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| The 7 Best Things (Happy) Couples Do: From Both The Client’s and the Therapist’s Perspective |
| Feature Articles - Family | |
| Monday, 30 September 2002 | |
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“Only the truly kind person knows how to love and how to hate” - Confucius, 500 B.C. 1. Be old enough to date. 2. Be sexual. 3. Be willing to divorce. 4. Know how you chose each other. 5. Let yourself be astonished. 6. Manage your fear, hurt, shame, and loneliness. 7. Own your own part. 8. Let disappointment enrich you. As James Masterson (1988) noted in The Search For The Real Self, his popular book on borderline and narcissistic personality disorders, one of the key indicators of achieving emotional adulthood is the ability to soothe painful feelings. We have emphasized this need for self-soothing throughout our work, as have sexuality and intimacy pioneers James Maddock and Noel Larson (1995), and David Schnarch (1991, 1997). This notion of soothing the self also captures a lot of what has been systematized into the wisdom, rituals, and lore of AA, such as The Serenity Prayer, and sayings like “One Day At A Time” and “Easy Does It.” When the 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous are practiced responsibly and with balance, they embrace a style of life and advocate a level of personal integrity that we have been proud to be a part of for over two decades. And of course, as with everything else in life, when they are misapplied and used to justify the abuse of others or self, they are like any other system of living — they can become part of someone’s worst nightmare. Maddock, Larson, and Schnarch also emphasize the crucial role that personal integrity plays in intimate relationships. Having and exercising personal integrity in a relationship is highly dependent both on the ability to self-soothe, and on the ability to confront oneself. The notion of self-confrontation is sometimes at odds with the techniques used by some older treatment programs that still emphasize breaking down the client’s defenses from the outside. As Maddock and Larson advocate (1995, 2002), it is much more subtle and effective to help a client back himself into a corner where his problems heat up inside of him enough for change to occur. At the end of inpatient addiction treatment, one is often told: “Don’t make any major changes in your life for at least 12 months — don’t change jobs, don’t get divorced, just keep going to meetings and work your program.” It is actually pretty good advice. Major life changes can easily contribute to relapse, especially during the first year of recovery. Of course, there are any number of antecedents for relapse, such as untreated depression, anxiety, a chemical imbalance due to improper diet, abrupt job changes, and serious relationship disruptions. The emphasis on relationships as a major source of stress, and therefore as a major trigger for relapse, is a wise stance to take, in our opinion. Over the years, we have gradually discovered that keeping the goals of self-soothing and self-confrontation on the front burner, and then weaving the above eight things from our list into our work with couples — in recovery or not — has insured that they get better, and get better faster, than when we don't do so. We have also noticed fewer serious relapses with this focus. With that in mind, we would like to take you briefly through each item on our list and explain for each one what the challenge is for the client and what the challenge is for the therapist. We encourage counselors to read the list and apply it to themselves first, because unless therapists have these eight requirements relatively “clear” within themselves, they will have a hard time helping their clients. We hope they give you some things to think about and integrate into your work. 1. Be old enough to date. Dating is a process of discovery, and is therefore a process of hurting and getting hurt. If you can’t tolerate being rejected, and if you can’t tolerate respectfully rejecting others, then you aren’t old enough to date, so you certainly can’t keep a marriage going successfully. The challenge for the client is to grow up, which is why we have emphasized Erik Erikson’s stages of development in all of our work for the past 30 years. The challenge for the therapist is to be grown up enough to want the client to grow up. If you need to be needed, if you aren’t comfortable having your clients be angry at you, if you get mad at your clients and try to control them, if you are unwilling to get supervision of your work for fear of being “found out,” if you rescue your clients instead of subtly moving them toward rescuing themselves, then it’s time to confront yourself. 2. Be sexual. As David Schnarch (1997) says so clearly, marriage is a sexual relationship, and so you can choose to not be sexual, and therefore be single; or you can choose to be married, and therefore be sexual, but you don’t get to have it both ways. If you are in early recovery from an addiction or are just beginning to come to terms with incest memories, your sexuality may well be affected. In the context of a grown up relationship, you and your partner will eventually find a way through this tangled thicket via conflict, which we all know is a good thing — not something to be avoided. The challenge for the client is to embrace one's sexuality as a fundamental aspect of one’s identity. The challenge for the therapist is to be comfortable talking about and exploring sexuality with clients in very specific terms. “How’s your sex life?” may be a good opening question, but it’s just that — only an opening question. Exploring exactly what happened, moment-to-moment, after he touched her clitoris in a way that hurt, causing her to wince in pain a little bit, will tell you a great deal about a couple. Did he stop for a second, feel the hurt and rejection, wince a bit himself, then soothe himself and continue? Did she offer where he could move his finger so that she could continue being intensely stimulated? Or did he immediately jump out of bed and yell something about never doing anything right or never being able to please her, as he stormed downstairs to sleep on the couch? The difference between the two is the difference between having sex with an emotional child or adult. 