builds trust and forms a “good enough” therapeutic relationship, the structural family therapist asks the couple to do an “enactment,” (Talk to one another Page 1 Facilitating Transformance for Couples - 14th June 2021 View online at https://aedpinstitute.org rather than to me). Enactments are necessary because only then can the therapist witness the couple’s systemic dynamic. As the couple talks to one another, structuralists step back to observe the couple’s circular interactions, and then identify the complementarity of the positions they take with one another. Much like individual AEDP does “moment-to- moment” tracking of the patient’s nonverbal behavior, structuralists put far more weight on the partners’ nonverbal styles as they talk, than on the content of their words. With this systemic map in hand, the structural therapist goes about creating change within the session (Greenan & Tunnell, 2003). In structural family theory, the fundamental mechanism of change is unbalancing, that is, to challenge and confront the couple’s behaviors head on (Nichols & Minuchin, 1999). To change relational dynamics, the couple is made to feel anxious about their dynamic, usually challenging one person at a time. Minuchin believed that if someone was not made to feel anxious during the session, it was not a productive session that would produce change. Hence structural treatment is purposely designed to raise anxiety to effect change (Tunnell, 2006a, 2006b). AEDP believes the opposite: That lowering anxiety and making the individual feel safe is the way to effect change. Again, although their therapeutic methods are vastly different, Fosha and Minuchin share a belief in transformance. Just as Fosha believes there is a “self-at- best” lying latent underneath the defenses of the individual patient (and mines for it), Minuchin believes that healthier relational behavior exists beneath the maladaptive behavior and challenges the couple to find it (Greenan, 2010). Just as Fosha believes there is a “self-at-best” dormant under the defenses, Minuchin would argue that there is a “couple-at-best” hiding beneath dysfunctional dynamics. The structural therapist is not always a confrontational provocateur. Throughout treatment, the structural therapist alternates between joining and challenging. Minuchin was fond of describing structural interventions as a two-step combination of “stroke and kick,” “stroking” and being softer and more supportive when people begin to change, but “kicking” when they persist in old behaviors. In my four years training with Minuchin, I never got comfortable with the kicking part. In search of treatment models that that did not require the therapist to take such adversarial and challenging positions, I began applying to couple therapy (Tunnell, 2006a; 2012) several principles of individual AEDP. Individual AEDP and Its Implications for Couple Therapy As an individual treatment, AEDP in early sessions creates a safe attachment bond between therapist and patient, as a platform to help the patient begin to uncover and process warded-off emotions. All attachment bonds are based initially on positive affective experiences. Thus in the very first session, the AEDP therapist explicitly expresses affirmation, empathy and compassion for the patient. In the first and in all subsequent sessions of treatment, an AEDP therapist offers safety and remains explicitly positive toward the patient, always affirming and complimentary, at times praising the patient’s ability to cope and survive thus far in life, all the while recognizing the desire for symptom relief. Page 2 Facilitating Transformance for Couples - 14th June 2021 View online at https://aedpinstitute.org Once safety is established, the AEDP therapist actively helps the patient—by providing continual empathic support—to identify and access “core affects” somatically in his body (sadness/despair, fear, anger, joy, pleasure, shame, disgust), moving from State 1 “top of the triangle” where anxiety and defenses reside, to State 2 core affects (Fosha, 2000), which have often been repressed or warded off by means of some other defense. “Core affects” are naturally occurring, universal and hard wired into our physiological systems (Tomkins, 1962, 1963), because they have survival value, have adaptive action tendencies, and are a guide to living (Frederick, 2009). Feelings do not necessarily have to be acted upon, but they are ignored at our peril. Most individuals as children learned to repress some (or all) emotions in order to maintain an attachment relationship with one or both parents; many parents can’t handle affect. As Fosha (2000) has written, expounding on Bowlby, in sacrificing emotional authenticity for attachment security, children learn it is not safe to express affects that could upset the attachment figure on whom they depend. To cope with that dilemma, they develop defenses against feeling in general, and a reticence to express emotion to intimate others in particular. While defenses may have been partly adaptive then—because they preserved their attachment ties to the parent—defenses also left them cut off from their innermost feelings, as well as thwarting the development of a deeper relationship with the parent. The flow of an individual AEDP session is quite different from traditional individual psychodynamic therapy: The AEDP individual therapist actively and frequently interrupts the patient’s narrative and slows him down as he tells his story, even in the very first session. Through moment-to-moment tracking of nonverbal signs that the patient is experiencing emerging signs of affect (e.g., a sigh, a change in facial expression, a shift in gaze, nervous twitching), the AEDP therapist attempts to down-regulate any anxiety and bypass the patient’s usual defenses, so that he begins to experience the core emotions that accompany his narrative. Unlike the parent reproachful of the child’s affects, the AEDP therapist provides a safe space where the patient can connect with her body physiologically, describe the somatic sensations verbally, and express the emotion in its entirety, e.g., cry in response to sadness, feel the anger in the body. In AEDP’s technical terms, this sequence in which the therapist actively helps the patient access, express and manage warded-off emotional states is called “dyadic regulation of affect” (Fosha, 2001). The emotional experience is processed to completion and shared with the therapist. The AEDP therapist functions as a midwife for the patient to have a full emotional experience. As the wave of fully expressed emotion subsides, and that experience is processed with the therapist (State 3), Fosha