Are You Allergic to Your Partner?

Hi there and welcome back to another episode of The Couples Corner, a place where couples connect. I am one of your co-hosts, Katie Lemieux, and this is my friend, colleague, beautiful other co-host. Oh, thank you.

Hi everyone, I'm Susan Block, and Katie and I are both licensed marriage and family therapists right here in South Florida, and we are extremely passionate about the work we do in private practice with couples. So welcome and thanks for tuning in.

Yeah, and passionate about bringing all this awesome information to you, and we're so excited about the plethora of guests we have. And today we have a friend my friend and colleague Jason Wasser. Jason and I actually met through licensure supervision. So in the state of Florida, many other states, as a therapist we have to do extended work to actually become licensed. So Jason and I have shared many moments, talked about many cases, had a lot of fun actually in supervision, and he is going to talk to us today about are you allergic to your partner? So what in the world does that mean?

So when we're talking about allergies, we're not actually talking about a histamine response, like if you get stung by a bee. What I'm talking about when I'm working with my couples is what's going on under the hood. What's going on as a client or a couple will be looking at each other and it's sending signals or triggers throughout the physiology of their body and what stress patterns are going off when they're in that engagement or in that dynamic with the person, whether they're realizing it or not.

Interesting.

So really how what you're dealing with in your relationships are impacting you, your physiological well-being, not just your mental or emotional well-being.

Right, and as therapists, we know that most Most of the time we're just dealing with the conscious part of what are they thinking, what are they going through, what are the patterns. I'm also taking it much bigger and saying, "Well, what's going on besides that? What's influencing those intellectual responses?" Because if they're in a fight-or-flight response, then the responses could be to move away or to avoid dealing with any conflict or not dealing with their other partner that they're having issues with. And one partner will see it, "Well, you're being aloof," or, "You're being distant from me," and the other person doesn't realize that they're going through this stress pattern that's actually keeping them blocked, and that's what I'm trying to tap into and to eliminate that.

Interesting.

So I'm fascinated to learn how you got started doing this, specifically working with couples.

So over the last many years, as we said, we were doing the marriage and family therapy route, and I found there was something else that I was kind of missing and trying to tap into. So I stumbled into this protocol called Neuro-Emotional Technique, or NET, which came out of chiropractic originally, and it's a mind-body stress reduction protocol using a muscle test to access a part of the brain that we don't typically will use in the therapy session. We know what's going on, but we don't know how to assess for what's going on. So I'll use a muscle test, usually on the arm, and using light pressure on the arm to assess whether there's a trigger. And usually if there's nothing going on, the muscle test will hold strong. And if there's a weak— if there's something that does get triggered, the muscle test is going to go weak. It's kind of accessing the fight-or-flight process. So while using that, we then use Chinese medicine meridian points on the wrist to assess which meridian is being stimulated, and we find the emotions connected to that meridian. And then once we find that, we can locate the story of why that person is having an issue with whatever is going on around them. And then to solve that problem, we use a pulse point correction that they just hold the points on that wrist, whichever one it was, while holding the emotional points on their forehead, and they relive that snapshot, or, you know, go back into that memory of that snapshot. And that kind of corrects the physiology and the stress pattern. As if they're going through it right now, because that part of our brain doesn't have the limit of when it happened. It can be happening as if it happened 20 years ago right now.

So is it safe to assume that it's not necessarily because it's you and your partner specifically, but it's your whole life story that you're bringing to the table that may have nothing to do—

you mean your partner may have nothing to do with why you have an issue with your partner? And as you're dealing with whatever issue, you think you're directly targeting something by talking about the couple and the relationship and the dynamics or money or family or sex or to any of those things, but it may have something to do when they were 6 years old that had something to do with a friend in class that they were sensitive to, and that became an emotional block for them. And now every time that that comes up, it stimulates that stress pattern.

Exactly. And there's, you know, couples take things so personally sometimes, and so—

And they don't know why.

Almost giving them permission to say, this is not about me, this is really about your history, and I want to learn more about it.

