The historical information helps me better understand the individual uniqueness of each partner and what happens when they combine their unique chemistry.
During the Middle Stage (which actually begins in the first session) the emphasis shifts more to exploring crucial processes of your relationship: your patterns of communication, conflict, collaboration, and caring. This typically includes reading and other "homework" assignments. The real work happens in your home, not my office.
The Ending Stage defines itself. It involves tying up any loose ends in the relationship, such as issues that were too emotionally explosive to thoroughly deal with in the beginning. Beyond that, I like to see couples develop a shared vision of the relationship they are co-creating now and through the predictable future stages of life.
What does my childhood have to do with this?
What we experience in our first few years of life profoundly influences how we relate to people of the same and opposite sex. As we get older, without even realizing it, we learn models for what men and women are like, what their roles should be, and how these things are expressed in marriage. These years also impact our self-esteem, our ability to trust, to express feelings, our autonomy, how we handle conflict, what kinds of people attract us and repel us. And this is just a tiny fraction of early life experiences that may have something to do with our marital relationships.
The early experiences that affect us now do so in unconscious ways. For instance, we sometimes get stuck in repetitious patterns of marital conflict that keep coming back, even when we think we have solved the problem. This happens because, while we may have solved the surface problem, but we didn't recognize and deal with the unconscious issue that got played out. The conflict pattern comes up again. It may come with a different subject, but the process of the conflict is just the same.
In practice, I focus mostly of what is happening now in your daily experience, or in the present moment in my office. I use early life experience as context for deepening the work, a vehicle for gaining broader perspectives on situations that helps people free themselves from "knee-jerk" emotional reactions and access creative solutions.
What role does sex play in a good relationship?
Often, maybe even most of the time, the quality of the sexual relationship reflects what’s going on in the rest of it. Barring other factors, the higher the levels of mutual trust, intimacy and acceptance, the higher will be the sexual satisfaction. Life is inevitably stressful, and couples always experience conflict in varying degrees of intensity and duration. Couples who can set aside the stress and friction for a while, risk vulnerability with their partners, give pleasure to each other, and be physically close are more likely to enjoy sex together and enjoy their relationship outside of the bedroom (or wherever they have sex). In this way, sex can enrich and deepen the marriage. Can good sex fix a troubled marriage?
Generally speaking, no. But that begs the question, what do you mean by “good sex”? Couples having serious troubles sometimes look to sex as a vehicle to make things better. This may involve one or the other partner sometimes having sex because they think they “should” to help the relationship, not because they feel the desire and closeness that would naturally lead to sex. The partner who gives in may not enjoy the encounter very much, and may feel some resentment that does not get expressed directly. The partner who initiated sex will pick up on the unspoken feelings nonetheless. Both partners may come away from the experience feeling unfulfilled, hurt, and resentful. Each may blame the other for those feelings. It won’t be good sex, and it won’t add anything positive to the relationship.
On the other hand, if, in the process of consciously working to improve things, the couple is able to put aside their individual protections, surrender to vulnerability, and receive the partner’s vulnerability with gentleness and compassion for a little while, they may create a satisfying sexual experience that indeed contributes some healing to the marriage. Notice, however, that the healing didn’t come from having adventurous, athletic sex. It started with putting aside protections, becoming vulnerable and treating each other with gentleness and compassion. That sets the stage that makes good sex and relationship healing possible.
Remember that sex isn’t just a matter of getting to orgasm. Holding hands, giving your partner a back rub, the non-sexual caresses and touching that can occur spontaneously as you’re moving through the same room all contribute to a climate of physical intimacy.
I don’t understand why all of my serious relationships end badly. Why can’t I find the right person?
A good friend of mine who has had a series of primary relationships that ended badly after a lot of pain and melodrama puzzled over this problem a great deal. He said, “I’ve tried to analyze all these relationships to figure out what went wrong, and I realized that I'm the common denominator. I was in each one of them.” Quit looking for the right person. BE the right person.
The truth is we tend to bond with partners who are at about the same place on the functional-to-dysfunctional scale that we are at that time, although we may express it in very different ways. But this is an oversimplification. Unconscious processes powerfully influence the mechanics of attraction. There is a saying that we become one of our parents and marry the other one. Another oversimplification, but many people notice this about themselves.
Brace yourself for some deep-yogurt psychobabble. This is a model - a theoretical description of processes that are difficult or impossible to measure or observe directly. All models are imprecise. Some are useful. This is not the only model that may be useful. The "Imago" model says we tend to be attracted to someone who symbolically resembles some amalgam of various characteristics of our primary childhood caregivers. For most of us, that’s mom and dad, but other important people can get thrown into the mix. And our partner is attracted to us through the same process. This happens because the unconscious part of us longs to get unfulfilled childhood needs met with the same caregiver who didn’t meet them. That’s not an indictment of your parents as caregivers. Infants are insatiable. No parent can instantly meet all of an infant's needs.
Marriage offers us an opportunity to get those needs met with just the right person (one whom the unconscious recognizes as the symbolic caregiver), but only if we go about it consciously. That requires learning more about our deepest desires and needs, and sharing them with a partner who is safe, receptive and willing to help us get those desires and needs met. We fell madly in love, got married and everything was fine for a while. We’re still great friends. We admire and respect each other. But now the passion is gone. Is our marriage doomed?
No! First, let’s talk about falling in love - the experience we go through when we have found “the one”. Typical symptoms include thinking constantly about the “beloved”. Yearning painfully to be together. You can’t eat or sleep. Your heart goes all aflutter whenever you see him or her the first time each day. This is infatuation. I think it’s mainly a glandular event that exists to ensure the survival of the species through reproduction. It has a half-life of about six months. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
Remember, we don’t fall in love with just anyone (see above). The person we attract and to whom we are attracted has rare and special characteristics. If, after the intoxication of infatuation wears off, we find ourselves married to a great friend whom we admire and respect, we are where we should be - coupled with perhaps the perfect person with whom to share a life. Couples who learn to grow and explore consciously within the marriage often discover the passion is still there, even if it has changed form. This path leads to a deeper and more mature relationship that cooks with a hot bed of coals that the raging flames of infatuation left behind.
Some people get addicted to the intensity of the initial infatuation. When it subsides, they leave the relationship, looking for another fix that won’t last much longer than a toot of cocaine. This is another way people bounce through a series of relationships that end badly.
We bicker about little things and we don’t seem to have much in common. Does this mean we're not going to make it?
Sometimes people bicker about little things because they have an unrealistic belief that eventually they should agree about practically everything. The relationship then devolves into an endless power struggle in which each partner tries to get the other to recognize the rightness of their position. The fundamental question here is, would you rather be right or happy? I know what you’re thinking. If your partner would just admit that you’re right, that would make you happy. Wrong! This could only happen if your partner withheld the truth from you that the two of you are different people who cannot and will not always sees things the same way.
People can place too much emphasis on sharing common interests. Appreciating your common ground and respecting your differences is far more important. Respecting your differences involves accepting the truth that your interests, opinions and beliefs are yours alone. They are no more valid or important than your partner’s. Some people fall into the erroneous mindset that says, “My favorite forms of recreation, my political opinions, my religious beliefs, my recipe for chili (with or without beans?), my way of mounting the toilet paper roll are the best and the only right ones. Anyone who disagrees is at least a little defective.” If your partner doesn’t agree on all points, you may launch a campaign to bring your partner around to the right way, because, after all, you don’t want to have a defective partner.
The truth is, no one has the whole picture of anything. Accepting the validity of your partner’s position, even if you don’t share it, isn’t the same as admitting you were wrong (and you CERTAINLY wouldn’t want to do that!).
