Mark A. Chidley, Certified Rapid Resolution Therapist

People have infinite ways of providing themselves comfort as an answer to emotional pain. Cutting, burning, picking or scratching the skin; pulling out hair, chewing nails down to the quick. Actually almost anything done excessively in an altered state can do the trick: shopping, spending, hoarding, exercising, sex, masturbating, gambling, and, of course, eating or restricting eating. Almost anything that can be put in the mouth, inhaled, touch the skin, or impact the nervous system in a dramatic way that releases endorphins is of great use to those suffering emotional pain. Many  modalities share the common advantages of being individually controlled, can be done in private and kept secret, pose no resistance of themselves, break no laws, and create a very efficient, alternate hedonic loop in the brain that gets the relief to where it needs to be in a hurry. An alternate route of satiety and relief that is much faster and effective than other routes. Actually, to understand how these methods alter the nervous system to relieve pain is to understand they are a rather brilliant idea.

But how can I, as a therapist, say that? Well, Jon Conolly, the creator of Rapid Resolution Therapy has reminded us that the human predicament is quite unlike any other animal’s  walking the face of the earth. When a dog or a monkey has to deal with having to run or fight for it’s life, the brain’s emotional mechanism floods them with negative feeling and motivates them to profoundly pay attention and take action to get their situation to stop happening.  It is turned on and off quite efficiently. They are not in pain while it’s on. A rabbit running for its life is motivated, alert, and made unusually strong and fast.  It all  lasts no more than seconds,  at most, a couple minutes. The animal, if it survives,  shivers a bit, shakes out its coat, and resets emotionally back to normal. It goes about nursing whatever physical wounds it has suffered matter-of-factly, without anything like emotional pain. If it is caught and its brain understands there is no chance for escape or successful counterattack, a kind of peacefulness settles over it and its mind exits the scene. There is no emotional pain there either.

But not so with us. For us,  the flush of anger, grief, fear, betrayal, outrage, etc., can turn on and stay on for years. Think about the predicament of some people having to cope with the flood of something meant to meet survival challenge with all its original intensity every hour of their life. Unremitting jacked up anger, horror, terror, disgust. You get up with it, you spend your day with it,  go to bed with it, and it is there in the night.  A switch that had it turned off,  would have been tolerable, but now stuck in the “on” position, spells excruciating pain. And then because humans can stick on meanings afterward, shame, guilt, or hate may also appear. Still another layer of pain. This guy is sitting on a bench and sees a pretty lady chatting happily with a man. He remembers his wife’s infidelity. That gal is riding on a subway and she smells a certain body odor. She remembers her rape. All you have to do is lightly push on the sore spot and even though it’s twenty years later the person is beside themselves. It no longer has anything to do with survival but the old brain doesn’t know that. It keeps sending the signal to get it to stop.

Take cutting. Imagine how sick of  that pain you’d have to be to be willing to localize and control it by cutting on the tender tissues of the breasts or inner thighs or even genitals. Connolly points out that now at least you have it in one place and you know who’s doing it and how long the worst part will last.

From this perspective, it is not hard to figure how something damaging that also offers relief, containment,  and instant comfort could be recategorized by the primitive part of our mind as an old friend, a reliable one at that. But that is not how the parents  who bring in their 14 year-old daughter to therapy see her cutting, or how the culture sees the 22 year old’s bulimia or the sex addict’s repeated immersions in pornography.  The culture to protect itself sees the behavior and wants us to put it outside the limits of acceptable with a label.  Instead,  this attitude glues pathology onto the person’s identity even firmer as they are seen as weird, abnormal, and aberrant because people are more likely to go along with a consensual meaning instead of taking a longer look at a phenomenon for themselves.  And this is what is happening even if we give it a fancy diagnostic name.

And what if counselors buy into all this distancing and labeling? To me it’s like going up to a very lonely and desperate person and insulting them for choosing to hang with the one friend they’d found in the world. “Hey, Why do you keep hanging around with that jack**s?”, is not a question I want to lead with or imply. I want them to get that I get how much pain they’ve been in. Are there better ways to handle it? Without a doubt. But I won’t get there, wont get a connection with that person in order to shift them into something better until they get that I get them.

