I Can't Look You In The Eyes

Places we don't want to go. Coregulation gone bad can take many forms and this is one of them: the Sandman effect case study. Also about a father and a son.

My client S. is a very strong man. He does a job that requires a great deal of responsibility, the capacity to establish himself as a team leader, and the ability to remain cool and collected at all times. He has something of a ‘Be Strong’ driver about him (for those of you familiar with the language of Transactional Analysis). But S. is also emotionally intelligent. His job demands that of him too, he told me.

S. did not shy away from looking me directly in the eyes. His gaze was piercing, and I could tell that, as he looked, he was both evaluating me and trying to make me feel at ease. Direct eye contact is so strange and powerful, especially when it comes from someone who uses it intentionally. It can be a little like looking into the sun. This man could connect.

Although an uneasy decision, S. has come to therapy to make sense of - and hopefully resolve - the complicated relationship with his father. Most strikingly: he could not look his father in the eyes.“I love him,” S. assured me. “But I’m deeply ashamed and sadenned by something I’ve known for a very long time - I can’t look him in the eyes”. He was looking me in the eyes when he said that. He seemed very sad. “I’ve never told anyone this before, but I know he knows. It’s our unspoken secret. I can’t look my father in the eyes, and I don’t understand why.”

S. was conflicted. On the one hand, he felt that he ought to be grateful to his father - overall, he had been a good father, and his childhood was OK overall. Noone was perfect and his father was no exception but being unable to look his father in the eyes seemed ridiculous, he thought. Especially for someone like S. – strong, capable, and composed in any crisis. Why did he even need help with this? On the other hand, S. was pragmatic: this had been going on for years, it was not improving, and his father was not getting any younger. He needed to attempt to get some resolution.

I always appreciate when things get raw and honest in therapy. I welcome the shadow. I like when clients feel they can speak their shadow. You could say I am a shadow junkie. And it really is psychotherapy gold. I knew we had gold here and I knew exactly where to go with it.

Coregulation Gone Bad: the Sandman Effect

In the world of psychotherapy, the term coregulation usually carries an unconditionally positive connotation. Therapists tend to view coregulation through rose-tinted glasses. But that is going to change for you as you continue reading.

I recently described, the Sandman effect, or the coregulation gone bad.

Coregulation can be defined as bidirectional linkage of emotional channels between two individuals.

There is ample evidence of coregulation occurring developmentally, for example between parents and children. Although it has received somewhat less attention, similar processes take place in our adult lives. And the closer the person we are emotionally 'resonating' with more resonating tends to happen.

The biological mechanism that mediates this emotional linkage is biobehavioural synchrony (also called interpersonal synchrony). It is defined as alignment in time of behavioural and biological parameters between two people.

This mechanism, which encompasses behaviour, endocrine coupling, physiological coupling, and interbrain synchrony, possibly occurs as a contributing factor to the quality of the interaction, or simply as a result of the interaction and mutual involvement of two people.

While coregulation is known for its positive effects, it is a double-edged sword, and by the same token, unwanted or negative coregulation can ensue as a result of two people interacting.

Different forms of coregulation or emotional linkage have been described (see the figure below) and some of them propagate difficult and negative emotions.

From Butler, Emily A., and Ashley K. Randall. "Emotional coregulation in close relationships." Emotion Review 5.2 (2013).

With regard to the graph above, and from my experience, I would add even more forms of emotional linkage - where it is not necessarily the intensity that is transmitted but rather discomfort, unease, despair, empty feelings, and so forth. For those of you who are therapists, you will know what I am talking about. I believe we all find ourselves experiencing feelings and affects that are not our own and that, as a result, we cannot make sense of.

Look Me In the Eyes And See My World

There are many ways for people to synchronise and coregulate - for better or for worse - and I am not sure whether the science has established a bona fide hierarchy between them as of yet (as in which leads to more and faster synchronisation). However, for me, eye contact is certainly on the top of the list.

I believe some research supports this idea. For example, one study on spontaneous brain synchronisation found that shared eye contact acts as a cue that leads to brain synchronisation in individuals who are not interacting or engaging in any other shared activity.

However, I do not think I need to sell you on this one anyways. After all, it is how mothers and fathers soothe their baby’s fears; it is why we look away from someone when we are too afraid that they will read our feelings, and the reason we know that giving that particular look will speak louder than words.

