‘Naming’ and ‘shaming’ in attachment-based psychotherapy with violent couples

‘Naming’ and ‘shaming’ in attachment-based psychotherapy with violent couples

Christopher Clulow *

Recent UK government figures indicate that domestic violence accounts for 16% of all violent crime (Home Office, 2007). One incident is reported to the police every minute of the day, in this most under-reported area of behaviour. It is estimated that domestic violence will affect 1 in 4 women and 1 in 6 men over their lifetime (Wahlberg & Allen, 2004). These shocking figures have prompted proposals in England, and in some other countries, to ‘name and shame’ perpetrators, and to place them on a register akin to that kept for the perpetrators of child abuse.

From a statistical perspective being young, poor and a woman are the key risk factors that define vulnerability. I want to explore from an attachment and psychoanalytic perspective the proposition that idealisation, as an unconscious means of avoiding feelings of shame, is a risk factor that makes couple relationships vulnerable to certain kinds of violence. I also want to propose, as a therapeutic strategy, a very different model of ‘naming and shaming’ from that envisaged in some quarters of public debate.

A case vignette: prelude

A colleague and I saw a couple who referred themselves for help immediately after a fight in which the husband had lost control, kicked his wife, and repeatedly hit her. Although their relationship was emotionally volatile this was the first time he had been physically violent. They were both shocked by the outburst, which had led them to separate, but they wanted to explore if their relationship had a future.

He, unlike many partners who deny their violence, acknowledged his behaviour and was able to describe the emotional context in which it occurred. He was depressed, was losing confidence at work and was tormented by acute feelings of self-doubt that he could trace back to childhood. But when he talked of the marriage he described his partner as someone who refused to recognise her dark side and always put herself in the right. Her career was taking off as his was waning, and he felt that she scorned and undermined everything he did, refusing to recognise anything good that he had brought into their relationship. These feelings had condensed into hot anger directed towards his wife during the argument between them in which he lost control. Now, living apart, he was desperate to be reunited with her.

His wife, on the other hand, described a marriage in which she had felt controlled, bullied and oppressed, but said she had filtered out the reality of what she described as her husband’s coercion and anger by trying to preserve a dream of how their relationship was and might be – for herself and for their children, one of whom had witnessed the attack. The violent crisis had caused her to see the marriage through a different lens, and she was not hopeful about their future. Yet, alongside these negatives, both partners could merge into a rapturous description of their capacity to be soul mates with each other, and in this state of optimism they chose to get back together as a couple at the same time as they started therapy for their relationship.

They were a couple who had already had some years of individual therapy, and they could be insightful about themselves and their relationship. A core wound for him was the departure of his father when he was 3 years old, leaving him as an only child to be his mother’s support – a position that, in conventional oedipal terms, left him in states of mind that could oscillate between self aggrandisement and abject inferiority. To the world he projected a picture of calm authority and considerable talent. This was something that had attracted his wife to him. His appearance of strength was perhaps especially important to her being the only child of parents who had split up in her adolescence; she was left by her mother to care for a father who crumpled with the blow of the marriage ending. No doubt their idealisation of each other when they met, and the ideal that they both sought to preserve of their relationship as a couple, was intended unconsciously to protect them against the legacy of disappointment and pain that had been passed on by their respective parental families. It also contained within it the hope that they might recover some of the care that had been forfeited within their parental families. Their drive to merge created a borderline relationship in which they could feel enmeshed with each other, hyper-sensitive to perceived criticism, control and abandonment, and exposed to periods of extreme emotional volatility.

For my colleague and I there were strong transferential pressures to really understand them as individuals and as a couple, and when we got things right we were rewarded with a response that made us feel high on the buzz of being insightful, perfectly attuned therapists. Conversely, as you might predict, when we failed to understand them we were attacked for being useless and pedestrian, and could be exposed to their contempt. When either of us made a comment that differentiated our experience from one or other – or both – of them, or even from each other as their therapists, there could be a tangible sense of tension in the room.

Shortly before a break in their therapy, at a time when the marriage was not going well, and following a session in which we as therapists had been berated by the wife for not directing them as a couple but ‘leaving them to flounder’ (a dynamic in which she invited them to behave in a way that she complained of in her husband), there was a crisis. She described feeling unsafe with her husband at home and in the sessions, feared that he might be violent again and said she wanted to be apart from him. At first he was bemused, asking what had happened to make her feel unsafe, but when she said she wanted to leave him he exploded with frustration and threw the contents of a coffee carton that he had brought into the session over her, catching my co-therapist as well.