It’s on me to convey that I understand how desperate they got and how frightening it would be to let go of that old friend. And that I have something better in view, like an end to the obsolete messages themselves; the start of a whole new life.

Beginning this month I switch things a bit, taking a look at some common life problems from a Rapid Resolution Therapy perspective. The topic this month is Intimidation, a theme that seems to show up in a lot of people’s lives.

We know in these times of economic challenge,  some may be in jobs that are not to their liking.  Others may have returned home or to a relationship of situational dependency.  In both situations, leaving may have a steep downside, and may be perceived as not an option. Intimidation seems to take root in these soils, causing great anxiety and pain. As one person put it, “I seem to just freeze when he (she) acts that way. I should know better and usually hate myself afterwards, but at the time, I just take it. It’s like I can’t think of anything else to do.”

This deer-in-the-headlights effect is commonplace around an intimidator and should not be taken as a sign of personal weakness. We’ve all heard of the fight/flight response, but freezing around a predator is also one of nature’s built-in options that takes place in the oldest part of the brain. When a cat catches a mouse, and its brain understands that both running and fighting are no longer possible, the mouse goes totally limp, its mind and body cooperating to feign death. The almost instant down-regulation of the nervous system and mental numbing  is meant to keep us and all other animals still until the predator loses interest and danger passes, or at least keep us anesthetized if we are going to be eaten alive.

People often try to reason with an intimidator or express their hurt, hoping to wake up empathy and understanding. They may persist despite evidence to the contrary, especially if caught up in their own expectation that people should always be reasonable, responsible, and kind. The problem with this approach, I believe, lies in not recognizing that the intimidator’s prefrontal cortex is off-line. This is the part of the brain in charge of self-awareness, empathy and good judgment, where normally a person could look at the whole picture, and back-off for the good of all concerned.

But intimidators are dealing mainly from the older brain, where perceived powerlessness and threat to survival register and have to be acted upon.   That part of the brain doesn’t have what Dan Siegel has called mindsight, the ability to read the inner world of someone else, and may not compute the valuable social information coming in from others.  For intimidators, the threat is immediate and must be acted upon. Displays of anger, aggression, and control become appealing because they work–temporarily.  They intimidate others in order to go one-up,  to climb up and out of the victim position, which is where they see themselves. They learn powerlessness and emotional pain don’t have to be felt; they can be short-circuited and transferred to another. But this loops back on them. Control and aggression carry within them the seeds of heightened insecurity. Fear, rigidity and loss of mindsight amount to a massive inability to adapt, which sets intimidators up for even more vulnerability in each new situation. 

From the view of this as a relational system, this is a powerful cue that pulls for a symmetrical (complimentary) response from others.  They simultaneously hate and are drawn to the vulnerability which they create in others or others carry for them.  And vulnerability seems to activate them when they come across it in others. They don’t see the outstretched olive branch their victim may be holding. They see a red flag, a reminder they could be weakened and hurt again.

So here’s a story that might help. Long ago in old Mexico, on a remote hacienda, young Pedro was watching his father and the other men handle the cattle at branding time. Pedro wanted to take part, and be more like the men. His father said, “Pedro, my son, to be a man you must first deal with El Malo, the bull.” El Malo stood about ten hands high at the shoulder, was solid muscle, and known for his nasty and unpredictable temperament. More than one of the ranch hands had a long scar along the ribcage from getting careless around El Malo’s great horns. His father continued. “My son, you must go into the corral and face El Malo. And you must find a way to get him into the barn. Then you can take part in the branding.”

