Category: Couple Therapy

Biological Perspectives on Emotions Couple Therapy Psychotherapy Relationships • • • • By Ann-Marie Codori, Ph.D. 1 Comment

At what age do humans develop emotional intelligence? The answer might surprise you.

Emotional pain typically drives the quest for psychotherapy.  Pain, after all, is nature’s signal that an organism’s welfare, and survival, are threatened.  Hence, taking action to identify the cause of the pain and to eliminate it are adaptive.  Any psychotherapist, and anyone who has undertaken psychotherapy, will tell you that it is not always easy to identify the cause of the pain and treat it — unlike how we diagnose and treat bacterial infections with antibiotics.  We have no clinically-available biological markers for emotional distress: no blood tests, brain scans, or urine assays.  The pain is no less real than that experienced elsewhere in the body, but explaining it is orders of magnitude trickier and requires more indirect methods of assessment.

Just try finding a word to describe the experience of an emotional ache.  The exercise renders most of us speechless for minutes.  Patient: “It feels bad.”  Therapist: “Yes, but which bad feeling is it?”  Patient: “I don’t know.”  And so the patient and therapist begin the excavation of the layers of his/her emotions and emotional learning history, down the layers of time as far as we can go — working to identify the feeling, its duration, its triggers in real time, and its roots in emotional history.  Read more


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Biological Perspectives on Emotions Couple Therapy Depression and Mood Disorders Psychotherapy Relationships • • • • • • • • • By Ann-Marie Codori, Ph.D. 0 Comments

Major Depression May Be Triggered by Teenage Stressors

A recent study using mice to mimic stress and depression in adolescents suggests that the teenage years are a particularly vulnerable time for the brain.  Working with mice who carried an introduced human gene mutation for depression, the researchers exposed some of the adolescent mice to social stress (isolation for three weeks) and kept a control group of mice stress-free.  There were two important findings.  First, the gene mutation for depression had no effect on mouse behavior except among the stressed mice.  Second, they found that the behavior change may be mediated by increases in cortisol (a stress hormone) and decreases in dopamine (a neurotransmitter in the brain).  Morever, after they returned the stressed mice to their preferred social environment, the behavioral abnormalities remained.  This study, and others like it, suggest that once activated during adolescence, the neuro-biological pathway active in depression does not turn off, even after the stressor has passed.
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Couple Therapy • • • • • By Ann-Marie Codori, Ph.D. 0 Comments

Trouble expressing your emotions?

http://www.elainebaileyinternational.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/Triune-Brain.png
The Triune Brain

Blame it on your 3-part brain, each part the product of a different phase in evolutionary time.  Emotions live in the limbic brain; thoughts live in the neocortex.  Emotional information gets lost in translation.

 

(Figure adapated from http://elainebaileyinternational.com/wordpress/?s=triune+brain&.x=0&.y=0)


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Couple Therapy Relationships • • • • By Ann-Marie Codori, Ph.D. 1 Comment

Codependent: A word that should be banned from our vocabulary

During the 1980’s, the term “codependent” entered the popular press with the publication of such books as “Codependent No More.”  Regardless of what the author, Melodie Beattie, intended, the word has come to be synonymous with being excessively emotionally dependent on an other person.  The problem with the term, as it has come to be used, is its implication that depending on another human is somehow pathological.  Nothing could be further from the truth.

Two decades of research on the formation of attachment bonds in humans and other mammals demonstrates that we are shaped by evolution to need one another.  Hence, we are all dependent.  Worse, a great deal of our suffering is caused by the starvation of our attachment needs.  In my practice as a psychotherapist and marriage counselor / couple therapist in Baltimore, I witness the anguish caused when these needs go unmet. 

Do us all a favor; stop using the word codependent.  The next time you feel tempted to use it, remember that our brains are hard-wired for mutual dependence.


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Individual Emotionally-Focused Therapy

Emotionally-focused therapy (EFT) for couples is a highly effective method for resolving relationship distress and creating …

At what age do humans develop emotional intelligence? The answer might surprise you.

Emotional pain typically drives the quest for psychotherapy.  Pain, after all, is nature’s signal that an organism’s …

Major Depression May Be Triggered by Teenage Stressors

A recent study using mice to mimic stress and depression in adolescents suggests that the teenage years are a particularly …