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No one knows what they’re DOING!

Hi everyone, it’s Maggie O’Connor at Breakthrough MFT, helping you reach your ‘breakthrough moment’. 

Have you been feeling like ‘nobody knows what they’re doing?’

Like your school systems or your local government isn’t providing enough information, or guidance about what to do next? Or whatever they are telling you just feels scary or too risky somehow?!

Well, of course you are feeling that way. 

They don’t know what they’re doing. 

And neither do we. 

None of us do! 

Individually, we are making decisions about how to keep our kids safe while functioning as families. And we generally feel anxiety about those decisions. I imagine it’s a similar dynamic in school systems and local governments in that they are making decisions that impact entire communities.

Intellectually, we know that there are no perfect solutions. 

But emotionally, it makes us feel anxious and scared, because the stakes are just so high. And the environment that feels like it’s changing day to day, just intensifies those feelings.

We’re constantly on this hamster wheel of feeling awful and then taking a breath, then feeling awful and then taking a breath…

If we could just slow it down and for a moment, and put aside our anxiety and frustration, even put aside our fear just for a moment; we might find some compassion for ourselves; 

To say – 

I am doing my best, 

I am making the best decisions for myself and my family,

I will make mistakes and I will do my best to correct them.

In finding that compassion for ourselves, we might find compassion for those around us… for the teacher who can’t get the technology to work; for the school administrator who seems to be changing the plan week to week! As we get back to the business of educating our kids as safely as we can, we would all do well to remember that we’re all human and we’re doing the best we can.

We’ve never done this before. 

And we don’t know what we are doing. 

We just need to make the best decisions we can, with the information we do have.

It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t voice our concerns, when we have them; but it does mean that we do it with the kindness in the way that you wish others would do with you.

My decisions may be different than yours. 

But we are all doing the best we can.

I’m Maggie O’Connor, hoping this helps you to ‘break on through’.

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What is Couples Therapy like?

Hi everybody it’s Maggie O’Connor at Breakthrough MFT, helping you reach your “breakthrough moment”. 

So you’ve made the brave decision to start couples therapy! You have visited multiple therapist websites at 2 a.m., you’ve maybe asked some friends for referrals; but you’re wondering about the investment of time and energy and frankly, money!

How long will this take?

Won’t we always need therapy if we need it now?

These are good questions and they should be asked!

Therapy is a lot like going on a road trip into uncharted territory. You and your partner are the travelers; you’re expert in yourselves and your relationship, and the therapist is the expert in the uncharted territory! 

We know how to navigate an impasse, we know how to use momentum to move forward. We know how to recognize a bridge that’s been washed out by the river…

But it’s your journey, and it’s your phone call that gets us on the road.

Good couples therapy is not about rehashing the argument of the week; that would be a recipe for doing this forever!

Every couple has a negative cycle they fall into whenever they’re faced with a threat, conflict or distress…

The words your partner is speaking suddenly stop making sense, you start to feel anxious, angry – maybe even depressed. You get the sense like, ‘…oh God here we go again…’ 

But you don’t know how to make it stop; and so the words that are coming out of your mouth stop making sense, even if it’s just because you know you’ve said them a million times before and they haven’t really been effective – but you don’t know what else to do. So you get louder – or sometimes you just get quieter – you feel more desperate either way, you feel more distressed. You feel more hopeless and maybe there are tears, and eventually someone walks away… maybe both of you do… 

And that’s what a good couples therapist already knows about your relationship. You have a cycle with your partner. We know that both of you make sense, we just have to figure out how. 

What makes two people who are intelligent human beings, wired for connection – so unable to reach for each other in the dark? Once we’ve defined your unique cycle, you can use it as a road map for future conflict.

How long that takes is partly about how much damage has already been done and needs to be repaired, but mostly it has to do with how hard you want to work, both within and outside the sessions. It’s different for everybody, but it always starts with a phone call. 

I’m Maggie O’Connor, hoping this helps you to ‘break on through’.

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The Truest Thing about Couples Therapy…

Hi everybody, it’s Maggie O’Connor at BreakthroughMFT, helping you reach your ‘breakthrough moment’.

This pandemic is an amplifier for whatever was already going on in your relationship; the good the bad, and the ugly.

You’re not alone if you’re thinking about using couples therapy to help you get through this quarantine, so let’s think this through together.

When people are finishing a course of couples therapy, the thing I hear most often is, ‘I wish we had done this sooner; it didn’t have to hurt so bad for so long’. This is when I wish that people would actually talk more about being in couples therapy outside of the room where it happens.

Here’s the truest thing about couples therapy: people do come to it much later than they probably should.

Either they’ve been spinning in their negative cycle for so long they just really do not know how to get out or they’re coming as a last-ditch effort before divorce. It makes sense – people are understandably afraid of talking about their problems out loud! Let’s break this down into two very common maybe universal factors that make people nervous about starting couples therapy

#1 –  “The therapist and my partner are going to gang up on me” (also known as, “it’s going to be all my fault”)

In couples therapy the client is actually the relationship, so to take sides for the therapist would actually be abandoning the ‘client’. It wouldn’t make sense.