The boy was very scared, and didn’t know how he was going to do it, but he climbed into the corral. The bull was at the other end nosing in the dirt, his huge withers and flank shining in the sun. Pedro advanced slowly, one tentative step at a time, until he was within arm’s reach of the bull’s nose. He was still very frightened, but he observed: the bull, looking back at him, had a mixture of emotion in his eyes. There was anger, but there was also fear, sadness, and confusion. Mostly confusion. Pedro leaned way forward and dared to touch the great muzzle and for just an instant, the bull let him. But then becoming wary again, El Malo snorted and backed up, waving his horns. Even more of that confused look was in his eyes. Suddenly, Pedro turned around and with his back to the bull, walked even steps across the corral back to the barn door, counting to himself as he went. When he got to the barn, he made sure to lean his back right against it so his hands found the crossbar that locked the doors. Then he started yelling and dancing, shouting “Toro, Toro”, making quite a fuss. The bull hooved the ground one, twice, and then charged. Pedro watched him come, counting the bull’s strides and at just the right moment, lifted the crossbar, spun out of the way, opening the barn door, as El Malo’s massive head and trunk whisked by. His momentum carried him all the way into the barn, with his backside facing out, whereupon Pedro quickly shoved the doors closed and dropped the crossbar. The men cheered and clapped his father on the back, as his father smiled broadly and nodded at his son. Pedro had figured out how to get El Malo the bull into the barn.

(Disclaimer: The reader should not to take this as literal, specific advice. It would, for instance, be a very bad idea to purposefully incite a more powerful person who is in a position to harm you. The point of the story is get us to realize we may have more of our brain on-line,  as it were, than an intimidator usually does, and hence, more creativity ready at our disposal)

There is a famous story that Milton Erickson used to tell about the studies of Margaret Mead, Jane Belo, and Gregory Bateson when they went to Bali in the 1930′s. They found the Balinese people can go into a deep trance at a blink and in fact can do things like go to the market, accomplish their shopping, even visit a neighbor–all while in a trance. Autohypnosis is part of their daily life. The three famous researchers actually brought back movies of this occurring for Erickson to examine. Of course it didn’t surprise him; he recognized this is not a culturally specific phenomenon, but pointed out that for all peoples, trance is a rather ordinary everyday experience (My Voice Will Go With You: The Teaching Tales of Milton Erickson, edited and commentary by Sidney Rosen, p.74). Erickson himself was legendary for recognizing hypnotherapeutic opportunities and making lightening-fast use of them.

Rapid Resolution therapists are keenly interested in making rapid connections with our clients and making best use of these naturally occurring states.  We could, in the best sense of the term, call this Guerilla Connection. We want the world to drop away for the client,  to grab their complete attention, and to create a special kind of joining experience,  because it sets up a profound receptivity to our healing interventions. There are subtle changes that indicate a client’s “response attentiveness”. They will vary a bit from person to person but could include a flattening of facial expressions, staring, absence of blinking, and almost complete immobility.

This can be created in multiple ways: as we demonstrate interest and understanding in their situation; as we use appropriate humor and become interesting, even intriguing, to the client; as we provide uplift, separating identity from illness language and using tense changes to locate trouble in the past; as we use voice to create pauses, tonal emphases, or duplicate word choice, rate and volume of speech; as we use our own body to mirror posture and rate of breathing; as we listen to stories from their personal lives and catch certain signs of trance, particularly rich, sensory-laden words that are anchoring an experience that is pivotal for them. I’m remembering one lady who started telling me about being able to smell her deceased mother’s perfume sometimes. In retrospect, I missed that one.  I only needed to tell her “That’s it. Stay with that” and she would have slipped into an immediate connection, a connection she had previously been blocked from.

A person’s language can tell a lot about their preferred channel for forming connection. Someone sharing with you something from “the way they see it” or from their “point of view” is likely to favor visual input. But not everyone is visual or adept at creating images in their mind’s eye.  Another person may emphasize the verbs “hear” or “say” in their reports of experience, or what something “sounded like” to them; they may automatically assume they must recite large fragments of conversation for you to get what they experienced. Such a person favors auditory input. And, of course, others will “lean toward” being “in touch with” something,  or the “feel” of an experience. They will even demonstrate with their bodies through shudders, shrugs, and shifts of posture whether they were “comfortable” or not with something. These are the kinesthetic folk.

