The marital individual

I don’t have the Marriage and Family Therapist license and don’t know what gospel those clinicians pick up en masse in the classes and the culture. Here I’m thinking of the matter of doing individual therapy with one spouse outside of the couples work. Slightly afraid of getting whapped on the snoot by the MFT herd for admitting I’ve done it, I leap to this safe space: an individual session with the husband, with his wife listening in at the other end of the couch.

We had all established, over several weeks, that the husband was a different species, always beautifully dressed from business, hunkered within himself, listening askance with covertly attitudinal dissociation. I don’t remember if he actually admitted his Narcissism or just couldn’t find the words to dispute his wife’s charges. He didn’t look like a sophisticated man-about-town, more of a child’s naughty face, yet he and his associates would party, consort with paid women. Lying was pathological. She doubted, after a decade of marriage, that he liked her.

So while this was intended to be marital therapy, I took him aside (in effect) and asked him to look inside himself. These were not hippie, New Age words. I asked and taught him to descend to awareness of the body’s “felt sense” history, the subtle feeling-experiences of his lifetime. This was Dr. Gendlin’s Focusing therapy (see blog post*). One learns one’s deeper truths – our real feelings – that accumulated in childhood and later through living, not by thinking about things. Our thinking is superficial at most levels, self-medicative, prosthetic identity-producing: rationalizing, intellectualizing; the paradox of shallow and defensive that feels true and profound. I gave him examples of people who “thought” one thing but came to realize they felt and really lived another: the woman who “loved her mother to death” yet never visited her at the nursing home. The man who’d “always wanted to be a computer programmer” but inexplicably couldn’t bring himself to study. My own example of majoring in philosophy, freshman year college, and avoiding access to the body feeling – “that is dreadful.”

I felt strongly that we could get to the bottom of the marital impasse if he would learn himself, and not just feelings in the now informed by his history. No – also his identity, the seeds of his Narcissism, his feelings about girls and women, his quotient of human need and feeling lost inside the ocean of an insular being.

“Know yourself.”

I don’t know that it’s impossible for a Narcissistic or other-alienated person to find, by the solitary, molecular search, his human part and decide to live that instead of the main. To realize a deep dependency that belies his “playing around,” loner, bitter self, and re-dedicate to his wife. What I do know is that relational process, even couples’ inner child work, will not reach this depth. When marital therapy is about the relationship primarily, aren’t we missing a big show by not focusing acutely on the psyche of the troubled person, each person?

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* https://pessimisticshrink.blogspot.com/2015/01/rabbit-hole.html, along with Gendlin videos, the website – http://www.focusing.org/ – and the principal book – https://www.amazon.com/Focusing-Eugene-T-Gendlin/dp/B004HWKYSU.