“The drama of romantic bonding is the adult version of the bond between parent and child,” is how Dr. Sue Johnson, the founder of Emotion Focused Couple Therapy (EFT), describes how couples experience their relationship and how they link together their historical emotional experience and express those emotions together as a couple.

 She carefully explains how these human connection patterns replicate the same patterns between parent and child, that the past becomes the present in an intimate emotional, and interpersonal relationship.  However, this description might appear, on its face, a little innocent as it only hints at the fragrance of the mammoth collection of possible complications that couples, in their lifetime, struggle with during a marriage such as childbirth, physical injuries, hospitalizations, deaths of friends and family members, substance abuse, physical, verb, and emotional abuse, mental illness and the most traumatic: fraud, treachery, betrayal or, euphemistically described as, infidelity.

 Today, I would like to present some new scientific discoveries that explain why our relentless pursuit: pleasure and how it leads to pain and what to do about it from Dr. Anna Lembke's work in Dopamine Nation, Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence. "We've all become vulnerable to compulsive overconsumption" because we have been rapidly moving from an environment of scarcity into an environment of plenty where we can "swipe right" for pleasure only to find pain and suffering close behind. 

More importantly, I am going to compare and contrast, in a general way, 2-separate marital cases, and what worked for me.  How to Repair a Failing Marital Relationship when Addiction and Betrayal aggravate it?

Learning Objectives:

Objective 1 - Name it: betrayal and infidelity. Apply Carl Rogers’s client centered therapeutic style by developing an Unconditional Positive Regard for the clients in unison with the strategies in the book His Needs Her Needs.

Objective 2 - Claim it: Ask attachment questions that will help you and your clients unpack their life’s truthful attachment injury narrative on how they arrived in this position using EFT Attachment Questionnaire and Dr. Jeffery Young’s Schema Questionnaire, the YSQ. 

Objective 3 - Tame it: Show them, in a truthful loving way, how to take responsibility for repairing the Monster that has been let out and into these marital relationships by applying strategies in these books: Effortless Forgiveness, His Needs Her Needs, the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous, and Dopamine Nation.   

2.0 General CEU Hours

Terrence Michael O’Neill, MS, LMHC

Terrence Michael O’Neill is a Florida licensed mental health counselor in private practice at Restoring Hope of the Palm Beaches, a graduate of Palm Beach Atlantic’s Counseling Program, a passionate advocate for substance abuse counseling with more than 30 years of experience in the recovery field, a Recovery Advocate for the Headwaters program at the Hanley Center at Origins Behavioral Health, and a former public school teacher in the Oxnard, CA Public School District.  

Publications and Copyrights: The Pleasure of Torment – A Series available on Amazon eBooks; Island of the Pleasure Seekers – Computer game Optioned by Namco, 2008; Benny Finds His Purpose – Inspirational Storybook for Adolescent Children, 2003, and a Substance Abuse Memory Tool M.S.I.R.S., 2016, and a Application For United States Letters Patent: Docket No. SK 08337, Automobile: Lap Covering System, 2009.  Association: American Counseling Association.

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John Davis, President