That said, a licensed seasoned therapist will be aware of the imbalances in your relationship that make it sometimes feel like it is all your fault or you’re being blamed… But we’re not mind readers; so if at any point you feel blamed or ganged up on, you can and should tell the therapist! A good therapist will slow it way down and make sure that gets addressed before we move any further.

#2 –  “This will be the beginning of the end” (also known as “it’s not going to work”)

Sometimes people are coming into therapy (and it’s an appropriate use of therapy) to let go of each other to end a long-term relationship, either for yourselves or for the sake of children in a divorce situation… but that’s not what we’re talking about here.

Assuming you want to stay together, it’s good to express to your therapist the fear that it might not work out. It might even be a good sign that you’re afraid because it reflects a certain investment in the relationship and a hope that it will work out. Most couples who come to therapy are not ‘done with the relationship’, but they are done with the destructive cycles that lead to such disconnection between each other!

As long as two people are sitting on the couch, we have potential to step back from the edge and create better ways of being with each other.

In choosing a therapist:

  1. Make sure that you’re looking at licensed marriage and family therapists (LMFT’s) or licensed therapists who have advanced training or certification in a couples therapy modality.
  2. Make sure you feel comfortable with them.
  3. And then get to work, inside and outside the therapy room.

It doesn’t have to hurt this bad. There are better ways of being with each other.

I’m Maggie O’Connor, hoping this helps you to ‘break on through’.

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Do We have Good Communication?

Hi everybody, it’s Maggie O’Connor at Breakthrough MFT helping you reach your”breakthrough moment”.

How do I know if I have good communication with my partner?

If you’re asking the question, you probably are feeling like there’s something missing in this area for you.

We know if we’re being heard. We know if we’re being seen. More importantly, we know if we’re being seen even for the  parts of ourselves that we don’t share so easily; and in this pandemic, we are showing more of ourselves than we ever thought we would!

So I ask you, ‘How is that being received in your life?’ because here’s the part of communication that always gets missed: It’s not just about what you’re showing or what you’re saying, but how it’s being received by your partner.

For example, in a couples session, the wife was talking about how she was putting the baby to bed and she says, ‘…so I went back in to put a blanket on the baby…’ and the husband jumps in and says, ‘So you’re saying I’m a bad father!!!’ 

Does she think he’s a bad father? Probably not.

But something’s happening in that system that makes it hard for the husband to see her as nurturing, because he feels so criticized. It’s being expressed, this nurturing, but it’s not being received. This couple could get lost in a negative communication cycle very quickly – sort of like, ‘this is what I heard you say… this is what I made up about it… and that’s what i’m reacting to…’ 

We react to the narrative instead of the person.

Narratives are stories we construct about why people do what they do, and they can be really helpful as we organize our daily lives. But sometimes they’re more accurate than others.

In a healthy communication system, it feels safe to be curious and explore with your partner what just happened there. So, in in this situation the wife could say, ‘…hey, what’s going on? Do you really think I think you’re a bad dad?’ The husband could consider the question, and respond to that.

In a less healthy communication structure, the narratives are all we have so we hold on tight they repeat and make it reallllly hard to see the other person for who they are what they’re saying. This husband will insist that he can’t get it right with his “critical wife” and they will lock into a defensive cycle that will make it impossible for them to share this nurturing moment with their baby.

Neither of them will feel seen; neither of them will feel heard.

Therapy can help you recognize and define some underlying patterns or issues that might make it harder for you to be curious with each other. Therapy can help you run more accurate narratives rather than letting them run you.

I’m Maggie O’Connor, hoping this helps you to ‘break on through’. 

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What’s Dysfunction Got to Do With It?

Hi everybody, I’m Maggie O’Connor at BreakthroughMFT helping you reach your Breakthrough moment.

I’ve been thinking a lot about dysfunctional family systems.

In any family, whether or not it’s spoken out loud, everybody knows what the rules are.

In dysfunctional families, regardless of what specifically occurs within the walls of the home, secrecy is rule #1, and it is characterized as loyalty.

Children growing up in these families often believe that the abuse, conflict or neglect they experience is normal.

When no one challenges the abusive parent(s), children typically assume it’s their fault – internalizing blame and turning it to shame. And shame says ‘don’t ever, ever talk about it’.

It’s dangerous to call the abuser out, because you know that you will suffer punishment, and nothing, NOTHING will change. The ‘system’ will continue to sustain itself.

So we develop a way of being in order to survive within the system.

This way of being is the “role” you play. You may have heard of the Scapegoat, the Golden Child, The Loner…

In these roles, each family member accommodates the abuse or neglect in their own way, in order to survive themselves. This is what we mean by dysfunction – it’s how the parts of the system accommodates the abuse and allows it to continue.

Characteristics of dysfunctional families include:

– Lack of Empathy
– Denial
– Poor boundaries for yourself
– Disrespect for the boundaries of others
– Extremes in conflict – in either direction – Overly violent or overly peaceful
– Un-equal treatment of family members due to real or perceived attributes

 

Everyone in dysfunctional families are at risk in all kinds of ways, but none more than when they try to call out the dysfunctional system itself. Then you risk abandonment, which to our survival brain, means death. So individual members find their way within the system, to survive.

The discussion about police reform is not about individual officers. It’s about a dysfunctional system that protects the members who abuse and neglect and punishes well-intentioned members who would otherwise speak against it.

As respectful food for thought, perhaps it gets under our skin in part because we recognize some of our own experience and feel compelled to protect the status quo.

I’m Maggie O’Connor, hoping this helps you to break on through.

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When You and your Partner see #BLM Differently

Hi everybody, I’m Maggie O’Connor at Breakthrough MFT, helping you reach your breakthrough moment.

I see a lot of couples struggling right now with different levels of awareness regarding the statement, “Black Lives Matter.”

As white people, we have been socialized that overtly talking about race is somehow rude or inappropriate – remember the Seinfeld episode when they kept saying, “I don’t think we should be talking about this…” “No!”

We look for exits rather than going deeper into the conversation.

“All Lives Matter” is one of those exits.

Right now, well-meaning white people are getting our heads around our role in perpetuating trauma against our black brothers and sisters through our denial and ignorance, and what generations before have to do with that. It’s embarrassing, it’s painful – and many of us feel shame for our behavior.

Some of us react to that shame with denial that the lives of black people in our country have been so devalued, that there needs to be a specific statement about “Black Lives Matter”.
We’ll try to bargain it out, saying, ‘well all lives matter’ without recognizing the fundamental disparity within that group of “all”.

That until your brother with black skin has just as little chance of being pulled over, or run off the road or shot at as you with your white skin, we have work to do.

Of course all lives matter. But we have work to do to make that statement truly reflected in our behavior and beliefs.

In talking with your partner, it’s personal. You know them best.

If they really care about other people, and I’m sure they do, then your partner’s defensiveness is probably more about the shame and embarrassment of walking around in white skin and not doing enough to notice the people around them.

You can come from a place of curiosity with them – be really interested in what makes them feel that way, without judgment or correction – engage in a discussion about when they first became aware of racism, and how it’s played a role in their lives. Respond with compassion to say “It makes sense that you would feel that way/ have a hard time with this;” encourage them to think out loud.

Silence perpetuates shame and ignorance. It’s in talking about it that we process and move the discussion forward – it can be as effective at home as much as as it could be on the national stage.

I’m Maggie O’Connor, hoping this helps you to break on through.

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What Couples Therapy can tell you about #BLM


Hi everybody, I’m Maggie O’Connor at Breakthrough MFT, helping you reach your breakthrough moment.

There’s a point in couples therapy at which for some reason, one partner becomes more able to hear the other’s pain. Lowering whatever defenses they’d been using to deny or ignore that their partner was hurting, they now hear it differently, maybe even for the first time, though it’s been in front of them forever.

Here’s where the ‘injured’ partner often feels incredulous at this turn of events – it feels too sudden, or suspicious in some way. ‘I’ve been saying this to you for months and years – I’ve cried, I’ve begged, I’ve frozen you out – and now? NOW? All of a sudden you just hear me differently? What am I supposed to do with THAT?!

So this is how I see feelings surrounding the sudden show of support from white Americans for ‘Black Lives Matter’ – Why now? And what to do?
What do we do with a national relationship that has repeated this ignorance for lifetimes? For generations the injured partner had to figure out a way to live with the other – the white people – who would never, ever see them. And Now? Seems kind of stupid to take us seriously.

So the anger and suspicion from the black community makes sense. Our job as well-meaning white people is to listen, and figure out ways to keep showing up in support, recognizing the hurt underneath.
We hear confusing messages about how to help – Speak up, sit down, educate yourself, but don’t read that book, raise money, that’s performative, that’s not enough, that’s too much –

In trying so hard to do avoid doing the ‘wrong’ thing we can be in danger of becoming paralyzed and doing nothing. Our other job is to stay open to what we are being told as we figure this out together.

Some of us can acknowledge that we just haven’t been listening. We have heard the message before but have been ‘privileged’ in that we didn’t have to think about it. We didn’t care because we didn’t think. It’s embarrassing, and painful. And brave to acknowledge out loud. Others are just waking up to this awareness – and are struggling to understand the need for statements like “Black Lives Matter”.

Wherever you are in your awakening, it’s real – it taps into everything that make us human. It shows risk and vulnerability, considering that as well-meaning white people as we may be, we have really missed the truth that was right in front of us. And it is deeply saddening.

To continue our support in the long run, we need to seek learning environments and social support that will encourage us to keep trying, though it won’t always be comfortable. If you feel like you’re shutting down, get support for your growth. To get anywhere meaningful, we need to stay present – we need to stay awake.

I’m Maggie O’Connor, hoping this helps you to break on through.

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Breakthrough Marriage and Family Therapy, PLLC

14 Harwood Court, Suite 425
Scarsdale, NY 10583
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