Another day, another marital session

All marital therapists have seen couples who have an infinite need and capacity to argue trivia, running juggernaut fashion over everything we do. They throw knives and acid at each other, hurtful, soul-murderous. I approach this gently. Actually, with a velvet glove holding an anvil hand. “Please see if down deep, you actually like the other person. I don’t mean ‘love.’ That’s too easy to say and do. I mean like: admire the character, the person of your partner.” Too many couples got together without the actual like.

Another necessary approach: What is the buried splinter, either in your marriage or in your childhood (likely both), that poisons your heart in the here-and-now, makes you always painfully bent, and finds its reason in your spouse, the “identified patient”? The splinter could be simply that you don’t feel loved: She is absent the capacity to give much. It could be distrust starting in the death of self-esteem in childhood and resonating paranoid fashion into your adult life. It could be the splinter in your childhood that stopped your growth and makes you feel, unconsciously, un-adult. That will cause pervasive problems. Or the childhood splinter of unmet need, where nothing in the present can make up for it. Therefore – she must be a failed need-meeter.

I worked with an interesting case of such underground venom. Following a War of Attrition session so irrational and hateful I could only answer it with Hendrix’s see-the-bunny “re-romanticizing” technique (ignore the pain and leap straight back to the original feelings and good times), the couple came in in loving harmony, holding hands, eyeing each other with respect. We went to the childhood splinters, possessed by each, saw how they trolled in the now. All was good. With two minutes left to the hour, with no warning the wife disinterred an ancient grievance – a lie he had told, while they were dating, about talking to another woman. He had apologized for the lie a number of times. And here, eleven years later, she brought it up with feeling and a peremptory, gnawing voice.

An idea came to me out of the blue; that is, by loose association and not from anything I knew about the clients. So I could not assume it was correct. I thought of those individuals, cited by Janov, who drop out of a doctoral program just before they would graduate. I thought of my father, who left Johns Hopkins medical school before finishing. There was Janov’s observation that many “housewives” (from the 1960’s) would clean the house but would leave a room undone – having something still ahead of them – because to complete a job to satisfaction and still feel “Is this all there is?” would be to know the empty depression of their lives.

This has been too-casually called “fear of success.”

I suggested to the woman that in the face of goodness and fulfillment, does she create sabotage, as seemed to be happening in this session? For many, I said, happiness, completion, to “have arrived” feels strangely wrong. It brings up the incomplete, the pain that still lies beneath. This is because the goodness is essentially a lie that says “I am fine and can move on” when in fact you still hurt at the core of your soul and would be leaving yourself behind to move on.

I thought this might be a sterling idea that could, by luck, be an epiphanic truth for her. Instead, she said: “Yes, it’s true. I’ve always known that about myself.” Hearing this, it was her husband who was “epiphanied.” He hadn’t known this about her, or (of course) that she was aware of it.

Session ended, with the implicit homework to know more about and master this self-sabotaging.