MODELS
DEVELOPMENTAL MODEL
It’s common knowledge that infants and children experience predictable developmental tasks and challenges.
This developmental crucible shapes our emotional, cognitive, and physical well-being. Thought leaders Ellyn Bader and Peter Pearson argue that a couple’s relationship also goes through similarly predictable developmental stages, as a normal part of becoming intimate partners and achieving emotionally maturity.
The Developmental Model describes these stages as developmental challenges, not pathological obstacles.
These stages are:
BONDING (SYMBIOSIS)
DIFFERENTIATION
PRACTICING
RAPPROCHEMENT
SYMBIOSIS
In the Developmental Model, a couple bonds early, and falls into some degree of limerent romantic love.
The couple, at this early stage, will tend to focus on their similarities. They will avoid the friction of their differences, although, of course, they realize intellectually that they aren’t going away.
Regardless, differences aren’t top of mind during this initial bonding stage.
Americans, in particular, thoroughly enjoy the romantic fiction of “soul mates” who are “meant to be together.” We are die hard fools for love. Bless our hearts.
Sex, at first is often fast and furious, and their mutual enthrallment may threaten other relationships.
This is the Limerence. It’s also known as romantic love. Pop music tells us that this experience is intoxicating, marvelous, and engulfing …so that must be true.
Bonding is also an important stage for babies and their mothers. Couples in this early stage engage in intimate physical touch, such as cuddling, and sleeping intertwined.
DIFFERENTIATION
However, after about 18 months… or time inevitably goes on, differences between partners become impossible to avoid.
Differences become more prominent in this next phase. Whether fights arise from these differences or you attempt to co-exist with them peacefully. You sometimes feel flashpoints of friction.
In childhood, this is the time when the infant realizes that the Mother is a separate creature, with her wants and needs. The Mother is no longer an extension of the child, magically knowing what the child wants and needs, instantly soothing and satisfying.
In normal couples’ development, each comes to a similar awareness: “Holy sh*t! We’re separate human beings with different wants and needs.” Hopefully, at this stage, couples learn that expressing themselves clearly and openly isn’t threatening the love they share. Conflict avoidant dynamics, trauma, and personality disorders can also emerge and impact this developmental stage.
It’s vital that partners can notice differences and accept them without judgment. Their relationship isn’t necessarily hampered because of those differences. Differentiation can be good for you.
If both spouses get to this stage at roughly the same time, (which doesn’t usually happen…) it’s a time for frank discussions that will help you both clarify your values. These discussions require a particular skill set which, in my opinion, is the beating heart of why this model can be so powerful.
With appropriate, teachable skills, the intimate sharing and handling of those differences can also bring you closer.
I can help with that.
Your conflicts can be gateways to intimacy
It is the usual tug of personalities to be wanting different things at the same time. When you navigate this developmental challenge successfully, you’ll practice a method I’ll teach you for self-regulating and managing conflict without escalating or needless drama.
These teachable skills provide an alternative to “giving up” what you want and need, or feeling “hopeless and defeated” that you’ll never get your needs met. You’ll also have a powerful alternate to “mind reading.”
With Intensive Couples Therapy, my couples learn to listen without flinching at each other's feelings as accusations and becoming defensive.
The importance of bestowed attention and a careful protocol
You’ll learn to speak about your experience with appropriate skills without projecting your hurts or feelings onto your partner. With new communication skills, you’ll stop blaming or accusing. You’ll talk with a clean heart about how recent events have impacted you personally.. and what you want instead.
You’ll discover the value of starting sentences start with “I feel…” or “I think…” You’ll go through the critical process of defining your thoughts and feelings in front of your intimate life partner.
The more you both communicate with new skills, the crisper and more precise the issues and their meanings will become to you.
Conflict can be a gateway to intimacy. With the help of bestowed attention and a careful protocol, you’ll learn more about yourselves as a couple: your goals, values, hopes, and dreams.
You’ll learn more about yourselves through sharing and exploring the differences that arise between the two of you. This is the role of the “Initiator” in the Developmental Model.
Ideally, the listener (“Inquirer”) learns to become more open, curious and less defensive. Even if their partner is angry at them, they learn to remain calm internally.
“He/She is telling me about their experience of me. They aren’t talking ABOUT ME.”
This can be hard because it assumes that two realities exist, not just one. The primacy of two separate realities is vital in all effective couples therapy. A differentiated partner can become empathetic when their partner is hurting, curious when angry with them, and reassuringly present and bestowing attention when their partner becomes dysregulated.
In the role of the “Inquirer,” they learn to ask the most challenging, truly open-ended questions imaginable. Questions that help the speaker go deeper while feeling they are in the presence of someone who is focused, bestowing attention, and truly wants to understand.
Differentiation is the normal stage, a 'tug' of personalities, and clear discussions are needed. It assumes that two realities exist, not just one.
