BETWEEN COUPLES, PERCEPTION IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN TRITH

People have different values and perceptions about the same behaviors and events.  What is acceptable to one is not to another.  During the many years I saw couples in therapy, I never wasted time trying to find which one had the facts straight.  Subjectivity causes distortion of facts and it has so widely been researched and proven that witnesses may believe they are telling what was there but, often, they are telling what they  think they saw.

The therapeutic work that must be done is to help them to understand what in their value system has been violated and how they have been conditioned to react to it.  Often, it is as simple as each believing the other should feel as they do.  Of course they may not, having grown up to think for themselves and coming from an entirely different context where values and  tolerance depends on religious and ethnic values as well as social norms in  their previous environments.

One of the most challenging aspects to marriage in the need for a couple to merge these in order to live a compatible life.   If neither can compromise or change any of their views due to their rigidity, the marriage will not last...at least not happily.  Surprisingly, fidelity is not a requisite for all relationships.  Impotent husbands or frigid wives often accept different rules of behavior.  When one partner withholds intimacy as a manipulation or punishment, marital rules may change.

Again, it all points to  the reality that nothing can be assumed from outside the marriage.  It is a cardinal rule that a therapist must not make assumptions or pass judgements.  The first rule taught to any therapeutic discipline is  "start where the patient is".                                                                 

MATURITY: MAKING ALL PARTS OF SELF CONGRUENT

If a child's world is laden with violence, both witnessed and directly experienced; if there is inadequate nutrition and emotional nurturing; if the child's world is totally unpredictable as are the people in it; if the child is unable to read social and facial cues (eg. Asperger's, schizophrenia, and other conditions); if the child has never had to face frustration tolerance or amuse itself; if a child is never taught to take care of any of its own needs; if the child has witnessed murder of a parent or other extraordinary trauma, to name only a few factors, their mental, social and emotional development will be compromised.

Treating adults becomes complicated. If it is truly PTSD that keeps an adult unable to control feelings and behavior, brain changes have occurred that prevent the normal talk therapy, insight oriented or cognitive-behavioral, from being effective easily, if at all. Otherwise, trying to help a patient make their child-part (not really understood as it happened) and adult-part (now seen through more mature eyes, hopefully) merge, the goal of whatever therapy is used.

However, when the child and the adult stay as two separate entities with no hope of joining, the mental and emotional tug-of-war the person experiences is painful to them as well as others forced, helplessly, to view it. It is truly like talking to two people in the same body. Even knowing what is best, this person gives in to that which is tempting and easy to do, while denying consequences, only to be hit with excruciating guilt and disappointment to self while feeding their injured ego with more loss of self-esteem.

Longing and desire become obsessional. Getting the voices and directives out of one's head is difficult, if not impossible. Many who experience this want to run from it, mistakenly assuming the triggers are outside self. Obsessiveness follows you wherever you go because, like so many other things, it lives in your head.

Many people continue to assume that just telling people what they should do or say is enough. If they don't follow that 'good' advice, forget them. Life just is not that simple, nor are people, least of all people who have been compromised by not having the good luck to be genetically strong, raised with love and nurture, and exposed to those things that precipitate growth instead of, simply, pain.

If only more people could understand condition and respond with empathy and patience, how much better our human world would be. Many people seem to care more for animals than humans because they feel an unconditional love from their pets. All animals are not as loving to humans. Even animals who have been rescued from traumatic lives often can not be rehabilitated to give up their fears and unacceptable behaviors.

Another side effect of this war is that we are going to see a generation of traumatized children from the middle East who will have hardened their emotions with denial and projected hate to the supposed perpetrators of their misery. We will have hundreds of service people return with PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder) unable to sleep without recurring nightmares and fearful of life as they no longer know it. One can only sadly wonder how many people cannot easily be fixed by therapy, prayer, or 'good advice'.

POWER IMBALANCE IN MARRIAGES

Every once and a while, whatever the trigger may be, I pause and reflect on some of the marital interactions I have viewed over the years in my clinical practice. The elements of power, authoritative/demanding vs submissive/passively accepting, or passive-aggressive, play out to different degrees in all relationships.

There are constant power struggles in all marriages though they may be major or minor and handled very differently. While our society accepts equality between the sexes in today’s marriage, not all spouses handle relationships and marital tasks of household and offspring in an equal or shared fashion. Some of these imbalances are culturally dictated; some by the lack of assertiveness in one or the other, some in mimicking the only model the players have witnessed in the past marriages they observed, and some because neither partner has thought it out, negotiated, or agreed to the most critical expectations of the other...

When matters are quite off balance, one spouse might be physically or emotionally abused( in the perception of others or themselves). If the abused one has little sense of worth to begin with, the abuser continues to further the sense of worthlessness in his /her partner with enough occasional remorse to keep the other partner always hoping that their will sometime be approval shown for their forbearance, patience, caring and forgiveness.

If that fails to happen, there is little left but anger and disappointment. Add complexity to this interaction by including projection, displacement, fear of being left alone, anxiety about caring for children alone, shame, and the myriad of other possibilities. Marriages are often kept together that stumble along unhappily for both, who in their attempts to find some happiness may use totally inadequate or destructive coping mechanisms. Extra-marital liaisons are often an attempt to experience what a relationship with someone else might be like, in the often mistaken belief that the problems all rest in the partner, not one’s self.. When a decision is made and the marriage viewed as intolerable to one or the other, a no-fault divorce is fortuitously made easily possible in our present day. However, when the idealized version perceived as what the marriage could have been, is either mourned or made often failed attempts to return it to the track it was hoped to have been on in the first place…to the ‘lived-happily-forever-after’ route, the desired destination is rarely reached unless a proper balance is set. Usually, having been tried and failed before, it might be expected that it would fail again because it is not a script either can follow.

It is my impression that living with that false hope is probably one of the most painful routes anyone can take. It is doomed to constant disappointment and anger both at the spouse and at one’s self due to a perceived weakness for accepting such disappointment and abuse). Throughout my many clinical years I have often seen such marriages, though all with totally unique elements between each couple. I see these marriages as imbalanced because one person takes a position of power (or is enabled to take it by being given it). The enabler is frequently caught in this position out of fear. The fears may be totally unfounded to the eye of an objective beholder but are clearly real and terrifying to the person experiencing them. The perceived ‘strong one’ may secretly wish to be stopped because they feel themselves on a runaway of behavior but, sadly, have prevented that action by the strength of their demands and threats to their partner, who remains terrified and knows no other way but to remain distanced, fearful, and emotionally detached. One of the dances in this situation is that of a ‘distancer’ and a ‘pursuer’. Picture that the more one pursues someone that is trying to distance, the more the distancer has to fight to get away. If the pursuer is looking for closeness and comfort, it is easily seen how that won’t work. The roles of distancer and pursuer are interchangeable, given different circumstances, in most relationships.

There are two alternatives in such imbalances: divorce; or work to change the balance.. Because people have tried and failed for so long, they would do well to be in couples therapy for this work. The therapist should be equipped to take them ‘out of the box’ in which they have been stuck and help them see that there are other ways to behave and achieve more desirable and effective results.