It is not your job and it is not your skill set, and most importantly, it is not the relationship you want. If you want to be your wife’s therapist, get a divorce, get your PhD in either psychology or psychiatry and then give her a call after you have set up your office, but guess what? She probably won’t want you as her therapist then any more than she does now.
Consider Mary is angry and she is angry about something she’s been upset about before. You stay out too late with your friends. You’ve done nothing intrinsically wrong, and in point of fact you do everything right: this isn’t a regular issue and you call her to tell her that you’ll be late and in fact you are not too late but when you come in she is seething.
When this has happened before (footnote) you embraced her anger, you mirrored her, and after a while you discovered that her anger stems from her fear that she’s not important in your life, that she feels you would rather be with your friends, and ultimately this all goes back to the rejection she felt in prior relationships where she had been betrayed, and possibly even further back to formative issues with her parents.
After a lot of patience and mirroring she calmed down and her anger passed and life was good.
But now, coming back from time with your friends, you sense her anger because she’s got that tone of voice and it’s about twenty degrees colder in the room where she waits for you and because you’ve had the discussion with her before you have a good idea of what’s going on and because you love her and because you don’t want her to be angry you say:
YOU: C’mon Mary, you know this isn’t about me. You know I love you and that your anger is merely a defense against your fears of betrayal so why don’t we talk about that?
Which would be a great line for her psychologist to say in the safe confines of the counseling room and could have all sorts of therapeutic benefits because, guess what? Mary wouldn’t be mad at her therapist and thus maybe Mary could hear it. Mary is paying her therapist for that sort of insight and Mary wants her relationship with her therapist to be one that includes reality checking. Mary wants her relationship with her therapist (as does her therapist) to be a relationship of un-equals, a relationship of professional distance.
Mary wants you to love her, and she can’t love you if you try to create a therapeutic relationship. You job as a better man is to let Mary work on her own shit. You can listen, you can mirror, you can validate and empathize but the second you get into psychoanalysis you shatter your relationship of love and create a dynamic where you are the rational and she is the emotional, where you are the adult and she is the child, where you are right and she is wrong.
Now it could be if your beloved is evolved almost to the point of transcendence that she’s going to pause, listen, and say
MARY: Thank you for that profound insight. I always appreciate it when you help me identify my growth points. Let’s have sex now.
But the most likely scenario is that Mary is going to feel attacked, because no matter how carefully you tread you are right up against her soft spots, her tender areas, her buttons if you will, and pointing out, however well intentioned, no matter how lovingly phrased, that her anger is misplaced is going to effectively tell her she is wrong. You are going to tell her something you intend to be kind and understanding and she is going to hear:
YOU: WRONG. WRONG, WRONG, WRONG! I CANNOT BELIEVE YOU ARE SO STUPID; THAT THIS IS STILL AN ISSUE. YOU KNOW I DID EVERYTHING RIGHT AND YOU ARE OUT OF LINE…..
And since that is what Mary is hearing, you can imagine she is going to react pretty much the same way she would if you had actually said it. It won’t be pretty. At best you continue your half-assed attempt at therapy and things will get worse, At worst you become reactive and it all goes to hell. You won’t go to bed until late, you will not sleep well and you will not wake up happy. Don’t go there.
So you do what you did before: you embrace her anger, you hear her out, you mirror and you let her talk. This works. I know it’s hard, I know it’s repetitious, I know there’s a part of you that wants to scream.
YOU: I have to do this again? Haven’t we been over this? Why can’t she clean up her side of the street?
But screaming that is just like pissing into the wind: it’s just going to blow back on to you. Don’t do it, it’s non-productive, it is in fact just an invitation to destructive behaviors and regression on both of your parts.
By mirroring Mary you allow her the room to hear herself, you allow her the chance to put her thoughts in order, you give her the opportunity to reinforce the insight she had before, you give her the safety she needs to face her fears and to let go of the bad behaviors they engender.
More importantly, you show her, rather than tell her or perhaps even yell at her, that you love and respect her.
And it could well be she is never going to get over it. It could be she’s not going to get over it because she’s never, ever, going to clean up her side of the street, she is never going to venture into introspection and growth, and maybe you will have to move on to a better relationship, but honestly if that were the case the mirroring wouldn’t have worked first time around. It took you a while to get where you are, but you did (albeit dragging your feet and feeling blindly in the dark.) Give her the credit you have given yourself and recognize it will take her a while too, but it’s worth the wait.
It could also be that this is always going to be an issue that will crop up when she is under stress. This is normal. Some stuff goes so far back it just isn’t going to get fixed, completely fixed and healed, in our life times. Like a bad back or a rotator cuff injury you have to accept that it is going to get inflamed and hurt every so often.
But like a bad back or a rotator cuff injury, you know it won’t last forever, you know how to treat it and if you keep at the exercises and the work the frequency and duration of the events will dwindle.
And one night you’re going to call and say “Honey, I’m going to be a bit late tonight…” and Mary is going to feel that familiar fear and even if she can’t set it aside she going to recognize if for what it is and let it go because you’ve given her the support she needs to do her work.
Very perceptive. This is an easy trap to fall into, particularly when we are armed with a ‘little knowledge’. You catch it perfectly in the paragraph which reads
ReplyDelete“…..the second you get into psychoanalysis you shatter your relationship of love and create a dynamic where you are the rational and she is the emotional, where you are the adult and she is the child, where you are right and she is wrong”.
You make explicit something that I sometimes (alas only sometimes) became aware of after the fact; that I was casting my wife as subordinate to me. Me; the clear-eyed, dispenser of wisdom, had naturally gravitated to a position of mentor and counsel. Having adopted this position it is then impossible to sound anything but trite, and condescending. I had become a type of Yoda who about to get his ass kicked was.
In essence, the ‘therapist’ scenario above does not differ significantly from our responses in ‘pre-therapy days’ where we would treat our wife’s emotional disclosures as ‘problems to be solved’ or favor her with ‘bon mots’ such as ‘you’re being irrational’.
Your well-constructed argument leads us inexorably to her hearing of our analysis
“YOU: WRONG. WRONG, WRONG, WRONG! I CANNOT BELIEVE YOU ARE SO STUPID; THAT THIS IS STILL AN ISSUE. YOU KNOW I DID EVERYTHING RIGHT AND YOU ARE OUT OF LINE…..”
Even reading this again I want to stammer out “not what I said….didn’t mean that…wasn’t my intention…you can’t have thought that…..furthest from my thoughts….”. I’m remembering a story that concerned standing in a hole and the decision to dig further.
Just before reading this article my wife had called me and was telling me about a large number of things to be done that were converging on her all at once. I had made a real effort to listen, actively, and not ‘problem solve’. At the end of the conversation she thanked me for listening, a compliment which I did not comment upon but which pleased me.
As I was reading your article I decided to call my wife and thank her for thanking me for listening. I know that by making the call we were drifting dangerously close to a dialog of the form; “Thank You’, ‘No, Thank You’, “No really, Thank You”, “Really, it’s You who should be thanked, Thank You”, “That is very gracious of you but…….” The interchange then continues until plates are thrown. That notwithstanding, I wanted to appreciate her feedback and I said that I had wanted to be supportive and that by thanking me she had confirmed, to me, that the approach I took was the right one for that conversation. I now have a better idea of how I can listen in a way that engages with her and leaves her free to speak. She subsequently invited me to help her problem solve and plan how to deal with the tasks at hand. So now I actually do get to problem-solve but this time at my wife’s request, without dispute. I did not play therapist. She was able to express herself and feels heard. Win-Win.