Working With Affective Blocks in Therapy

In a previous post, I described why insight-based and relational work can reach a limit when emotional memory is activated. This piece focuses on how that limit shows up in practice, particularly for therapists working with couples and families.

Affective Blocks in the Therapy Room

Most therapists recognise the moment.

The session has been thoughtful. The pattern is clear. The cycle has been named.

Then something tightens.

A parent suddenly reacts to a child’s tone.

A partner escalates at a specific phrase.

A name is mentioned and the room shifts.

What follows is not confusion or lack of understanding. It is a particular emotional reaction that feels immediate, overwhelming, and disproportionate to the present moment.

I refer to these moments as affective blocks.

Affective blocks are not global dysregulation.

They are not emotionally immature.

They are not resistant in the usual sense.

They are reliably triggered responses, linked to particular cues such as words, gestures, tones, or relational positions that bypass reflection and choice.

From the client’s perspective, the reaction feels automatic or hijacking.

From the therapist’s perspective, it can abruptly derail otherwise productive systemic work.

Why Working Around the Block Often Fails

In family and couple therapy, we are well trained to address such moments.

We slow the interaction.

We reframe meaning.

We coach alternative responses.

We locate the reaction in family-of-origin narratives.

Sometimes this is enough.

However, when an affective block is present, these strategies often hold only until the same trigger reappears. The reaction returns with the same intensity, leaving clients frustrated and therapists quietly stuck.

This is not because the formulation is wrong.

This is because the work occurs at a level that the reaction cannot access.

Trauma Without a Trauma History

One reason affective blocks are easily missed is that they do not always correspond to an obvious trauma narrative.

Many clients have never experienced a Criterion-A traumatic event. They may not identify as traumatised at all. And yet their responses look unmistakably trauma-like.

Sudden hyperarousal, shutdown, flooding, or collapse.

These reactions often arise from interpersonal experience. Repeated humiliations, chronic relational threat, abrupt losses, or moments of helplessness that were never metabolised at the time.

Within ongoing relationships, these unresolved emotional memories can become embedded in interactional cycles, repeatedly reactivated without ever being directly addressed.

What Changes When an Affective Block Resolves

When an affective block shifts, the change is usually quiet.

Clients do not need to remind themselves to respond differently.

They stop bracing for the trigger.

The familiar escalation simply does not arrive.

From a systemic perspective, this is often the moment when relational work becomes possible again. Not because the relationship has been fixed, but because the emotional obstruction has lifted.

For therapists, these moments can feel uncanny. Not because they are dramatic, but because something that once dominated the work is suddenly absent.

If you recognise these moments in your own practice, when everything makes sense, yet a specific reaction keeps returning, learning to recognise and work directly with affective blocks may clarify what has been holding the process in place.