Explanations for domestic violence

Domestic violence is not a uni-dimensional phenomenon. There are different kinds of violence and different explanations for them. Despite growing evidence of female violence within the home, most explanations contain the assumption that it is a problem of male behaviour. Particularly prominent have been sociological theories that view violence as a response to dissonance between role expectations generated by social conditioning and male frustration in being unable to realise these expectations because of changing socio-economic realities.  A similar and related explanation focuses upon culture clashes in which there is conflict between pressures to break down traditional attitudes towards gender differences and forces that resist change by seeking to continue to structure inequalities into relationships between the sexes. Both approaches regard home as the private stage upon which public dramas associated with the place of men and women in society are played out. Neither account for the fact that domestic violence occurs in a minority of homes and that it is not socially acceptable in the countries and cultures that have undergone the greatest changes.

Psychological theories come at the problem the other way round, seeing violent behaviour as the externalisation of internal states of mind. They tend to focus upon individual psychopathology in taking up perpetrator and victim roles and explore whether and how childhood experiences shape adult behaviour. While acknowledging that violent and controlling behaviour may mask the fear of dependency and feelings of helplessness they can discount a relational understanding of the phenomenon and focus on the treatment of the perpetrator.

Of the psychological approaches to understanding violence in relationships I shall focus on those drawing on attachment theory, and on empirical research that has established that some forms of insecure attachment may contribute towards taking up perpetrator and victim roles.

The role of attachment in violent behaviour

John Bowlby, the architect of attachment theory, envisaged the sometimes violent protest of an infant or young child as being entirely functional in the attempt to restore proximity with an attachment figure:  “[In] the initial phase [of separation], the young child appears acutely distressed at having lost his mother and seeks to recapture her by the full exercise of his limited resources. He will often cry loudly, shake his cot, throw himself about, and look eagerly towards any sight or sound which might prove to be his missing mother.” (Bowlby, 1969, pp 27-28).

But positive protest can turn into self-protective and aggressive behaviour in the face of repeated disappointment in the attempts to restore a sense of attachment security:

“Separations, especially when prolonged or repeated, have a double effect. On the one hand, anger is aroused; on the other, love is attenuated. Thus not only may angry, discontented behaviour alienate the attachment figure but, within the attached, a shift can occur in the balance of feeling. Instead of a strongly rooted affection laced occasionally with ‘hot displeasure’ … there grows a deep running resentment, held in check only partially by anxious uncertain affection”. (Bowlby, 1973, pp 287-288).

Bowlby proposed that the strength of attachment bonds is unrelated to the quality of attachment relationships – spouses can feel strongly attached to abusive partners. Building on studies of bullying and victimisation in childhood, that paired avoidant and anxiousambivalent attachment styles, Canadian researchers developed a 4 category model of attachment, breaking the insecure dismissing category into dismissing and fearful sub-categories (Bartholomew et al., 2001). They then looked at the interaction of these variables with those affecting the positive or negative regard of self and others to provide a model for understanding abusive behaviour in adult couples. They argued that the dependency and separation anxiety associated with preoccupied and fearful attachment categories may make it difficult for partners to leave an abusive relationship and may predispose them to taking up victim or perpetrator roles (in contrast to dismissing and secure partners who can contemplate leaving the relationship). Similar emotional constraints on leaving an abusive relationship can apply to victims of trauma. The approach behaviour of preoccupied attachment and avoidance of fearful attachment may result in perpetrator and victim potential either way round. They concluded that there were surprising similarities in men’s and women’s experiences of abuse in intimate relationships (and similar dynamics in abusive male same-sex relationships), but that gender may distinguish between men and women in terms of victim (women) and perpetrator (men) roles when either partner was fearfully attached.

Dismissing and fearful attachment are linked with idealised descriptions of family relationships, the semantic representations usually conflicting with episodic details and rendering the attachment narrative incoherent (insecure). Likewise, we know that ‘defensive exclusion’ operates for the victims of childhood abuse, and idealisation might operate in their cases too:

“Trauma victims have exaggerated separation anxiety, anger, and … [their] profile also includes problems with regulation of affect and impulse control, an intense dependence on primary interpersonal relationships, and an inability to tolerate being alone” (Dutton, 2007, pp 198-199).