3. Be willing to divorce. The challenge for the client is to be willing to choose one’s own identity over the relationship, as much as one chooses the relationship over one’s identity. Relationship anxiety gets very high at times like these. If every time our clients get close to this precipice we let our own anxiety get the best of us, we will unconsciously sabotage the very growth that is about to happen by either rescuing (doing things for the client that he can do for himself), or by telling the person what we think they should do. Divorce does not happen because people occasionally take a stand. It happens when people don’t. Conflict by itself isn’t what kills a marriage. It is conflict that is either suppressed or acted out destructively that kills a marriage. The challenge for the therapist is to be able to manage their own anxiety about hurting others and about their own pasts, while moving clients toward revelation of their own selves. We must ask ourselves, “Am I willing to let my client down?” If I’m not, then I need to get some help. 4. Know how you chose each other. People get married (or into any long-term committed relationship) knowing why they chose each other. And then several years into it, they begin to discover the real reasons that they chose each other. We do marry our mothers and fathers. No matter how healthy we become, no matter how much therapy we do, the pattern of our partner choices will always be the same. Believing that the rules of life don’t apply to us because “We’re in recovery” or “We’ve done enough therapy” is just part of our narcissism — “We’re special.” The details and intensity may change, but not the patterns. The challenge for the client is to move beyond the illusions that were useful and necessary in childhood, for the rewards of adult depth. The challenge for the therapist is to take great pleasure in being a “psychological archaeologist” while calmly witnessing our clients struggle with, embrace, and digest their life stories. 5. Let yourself be astonished. This is one of the most clearly distinguishable features of a really great love relationship. The challenge for the client is to be truly spiritual — i.e., to have awe and wonder about the universe, to delight in the little things in life, and to value these as the most important aspects of a deep love relationship, without being naive and childish. We hear people stuck in the victim role saying, “I don’t want to lose my inner child’s ability to play and have fun,” when what they really mean is, “I don’t want to grow up and stop being a victim because I am most comfortable when being rescued.” There is a great distance between being childlike and childish, in our minds. The challenge for the therapist is to also be spiritual, and to be disciplined enough to be unfazed by our client’s drama and intensity, so that he/she can move toward the power and joy of “the ordinary.” This is especially important with our more troubled clients. 6. Manage your fear, hurt, shame, and loneliness. In most cases, domestic violence is about a failed attempt to self-soothe these “softer” emotions. The failure to soothe then quickly escalates to rage. We note with much emphasis that while these emotions are most often the ones involved in domestic violence, they are also the ones involved in the deepest intimacy imaginable between partners. Therein lies the dilemma. Therapeutic interventions that focus on “feelings expression” without also focusing on “feelings containment” are doomed, and often doom the client’s family members, too. Psychologists now know that the kinds of dramatic “feelings work” that many of us did in the 1980s, where the client is urged to pound a pillow with a bataka bat while screaming at his parents, does little to solve this dilemma, and with the more vulnerable client, can do more harm than good. The client’s challenge here is to accept that she has feelings, to recognize what they are, to feel them, and then to consciously choose what to do with them. Learning to soothe oneself is crucial here. The challenge for the therapist is to be aware of our own countertransferences and feelings — how much this client makes me angry, how embarrassed I am for him, how much I'd like to rescue him, how he reminds me of my father, etc.