PRACTICING
At some point, like a kiddo squirming to get out of their parent’s lap, the Practicing stage starts when one or both of you begin to notice and respond to the world around you.
Once you get that you can delight in your differences…and it won’t damage your relationship, you can now begin to explore the world around and between the two of you.
If successful in Differentiation, they’ve learned how to manage differences, speak up clearly for themselves, and the manage the anxiety of doing so.
Now, in Practicing, they test out what it means to them, and how it impacts the relationship, to have “selfish moments,” separate friends, private thoughts, distinct career ambitions, unique hobbies, or periods of emotional withdrawal.
If both are at this stage at the same time, it is a busy time of growth for both.
Each hardly notices the other’s exploration and independent activities, or if they do, they are proud that they are able to function so well, without being overly “needy.”
Both are enjoying the ability to become more creative, more curious about themselves and the world around them, and to identify themselves as worthwhile, powerfully loving and lovable human beings.
Are new couples are like children?
Children are driven to explore and engage the world around them. It is a normal developmental task.
Couples in this stage begin to wander from the nest. They become more curious.
I’ve heard some of my colleagues argue that this is also a phase where immature partners might choose to sh*t-test the relationship to reveal how it impacts the relationship to take these occasional selfish moments.
Separate friends, private thoughts, distinct career ambitions, unique hobbies, and sometimes, but not too often, periods of emotional withdrawal are all aspects of differentiation.
But it’s the ability to return to intimacy. Share. Ask interesting questions. Explore your values, wants, needs, and most important of all, your preferences.
If both partners are at the Differentiation Phase at the same time, it usually is an epic time of growth for both. Researchers have come to call this sensibility “personal expansion.”
RAPPROCHEMENT
However, with the proper developmental assistance (like excellent couples therapy)…a shift may happen. A shift that invites you both to reflect on the unique pleasures of being a team, having a profound sense of “we-ness,” and feeling bonded.
Like returning home to the familiar after a long sabbatical elsewhere, this sense of “returning home” invites a couple into a more complex and beautiful conception of their relationship. A conception that has become both more tender and more open.
What was once “ordinary” and “nothing special” is now met with gratitude and powerful noticing.
I don't sleep most nights,
Just lie awake and count my blessings.I'll take this endless life
Of perfect pointless mornings.I'll hold you till the morning comes
'Cause it's all that I can do.I'm so open. I'm so open.
the Cowboy Junkies
• There’s far greater vulnerability and openness at this stage. My clients seem to open like flowers. Perhaps you will, too.
• They report more profound safety and satisfaction within the relationship.
• Many couples express gratitude and a profound appreciation for their partner’s unique contribution to their life.
Like the child that happily explores the world, Rapprochement resembles an exhausted kiddo child at the sunset of a long and delightful play date, delighted to, once again, return home and see their intimate others, their pets, their toys, and the comfort of their warm, familiar bed.
Couples in Rapprochement hold the stance, “Let’s discuss that. This has to meet your needs as well.”
Getting what you want is no longer seen as a zero-sum game.
Imagine that each of you wants to understand and help the other get what is most important to their marital satisfaction. An abiding sense of teamwork knocks at the door, holding a new toolbox. I can help with that.
The merits of shared selfishness
. Couples in Rapprochement are universally selfish. By that, I mean only “win-win” solutions are worthy of consideration.
“What makes you happy makes me happy” might have been said during the more superficial Symbiotic phase. Still, it is genuinely intended and, more importantly, understood more profoundly. Imagine each of you feeling personally enriched by the happiness of the other. This is what happens in Rapprochement.
...the partners learn to give, even when it is occasionally inconvenient to do so, because the marriage no longer functions as a “zero sum game,” with a winner and a loser being the outcome of such marital games.
Noticing your attachment style alongside your partner’s need for Differentiation can help you develop greater maturity as an individual and an enhanced capacity to respond clearly and consistently and with more excellent care and attention to your partner’s nervous system.
They voluntarily choose to give up those things that they realize are distressing to their partner without resentment or feelings of deprivation. The practicing phase was the struggle over how to manage differences. But couples in the Rapprochement phase? They got this.
My sex therapist colleagues tell me that the sex gets better at this stage, too.
SYNERGY
Once you achieve the Rapprochement stage, ordinary pleasures are more frequent and delightful.
That’s because you’ve discovered the force-multiplying power of cooperation.
As in the Lessons of the Geese, there is a recognition on a visceral level that working together is not only just as east as working alone, it also requires a couple to “grow themselves up” and escape the gravitational pull of the sh*tty families of origin that some folks have to pull themselves up from..
Here’s an obvious cultural truth; whether it is team sports, a musical band, or a game of competitive chess, the group that works together is the group that succeeds.
