Can You Fix Your Marriage But Not Talk About Emotions?

My husband grew up loving the 1960’s TV show Star Trek. A few years ago, he met William Shatner and has his autographed photo hanging in our study. His favorite character on the show was Spock, the Vulcan who operated on logic without emotion. He’ll admit that he entered marriage thinking, like his hero, that emotions don’t matter. He thought that if we could just be more logical or learn better communication methods, everything would be fine. I pointed out that that thinking is why Spock stayed single. Thankfully, he’s changed his mind.

Sometimes I hear echoes of Spock, usually from husbands in distressed marriages. When I bring up my counseling method, Emotionally Focused Therapy, often I here, "Don't talk about emotions, just fix our marriage." But the fact is, you can't fix your marriage without dealing with the emotions that drive it for good or bad. Just learning better ways to communicate isn't enough by itself.

You Can’t Fix Your Marriage By Just Talking About Communication Techniques Because It's Impossible to Communicate Without Emotion

Decades of research dating back to the 1930’s have consistently shown that communicating as a couple requires understanding emotion. Human beings are emotional beings. Emotions aren’t just what we feel; emotions are what we are. Emotions are the key to our whole identity. So, we send emotional signals all the time. Our brains have mirror neurons that constantly scan the faces of those with whom we are in conversation for emotional cues to interpret whether they are happy or unhappy with us, and we unconsciously adjust our behavior to these signals. Even if you put on a “poker face” and try to show no emotions, your partner’s brain will tend to make a negative interpretation and decide that you are angry or indifferent to them.

In 1975, Dr. Edward Tronick, of UMass Boston’s Infant-Parent Mental Health Program, did an experiment called the “Still Face.” A mother, at first, interacts with her baby who coos and shows delight. Then she goes still faced, showing no emotion or expression. After three minutes of trying to engage with the mother as before, the baby rapidly sobers and grows wary, repeats the attempts to interact, and when this fails, withdraws and turns away from the mother with a withdrawn, hopeless facial expression.

The fact is that emotional signals strongly impact how and whether we and our partner feel loved. So, it is critical that we are aware of the signals we’re sending and learn how to read our partner’s signals. If we don’t, our sense of loving and being loved suffers.

Emotionally Focused Therapy

When couples become disconnected, emotion is always the cause and the cure. Everyone has a driving need to feel closely connected to a primary person in their life. And the fear that we will become disconnected from that relationship is always there. So, we are always asking the question of our partner, “Are you there for me? And we need to know, and even more so feel, that the answer is yes.

Behind the endless arguments and conflicts where one partner stridently pursues and the other partner avoidantly withdraws are strong emotions driven by needs for close attachment. Partners react to disconnection in the same way as the infant in the Still Face experiment and they get stuck in their negative interactional pattern. When one partner pursues the other by saying things like, “Why didn’t you call me to tell me you would be late?” and criticizes and complains and protests, it is really a call for connection. But because it feels threatening, the partner shuts down or goes silent or leaves to avoid making things worse. And they get stuck.

In Emotionally Focused Therapy, the first thing the therapist does is identify this “negative cycle” and each partner’s role in it. Then they work to discover the emotion behind the pursuing and withdrawing, and help the couple to communicate that need in a way that the partner will receive. This event teaches the couple how to interrupt their negative cycle, and in doing so, arguments lessen in frequency and severity, and couples find a stronger bond that lasts for years.

I urge you to read more about Emotionally Focused Therapy and then contact us for a free thirty-minute consultation.