Studies of attachment disorganisation in childhood suggest that the child’s initial disorientation is succeeded by brittle behavioural strategies to control the parent, either through punishment or rolereversing caring strategies Lyons-Ruth & Jacobwitz, 1999). This appears to be at odds with attachment behaviour since it provides neither care nor protection – instead the child is placed in control. However, punitive and care-giving control may represent attempts to coerce the attachment figure into providing care, or into becoming the object of care so that, through projective identification, the child may be cared for vicariously. This attempt to disclaim need through the aggressive assertion of control can result in behaviour that has been described as ‘asking with fists’ (Freedman, 2000), a phrase that vividly captures a strategy for managing need and its attendant fear of dependency.

Violence as a re-enactment of past trauma or loss has been linked with an absence of ‘mentalizing’ (Fonagy et al, 2002) – the capacity to think about and reflect on one’s own state of mind and that of others.

Some of the processes that affect mentalization are as follows:

• Abused children may blame themselves rather than think about their attachment figures as abusers, restricting their capacity to think and act as individuals.
• Individuals with a limited sense of their own identity may feel less responsible for their own actions, may fail to register the psychological consequences of those actions upon others and may reduce others to the status of objects through their inability to hold them in mind.
• Traumatic memories, or the fear of abandonment, can cause a dissociative reaction in which frightening elements in the core drama are expelled in the self and controlled in others. Because the trauma cannot be thought about, others (especially partners and therapists in connection with our interests) are unconsciously manipulated into the state that the self finds intolerable.

I was struck by a finding from one of the studies appearing in a literature review examining exposure to family-of-origin violence and subsequent marital violence (Delsol and Margolin, 2004) that men who were violent in their marriage were more likely to idealise and protect the abusive parent or family member from whence they came than men who were not violent but had also experienced violence in their families of origin (Caesar, 1988). The second group was more likely than the first to admit to the shortcomings of parents and acknowledge anger towards the perpetrators of violence in their own parental families. The point was also made by Dutton (2007), who reported that men referred by the courts for violence to their partners idealised their parent’s treatment of them, despite having had terrible family histories. This rang bells for me from both research and clinical perspectives, and seemed to have some bearing upon the phenomenon of denial that is so frequently encountered in domestic violence.

I have written elsewhere about research conducted at the Tavistock Centre for Couple Relationships to investigate any links there might be between the attachment security of the partners and the way they managed conflict in their couple relationship (Clulow, 2001, 2007). In analysing data from a pilot research study my colleagues and I came upon two statistically significant findings. The first was the rather surprising one that a man’s secure attachment, as measured by the Adult Attachment Interview/AAI (George et al, 1985), was correlated with his partner reporting higher levels of verbal aggression on the Conflict Tactics Scale/CTS (Straus, 1979) than those reported by partners of men who were rated as insecure. The second finding was that men with high idealisation scores when representing their relationships with their mothers in the AAI (indicative of insecure dismissing patterns of attachment) were more likely than others to have partners who reported physical violence and verbal aggression on the CTS. We asked what sense might be made of these findings, and I summarise our thoughts below.

The first result might be explained in a number of ways. For example, the women with secure partners were responding positively to questions on verbal, and not physical, aggression. Aggression is not the same thing as violence, and even if the verbal aggression was violent no ‘skin’ boundary had been broken between the partners. The result might also be explained in terms of the greater freedom of women with secure partners to know and communicate about what’s going on in their relationship than women with insecure partners, who may be fearful of the response they will receive if they draw attention to their partner’s behaviour or emotional state (a point that may be relevant to the under-reporting of and wishful thinking about domestic violence in situations where the threat of physical assault is very real). The key point for the purpose of this paper is that these women felt safe in naming aggression in their relationships.

The second finding from our study, associating a man’s idealised representation of his relationship with his mother with an increased likelihood of his partner reporting verbal and physical abuse, invites attention to the role played by the nature of the defensive systems operating between partners, especially the defence of idealisation, as a predisposing factor to violent behaviour. We might, for example, entertain the possibility that the psychogenesis of violence is linked with a predisposition in one or both partners towards a kind of narcissistic object relating that aims to preserve an idea – even an ideal – of the partner and partnership against the intrusion of discordant and unwelcome realities.