Looking someone in the eyes is a powerful agent of coregulation and synchrony, for better or for worse.

I Don't Want to Feel What You Feel

Coregulation is generally thought to contribute to allostatic balance. Allostasis is the process by which our organism prepares for necessary changes in line with the demands of the external environment and our own internal needs. The processes of allostasis aim to maintain homeostatic balance, which is the overall equilibrium of the body's state, maintained within limits conducive to life.

This allostatic balance can be achieved through one’s own self-regulation and anticipation of needs. However, humans being so co-dependent on each other and finding strength in numbers (btw other animals do it too), we have developed an alternative way to achieve this balance: by utilising other people’s emotional resources and their capacity for emotional regulation thus entering the realm of coregulation. We are forever engaged in the dance between self-regulation and coregulation.

But what happens when the situation is reversed? When one person is okay, in other words in a state of homeostasis, and then, upon connecting with another person’s emotional landscape, loses their balance? This phenomenon can be profoundly disturbing on an emotional level. When we disagree with, or have a troubled history involving, someone else’s worldview and emotional landscape, experiencing, first hand, via synchrony, a glimpse of their inner world can be an uneasy and unsettling experience.

I think that is exactly what was happening to S. with this whole business of not looking in the his father's eyes.

While everything appeared calm on the surface, S. and his father had a long history of a deep unease in their relationship. Even so, this unease was hardly if ever and only indirectly aknowledged between the two. Rationally, S. saw his father as a hard grafter - a man who had come from hardship and who, despite adversity, had managed to be an honest man who ensured his family never wanted for anything. But that was hardly scratching the surface. Beneath, ran an undercurrent of deep-seated irritation, or dislike if you will, towards his father’s general attitude to life. S. found it difficult to tolerate his father’s negativity. He had always been like that, S. reminisced in our sessions : believing that life is hard and that people are ultimately either ill-intentioned or uncaring. S. felt that his father had spent most of his life convinced that it was him against the world and that others were out to get him.

As we made our way through this wilderness of unspoken feelings that have created a pretty little pile over time - misattunements, unspoken resentments, silent falling-outs, and increasing emotional distancing - memories surfaced. Memories of teenage years marked by fear that those attitudes would ‘contaminate’ S. He never wanted to be like his father and to ‘suffer’ life rather than live and enjoy it. Later, memories emerged of the first signs of guilt for these feelings towards his overall well-meaning father, combined with a searing anger that always remained just beneath the surface but never boiled over. Questions like ‘Why do you have to be like that, Dad?’ and ‘Why do I feel I must constantly battle against this tide of emotional misery?’ were never far and would linger after younger S. would spend time with his dad.

Doing the Work

I think you get the picture: things were complicated between S. and his dad. And their tacit pact to not address things, did nothing to resolve the problem.

From my perspective as a therapist, it felt as though that gaze from his father’s eyes was telling this entire story through its own silent but powerful language, carrying feelings that were deeply felt but purposefully left at the margins, too difficult to fully confront.

So, therapy-wise, what did we do about it? Well, for starters, introducing the concept of synchrony into S.’s world was a revelation. It helped him understand that what he was experiencing was not some quirky weakness. (S. did not like ‘weak’ people, and he certainly did not like any signs of weakness in himself.) Then I encouraged him to consider starting that long-overdue conversation with his father, if he felt able to. And while psychologically gearing up for that, now armed with his new understanding of why looking into his father’s eyes was so much more than just eye contact, I suggested he show his father love in his own way, recognising that the history between them was there to be reckoned with and that the responsibility for its weight lay with them both.

We are still working on this, S. and I. I think things are getting better. As a result, I think S. gives more power to emotions and things we cannot see but we can certainly feel.

For my part, I am not sure how well I did justice to this story, which gave me a privileged spectator’s seat into the complicated emotional dance of the troubled but loving relationship between a father and son. Bearing witness to it was, for me, a privilege. And what did I learn? Well, I used to think that the expression ‘the eyes are the mirror of the soul’ was somewhat an overkill. Do I still think that? Not even a bit.

As always, thank you for reading. Any thoughts, similar experiences, clinical or otherwise, please share, I would be delighted to read.

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Related Reading

• The Sandman Effect