typical Deadlocked Relationships and an Effective approach to Repair or Salvage them
Many young adults at Stages 1, 2, and 3 struggle to find their own identity and often remain with unfulfilled emotional needs stemming from their original family. Such individuals look for romantic partners who satisfy their emotional needs rather than selecting partners who can help them achieve their shared desires through companionship. When these young adults are driven by ‘need’ rather than ‘desire,’ they usually seek partners from familiar and complementary levels of emotional development. Such couples often experience high levels of conflict, while they represent an ideally complementary match in the needed mode of emotional development. In an effort for either partner to progress to a higher stage through emotional development, the couple undergoes a necessary period of adjustment through an uncoupling process, leading to temporary withdrawal, separation, infidelity, divorce, or reunion.
It is important to stress that individuals’ attachment styles formed while growing up as children significantly impact their relationship style once they become a couple. In this context, their level of attachment to their primary caretaker, typically their mother, is relevant in pre-conditioning relational patterns according to various cultures’ developmental stages. The attachment level characterizing mother-child relations is critical regarding emotional development across cultures at various developmental stages.
The 5-Stage model contends that an effective therapeutic technique for couples embroiled in conflict is to help partners advance along the developmental path from the emotional stage they find themselves in. This is initiated by partners putting a halt to a blame game for unhappiness in the marriage. This trajectory can follow the path illustrated in the emotional development ladder introduced through the 5 Stage model to avoid a premature break-up. Only when a partner refuses to participate in a collaborative effort to grow through therapy or education while temporarily detached or emotionally unknotted does divorce or breakup become a viable option to end a vicious sadomasochistic blame game. However, motivating couples to participate in a collaborative effort to work on emotional growth also poses a challenge to therapists since partners’ established feelings of love presuppose their other half’s unconditional acceptance without their need for extra work to change.
A couple has a better chance of salvaging the relationship if either partner is willing to make an initiative to improve his or her view and approach to the relationship without blaming the partner and requiring him or her to participate in the couple’s therapy. The couple counseling to learn communication skills should not be the main tool the couple tries to learn through therapy. Communication skills are acquired along the path of one’s emotional development. As in many deadlocked relationships, unless they change their views on themselves, their partners, and why the relationships are where they are, they will waste lots of resources on many months of therapy to realize that simple communication skill training will keep reverting their communication and engagement style to the original dysfunctional pattern. No relationship is perfect at the start and has unimaginable potential to repair, maintain, and improve if one is not afraid to learn and accept the reality about themselves at first, then their partners and the relationships.