Right, absolutely. So you can have the dynamic of the couple while you're talking about navigating what they're going through and also what they're bringing to the table, that unresolved or unfinished business from the family of origin that sometimes they never tapped into before they walked up into this relationship because wherever you go, there you are. You bring yourself.

Surprise!

Right?

So you bring yourself to this experience and you're hoping that your spouse or your partner or significant other will help resolve some of those things for you, but they may not get triggered or know that you have to deal with them until you meet that person or you're in that relationship with them, and that's when the stuff comes up.

Yeah, and that, and that I always say is the beauty of relationships and the opportunity for healing, right? We often think if we're not able to look inside ourselves or connect with ourselves, we think, oh, it's the blame game, it's our partner, and you know what, we're gonna break up and then I'm gonna meet the same Joe, Dick, and Harry with a different name, and it's just gonna be triggered.

Another thing may come up from those positive and negative traits, but you're still gonna be triggered for different things from different people, and that's why we're more drawn to other people versus not drawn to other types of personalities.

Right. So I think Susan and I are really curious about, like, can you give an example of maybe a couple you've worked with or how this process works?

Yeah, absolutely.

So this couple that I was seeing off and on for a while were having significant, significant issues. They were— they're now married for 12 years, so they're still thankfully pulling through. But I started experimenting with this about 2 years ago with them, and I brought the husband out of the room into my waiting room, and I used this protocol with him in the waiting room. His wife was sitting on the couch in the office, and I said, I want you just to think about picturing her. Don't peek around the corner. And I went through the protocol. I pulled up his arm, muscle test, it went weak. We found the emotion, whatever it was, we cleared out that thing. Then I brought him to the front of my door. Look at her again. It still went weak. Cleared out whatever emotional thing was. So then I would— as we cleared out each little trigger point, we kept bringing him closer and closer and closer till finally they were nose to nose. And then there was no more resistance or allergic response to being in that environment or being that close to her in that intimate environment where it didn't trigger anything.

So now, is he connecting on an intellectual, conscious level of that memory, or it's just more—

Well, it's non-conscious because you can think about something, be like, "I want to be okay with you. I want to be here. I want to have connection. I want our marriage to be great." But behind the scenes, what's going on in those flooded emotions that you can't consciously explain? Or express, or know that sometimes it's— most of the time you don't even know what's happening. So this really taps into that and fast-tracks a lot of those things that we're trying to really tap into as therapists.

When you say fast-tracks, what does that actually mean?

So I find that we're sitting and talking for— with issues, and we're talking with clients, and something may not come up for the 5th session, the 7th session, the 10th session. So I had a client that came in trying to figure out her relationship with someone she was seeing, And went through the intake form and there was nothing that was outstanding in the intake form. And we go through this and it was about her trying to stay connected in this relationship. And the emotion that came up was abandoned when we found where the original trigger was. And it went back to a 2-year-old experience. So we're looking and I'm like, "So what happened at 2 years old where you were abandoned?" And she looks up, she goes, "Oh, I was given up for adoption then." Oh wow. Wasn't in the intake, wasn't discussed at all as part of things, and she didn't even think to bring that to the table as why she's having present-day issues with the relationship. And I said, so when were you thinking about sharing that with me? She's like, I don't know, maybe it would have come up in the next handful of sessions, but I didn't know, I didn't think it was connected. So that's how I can bypass and short and fast-track.

And too, I'm guessing a lot of times, like, when we're blocked about something, sometimes we really just totally block block it out. Our brain is an amazing tool, and so we might think we're okay with something, put it to the side, avoid it, and then it's like, oh, but I've dealt with that, or no, I'm good with that.

And that's the intellectualization of it. I'm okay with that, but behind the scenes, something else might be going on that you think has nothing to do with it or don't realize it's there. So I kind of have the rule of thumb that everything's related to everything, okay? And anything can cause anything. So it doesn't mean just because you stress at work, that means you're gonna come home and yell at your partner. It can be for a host of many reasons that you're gonna have these challenges.

Wow.

