Loving well. Helping couples do what matters most.

The Art and Science of Love

Despite relationship being so natural, it tends to be an area of human experience that is equally challenging, puzzling, and painful as it is rewarding, transformative, and blissful. Why?

Answers can be found in contemporary neuroscience, close observation, and deep introspection.

We are biologically wired for relationship.

All too often, couples get stuck in cycles of fighting, withdrawal, and shutdown (“fight, flight & freeze”), without understanding the primitive biological and historic underpinnings that color their experience of each other. When couples are caught in these dysregulating cycles, the loving connection once enjoyed in the relationship begins to wither. When this repeats in an ongoing way, our lover begins to seem more like an enemy than someone that we want to move closer to physically for emotionally. The experience of being “in love” starts to fade while feelings of frustration and disappointment become all too common. Add to this the stresses of careers, child rearing, and an over-scheduled life, and the happiness that we once knew begins to fade. Why?

As very sophisticated mammals, we are wired neurologically with an ability to recognize patterns, and to generalize from past experiences to anticipate future events.  This system of automatic appraisal, preparation, and response has been invaluable for helping humans avoid the ancient threats of predation. Although most of us no longer live in a world where we need to worry about being hunted, this system of threat detection and response continues to be part of our brain architecture.  A drawback to this hard-wired system of protection, is when our automatic appraisals of impending threats are inaccurate, or when our behavioral response is ineffective for the current situation.  What’s an effective response with a predator will definitely create problems with your spouse or partner. This automatic sequence of perception, emotion and behavior often becomes reinforced for couples through the consequences of repeated reflexive behaviors, unfortunately reinforcing fear-based biases.  And so the cycle the continues… I’m sure you’ve been there. I know I have.

These reflexes are also lacking in maturity, as what we fear in relationship as adults, is often based on personally relevant, yet archaic experiences from decades ago with other people. The deep learning we had about relationship. What I call “the old country.” If partners aren’t skilled at showing each other reality in a manner that helps update old assumptions about love and relationship, then misperceptions and misunderstandings will be the norm, and these outdated reflexes will scare your love away. You’ll spend too much time fighting about reality…what did or didn’t happen or who, did what, when. It’s a waste of time and a waste of your precious life and love.

For couples to move forward out of these unsatisfying patterns, they must co-create new kinds of experiences that demonstrate understanding, compassion and love. Relationship problems are not communication problems which is what most couples and too many therapists believe. They are perception problems.  To solve perception problems, you must understand how perceptions are created by the brain, and how you can alter them through experience.  Experiences that more accurately reflect truth and love.

My work with couples involves an experiential study of the habitual patterns that lead you away from connection and trigger the primitive strategies of self protection, and how you can help each other to relax these reactive states into real intimacy.  In this way, you help each other to grow beyond vestigial ways of perceiving, feeling and relating, so each of you is more yourself with the other. When this happens, you will thrive as a couple, and as an individual.

I’m also considered an international expert on a method of couple therapy called PACT, and I was one of a handful of therapists in the United States to be selected by Stan Tatkin to be Core Faculty for the PACT Institute.