A committed relationship needs an abiding sense of “we-ness.”
For couples in the Rapprochement stage, emotional and cognitive synergy is routine.
They can easily settle on joint projects and ways to work together to achieve them. They can also integrate their emotional connection easily into everyday life… and work well together sexually as well.
Is your marriage developmentally challenged?
Ahh, wouldn’t it be great if we could all just skip to the good part!
Alas, this is not so easy.
Understandably, some couples rigidly cling to the Symbiosis state, and become expert at either denying the inevitable differences when they arise, or battling to have their preferences become the running rules of the relationship. That’s where I screwed up with my ex, BTW.
In both cases, couples have a difficult time articulating precisely what they want, how badly they want or need it, and at how they’re willing to similarly adapt to their partner wants, needs, and preferences.
If only you were “kind enough,” or “sensitive enough” or “generous enough” or “caring enough,” then you’d do such a better job of mind reading — and knowing what I want, and effortlessly giving it to me without my having to ask.
Now the attachment styles show up. Once activated, it may become obvious that you have not clue how to calm them down adequately. And they haven't learned how to calm themselves down, either.
However, if you can attain the vaunted Rapprochement Phase, couples can easily agree upon joint projects, and the best ways to work together to achieve them together.
Symbiotic hostile dependent
In contrast to the conflict avoidant symbiotic couple, the Symbiotic Hostile Dependent couples fight readily and intensely. But like the Conflict Avoidant couple, they may also have a poor ability to self-define, or ask for what they want in a calm, connected, and rational way.
The Symbiotic Hostile Dependent may also discover that it feels safer to criticize, rather than complain, or ask directly for what they want.
It might feel "too risky" to ask. Making requests of intimate others may not have been a feature in their family of origin.
There is sometimes an assumption with hostile dependent couples that their partner isn't ready and willing to be support them, or isn't open to helping them to feel safer.
Symbiotic conflict avoidant
Couples with a symbiotic conflict avoidant style are trying to ignore the smoldering volcano that is their marriage.
Instead of engaging in a healthy “eyeball to eyeball” conversation, the more avoidant partner avoids, and eventually the other partner colludes to some degree with this avoidance dynamic.
The pressure to avoid confrontation is even more compelling than the pressure to delay negotiation. For the conflict avoidant couple over time has achieved outstanding skill in reading non-verbal signals and micro-expressions. potentially conflictual topics.
Neither wants to create waves. A “pseudo-agreement” develops in which both agree to not disagree. However, often this tension for harmony comes at an enormous psychic cost.
Any given life crisis may prevent the symbiotic conflict vvoidant couple from the numb comfort of the “same old, same old”
The reason why so many symbiotic conflict avoidant couples can weather the toughest storms is that mundane life challenges tend not to challenge their shared values.
However, when conflict avoidant couples face an issue that challenges the deeply held (and incompatible) values of the other, they have no tools in their life experience to use to tackle this sort of abiding conflict.
They may have successfully avoided their fear of aggression and self-assertion, but it often comes at the price of a lifeless (or sexless, passionless) marriage. It’s been estimated that about 20% of American marriages are “sexless” (this is defined as having sexual contact 10 times per year or less).
It’s likely that Symbiotic Conflict Avoidant couple are more than well represented in this population.
We see two traits commonly in Symbiotic Couples: MINDREADING & PROJECTION
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Fights might begin this way:
P1: “I’m so fu*cking pissed off at you…”
P2: “Why?”
P1 “ C’mon. You know…”
P2: “No I don’t.”
P1: “ Fu*k yeah, you do.” (wash, rinse, repeat…) then finally:
P1: “You knew I wanted you to blah blah blah, and you deliberately (did/didn’t/ignored/did something else…) because that’s the kinda…”
Can you see their mind marinated in conflicting expectation?
Better to ask directly, simply, and pleasantly. But that would risk rejection, and for many of these couples, that is far more painful than the fight that eventually ensues.
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For these couples, there is a lot of talking about their counterpart. In fact, much more about the feeling of the other person, than the vulnerable move of describing one’s own feelings:
“You knew I wanted X, but you said to yourself ‘No way am I going to give that to her,‘ and you didn’t because you’re still mad that I did Y.”
Got that?
This isn’t a question. It is a statement of fact. “I know you better than you know yourself” sort of thing. “Nothing will change my mind. I’ve got your number…” (and never is it a lucky number…)
To say: “I would like to go to my favorite restaurant on my birthday,” is a big risk. Internally, often there is the thought “Why should I have to say that? Why aren’t THEY asking ME where I want to go?”
So there is withholding.
And as the birthday approaches, and no reservations are made, a demand for nurturance is made hostilely, and then angrily refused:
P1: “Aren’t you even going to ask me what I want to do on my birthday tomorrow?”
