Nov. 17 Life @ MCO Report
Farwell from Anna McGuire
“It has been an honor and joy to have been a part of this team. During my time at MCO, I have learned and grown so much, I contribute so much of that to my interactions with each of you. I’m so thankful for the work this team does for the Kingdom. Blessings to you all!” ~ANNA
MCO Wellness Advocate Program:
Help those you care about connect with the care they need!
We are so excited to launch the MCO Wellness Advocate Program. As a member of the MCO Wellness Advocate Program, you can help advocate for the importance of mental, emotional, relational, and spiritual wellness, and spread the word about the professional care that MyCounselor provides.
Each person you refer will receive a discount on their first session and, as a thank you, you will receive a $25 gift card of your choice!
The MCO Wellness Advocate Program is a community of people who believe in the importance of biblically integrated and clinically informed Christian Counseling who want to help others connect with counseling that really works! Watch the video below to learn more.
Learn More & Become an Advocate: https://mycounselor.
Clients Loving on our Clinicians
- Sarah: I just needed to be heard today in a safe space and Sarah provided that for me.
- Carrie: I love that the sessions are ALWAYS welcoming and friendly. I love that Carrie picks up on things I am trying to say but don’t have the correct words to get it out. She is always kind and respectful towards my beliefs and feelings. She has helped me and is helping me piece my life puzzle together and I am so grateful for her!
- Melanie is AMAZING, understanding, no judgement and listens very well.
- Lane is just awesome, I can’t say enough good things about him. He’s just so good at what he does. I feel supported and understood by him and I’m so grateful for his service.
- Tish is knowledgeable, compassionate and perfect for us
- Robbin: My counselor has been great. She is supportive and I enjoy talking with her.
November Birthdays
Mary Faxon – November 19th
Mary! Where to start?! Happy birthday to one of the most caring, kind, compassionate, empathetic, caring, genuine, and authentic humans and therapists I have every had the honor of working alongside and guiding. You are bound for greatness and I cannot wait to see what the future holds for you! Don’t hold back celebrating YOU today and enjoy every moment. You deserve it, girl! And again, HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!! ~ Rachel
Melanie Hart – November 24th
Melanie, you are a gem! I wish you the greatest of birthdays with many more to follow. The love, care and concern you have for your clients is incredible. This month we celebrate you, a woman that shows the heart of Christ and genuinely cherishes His people. Enjoy your special day cause you deserve it! ~ Rosie
November Celebrations
Danielle is Pregnant with #3
Danielle is pregnant with her third child and rocking it as a clinician here at MCO. Her bundle of joy should be making an appearance Feb 2nd! Congrats Danielle!
Prayer Requests
Lacey– family is in need of your prayers. Our 8 y/o grandson, Jensen Lee has just been diagnosed with Leukemia. We are in shock and trying to get our kids everything they need before they head to St Jude’s today. Please pray for our sweet boy as he has to walk this journey. Please pray for our son and his wife as no parent is ever prepared for this. Please pray for us as our grandparent and parent hearts are breaking as our kids hurt.
Kiran– My husbands health and healing. Healing for my sons broken leg
Sarah- Soldiers across the country, including my husband, are being escorted and “ordered” to take the vaccine on a new timeline and are being told that if you request any exemptions, you’ll be denied and chaptered out of your military career before they can ever look at your paperwork. Our family is directly being negatively impacted by the events of our country today and feel very helpless. Please pray for our peace of mind and for how this is impacting other aspects of our life plans and physical/family planning goals.
Mary– Pray for the single mother of 2 precious girls, my former students in Vietnam. Girls drowned close to their home. The family and community are recovering and the mom is staying connected with the underground church there so that’s a blessing in the middle of grief.
Mary –My aunt is with her son and daughter-in-law who can care more fully for her as she has now broken both hips that were brittle from extended treatment. She’s in good spirits but we just don’t know what it will look like for her in this time. The foster teens in her care are doing well on their own and have their own place and working on completing education.
Britni– My nana had surgery to remove breast cancer. Everything is looking fine but please pray for my mom and her heart as she helps my nana recover.