Of course,  Guerilla Connection works both ways.  The other day as I was checking out of a restaurant and paying for the meal at the counter, a sudden sneeze came on me. One of those that tickles for awhile and works its way up, that you try your hardest not to have. As my hand went up instinctively to protect others from the spray I thought sure was coming, the cashier mirrored my hand and raised hers suddenly to her own nose while her eyes riveted me. The raising of the hand to cover the mouth and nose is a universal gesture that she recognized and used to join me. While shaking her head “No” she ordered me to say  ”Watermelon, Watermelon, Watermelon” three times!  I looked at her in amazement because it sounded urgent and ridiculous, like the words “Ab-ra Ca-da-bra” before the climactic moment of a magic trick. I obeyed like a schoolboy and said the magic word “Watermelon” three times. And you know what,  it worked! Not only no sneeze but the tickle completely vanished. In about 2.5 seconds she had created a “purposeful communication utilizing connection, credibility, and effective language to get the desired response from the subconscious.” She had done a Guerilla Connection on me and performed a mini piece of good samaritan therapy.

I’m just amazed by language and all the other ways we communicate and how,  as a species, we connect in the everyday to help each other. As you sit down with someone, or even as they walk into your office, keep all channels open and you may find a way to do a Guerilla Connection and make something very powerful happen fast.

We live in the shelter of each other    – a Celtic saying

Susan Johnson, arguably our era’s most prominent researcher and developer of today’s most coherent, research-based system of couples therapy, Emotion Focused Therapy, says emotional starvation is real. She echoes what John Bowlby said 40 years earlier. He and Mary Ainsworth in their now famous attachment studies documented that humans monitor the emotional and physical availability of our caregivers, that we reach out to this person when we are upset, that we miss this person when apart, and that we count on this person when we go out into the world to explore (Johnson, 2007). Harry Harlow, a colleague of Bowlby’s , found monkeys depend on what he termed “contact comfort” and preferred it even to food, when given the choice. On the flip side, isolation from a caregiver revealed the accumulating mental toxicity and crippling that results when there is emotional starvation.  “Effective dependency”, heretical in Bowlby’s day, when separation and individuation ruled developmental theory, still runs  counter to our culture’s norms. But it is now recognized as central to healthy social development and later satisfaction in adult love relationships. It turns out  that a sense of secure attachment not only makes close relationships work, but also is one of the keys to recovery from trauma.

The pain resulting from lack of secure attachment in adult love relationships is, I believe, one of the most underestimated forces affecting our health. When attachment bonds are strained or eroded, not just our mental life, but the delicate balance of our stress hormones, our immune systems, our cardiac function,  our overall resilience, aging process, and even longevity are often thrown into a downward spiral. It follows that when a person lacks a secure base and safe haven in relationships the effects of trauma are amplified and become even more pernicious.

Perhaps one of the most striking historical examples of this was the relationship between Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln. After the death of their son Willy in 1862, the second son who had died,  Mary, who already suffered from mood problems, lapsed into a deeper and more complicated depression.  Kentucky born, she had also lost several brothers by that time who served on the Confederate side, as well as brother-in-laws, her sisters’ husbands, taking each successive loss worse than the last. She alternated between distracted and prolonged bouts of crying on the one hand, and frenzied outreach on the other,  at times writing Lincoln disorganized letters pleading for his support, even though they lived under the same roof.   But she could not access her husband and witnesses from that time testify she could not be consoled. He was already working up to eighteen hours a day as he took the troubled course of The American Civil War increasingly onto his own shoulders, but also used work to distance himself from her intensity.  Her descent into compulsive shopping was legendary, as she would buy up to 300 pairs of gloves at a time, or spent thousands on lavish furnishings for the White House to soothe herself. She could be rattled by the most benign of events. Once, when the President rode out to survey a nearby battlefield, a general’s wife happened to ride up beside him. Mary,  further back in in her carriage spotted this, and suspected an affair was underway. She fumed , accused, and tried to gather support for her point of view all through the day and into a reception dinner that night, embarrassing both Lincoln and his guests.  Without any internal or external anchor, she collapsed, and had to spend the next two days in bed. Her notorious tirades and flights into paranoia became more frequent,  and all but her own servants learned to stand clear. By the time of Lincoln’s assassination in April of 1865, she had little left with which to fight, and with that final blow, she never really recovered. She deteriorated over the next two years and was pronounced “insane” by her doctors, spending much of her remaining days in her darkened room in her family’s home in Illinois.

