Alex Szablya MA, LMHC

“I’ve wanted to be a psychotherapist since I was 14 years old. I don’t know that there was any ‘aha’ moment, but what I do remember is that it felt less like this is what I want as a career, but this is what I want to do with my life.”

 “I did my undergraduate work in three different universities. University of the West Indies, Washington State University, and then I finished at the University of Washington. My master’s degree came from Seattle University in what was called the MAP program, the Master’s of Applied Psychology. It is a program that is steeped in existential phenomenology, which means essentially that the here and now is the most important thing. And sometimes your past gets in the way of the here and now. My work involves helping clients understand what is going on in their lives right now as a couple and how the past impacts that, and what to do about it.”

 “The first time that I worked with a couple, it was as if I was called to work with them, called to help them. I knew that an evidence-based strategy would help them. I wanted to understand their story, and I wanted to understand what it was that was driving them and how they could move forward in a positive way. And ever since then, that is what I have wanted to do.”

There are several. John Gottman was a researcher at the University of Washington for over 40 years now. He was an interesting guy. I think he had been married twice and divorced when he looked at his research buddy and said, “I don’t understand women, and I want to understand what makes a marriage good.” And so he developed at the University of Washington something called the Love Lab, which was an apartment that was overlooking a very scenic area called the Montlake Cut. He would bring couples in for 72 hours, and he would set them up. He’d hook them up with monitors, and he would have a one-way window, and he would simply look and observe them for 72 hours. He did this, and every few years, he would invite the same couples back to do it all over again. And what he found over the course of time is that there were couples who had really good qualities that helped a marriage survive and thrive. And he called those couples the Marriage Masters. And then there were couples that were terrible at communicating and were very negative. And he called them the Marriage Disasters. What he was able to do was watch a couple for one minute. He would watch them argue and, within one minute, could predict with 96% accuracy whether that couple would survive.”

Anger is, in most cases, what we call a secondary emotion. Anger is a kind of layer upon what is really underneath, and it’s kind of to mask what you’re really feeling. So if you can stop and say, “Okay, what’s behind the anger?” Sometimes it takes a while, but you will start to feel what is really underneath it. Is it fear? Is it hurt? What is it that’s going on underneath? And that’s what you want to start talking about. Does this take time to learn? Yes. And sometimes this is what we address on maybe our third day down the road. When we’re talking to our partner, how do we understand that there’s something underneath the anger? 

Every once in a while, anger is truly the primary emotion. When anger is a primary emotion, it’s because you are angry at an injustice. You are angry that something is simply not fair. And when that happens, and you are angry, there is no underlying emotion. So when you’re feeling that and injustice is the reason, there is no underlying primary emotion because anger is the primary emotion.”