Seeing Self and Other Through a Wider Lens

A supervisee recently asked me how my work with the View of Self and Other differs from what I learned in Emotionally Focused Therapy.

EFT is still nestled, very close to my heart. I still trust the clarity and compassion of its map. But it’s true that, in some significant ways, I’ve expanded the map.

One of these shifts is how early—and how explicitly—I widen the frame around the meanings that organize people’s pain.

One thing I’ve always loved about EFT is how quickly it gets to the heart of the matter. The meanings that drive our defensiveness are always there. They’re alive in the room from the start—sometimes obvious and loud, often subtle enough to be easy to miss.

People often name experiences like:

I’m not good enough.
I’m too much.
I don’t matter.

Alongside these are equally strong perceptions of others:

They don’t care. (Often interpreted—especially under stress—as narcissistic, emotionally unreachable, or shaped by neurodivergence.)

They’re demanding. (Often judged—especially under stress—as borderline or cruel.)

They’re selfish or unsafe. (Often judged as sociopathic or crazy.)

As we go deeper—whether through Stage II work or parts-based exploration—these meanings often sharpen.

The view of self can condense into something like: bad, unworthy, unlovable.

The view of the other into: incapable, abandoning, controlling, or dangerous.

This is familiar terrain in EFT. That part hasn’t changed.

What I do differently is how I contextualize these meanings early on.

Rather than treating them primarily as individual pathology or couple-specific distortion, I name them as adaptations to lived conditions—including gendered, relational, cultural, and systemic pressures.¹ We all have these experiences, regardless of how much or little big-T trauma we carry.

Before going further, one clarification matters: these trainings are not cleanly assigned, and they are rarely singular. Most people carry more than one, often simultaneously, and often in tension with each other.

Importantly, I’m not talking about identity here.

I’m talking about what people are trained to carry early, before identities are formed and reformed.

Some bodies are trained—explicitly or subtly—to earn belonging through usefulness, competence, or restraint.

Others are trained to absorb emotional labor, anticipate needs, or maintain relational stability. Many people are conditioned to suppress or override anger, disgust, contempt, exhaustion, numbness, and emptiness in order to stay connected or safe.

Many people—especially queer, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming folks—have lived multiple, sometimes conflicting, versions of these conditionings.

I’ve written before about how these accumulated trainings can become internal burdens in Unseen Layers of Burdens, particularly when they go unnamed for years.

When these adaptations are named as intelligent responses rather than personal failures, something shifts.

Here’s how this might sound in practice.

When I see someone working hard to make sense of the distress in their relationship—organizing, explaining, diagnosing what’s wrong and what needs to happen—I feel calm and compassionate. I hear a nervous system that learned early to manage pain by managing everything else.

I might reflect:

“I see how hard you’re working to take care of yourself and everyone around you. It’s almost like you’re alone with that job.”  

“I wonder how long you’ve had that job.”  

(Almost always, the answer is: As long as I can remember.)

At that point, most clients are willing—often relieved—to look beyond themselves and the couple, toward the generational and cultural conditions that shaped this role.² What was once framed as over-functioning or control begins to register as endurance.

When clients then touch the meaning of I’m too much, or the deeper pain of feeling monstrous in the amount of power they’ve taken on, or the grief of not mattering, these experiences feel less like personal defects.

They begin to feel more inevitable—more like natural outcomes of living in the world as it is.

The emotions become lighter to approach, easier to stay with. They are no longer proof that someone is failing—individually or relationally. They become signals of what has been asked of them for too long.

This doesn’t excuse harm.

And it doesn’t bypass responsibility.

But it does relocate responsibility—from character to conditions.

I explored this idea further in Change Requires New Conditions, Not New Effort, where I write about how transformation depends less on trying harder and more on shifting the environments that shape us.

For me, this shift hasn’t diluted EFT. It’s steadied it.

By widening the lens early—by naming the forces that shape how people learn to protect themselves—clients can go deeper with less collapse and less shame.

The map stays the same.

There is simply more room inside it.

And in that room, more people can stay.

References:

Knudson-Martin, C., & Huenergardt, D. (2023). Socio-emotional relationship therapy: Bridging emotion, power, and social context. New York, NY: Routledge.

Internal Family Systems Institute. (n.d.). Working with generational and cultural burdens

[Online training]. https://ifs-institute.com

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¹ This reframing of attachment meanings within gendered and relational power contexts is articulated in Carmen Knudson-Martin’s recent work on socio-emotional relationship therapy, which integrates attachment, power, and social context without pathologizing individuals or couples.

² This orientation is consistent with Internal Family Systems approaches that explicitly address generational and cultural burdens as organized, inherited survival strategies rather than individual pathology

For more on how therapeutic models expand to include broader relational context, read Better Together: Integrating EFT, IFS, and PSIP.

Photo by Cody King.