EMDR & Couples &

Family Therapy

EMDR & Couples Therapy

Mary Ray is trained in several modalities of couples therapy which she blends together while utilizing EMDR. EMDR processes past traumas. Past traumas lead to subsequent rigid behavior & outdated attachment behaviors. EMDR processing makes room for more present time adaptive flexible attachment orientated responses.

GOALS for EMDR couples therapy -

1. Partner/family provide support adjunct to EMDR therapy for their significant other who is working on personal past material in EMDR therapy. To bring significant other up to date on the EMDR work and current needs of the partner. So they can do some of the in between session exercises together. Partner/family can hinder progress of an individual client if the partner/family do not understand the reasons for the changes in clients behaviors, speech and sense of self. Help clients integrate new perspectives and behaviors into the couple/family context. Can´t treat a person apart from the people who love them. Cost Benefit Analysis what would you have to take responsibility for who would have to change in how they relate to client

2. Address/attend to relational issues often stemming from unresolved historical trauma + marital relationship events all relate to current marital distress,

3. EMDR to process shared traumas those experienced together., around parenting mistakes, sick child, spouse, infidelity, infertility, impotence = healthier dynamic once resolved and assists in giving appropriate weight to current issues

4. Bring both persons in the couple more into the present. Help people react/respond to each other in the present vs being detoured by the unresolved past. Enrich the couples current experiences once past traumas are no longer hijacking one or both of them into childhood adaptations which no longer work in adulthood they can be more present. After processing past current triggers do future templates together to build skills to help increase the amount of more effective conscious interactions

5. Increases bonding of the couple & increases empathy. sharing reprocessing of the individuals creates a powerful bond between them. They get to see their partner at their most vulnerable.

EMDR Couples therapy partners help one other heal while healing the relationship.

Explanations of the modalities of some of Mary Rayś couples trainings below:

Imago

from https://www.imagorelationshipswork.com/

Connect, Transform, Thrive, Imago is a unique and compassionate approach that helps you in your personal and professional life. Connect to reinvigorate yourself and your relationships. Transform conflict into connection. Thrive as relationships deepen.

Reimagine Your Life with Imago Relationships

Imago is the Latin word for "image". Deep down, each of us carries a picture of what we think love is supposed to look, sound and feel like. We bring that vision and those expectations with us into our committed relationships, but they don’t always serve us well.

How does Imago Relationships differ from other types of therapy? Imago takes a relational vs. an individual problem-solving approach. For couples, it guides them on understanding how each of them come to the relationship with issues and how to heal together as a team.

Rather than acting as a referee, our therapists teach and guide couples to communicate in a safe and structured way that removes blame, shame and criticism. Instead, by facilitating a conversation the couple can learn from one another, using conflict as an opportunity for healing and growth.

Imago Relationships’ collaborative approach often takes fewer sessions than other forms of therapy to uncover the root problems and patterns fueling most conflict and disconnection. Imago’s approach also lessens most common concerns partners may have about participating in therapy. These concerns or fears may include: belief a couple should solve their own problems; fear of being blamed for relationship issues; concern therapy won’t bring lasting change; lack of progress with previous forms of therapy; or the belief that the current status of the relationship should be left alone.

Why is Imago Relationships so effective?

Learning how to resolve conflict in healthy and loving ways helps to avoid lasting damage, resentment or hurt that can slowly tear relationships apart. Imago teaches specific tools, skills and guiding principles designed to empower couples and individuals to: Express feelings in a non-confrontational, safe and structured environment; Address the root of conflicts rather than problem-solve specific incidents; Embrace the fact that each partner has different needs, wants and expectations; Make small changes that create big differences in terms of happiness and fulfillment; Build more intimate, trusting and mutually supportive relationships.

Who can benefit from Imago Relationships?

Imago Relationship tools work well for people seeking to deepen connections, including individuals and couples at all stages of relationships. From dating and prenuptial to long-term commitments or marriages, our tools can help couples whether or not they are currently experiencing distress.

Imago Therapy & Workshops for individuals and couples - Explore emotional issues, deepen love and strengthen connection. Get more out of your relationships.

Organizational Workshops -Elevate employee engagement, improve collaboration and strengthen communication.

