When Couples Separate or Divorce: The Therapist's Role in Healing and Transition (5 minute read)
For Couples Therapists and Individuals Navigating Separation or Divorce
I was especially grateful for Dr. Liu’s recent training on how to help couples break up through an Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy (EFCT) framework. Some of my most challenging couples have come to therapy following an affair, chronic dishonesty, or addiction, seeking to understand whether their marriage can be salvaged.
I’ll be the first to admit—this is a high-pressure situation! Most of us enter this field to “make things better”: to improve relationships, alleviate old wounds, bear witness to painful transitions, and help clients “get to the other side.” But what if the “other side” is a breakup? A divorce? Split custody arrangements, or someone leaving the marriage for an affair partner?
In these moments, we are not neatly wrapping up healing with a bow; instead, we are helping clients pick up the shattered pieces left behind after a devastating storm.
Dr. Liu thoroughly covered both the components of breakup distress and the various attachment-style reactions to uncoupling. She offered countless case examples demonstrating how to guide couples through conflict by metabolizing individual and shared experiences of confusion, pain, helplessness, fear, shame, regret, anger, and grief.
As with any modality, it is important to remind ourselves of the goals we are pursuing as clinicians. Below are the EFCT goals (developed by Dr. Liu) when working with clients who are breaking up:
Foster Healthy Emotion-Regulation Strategies:
A) Therapists encourage the evocation and processing of emotion. We are not primarily focused on problem-solving due to decision fatigue. Therefore, one of our central goals is to help reduce the intensity of emotional pain.
B) After emotional processing, we must also integrate present-day cognitive dilemmas, such as analyzing information, perspective-taking, learning new ideas, and making decisions.
Rebuild Emotional Connection:
A) With oneself: We help clients practice accessing, experiencing, and accepting individual emotions and needs.
B) With others: This may be particularly challenging depending on attachment styles and relational ruptures. Ultimately, we are helping foster an environment where individuals feel safe sharing vulnerability and are able to offer support and care to one another.
Shift Internal Working Models Through Corrective Emotional Experiences:
A) Toward oneself: Helping clients develop a view of themselves as worthy, lovable, organized, and clear. This sounds so parent-like! I love this one!
B) Toward others: Building the capacity to trust and rely on others again. We want clients to regain the ability to trust others in the future despite being hurt by their partner, so their attachment style becomes more flexible and secure.
Oscillating between improving internal working models and safely attaching to—or detaching from—someone who has caused pain creates enormous opportunities for healing, repair, and growth if we, as therapists, can learn to tolerate immense discomfort in the therapy room. This skill is honed through ongoing self-reflection and by asking ourselves difficult questions such as:
Are my personal morals or values being triggered by anyone’s behavior?
Am I siding with anyone?
Is it easier to empathize with the person who has been hurt the most?
Am I afraid to ask a question that could induce more pain?
Would one or both people ultimately be better off divorced?
The longer I do this work, the more I realize there are many paths we can take to help couples. Often, a thick fog settles over those paths, making it difficult to see the way forward. As a result, tolerating ambiguity becomes an essential part of working with clients—especially without the benefit of a crystal ball to predict what the future may hold for them.
As EFT couples therapists, we must remain grounded in both pain and patterns, as well as hope and comfort, so we are prepared to de-escalate conflict, repair harmful views of self and other, and hold space for whatever outcome ultimately emerges.
We must cultivate a strong therapeutic alliance with everyone who enters our rooms, regardless of how many affairs they have had, how much alcohol or drugs they have used, or how much harm they have caused, because behind every painful behavior lies a story of suffering. We may not always uncover the origins of their distress, defenses, or hurtful behavior, but we can hope that they leave feeling heard, understood, cared for, and treated with dignity and respect.
Lastly, I would like to leave the clinician with this thought for self-reflection:
We must be aware of our own unresolved grief when it comes to sad endings. Are we forcing an agenda onto our couples because there is still some “unattended” grief related to our own losses?