Idealisation preserves an image of relating against a painful reality, and that reality is often fended off through denigrating the object that threatens to disturb that image. This is where shame comes in. Shame is a social phenomenon, and concerns the emotion that we feel when exposed to public censure. Shame is felt when the gap between the ideal self and the perceived self is exposed to public view. In the eyes of others we experience the contradictions between our private and public selves. We feel exposed by the contradiction and so we avoid their gaze. Or we blame others in order to shift attention away from ourselves, and hope that by scapegoating them we will escape being seen for who we are.

Shame is different from guilt. With shame, others are spectators. What they see applies to the whole of our being, and, as such, the exposure can be felt to be totally catastrophic. Guilt is more specific. It relates to particular actions or thoughts that we have committed in which others are not an audience but the victims of what we have done. Guilt implies a capacity to imagine what others might be feeling as a consequence of our actions; it fosters empathy in ways that shame does not. Shame directs any hostility or blame that might be entertained in relation to ourselves outwards, and attacks others through an often self-righteous anger directed towards them. As Pines (2008) has put it, shame is associated with loss of self-esteem and feelings of inferiority, it is “linked with the failure of that which we are [to correspond with] that which we would like to be, either for ourselves or others” (p.97). It can be associated with the sense of humiliation, and so linked with past trauma, as well as with feelings of need and unrequited love that are consequent upon neglect and loss.

Whereas shame from a Freudian perspective is closer to its public sense in acting as the guardian of public morality (the infant becomes self-conscious through its gestures evoking an unexpected and unpleasant response), from a developmental point of view we might regard shame as being associated with problems of self-integration. We need to find an object into which to project shameful attributes and then to control them in that object, because we unconsciously believe we shall become a social pariah if others see in us what we find so unbearable in ourselves. In these circumstances the developmental task of integration constitutes a formidable therapeutic challenge. As Clifford Yorke (2002) put it: guilt brings material into analysis; shame keeps it out.

The naming of violent behaviour in a marriage can be shaming for both partners, not just the perpetrator. This is especially true when it destroys an ideal image of self and relationship that has been maintained as a defence against psychological injury. Blame and denigration may ward off these feelings and deflect unwelcome attention to the other in the attempt to protect the self against overwhelming existential anxiety. Paradoxically, the attempt at self preservation at the expense of the partner can serve to bring about a re-enactment of the trauma of separation, loss or abuse, the very thing that it was designed to protect against.

A case vignette: continued

After the husband I first described threw coffee over his spouse he got up and stormed out of the room. I followed him, and persuaded him to sit with me in a separate room to cool off. My colleague did the same with his wife. Separately we worked at very practical things they could do to make the situation between them safe for the immediate future. They both, independently, thought that they needed time apart. With this in mind we closed the session with them together to establish some ground rules around such things as collecting his belongings when she wasn’t present, what to say to the children, and managing visiting times. We also set ground rules for future therapy sessions, which included no drinks being brought into the room and the cleaning bill for my co-therapist’s clothes being settled by the husband! But, apart from some concluding sessions, this marked the end of the therapy because the wife decided the marriage could not work.

In one of the final sessions the husband referred back to how sobering it had been to hear his behaviour being described as physically abusive early on in the therapy, and for his behaviour to have been linked with his violent feelings. Putting a name to his behaviour had been shaming, but it had also been containing to link this with a recognition of his emotional state. Were I to see this couple again I think I would place less emphasis on the interpretations that seemed to connect them with their early family experiences for a more mundane and active approach that focused on helping them to name their own emotional state, to think about that of their partner, and to risk the kind of interpersonal exploration that might allow them to relinquish the illusion that they were soul mates and could read each other’s minds. Such a mentalizing approach (Allen & Fonagy, 2006) might have helped them convert shame into guilt, and to tolerate the gradual dismantling of the idealised image of themselves and each other that inhibited their capacity for separateness and thought.

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^* Senior Fellow of the Tavistock Centre for Couple Relationships and Vice Chair of the UK Society of Couple Psychoanalytic Psychotherapists.

Membre d’honneur du Tavistock Centre for Couple Relationships, Viceprésident de l’UK Society of Couple Psychoanalytic Psychotherapists.

‘Senior Fellow’ del Centro Tavistock para el Estudio de las Relaciones de Pareja, y Vice-Presidente de la Sociedad Británica de

Psicoterapeutas Psicoanalíticos Especializados en las Relaciones de Pareja.