The PEX Method

Over the past 30 years at the Couples Clinic and Research Institute, we’ve pioneered a new approach for helping people develop more satisfying relationships.

The Pragmatic-Experiential Method for Improving Relationships (“The PEX Method”) translates new discoveries in the fields of neurobiology and relationship science into practical strategies for improving relationships.

Detailed in the books, Emotional Intelligence in Couple Therapy, and Developing Habits for Relationship Success, The PEX Method is scientifically-based, drawing from:

Long-term research studies that have identified exactly how people who are good at getting their partners to treat them well go about doing it.
Long-term studies that examine how emotional attachment occurs in couple relationships, and why an emotional bond is crucial both to the success of relationships and the well-being of individual partners.
New neurological studies which suggest how we can rewire our brains for more flexibility, enabling us to develop new habits that become so thoroughly integrated into our neural circuits that they become part of our second-nature.

The PEX Method helps partners build and use the skills of emotional intelligence to resolve impasses, recover from hurtful experiences, avoid frustrating interactions, and create truly enjoyable relationships.

Straight to the Heart of the Matter

Scientists have discovered that the dizzying array of bad things that happen in relationships can all be traced to a single cause – deficiencies in the core set of abilities that are necessary for relationships to go well.

By measuring the presence or absence of these abilities, researchers have been able to distinguish partners who are headed to a satisfying relationship from partners who are headed for unhappy futures (or break-ups) with over 90% accuracy.

This kind of predictive validity is virtually unheard of in most branches of science, and has captured the attention of therapists and educators around the world.

Most people believe that they have the abilities needed to make their relationships go well.

But available evidence suggests that this is wishful thinking.

Studies suggest that most people don’t meet the prerequisites for relationship success. It’s not surprising then, that half of all people who marry in the U.S. eventually divorce, and at least half of the couples who stick it out are unhappy with their relationships.

Most of us don’t have the habits needed to make our relationships thrive over the long haul. In fact, most people don’t even know what these crucial habits are.

But studies show that they are not optional.

If you want your relationship to go well, you simply must have them.

“If you want your partner to treat you well, you need to learn to think and act like people who almost always get treated well by their partners – and you certainly don’t want to think and act like people who hardly ever get treated well.”

– Brent Atkinson

Straight to the Heart of the Matter

This kind of predictive validity is virtually unheard of in most branches of science, and has captured the attention of therapists and educators around the world.

Most people believe that they have the abilities needed to make their relationships go well.

But available evidence suggests that this is wishful thinking.

Most of us don’t have the habits needed to make our relationships thrive over the long haul. In fact, most people don’t even know what these crucial habits are.

But studies show that they are not optional.

If you want your relationship to go well, you simply must have them.

One of the habits that are not optional involves the ability to react effectively when your partner says or does things that you don’t like.

When you feel that your partner is doing something that’s selfish or insensitive, it might seem to you that s/he is the one who needs to change.

But studies suggest that the most potent predictor of your partner’s willingness to change is your reaction to his or her selfish or insensitive behavior.

In fact, studies suggest that the ability to react effectively when feeling upset with one’s partner separates the men from the boys, and the women from the girls when it comes to having the emotional intelligence needed to sustain relationships.

Our book Developing Habits for Relationship Success will guide you step-by-step in learning about the set of habits that are so highly predictive of relationship success.

Why Is It So Hard?

The abilities that are needed for relationships to thrive are easy to understand and learn, but can be very difficult to do because at key moments, we often experience strong urges and inclinations that take us in the wrong direction.

Researchers have discovered that, when a relationship is distressed, each partner generally reacts to the other during arguments in highly predictable and patterned ways.

Thanks to some very helpful brain research in the past 30 years, we now know that this is because, across our lives, our brains get conditioned to produce highly specific response programs.

These are conditioned brain circuits that are pre-programmed.

Once triggered, they produce an amazingly-predictable pattern of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.

Brain researchers call these brain states “executive operating systems” or “intrinsic motivational circuits.” Ordinary people call them “states of mind” or “moods.”

The important thing is not what they are called, but to recognize that these internal response programs can dramatically dictate how you interact with your partner. To improve your relationship, you will need to become familiar with the specific mood state patterns that happen inside of you during disagreements with your partner.

