What is couple armour? Couple armour in couple therapy with body psychotherapy
13 באוגוסט 2020
What is couple armour? Couple armour in couple therapy with body psychotherapy
‘Sarah and David are sitting opposite me. Their chairs are at some distance from each other, and turned towards me. They hardly look at each other, and avoid it by maintaining eye contact with me. It’s our first meeting, and the tension is tangible in every sense of the word. It’s a familiar situation when couple therapy begins, and it stems from preliminary embarrassment and normative difficulty in starting therapy.
During the initial conversation I listen to them, and simultaneously try to feel the energy and atmosphere in the room. I turn inwards to myself, sense my own body and breathing. I resonate myself and them.
The room feels congested. Rigid. There’s a heaviness. The atmosphere is distant and I have a feeling of coldness. I notice that there’s no breathing within the room. Neither of them are breathing and this affects my breathing which halts as well. Out of awareness and in resonance, I enlist myself to breathe deeply despite the tension. I reflect to the couple: “There’s a lot of tension in the room”, then I breathe deeply again, which allows Sarah and David to breathe as well, to release some of their difficulty and start talking about what’s really in their hearts’.
This is the first paragraph of my most recent article - Melting the Couple Armour in Body Psychotherapy for Couples.
So what exactly is body armour?
Through my clinical work for over 20 years, providing individual and couple body psychotherapy, I’ve seen that the personal armour process is widening. It’s now also found in couples - where it’s more complex. Just as each of us has held-back, rigid, tensed places, in the same way during every in-depth encounter between two people difficulties are created between them at all levels: impaired communication, lack of confidence, a lack of intimacy, difficulties with sexuality, an encounter that creates complexity, pain, difficulties. All of them build the ‘couple armour’.
When the burdens of life and personal difficulties intensify, in a natural and normal way, we can sense in the couple relationship that the problems are increasing at every level. One can sense emotional, energetic, emotional, physical and respiratory difficulties in each member of the couple and jointly - where the couple armour is built.
Working with couple armour in couple body psychotherapy
In individual and couple body psychotherapy, the therapist sees in front of him three entities - the two members of the couple, and their relationship itself. When observing deeply, and profoundly resonating across from the couple, we can see and feel the couple armour in energetic terms – the energetic armour. While couple armour resembles individual armour, it is broader because it encompasses the two partners and their reciprocal dynamic. Our capacity as couple therapists to sense and observe couple armour in parallel with the primary personality is very helpful in the therapeutic process by being present with the relationship and couple dynamic. The aim is to observe and reflect, to help create the optimum process for the couple dynamic, the couple relationship and in other words – for the process of melting the couple armour.
For further reading on couple armour and the process of melting it with body psychotherapy for couples, I invite you to read my latest article
published in SPT - Somatic Psychotherapy Today in January 2020.
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