In Hold Me Tight, Susan Johnson cites numerous ingenious studies of couples under stress,  ranging from real life emergency room situations to experiments set up in laboratories.  These show that love bonds are literally our buffer, a mediating force in our perception of shock, stress, and pain. She has re-mapped the whole territory of couples counseling by seeing clearly that:  1) the intense emotions and life and death meanings that couples attribute to disconnection are not melodrama, but real. They make sense from a survival perspective and the ancient wiring of the limbic brain. 2) That deeper attachment needs and fears are the real plot beneath the surface drama of repeated conflicts. One partner feels an urgent need for closeness and to repair the gap and so goes on the attack. The other feels immobilized, like a failure, wary of emotional display,  and so withdraws in order to calm things down and preserve the status quo. Both miss the crux of the matter, and these strategies create further misunderstandings that just bring on more cycles of disconnection.  3) Moments of accurate emotional engagement that redress these underlying fears and needs are  key to restoring safety and jump-starting growth in both partners. The smallest moments or gestures of emotional engagement and responsiveness have inordinate power to redefine a couple’s map for the better, and therefore set them back on the right path.

The relationship between trauma and relational distress is a complex one, and much more has been written than can be summed here. But one point must be made relevant for those who work with survivors of trauma.  The partner who survives the kind of trauma caused willfully by another person  experiences what Judith Hermann called a “violation of connection”.  This kind of “attachment injury” involves a sense of betrayal or abandonment at one’s point of greatest need. It is especially potent to create distortion and poison the stability of a survivor’s current relationship.  There emerges a  reciprocal loop in which the after effects of trauma continue to erode the relationship, and, ongoing relationship distress can, in turn, exacerbate lingering symptoms of trauma. After awhile, the couples’ hair trigger reactivity, fiery clashes, cold withdrawals, and tense surveillance of one another can resemble a shared version of  PTSD.  This requires a skilled therapist who manifests genuineness, compassion, and patience, and who understands how to handle the inevitable impasses, working at a much slower pace.

Rapid Resolution Therapy has evolved as an individual method for healing trauma. It has different tools and approaches than those that work primarily in the context of the survivor’s relationship with their intimate partner. Our focus is on getting the individual’s mind to update and the recruitment of unconscious strength. Couple-based methods focus on accessing the strength nature has programmed into the “we”, as two stand together to face life’s troubles. Couples approaches claim that working models of the self and the relationship become stronger at the same time, and that may well be an advantage.  There is one important difference, however. Most models of couples therapy assume trauma’s effects will always be there in one form or another. RRT doesn’t  assume traumatic reactions have to be a permanent part of anyone’s life or that the dragon can only be “pushed further to the periphery” as the couple reconnects and muddles through together.  We know trauma can be cleared entirely and with lasting results.

But aside from these differences, RRT shares many commonalities, particularly with EFT. One is that when new information breaks through rigid constructs, it takes place in the deepest part of the mind.  RRT can look on with appreciation at a sister technology that understands how things can shift suddenly, how healing our need for  safe connection takes place below the level of negotiating, teaching communication skills,  ironing out cognitive errors, or learning new sexual positions. Second, we are pulling with the same pair of oars when we position clients to look at relationships scientifically. In the case of EFT, there is the the effort to make behavior understandable as mishandled attachment needs and primal fears that, when triggered, follow a predictable course for all humanity. We agree on the  therapist’s use of self to create a strong countervaling positive experience within the session. We concur with keeping participants emotionally connected to the present. And while we don’t “respect” feelings per se,  we respect the primordial wiring of the human mind,  and how its responses,  often confusing especially in relationships, are understandably oriented toward survival, and ultimately make sense.  Finally, we look forward together eagerly to the next few years and what new knowledge research will surely bring to us, about how to heal trauma’s ravages, whether individually or within a committed relationship.

I hope you, the reader, have enjoyed this three part series as much as I enjoyed writing it. I welcome your comments and wish you continued success and peace.