Josh Lolling– IBS, changes in my role at MCO, MCO is growing and changing.
Anonymuos– Wisdom and understanding as I navigate new season of my life
Fun Fact about Lane!
I grew up on a farm in Southern Missouri and had a pet cow named, “Joyce“.
Didactic Materials
11-17-2021 Didactic: Infidelity Recovery – Beginning Grief & Connection
Information- What you need to know:
In the timeline of infidelity recovery, the initial 2-3 months following disclosure involves the goals of increasing each person’s ability to connect with their own pain/grief and subsequently, increasing their capacity to connect with the pain/grief of the other. The therapist will act as a primary emotional support to each spouse and as a temporary bridge between the two of them.
Why is connection so important? “The most profound emotional injuries are not those that occurred during the moment of violation but those that result from the aloneness, desperation, demoralization, helplessness, and intrapersonal/interpersonal disconnection that followed and is subsequently rekindled by the mind thereafter” (AEDP 2.0 p.296- Fosha). Both spouses may have been experiencing this prior to discovery, but will certainly be after. It is critical to establish connection, first with the therapist & supportive others, then with the spouse.
Ideally, therapy will be divided into individual sessions for each spouse and marital sessions together. This allows for the therapist to work with each person individually to form attachment and with this attachment assist the person to deepen into their grief. Defenses and inhibitory emotions can be given extensive attention in these individual sessions. Additionally, deep core emotion, the other spouse may or may not be able to hold with their mate, can be held by the therapist. An example schedule might be, one week each spouse meets with the therapist individually, and the next week they meet as a couple. This can even be increased in frequency, if the couple is able, as the first few months of infidelity recovery are often a time of the highest need for support.
Marital sessions will utilize the security each spouse has in relationship with the therapist to help regulate them and allow them to begin connecting with their grief in the presence of the other spouse. The other spouse will be assisted in regulating by the therapist, allowing them to be impacted by their partner’s pain. Generally, the goal is for the betrayed spouse’s pain to be held first.
As each person, and the couple together, begin to have successful experiences of feeling into their grief and coming out on the other side, confidence increases allowing them to go to greater depths of pain and healing. In a sense, they realize “I can feel this and not die/I can feel this and get better.”
As the couple connect with grief, we will also begin to see the powerful impact grief can have on emotional regulation. Couples will notice marked improvement in their ability to manage what they feel effectively. Couples who hold pain well together, come to no longer have the same kind of dread about each other’s pain. Instead, there is a trust that nurturing will be received when needed and a growing sense of one’s own confidence to provide nurturing to another which will be received. A typical manifestation of emotional dysregulation and the attempt to manage it without grief, is the establishment of rules and expectations about a spouse’s behaviors. While expectations are not a bad thing overall, they can become injurious to both people when their primary focus is to prevent the couple from feeling their grief. It is no different than a person with unresolved trauma who has created many life rules and limitations designed to prevent the trauma being activated. Rules and expectations should be created with the understanding of the therapist that connection in grief is the ultimate goal.
Special Circumstances
Sexual Addictions:
When sexually compulsive behaviors, or really any other addiction are present, Beginning Grief & Connection will take a slightly different path. Up to this point, infidelity work has been quite uniform for all cases. Stop the infidelity/acting-out and tell the whole truth. However, after disclosure infidelity recovery looks different with sexual or any other addictions present.
Clients with addictions can be helped/supported to get sober and tell the truth. However, clients with addictions are not capable, early in treatment, of grieving or connecting deeply with their betrayed spouse. This is not a matter of being willing, it is a matter of capability. This is a difficult reality for many betrayed spouses to accept. It is completely understandable. They have been hurt profoundly, and now the spouse who hurt them can do only a limited amount to help them. It simply is “not fair.” Many betrayed spouses will struggle and view this as a matter of willingness. “If my spouse was truly willing/committed/really cared they would be able to be what I need.” or “Actions speak louder than words, and his actions tell me a lot.” We as therapists should always respond with a great deal of empathy to the betrayed spouse, but they also need clear direction. I will tell betrayed spouses “It is painful to accept but true, that your spouse is not capable of giving you what you need right now. What you need and what I am looking for from him is the willingness to become capable. He is not getting away with anything. Growing will be hard work for him every step of the way but will strongly refine his character.”
