MY HISTORY AND UNIQUE SELF

A study of family systems, through psychodramas enacting Family Systems

Factories and what happens with the addition of children (Dyad-Triad) leads

into the study of each person’s own family of origin. Genograms, a threegeneration

family map, allows exploration of influences in the family of

origin and reveals the invisible rules, scripts, and loyalties that may be affecting

current relationship. Participants also revisit their personal history through Guided Visualizations and Intensive Journaling to discover the impact

of early messages and past decisions, especially regarding love, adequacy,

and worth. They uncover their Revolving Ledgers, the emotional bills of

debts owed from the past that, as they walk through the revolving door of

life, they hand to whomever is there. Participants identify intense overreactions

to relatively minor behaviors of their partner that indicate the

presence of Emotional Allergies (another concept unique to PAIRS). These allergies

are acute sensitivities to whatever now reminds a person of pain or

threats from the past. Allergic responses are accompanied in the present by

protective reactions (ideas and emotions) and protective behaviors that

were used to manage the pain long ago.

Tools for healing allergies and past painful experience include the Healing

the Ledger Exercise and the Museum Tour of Past Hurts and Disappointments.

Here, partners confide previous painful or frightening experiences

to one another. This confiding helps the listener to understand and have

more compassion for the partner, and it helps the speaker to express pain

safely to a comforting, validating, and supportive partner. Partners are

shown how to hold each other in a nurturing way, while they are expressing

and releasing old pain. Participants may use the Letting Go of Grudges

Letter as a journaling and/or confiding tool, for finding relief and freedom

in working through grudges (hurts held in angry resentment to protect

from risking being hurt again). Through these experiences, participants

clear up misunderstandings of one another by reclaiming their personal

history rather than continuing to project and blame their partner. They reconnect

with suppressed early experiences and decisions that have been

interfering with their ability to trust or be intimate with their partner. Partners

also learn they can help to heal instead of hurt one another.

Couples also find that Emotional Allergy Infinity Loops underlie many of

their unresolved conflicts. Such a loop occurs when a person’s behavior

triggers an emotionally allergic reaction in his or her partner. The partner’s

allergic reaction then triggers an allergic reaction in the first partner,

whose reactive behavior then retriggers the second, and so on, ad infinitum.

In the throes of an Emotional Allergy Infinity Loop, each partner

often re-experiences the worst pains of childhood and the helpless reactions

of a small child. Typically each feels, “if it is like this, then I cannot be

here!” Each forgets to see his or her partner as a friend and experiences

the partner instead as the enemy. Each becomes lost in a reactive state of

believing the worst about self and partner and of using primitive protective

actions. Devastating distance can grow.

Couples now develop concepts and a language to understand and explain

what they are experiencing when they are conjointly in the grip of such

emotional intensity. As participants begin to understand and discuss their

Love Knots, Early Scripts and Decisions, Ledgers, Grudges, Emotional Allergies,

and Emotional Allergy Infinity Loops, they become capable of taking

responsibility for their own reactions, rather than blaming the other.

Couples are helped to strategize together to devise “emergency exit ramps”

from their loops and to work together to escape those slippery slopes.

Through empathy for the partner’s “child responses” and revision of beliefs

about the meaning of the partner’s behavior, the Emotional Allergy Infinity

Loop can be transformed into a Loop of Vulnerability and Empathy (LOVE).

To help see their unique self and inherent personality differences, participants

rate themselves on the Meyers-Briggs type indicator (Kiersey-Bates).

Through the use of exercises to illuminate the differences between the poles

of the four basic personality preference scales, couples begin to see how

many of their disagreements and conflicts are better understood as differing

styles of decision making, problem solving, information gathering, and

style of interaction. Differences, which had appeared to be threatening and

perceived as personal attacks, can now be reframed as temperament differences.

This often allows individuals to accept their own preferences and

styles, and helps couples approach their personality differences with a

sense of humor and even with compassion, instead of frustration, resentment,

or fear. Additionally, couples begin to appreciate how their differences

can be complementary in accomplishing life tasks together.

Participants also learn the “PARTS of Self,” a system of classifying and

understanding the various aspects of their own unique personality. Drawn

from the work of Virginia Satir, participants learn to identify and give meaningful

names to their subpersonalities, usually names of renowned figures

in culture, history, or literature. Disowned or suppressed PARTS of a person’s

psyche tend to act outside of a person’s control. Coming to know and

discover the positive value in each PART of Self allows each person to better

coordinate, utilize, and, if necessary, transform these PARTS so that they are

acting in harmony with personal goals and life choices. Their PARTS can be

perceived as resources. In a series of PARTS parties, classmates act out the

PARTS of one individual, and later the PARTS of a couple. The PARTS party

players help individuals or couples discover new and more creative combinations

of PARTS that the couple can use in conflict and stress or even romance.

Following these PARTS parties, individuals and couples explore their own

inner cast of characters and experiment with ways to rearrange the PARTS

they tend to use the most. In doing so, they discover how to better use all

their resources and uncover new possibilities for interactions with their partners

that are more harmonious and productive.