Get Over It: How can therapy help in recovering from relationship trauma?
“You may want Mr/Mrs Right, but the sexual activity after six months is more or less the same.” - Therapist Sue Cowan-Jenssen on finding ‘the one’
There it is again. That moment when you catch yourself replaying an old argument or a bad memory in your head, dissecting a breakup like a forensic pathologist, or worse, scrolling on social media or swiping on dating apps with the grim determination of someone trying to exorcise a ghost of relationships past with external validation.
The French Philosopher Denis Diderot called this rumination tendency, ‘L'esprit de l'escalier’: the spirit of the stairs - a moment of clarity and wit long after I would prove to be socially useful. The behavioural economists know that loss haunts us through loss aversion; we feel adverse developments much more strongly than positive ones. Whether it’s the loss of an argument, the death of a relationship, losing your job, or simply the version of ourselves we thought we’d be by now.
Introspection and self-reflection may have become modern-day virtues, but at times we will require an independent, impartial sounding board to truly understand how our past affects our current feelings and behaviour. This is the role of the therapist. We have all experienced painful memories that have harmed our relationships. So, how can we come to terms with trauma and move forward positively? This is what we will be exploring with our guest, Sue Cowan-Jenssen. Sue is an integrative psychotherapist and EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing) consultant with over twenty years of experience working with adults.
I asked Sue what makes a good therapy client: “Your core belief can be, ‘I’m damaged’. That is what you can bring to therapy. You also need to have the desire fore self-reflection and the capacity for taking accountability - something that politicians struggle with that politicians famously struggle with.” Political strategy dictates that Labour will continue to evade responsibility and blame their predecessors for their inheritance for the next four years, so I chose to offer no rebuttal.
The key point of whether you feel damaged can often be in our processing and storing of memories: what meaning do you give to confusing or upsetting life incidents that you may have had limited, or no, control over? Troubling memories can continue to haunt us, which can be the result of trauma and something that therapy can help you come to terms with. Some people would rather wish that they could just forget, like Jim Carey in ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’ - having targeted surgery to erase he memories of his ex-girlfriend.
“Dissociation is a defence, but it leaks out in other situations, perhaps when you fall in love.”
The problem isn’t the memory; it’s the meaning we give it and the lesson we take for ourselves. That time you were ghosted? It’s not just a bad date, it’s proof you are socially awkward. You were sacked? Not bad luck, but a verdict on your consciousness and creativity. As Emma Watson in the 2015 film, ‘Regression’ discovered, not all memories are an accurate reflection of what really happened to you.
These beliefs are our brain’s way of trying to protect us from future hurt, like we all learned to be careful with knives and sharp objects. But what we learned as children to protect ourselves, our unconscious memories and personal lessons from childhood, can no longer serve us as adults. “Dissociation is a defence”, says Sue, “but it leaks out in other situations, perhaps when you fall in love”.
Take infatuation, for instance. We all enjoy the feeling of ‘being in love’ for the first time. Most people attribute this to the first few months of romantic love, before the couple either break up, or move into the companionate love phase. This feeling of infatuation can be thrilling, but it can also blind us to obvious realities in the relationship which will soon become clear. As the protagonist, Richard, says in the film The Beach (based on the far superior book by Alex Garland, who’s mother was a therapist) when enthralled by Francois, his female French travelling companion: “When you develop an infatuation for someone, you always find a reason to believe that this is exactly the person for you. It doesn't need to be a good reason. Taking photographs of the night sky, for example. Now, in the long run, that's just the kind of dumb, irritating habit that would cause you to split up. But in the haze of infatuation, it's just what you've been searching for all these years.”
“It’s not about erasing the past. It’s about taking the sting out of them.”
Sue is a practitioner of EMDR, perhaps therapy’s closest thing to a ‘reset’ button for traumatic incidents. EMDR represents a kind of ’reverse-Pavlovian dog’ therapy: using eye movements to unhook traumatic memories from their underlying emotional landmines. “It’s not about erasing the past. It’s about taking the sting out of them.”
The independent role of the therapist is crucial to holding up a mirror to our own behaviour: we’re terrible at recognising our own patterns. That partner who’s ‘mysterious’ (emotionally unavailable)? The one who ‘challenges you’ (combative and disagreeable)? Are we all looking for our mirror-image, or do we want something completely different, who will expand our world? Noticing ‘red flags’ in a potential romantic partner represents a “lack of empathy”, for Sue. We are all looking for that perfect person, with no problems despite having lived a life. Someone may choose to open up about their difficult childhood in order to build a connection on a date, but the other person may reject them as, “I’m not here to process your childhood trauma”.
“If tough love worked, therapists wouldn’t be in business. You are not embracing lessons from that traumatic event, there can be things to be grieved and they need to be - but you can help become stuck in the past.”
This is what EMDR therapy can help people with, getting out of the emotional rut of the past. It’s no just apps that are harming modern relationships for Sue, but also our environment: “Working from home has been a disaster for relationships.” Maybe try to get into the office more if you are feeling lonely, then.
We’ve all felt the addictive trance of early love: the dopamine, the delusions, the way they just get you (until they don’t) - “I’m too perfect, until I show you that I’m not”, as Lola Young sings. But as Sue reminds us, growth isn’t about finding someone who ‘completes’ you. The American psychiatrist Dr Scott Peck explored in his in his book ‘The Road Less Travelled’ where these short-lived feeling of oneness comes from. Ego boundaries (the knowledge that you and I are separate entities) are relaxed during the early stages of a relationship. Like a baby and its mother, there is a feeling of wholeness, of not being alone anymore with this new person… until you realise that there can be glaring differences in our moods and passions. Sue believes that the search for the perfect other half is ultimately self-defeating: “You may want Mr/Mrs Right, but the sexual activity after six months is more or less the same.”
When the ego boundaries snap back into place (three to six months), it can be easier to move on and, even if you can’t forget, take whatever lesson you will from that incident. Vincent Cassel struggles to forget hypnotherapist Rosario Dawson in the 2013 film ‘Trance’, so she leaves him with a voice note giving him the steps he needs to take to move on, “if it all becomes too much, and you want to forget - just listen to the sound of my voice…” He chooses not to be hypnotised to forget her, but I expect he will be first in line for a therapy session with Sue. We may not be able to forget or all our negative tech-enabled relationships, but we can perhaps come to peace with them.
So how do we break the cycle? The Serenity Prayer, beloved of those in recovery from addictions, may offer guidance. After speaking with Sue, perhaps we could update it as a mantra for modern daters - A ‘Serenity Prayer for Swipers’…
Please grant me:
The serenity to accept that the search for connection and love can involve suffering (thanks, Romantic poets).
The courage to change your routines and patterns of attachment, not the person sitting opposite you.
And the wisdom to know you can’t outsource personal growth to an app.