So what are some of the techniques that you typically do with either couples or even individuals? I know you've mentioned that you—

Yeah, so one of the first things I would do is try to help them, you know, using that family of origin model, is help them identify the positive and negative traits of their original— their family that they came from that they may be projecting onto their spouse. And these are the things that they originally perhaps were attracted to, that if they were lacking in an area for themselves or their family, "Oh, my partner has this," or, "My significant other has this. Hopefully I'll be— feel more complete and more fulfilled," except those issues will eventually trigger other things that have not been resolved in themselves. So that's the first thing I'll look for when I'm doing the couples approach with this. And the second thing is once we have kind of a list of what are those issues that are bothering them, then I'll go and I'll use NET and to kind of clean up that list and those triggers. Yeah, the neuro-emotional technique protocol. So I'll use that and I'll walk them through this protocol, and usually within minutes, if not a session or two, a lot of those significant issues will be gone.

That's amazing that it's that fast.

It's that fast.

And then so what happens is—

I mean, you'll see radical changes just within their own relationship to that issue. They'll sometimes say, I can think about it, but it feels like it's so distant and it doesn't really pull me or bother me anymore. So you can see that in this session they're really having immediate responses to it, and then you'll see them go back out into the real world and they'll notice significant changes as they're in experience, like, oh, that bothered me last week and it's not bothering me now. What happened? Where did it go? What'd you do? So they freak out about it a little bit, which is really cool.

And I know that you also said that this works for anyone going through through fears or anxiety or stress, and there's so much to this, and we have such a limited time to talk with you about it, and I feel like we could talk about this for hours.

Sure, so I'd like to share with you the First Aid Stress Tool, which is also available on my website, which we'll get to in a moment. So the website is www.thefamilyroomsfl.com, as in South Florida, and I can also be reached 954-324-3677. If you go to my website, it's on the bottom of the page. It's the First Aid Stress Tool, or the FAST. So the First Aid Stress Tool is kind of a quick pulse point technique. So if you are thinking about anything that's stressing you, whatever it can be, whether it's something that you're dealing with financially or something with kids or something with work, what you would do is you kind of would hold out your wrists and you would hook under whatever side you would want to hook under while accessing the first, second, and third pulse point from the wrist point down. On the thumb side of your—

kind of like you're playing guitar.

Kind of like you're playing guitar. Exactly, great metaphor. And you would lightly access those 3 points on— it doesn't matter which side first— and then you would put it across your forehead. These 2 points here are the emotion points in Chinese medicine. So while going into that and you're thinking about the stress-related problem, you breathe 15, 20, 30 seconds, and then you're going to do the same thing on the other side while stimulating those points as well. And you have that on your website? That's on the website as well, and you can download that and put it up on your fridge and take it with you and leave it in your car, wherever you need to. And it's in 30 seconds to a minute, you will feel a noticeable change. It may not solve everything, but it will definitely tap into something.

So I know that, you know, our audience is national, which is amazing, and you obviously work with South Florida folks. And if they wanted to get in contact with you, you'll do a consultation?

Absolutely, yeah, I can do consultations either FaceTime or Skype, as well as if I can't help solve it locally, I can help you find I have practitioners that are local to you in your area. I have a network of probably 4,000 colleagues that do this protocol across the world.

Yeah, so if this is of interest to you and you might want to connect with someone but maybe have some questions initially for Jason Wasser, he can definitely help connect you to other folks. But we wanted to thank you for tuning in. What a really cool topic to talk about. And we have other fascinating topics coming up. We're going to talk about infidelity and how to heal from infidelity. We're going to be talking about envisioning your life after divorce. And many other topics.

So again, I'm Katie Lemieux and this is Susan Block, and we thank you so much for tuning in.

And don't forget to find us on Facebook at The Couples Corner in South Florida. You'll see a picture of Susan and I. Make sure you like our page. You will find our guests just like Jason Wasser. He will probably list awesome resources like he has been sharing with you, information clips, biographies of all our guests. So you want to check us out there, and we'll talk to you— we'll see you soon.