— and to always remember that our primary goal as therapists is to encourage our clients to grow up. 7. Own your own part. The challenge for the client is to ask the question, “What is my part?” This is no small challenge. Both victims and perpetrators tend to blame someone or something outside of themselves for why life is turning out the way it is. We have worked with countless therapists who get lost by being seduced into passing judgment on the “transgression of the week” or “the argument of the week” that couples bring into session. James Maddock (2001) says that six to twelve months after a marriage ends, the only question either person should be asking is, “What was my part in why this marriage didn’t last?” Any other question is pointless. The client’s challenge is also to become accountable, and to put aside the victim and perpetrator parts of himself as much as possible. (We all have both parts, by the way.) The therapist’s challenge is to be able to look at each person in the relationship as separate, and as equal in terms of emotional strengths and limitations, and to act that way, which is no small feat. Our challenge is to not take sides, and to push for differentiation in both partners. 8. Let disappointment enrich you. This is the grandparent of them all, and represents the centerpiece of therapy as well as life itself. It sounds like an oxymoron at first, until you realize that the only way any of us ever grows is to not just begrudgingly admit that disappointment is part of life, but to go at least two steps past that, and actually let it enrich and deepen us. This is what healing one’s narcissism is all about. It’s what coming to terms with loss is about. It’s what the ultimate paradox is about — that life and death are inextricably intertwined as part of a unitary process. The challenge for the client is to be ready and willing to accept that “This is my life.” It is also the ability to grasp the paradoxes in life, especially the one that says that depth comes through simplicity. The challenge for the therapist is to be aware of how our own narcissism affects both ourselves and our work, and to watch out for the need for intensity and drama in therapy. We need to continually re-affirm and re-embrace for ourselves the fact that small, quiet changes are the most important ones. We don’t do our clients much good when we are more narcissistic than them and need more drama than they do. Relationships and recovery Over a decade ago, we took a little risk and made a little discovery. We found that in a certain number of cases, if somebody kept relapsing, it might be just the thing for them to attend one of our 3.5 day ClearLife Therapy Intensives. The conventional wisdom was that no family of origin work should be done for at least a year because the emotions and memories that might be stirred up could trigger a relapse. The way we do the therapy work seems to make a difference. When people look at childhood patterns in a calm, non-confrontive environment during which time they are encouraged to cognitively re-frame the experiences in light of being a powerful, competent adult rather than a wounded-victim-angry-perpetrator-child, and when they are given soothing strategies, and when they learn that they can go into and come out of feelings and memories in a clear, gentle, “boundaried” way, then sometimes it’s the key to the relapse problem. The same can be said of couples work. One’s addiction is part of the whole picture, just as is one’s attempts to control the other person’s addiction. As each separate person in a committed relationship confronts himself instead of his partner, and as that self-confrontation more and more moves him away from what Caroline Myss (1998) calls operating out of his “Woundology” into what we call Powerful-Competent-Adulthood, the personal integrity of both people increases, the quality of sobriety increases, the risks of relapse decrease, and the intimacy in the relationship deepens. Erica Jong (1977) wrote, “The trouble is, if you don’t risk anything, you risk even more.” We point out throughout our book and in session with couples that “the distance between awful and awesome relationships is minimal.” We go on to note that this distance can be measured by 1) how much emotional awareness you have cultivated in yourself, 2) how you choose to think about life, 3) the degree to which you choose to soothe yourself when uncomfortable, and 4) the kinds of connections you have with others. These are all things that we, as adults, have the power to choose. This fact boosts the hope of even our most troubled couples. The Friels are New York Times best-selling authors of eight books and are psychologists in private practice in St. Paul, MN. John Friel also sees clients in the Reno-Lake Tahoe Area and is licensed in Nevada. Their web site is at www.clearlife.com References Erikson, Erik H. (1986). Identity Youth and Crisis. New York: W.W. Norton and Co., Inc. Friel, John C., and Linda D. Friel. (2002). The 7 Best Things (Happy) Couples Do. Deerfield Beach, FL: Health Communications, Inc. Jong, Erica. (1977). How To Save Your Own Life. New York: Holt, Rinehart, & Winston .Larson, Noel R. and James W. Maddock. “Violence And Abuse In Intimate Relationships,” First Annual Conference On Sexuality And Intimacy: Conflict, Passion, And Power, U.S. Journal Training, Inc., Las Vegas, NV: April 17-19, 2002 .Maddock, James W. (March, 2001). Personal Communication. Maddock, James W., and Noel R. Larson. (1995). Incestuous Families: An Ecological Approach to Understanding and Treatment. New York: W.W. Norton .Masterson, James. (1988). The Search For the Real Self: Unmasking the Personality Disorders of Our Age. New York: The Free Press. Myss, Caroline. (1998). Why People Don’t Heal and How They Can. New York: Three Rivers Press, 1998.Schnarch, David M. (1997). Passionate Marriage: Sex, Love, And Intimacy In Emotionally Committed Relationships. New York: W. W. Norton. Schnarch, David M. (1991). Constructing the Sexual Crucible: An Integration of Sexual and Marital Therapy. New York: W.W. Norton.              |
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