Addicted individuals need to establish sobriety and be involved in an addictions recovery group. This is critical to their success. Such work is done concurrently with infidelity counseling. Engagement in recovery is so important that counseling will focus on client resistance and barriers if the individual does not engage in addiction recovery, rather than continuing on with the typical infidelity recovery work.
Past Trauma:
When infidelity happens in cases where additional trauma is present, this can change the landscape of recovery. This is particularly true when the trauma has not been previously worked on in meaningful ways. The trauma may be present in either spouse’s life or both. When trauma is present, it should not be ignored.
For either spouse, remember that whatever the trauma was, it is likely the person survived and wanted to be done with it. The infidelity has now brought up something in them they had hoped was permanently over. In the case of either spouse, especially a betrayed spouse, it is important to process the grief of having a place in themselves which had healed be reinjured by a new person in a new way. For clients who had previously done meaningful trauma work, the therapist can work to process the grief of getting injured in the place which had previously healed. It is like having healed from a stab wound and then having your spouse inflict injury on the same part of your body again.
We do not need to turn the infidelity work into work exclusively on trauma, however. We are working on healing the infidelity injury. Therefore, we deal with the trauma as it intersects this work, but do not lose the focus on infidelity recovery. It is possible a client might choose to work on their trauma directly, they may even request this. It is important we process with them establishing two focuses, both the infidelity recovery and the trauma healing. The therapist will need to work with the client on managing having these two treatment fronts.
Intervention: What you need to do:
Our intervention is comprised of the following 2 parts:
- Feel into yourself and feel me (as the therapist) with you.
- Feel into yourself and feel your spouse.
Feel into yourself and feel me (as the therapist) with you.
The gateway to having compassion and connecting with another is to first connect with yourself. Failure to connect with self will lead to an inability to both heal and connect. The best that can be achieved is listening to one another and behaving well (ie: such as saying the “right things”). Feeling in the presence of another who is stuck in their defenses or pathogenic emotions is not beneficial. In fact, it can further the emotional injury. A case in point is the betraying spouse who attempts to be there to support their partner by simply listening to them, either because they do not believe their emotions are deserving to be recognized or they believe they have healed and are ready to move on. Their spouse will respond with either feeling little to no relief or may even react in anger, noting they are the only one being emotionally vulnerable.
As such, you will act as the initial support to each spouse. They are both too activated by their spouse or injured by them to be supported by their mate. The goal as therapist is to begin to assist the client to drop into core affect while feeling you there supporting. It is helpful to use the handouts provided here to conceptualize what is happening in the room.
The Triangle of Relational Comparisons helps us in infidelity work to recognize the relationships in the room with our clients. First, present in the room is the client’s relationship with their spouse. This relationship carries with it a set of defenses, signal affects, and core emotions. Also present in the room, is the client’s relationship with the therapist. Again, this relationship has the same components. Finally, and importantly, the therapist should be aware of past relationships being present. It is very common for infidelity to either spring from early attachment issues for betraying spouses or for the infidelity to exacerbate previous wounds for the betrayed spouse. Orienting yourself as counselor to the various relationships present in the room can help you stay oriented, allowing you to see what relationship you are working within at any given moment. Take time to briefly map out a couple you are seeing and the components for each part of the triangle.
**Special Note: It is quite common for a heavily defended betraying spouse to have present, in the room, their current experience of themselves in relationship to others in their life. Specifically, they use their experience of themselves as, for example, kind, generous, giving, etc… with other people to shield the pain of other realities about them. When the therapist comes in, representing the infidelity, the client will struggle with the tension between their positive sense of themselves with others and the experience of a therapist who is bringing to light the pain of their infidelity. This can manifest as feeling misunderstood or misrepresented by the therapist.