Your best shot at acting differently comes when you develop the ability to shift internal states when needed.

The ability to shift out of unproductive internal states cannot be willed at a moment’s notice…

…any more than musicians or athletes can perform skillful maneuvers without hours of practice.

Thankfully, hundreds of studies prove that the ability to shift internal states can be strengthened through practice just as surely as the mechanisms that enable complex musical or athletic movements. The PEX Method teaches daily exercises that…

interrupt the tendency to ruminate;
strengthen the ability to let go of upset feelings;
reduce physical arousal in response to perceived threat;
curb urges to judge, interrupt, counter, dispute, criticize and defend during disagreements;
foster the inclination to remain open and flexible during disagreements;

But the PEX Method goes beyond strengthening the ability to resolve disagreements.

It provides methods for cultivating truly enjoyable relationships.

Researchers have found that partners who build strong friendships can be distinguished from those who don’t by the degree to which they…

are curious about their partners’ worlds;
notice and acknowledge positive qualities that their partners have, positive; things that their partners do, or positive experiences that they have together;
look for common interests and shared goal and values;
make and respond to bids for connection.

Knowing this, you might think that the key to building stronger friendships is to put more effort into doing these things. But it’s not that simple.

In order for caring actions to count, they must be genuine.

Caring acts can be exactly that – caring acts.

The secret to cultivating intimacy has to do with figuring out how to “turn on” brain processes that automatically make us actually feel more interested in our partners, invested in our relationships, and desirous of satisfying forms of attention.

Using the PEX Method, partners engage in daily practices that prime their brain for naturally-occurring feelings of warmth, tenderness, affection, playfulness, and sexual desire. from: https://thecouplesclinic.com/our-approach/

PAIRS

The Mission of PAIRS is to teach those attitudes, emotional understandings and behaviors that nurture and sustain healthy relationships and to make this knowledge broadly available on behalf of a safer, saner, more loving world. Bonding, the unique combination of emotional openness and physical closeness with another human being, is a biological-need that impacts our physical, mental and emotional well-being through every stage of life.

While most of us are trained through years of education and life experiences to meet other biological needs such as air, food, water and shelter, much of what we learned from our own early family, educational, and professional experiences can actually interfere with our ability to get our needs for bonding met and to meet the bonding needs of those with whom we share our lives. The deprivation of bonding is perhaps the single greatest preventable contributor to illness, depression, premature death, relationship breakdown, and family fragmentation that directly leads to many of our most urgent national challenges.

That concept is central to the nonprofit PAIRS Foundation’s quarter century experience working with couples, singles and young people from all backgrounds and in every stage of relationship.

PAIRS training for the public teaches evidence-based, scientifically-validated skills for creating and sustaining relationships that are an ongoing source of love, pleasure, happiness and fulfillment for both partners, based on the centrality of bonding and a unique understanding of the logic of love and emotions. The goal of every PAIRS exercise and experience is to increase our capacity to create and sustain relationships in which we are able to consistently get our own needs for bonding met and meet the bonding needs of those with whom we choose to share our lives.

Experiential learning in PAIRS’ brief programs, such as the nine-hour, award-winning PAIRS Essentials program, delivers practical, immediately usable skills for improving interpersonal communication, understanding emotions in ourselves and others, navigating conflict and differences on behalf of the goals and dreams we most cherish, uncovering hidden expectations and assumptions that can otherwise sabotage close relationships, and learning to identify “emotional allergies” that may trigger strong reactions where we can unconsciously expect people in our lives today to make up for hurts, disappointments and other painful events from our past.

While PAIRS has been credited with saving thousands of marriages headed for divorce from the early eighties through the present, the focus of PAIRS is on human relationships. In many cases, those are relationships between spouses, domestic partners, parents and children (youth or adult), as well as co-workers and team members whose collaboration within visionary enterprises directly impacts client services and organizational success.

The skills participants learn in PAIRS will make a difference in any close relationship, including our relationships with ourselves as exercises offer the opportunity to better know and understand how the unique events of our lives impact feelings about ourselves and relationships with others. from: http://instructor.pairs.com/history.html

Also: Gottman; IFS; EFT; Family systems structural & communication theoretical frameworks; etc..