Love and Relationships

I often have couples come to CCBT for couples therapy. They expect the therapy to focus on increasing communication. Unfortunately, they communicate quite a bit, but often in ways that hurt each other, strangling their love for each other. Communication is not absent for them, it's broken.

When communication leads to being critical of each other, expressing defensiveness, or builds a wall between partners, it is still communication, but it is broken. Broken communication needs repair so that love can return to the relationship.

Repairing communication is a different approach to bringing love back to the marriage. If the goal is to increase communication, and that communication is broken, then the more the couple communicates, the more they fall out of love: a bad and harmful outcome, really. Repairing communication, instead, changes how partners relate to one another so that they express love: a good and healing outcome.

Couples turn toward each other and begin listening with their heart. John Gottman describes one way to do that as building love maps, which are the "in your brain" rooms that each of us have about our partners. Those rooms, or maps, need to be filled with stuff that really reflect your partner. The things you love about each other should be in there. One couple came in, and hadn't thought about how endearing they found each other when they met. They also didn't know what each other dreamed of for their life together. We built a way of understanding each other through turning toward each other's feelings, but looking below the arguments to see the people they really were. We built a way of seeing disappointment, not anger, when dreams are unfulfilled.

When you become defensive, remember that if you want love (not winning) the key is to repair the communication: accept responsibility for your side of the breakdown using a soft and loving approach to the words. Something like "I can see how what I did could have upset you. I am sorry for doing that. It makes me sad that I hurt you." Even though your partner might hurl an attack back again, persistent acceptance of responsibility will repair the communication. After the repair takes hold, you and your partner might want to ask and answer this question: What can I learn about my partner from that fight?

Love builds on listening, understanding, and accepting each other. Turning toward each other, even when upset, builds chances to feel connected. Love springs from expressing caring at the expense of "winning." Always remember, if you win a fight with your partner, then the love of your life just lost. Love wants the best for him or her, not losing. You really win when the love you want to give can be accepted by your partner, and the love you want to feel from him or her flows freely to you.

Behavioral Couples Therapy Shown Effective

Christensen et al. (2010) reported that even distressed couples benefit to a great degree from either traditional or integrative behavioral couples therapy. See the news release from UCLA
http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/therapy-can-help-even-very-distressed-156427.aspx Christensen et al. (2010) study on couples therapy

Dr. Arnold and Friends at Youngstown State University Summer Institute

Dr. Bill Heward provided the Keynote address on the value and science of Applied Behavior Analysis for children with autism. Dr. Arnold presented at one breakout session to about 50 school psychologists and other educators on his protocol the Integrated Functional Behavior Assessment Protocol (IFBAP). It was really a pleasure to be with old friends like Dr. Tom Stephens and colleagues, including the several of my old students (Darcy Edelman) from my Ohio State University days and Dr. Richard VanVoorhis of Youngstown State University.

Functional Behavior Assessment

The use of Functional Behavior Assessment is very important to developing programs that help teach more useful behaviors as well as skills for everyday life. Children with severe disabilities such as deafblindness benefit from programs that develop skills rather than stop behavior. The use of differential reinforcement to develop communication skills, better use of vision and hearing, and improved self-determination is a well documented strategy. Dr. Arnold will present an introduction to his model, the Integrated Functional Behavior Assessment Protocol at an institute at Youngstown State tomorrow. To see the slides, go to
http://www.slideshare.net/ccbtcolumbus/introduction-to-ifbap

Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder

A very well researched treatment for OCD is Exposure and Response Prevention (ExRP) therapy. The treatment combines a behavioral strategy that reduces over time an anxiety response to the obsessive thoughts, while preventing rituals so that real-life situations reduce their potential to trigger the anxiety. Sometimes the exposure is done through repeated thinking of a set of obsessive thoughts, while other times it is done with a recording of those thoughts played repeatedly. There is research that suggests that the best outcomes occur when 90 minutes of exposure to the thoughts is done once per day over several days. Contact us if you have OCD and want to consider ExRP: www.ccbtcolumbus.com

Barlow's Theory of Emotional Problems

Dr. Barlow, the well known psychologist who developed many evidenced based therapies for anxiety, argues in his theory that experiences, often very early ones, create problems with the neuro-physiologic mechanisms that help us all to manage our emotions. The outcomes are problems with managing, or regulating, our feelings When the feelings become overwhelmingly beyond our control, the theory argues that it causes us to avoid or escape situations that are coincidental to the feelings. Usually, something in the situation is a vague reminder of our earlier experiences when we learned to react so intensely. The theory also argues that the impact of the learning experiences on our thinking is excessive estimations of the risk of harm that we assign to situations, people, future events, and ourselves. These mistaken ideas are often called cognitive distortions in CBT.

At CCBT, we believe that Dr. Barlow's theory is evidence-based and we use it to inform the approach we take to treatment. The theory may appear simple, but its application is far from simple; however, it is probably on-target to a great degree.

Treatment of Irritable Bowel Syndrome

Today, I read an article on a newly developed CBT model for IBS. It was run as a pilot on around 50 subjects. The treatment had three phases: education about the psychological factors in IBS, use of mindfulness and self-awareness of the moment, and exposure and response prevention strategies. The treatment reduced all but the diarrhea symptoms to a clinically significant degree. The treatment appears to be much like earlier treatments developed for IBS using CBT.