The Self-At-Worst/Self-At-Best Functioning Triangles help us to know which version of our client is present at any given moment. Therapy is dynamic, and one moment the best self may be present and in an instant the worst self is activated. Use your own nervous system to help track this. If you suddenly feel off balance, confused, or tense, there is a good chance something has been activated. Self-At-Best leads to feeling you and the client are working together, on the same page, each others emotions, resonating with one another and providing for greater depths of exploration. Self-At Worst is noticeable as feeling disconnected from the client and unable to reach them and attempts at repair are resisted. If you, as the therapist, can help the infidelity client to access their Self-At Best, you will create new nervous system experiences which can be used later with you as the bridge between them and their spouse. In other words, if they can go there with you, then they can go there with you with their spouse in the room, then they can go there with their spouse with you in the room, and finally they can go there with their spouse outside of therapy. Again, below is a list (bolded are the parts the therapist focuses on as part of feeling into self):
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- I cannot go there (into my grief)
- I can feel my therapist with me
- I can feel my therapist with me so I can feel my grief
- I can feel my therapist with me so I can feel my grief with my spouse present
- I can feel my therapist with me so I can feel my grief with my spouse present and feeling
- I can feel my therapist with me so I can feel my grief with my spouse present and feeling and I can feel my spouse’s grief.
- I can feel my grief with my spouse and I can feel my spouse’s grief
Utilize the tables below to help you get a sense in session of different defensive and adaptive presentations in your clients. This kind of understanding will allow you to move beyond the “content” of what your client is saying to their actual condition. When you attune effectively to their actual state, connection and regulation can happen.
Defensive & Adaptive Expression of Activating Affects
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Maladaptive or Defensive Affect
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Adaptive Affect
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Grief
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Tears, leading to feeling worse.
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Tears over loss, with positive and negative memories. Leads to feeling relieved.
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Anger
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Frustration, leading to greater hopelessness.
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A rush of energy to the limbs, and feeling of greater energy to set limits or make a change.
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Closeness/Tenderness
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Idealized, perfectionistic image of the other based on self-need and longing. Longing and need-based.
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Gentle, unexaggerated, tender connection based on acceptance of the whole person (strengths and weaknesses).
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Self-Esteem/Positive Feelings about Self
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Exaggerated or grandiose feelings about the self, covering insecurity. Contempt toward others to bolster self-image.
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Quiet, comfortable feelings of pride or self-compassion based on acceptance of all aspects of the self and acceptance of similar qualities in others.
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Joy
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Inauthentic, dissociated, false peacefulness. Exaggerated calmness. Fake smile or serenity on face.
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Genuine relaxation and enjoyment. Deeply savoring the pleasurable or spiritual experience.
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Excitement
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Manic arousal. Urgency about the experience.
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Vital enthusiasm or curiosity. Life energy. Deep interest and involvement. Spirit.
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Sexual Desire
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Demeaning or hurtful to self or others, compulsive, addictive quality.
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Passion flowing freely-deeply satisfying to self and partner.
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(McCullough 2003 p. 123)
Physiological Characteristics of Defensive & Adaptive Affects
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Maladaptive or Defensive Affect
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Adaptive Affect
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Physiological: Direction of Energy Flow
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Either inward or outward, but hurtful to self and/or others. Self-attacking, tense, constricted, and withdrawn, or a bottled-up feeling with wish to explode or act out.
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Flowing out from the area of the torso to the extremities. Surging, resonating, responsive to the moment.
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Action Tendencies: Stimulation or Inhibition?
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Results in excessively thwarting or self-attacking inhibition or action, or impulsive of explosive acting out. Both lead to greater conflicts of problems with self and others.
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Surge of flow generates an action tendency, and expression leads to a sense of relief and satisfaction.
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Anxiety Release: Inhibition Increase or Decrease?
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Inhibition is maintained if inner-directed, and inhibition is only temporarily reduced if acted out.
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Inhibition is decreased, and person is calmer after expression.
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Lasting Effect: Relief After Expression?
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Momentary, but not lasting, and only if acted out. If not, frustration collects and build into perverse or self-punitive form.
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Yes, with lasting satisfaction.
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(McCullough 2003 p. 122)
Feel into yourself and feel your spouse.