P2: “Sure. What would you like to do?”
P1: “Well, I did want to go to Jack’s, but just forget it, now.”
P2: “Sure, we can go there.”
P1: “If you cared about me at all, you wouldn’t have made me bring it up. If you thought about my birthday, you never said anything. You are so inconsiderate, I can’t stand it. I don’t even know why we’re still together. Your such a withholding jerk.”
And if the couple ends up going to Jack’s, it is likely that they’ll both have a terrible time. He’ll feel beaten up, giving her what she asked for. She’ll feel resentful that “he’s only going here because I’ve asked him to.”
And yet many of these couples are terrified of leaving each other (even if they break up and get back together, over and over…) and they are terrified of being overwhelmed by the other’s demands and neediness.
There is a push/pull that says: “Come close, stay away.” Even acts of generosity are misread or dismissed. These couples often believe: “I can’t live with you, and I can’t live without you.” They are bitter, angry, and blaming. It was as if the love and connection switch suddenly turned off, and in flowed the dark, hateful and sour.
As Gottman describes, these spouses are in: “a Roach Motel for Lovers: They check in, but they don’t check out.”
These couples need new skills, and the capacity to “grow themselves up.”
The skills involve identifying individual needs, without being angry, and learning to negotiate these needs calmly. Rather than blame the other spouse for having wants and needs in a fight, (“That’s right, go out with your friends. You’re so selfish!”) they need to learn to make their own needs clearer. Instead of being resentful that one of you is getting your needs met, and seeing it as a “zero sum game,” (“Oh sure, you can go out with your friends, but what about me? Why can’t I do that?”) they can learn from their angry feelings to ask: “What is my resentment telling me about my needs?”(“When I heard you were going out with your friends, I realized how much I miss my buddy, who I haven’t seen in ages!”)
Having needs doesn’t mean betraying the partnership. For many couples, moving into Practicing, where each can enjoy separate activities and interests without challenging the bond, is the scariest thing of all. While they may want to pursue separate interests, many can only do that in an angry or defiant way. (“Oh ya? I’ll show you!!!”)
As you see above, fights in this stuck stage don’t serve to help each person clarify their wants and desires. They serve to either maintain distance, or, paradoxically, to reinforce emotional connection. Like the child who is beaten, they have learned that only through fighting (sometimes violently so) do they show each other their “true” feelings.They “care enough” to get upset.
One-Sided Understanding
Also common is that these partners are highly sensitive and reactive to hurts done to them by their partner, but just can’t understand how their behavior has any role in it.
Or if they do recognize that their behavior has cause pain, they justify it. It was pain that was well-deserved, (“You feel pain? Imagine how much pain I’VE felt over the years!!!) and there is little remorse (at least vocalized)
THE DEVELOPMENTAL MODEL:
Normalizing the Push toward Growth
The Developmental Model of Couples Therapy helps couples to understand the natural stages of intimacy, and normalize the struggles inherent in the predictable developmental issues that couples cope with.
The Developmental Model is important because It helps couples to recognize:
The developmental stage that each partner calls home.
The developmental tasks of that particular stage, and craft a plan to achieve them.
The twinge of familiar, devitalizing issues that sometimes cause them to feel stuck, and why.
how very specific interventions in couples therapy can help provide them with a “developmental assist” to work through the stuck points.
I was the first intern trained in the Developmental Model on the east coast. I received that training from my friends and colleagues Donna Gillman, and Katherine Waddell.
The Developmental Model is a comprehensive and complex approach to Couples Therapy. I value its clarity and normalizing approach to complex developmental relationship challenges.
I guess what I love most about the Developmental model is that personal happiness isn’t subordinated in order to sustain relationship happiness. Notions of differentiation are valued as much as the human need for attachment.
This is a beautiful, aspirational model of couples therapy.
RESEARCH
Bader, E. L., & Pearson, J. (2015). A developmental model of couples therapy. Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, 41(3), 257-270. doi:10.1111/jmft.12103
Baucom, D. H., & Epstein, N. B. (1990). Cognitive-behavioral marital therapy. New York: Brunner/Mazel.
Carter, B., & McGoldrick, M. (2005). The expanded family life cycle: Individual, family, and social perspectives (3rd ed.). Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon.
Furrow, J. L., Johnson, S. M., Bradley, B. A., Dalgleish, T. L., & Follingstad, D. R. (2010). Couple satisfaction: The development of a measure for couples. Journal of Marriage and Family, 72(4), 866-878. doi:10.1111/j.1741-3737.2010.00750.x
Markman, H. J., Stanley, S. M., & Blumberg, S. L. (2010). Fighting for your marriage: Positive steps for preventing divorce and preserving a lasting love. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
Schnarch, D. (1991). Constructing the sexual crucible: An integration of sexual and marital therapy. New York: W.W. Norton.