RETaC training

Emotions are an intrinsic part of our lives. They make us feel fantastic and they can make us feel hopeless. The power of emotion is huge. When we feel something, we can get lost in it. Feelings and emotions determine ‘everything’. The way we feel about something is the heart of our decision making. Think about it. When something ‘feels right’ we want to go for it. When something ‘feels wrong’ we are in doubt about what to do, or we don’t want it.

To be able to deal effectively with our emotions we need healthy emotional regulation. If that is not the case, we can feel stuck, experience negative emotions, and have disturbing relationships as they influence how we experience ourselves and respond to others. Healthy emotional regulation enables us to not get stuck in emotions and patterns. It helps to make decisions that are good for us and good for our partners and family. Healthy emotional regulation enables you to feel relief, say sorry, feel free…

RETaC is about individual emotional regulation. With RETaC you learn how to change unwanted behaviors that emerge from how you feel. The impact of that can be life changing because how we feel, determines our daily choices and decisions.

RETaC is about relational emotional regulation. Relationships are the one area where deep emotions emerge. The more intimate the relationship – be it with lover, friend, children, siblings, close family – the deeper the feelings impact us. With RETaC you will rediscover what you truly feel and how you can be part of a healthy relationship.

RETaC is about a new method of coaching and therapy. The neuroscientific research behind how our emotional brain works has led to RETaC. Relation Emotion Therapy and Coaching, traces and unravels (unconscious) feeling patterns that regulate our emotions and responses and transforms them into new resourceful felt experiences. Once that happens, our reaction patterns immediately change because their source changed. Not only do you learn to react differently with RETaC, but you feel differently which makes you react differently!

The transformations with RETaC are so profound that many therapists and coaches want to learn about how emotional regulation works, and how that is the key to deep and sustainable transformation. RETaC explains why much relationship therapy, emotional work, advice and techniques do not work when it is needed. RETaC will change the way you think change works!

That it can be challenging to maintain a healthy loving a relationship is a given for most people. There is a reason why there are so many relationship counselors.

The controversial Jordan Peterson advises against divorce, no matter how difficult it can be in the relationship. Why? The statistics show that divorced partners with children both get off badly. In a financial sense, in terms of starting a new relationship and in terms of emotions.

In a way I agree with him. Don’t get me wrong, I am not advocating that people should stay in a relationship that causes all kinds of distress. I do think that relationship suffering presents a huge opportunity for both partners. An opportunity to learn to understand something about yourself that is fundamental to ourselves. Because this “something” probably played a role in previous relationships as well. Something that will likely play a role in a future relationship as well.

The Relation Emotion Therapy and Coaching foundation training takes three days. Below is a brief summary of some of the topics that will be covered.

Day 1: The neuroscience of emotions

• You will learn the latest knowledge about how your emotional brain works.
• And you learn a new theory about how emotions arise.
• You will playfully investigate and practice the foundations of how emotions arise.
• You examine your own patterns in relationships.
• You examine your own feelings and learn where they come from.

Day 2: Mapping relationship problems

• What basic issues can arise in relationships?
• What are the problems of a blended family?
• Why do we blame each other for our feelings?
• The secret of crisis in a/your relationship.
• Learning to feel again.
• You transform patterns in yourself and patterns in your relationships.
• You will learn how to guide others in transforming deep feelings and patterns.

Day 3: Transform relationship emotions

• You investigate your own relationship issues.
• You investigate your own problematic patterns.
• You will learn how to map relationship emotion prediction loops.
• You will learn how your relationship emotion prediction loops change, in yourself and each other.
• You change patterns in yourself that have been playing for (many) years.
• You discover how to make new predictions together.

Intimacy touches us to our core. In a positive sense when things are going well and in the most negative sense when things are going bad. We have learned in our life how intimacy works through the most important examples in our lives: our parents.

From the second we were born we have been taught what, for example, intimacy is. How to act intimately, what breaks intimacy, what not to do and so on.

We have not learned this consciously. Sometimes we have been told how intimacy works. Most of the time, however, we have grown up in the midst of our unique example of intimacy. Because of what was said and done. And what was not done or said. Whether there was touching or not. And not only from our parents but also the larger system. Brothers, sisters, grandfathers and grandmothers, friends and girlfriends and so on.

All those thousands of experiences have formed a conceptual reality. A conceptual reality that unconsciously shapes our decisions. And this unconscious conceptual reality is the basis for possibly the most important aspect of relationship problems. Relationship related emotions!

Recent research shows that emotions may be the most important factor in our decision-making ability. For most of us, the feelings associated with these emotions are largely outside of our consciousness. 

Unconscious feelings play a central role in relationship problems. However we experience these feelings and emotions not as ‘our own’. We experience emotions in our relationships as a consequence of the action or inaction of the other person. This is actually a critical (mostly unconscious) mistake. This mistake ensures that the feelings and emotions strengthen. Making them more true and more challenging to change. 

Another aspect of the role of these relationship feelings is that neuroscientific research shows that these emotions are very difficult to overrule with our cognition. That explains why so much relationship therapy, advice and techniques does not work when it is really necessary.

Seeing yourself through the perspective of the other. Non-violent Communication. Embracing differences in thinking style. Understanding what “color” your partner is. Communication advice. Family constellations, insight into your attachment style, et cetera. All meaningful things, but when it really comes down to it… relationship emotions overrule what you know and understand. Read more about relationships on the relationship blog.

Relationship Emotion Therapy and Coaching (RETaC) is not the same as EFT (Emotionally Focused Therapy). RETaC is based on recent neuroscience research by Dr Lisa Feldman Barret. She explains in great detail how our emotions arise and that is not how we have learned that they arise. The source of our emotions lies in one of the most important functions of our brain: predicting what will happen. These predictions create our emotions.

Predicting what will happen

Predictions arise from unconscious physical feelings. It turns out that a large part of our brain is busy drawing information from a (relatively) unknown sensory system: interocepsis. Subtle heartbeat changes, or tensions around organs such as stomach, intestines, throat. Or restlessness in legs, etc., are carefully monitored by the brain. The brain links these (often) unconscious feelings to memories of these feelings. Why? To be able to predict as accurately as possible what will happen.

Articles

You can read more about RETaC in this excellent article by journalist and coach Aranka van der Pol.

This “prediction mechanism” of our brain is very useful. Because by making predictions we can handle new things and experiences very well. However, feelings can also be linked to experiences that consistently make the “worst” predictions possible. And all we notice about this whole process is the end emotion it creates.

Unconscious process

An important aspect of this is that this whole process unconsciously directs us. We do not link the emotions and feelings we experience to the past but to what is happening in the moment. We are also not aware of the origin of the prediction but link our felt experience to the situation or person of that moment.

By accurately modeling how emotions are created in our brain, we have been able to develop methods to work with this neuroscientific knowledge. With RETaC we make the unconscious process aware. And we change the predictions so that the Relationship Emotions also change.