Our focus, building out of feeling with the therapist is for the couple to begin grieving together. We will now be working on the bolded steps below:
- I cannot go there (into my grief)
- I can feel my therapist with me
- I can feel my therapist with me so I can feel my grief
- I can feel my therapist with me so I can feel my grief with my spouse present
- I can feel my therapist with me so I can feel my grief with my spouse present and feeling
- I can feel my therapist with me so I can feel my grief with my spouse present and feeling and I can feel my spouse’s grief.
- I can feel my grief with my spouse and I can feel my spouse’s grief
The Self-Other-Emotion Triangle shows us a very important transition point for dynamics between couple’s in infidelity recover. The reality, without grieving both separate and together each person will experience their mate as a “Triggering Other.”
- Betrayed spouses will experience their spouse as someone who is a walking reminder of their trauma.
- Betraying spouses will see their mate, and in particular their mate’s pain, as only serving to punish by making them feel their pain.
Deepening with the therapist allows the client to access core affect and begin to process the most raw parts of it. From this point, the client can now begin to feel in the presence of their spouse. The goal at this point is simple, getting one spouse to feel into their core emotion and the other to be open, allowing this emotion to impact them. Typically, we will begin with the betrayed spouse sharing their emotions with the betraying spouse allowing themselves to be emotionally impacted. Being in Self-At-Best does not mean feeling “good” or “comfortable.” It means authentically feeling in connection with others. At this point, much of Self-At-Best will be extremely painful, but know that feeling pain in this state is actually very relieving and strengthening. Do not be surprised by this.
Next, we want to begin to have the spouse who is listening (the betraying spouse at first), feeling into what is shared, also begin to share their own emotions around the grief. Both spouses are now going deeper into grief together. By each feeling more deeply into their grief and putting it in the space between them, the grief can be more fully felt by both. Additionally, they are increasing their connection in the space of feeling deep grief. A betrayed spouse will gain a sense of know they mattered from their spouse actually sharing their deep grief and eventually this will even lead to compassion (although, initially compassion may take the form of simply hearing and being impacted rather than strong displays of compassion).
From this point forward, the therapist’s goal is to create more and more nervous system memories of the couple going into both of their grief together and finding healing. This is a momentum building time. As each person experiences times of connecting with their own pain and the pain of their spouse, they will develop confidence to go further. Please understand this initial momentum will be mistaken by avoidant couples as meaning they are fully healed. It is not. Rather, it is a movement into deeper and deeper healing together. It is quite common for couples to come in and say they did not know what they were going to talk about in the session and leave amazed at what they just processed together. They will often say they had no idea what was processed as even there.
Momentum Markers
Look for the following to let you know a couple is healing/gaining momentum:
- Decrease in reliance of both spouses on defenses.
- Decrease in time spend in pathogenic affects.
- Increase emotional stability. This does not mean not feeling, it means feeling while staying connected to core self and maintaining sense of connection with meaningful others.
- Couple is having moments of grieving and connection outside of therapy.
Look for the following to let you know a couple is stuck:
- One or both people are locked in reliance on defenses.
- Feelings are limited to numbness or floods of pathogenic emotion.
- Emotional stability is seldom present, replaced with vacillating distance and reactivity.
- Couple is focused mostly on boundaries and “rules.”
- Grief is avoided outside of session.
If momentum is building, this leads into generally months 4-12 of infidelity recovery, deep grieving and healing, which will be addressed in subsequent training. If momentum is lacking, a number of things may be going on. The most important thing for a therapist is not to overthink and try to just “figure it out.” Instead, bring the difficulty to your clients. Bring their awareness to the “stuckness.” In many cases, they are already very aware and addressing it head on will be a relief. Go towards and feel into the stuckness together with them. We can only address the block by steering towards it. In these cases, you and your clients can make agreed upon adjustments to therapy, such as maybe one or both of them needing more individual help, or perhaps more intensive marital session frequency. In the cases of addiction clients, greater engagement in recovery programs may be needed. Take time to discover what the block is and don’t hesitate to staff your case with colleagues.
**Special Note: Please note the Impact Letter and Emotional Restitution Letter can be used as guides on what to grieve. Couples can take these and spend time in therapy processing each section of the letters, individually and together.
Handouts: