In the following video, Dr. Rand discusses pre-marital counseling, marriage counseling, pre-conception counseling, pre and peri-natal counseling, parenting and family relationships. She believes that prevention is always best, so she thinks couples should address issues before marriage and before conception. That way early relationship family patterns can be avoided before they are passed on. Addressing traumatic early childhood developmental injuries before having children is preferable if possible, but it is never too late (no matter what age) to address these traumatic issues because the memories from early childhood are held in the body and can be accessed through the body.
She meets with the couple (or individual) and takes a very detailed multi-generational family history of relationships from each person. This allows both people to see the “baggage” both they and their partner are bringing to the relationship. This enables them to each take personal responsibility for their own patterns of relating and makes it much more difficult to project them on to their partner.
Most couples have problems with communication because they unknowingly trigger the other person’s injury. The communication stalls at this point because the partner immediately and unconsciously reacts with defensiveness. Understanding each other’s triggers goes a long way in preventing this infinite repetition of attack/defend, which never moves the communication forward.
The other part of getting out of the communication dilemma is to learn empathy and mirroring, sometimes called active listening. It simply means really understanding the other person and compassionately communicating that back. Both people need to learn to do that with each other. It takes a lot of mindfulness to not go into automatic reaction. That is the work.
Video Interview with Dr. M. Rand, PhD.
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