"Reflections on Relationships",
a column by Joan Emerson, appears
every two weeks, starting September 2003,
in the Brooklyn Free Press, a newspaper
local to the downtown Brooklyn area.

To catch up with those columns
that have already been published,
look below.

First, Do No Harm!
(Vol 1. No. 47, November 14 - November 20, 2003)

Marriage Encounter Weekend
(Vol 1. No. 45, October 31 - November 6, 2003)

Personal Growth in a Committed Relationship
(Vol 1. No. 43, October 17 - 23, 2003)

The Past is in the Present
(Vol 1. No. 41, October 3 - October 9, 2003)

Maximizer or Minimizer
(Vol.1. No. 39, September 19 - 25, 2003)

Looking Back
(Vol.1. No. 37, Setpember 5 - 11, 2003)

First, Do No Harm!

Even in the best of relationships, there will be times when partners are so furious with each other that there's nothing to be done for now. The fury can come out of the blue, just when things seemed to be going their usual, comfortable way. All of a sudden, old familiar problem patterns reemerge, nothing new, and nothing that terrible, but this time it feels like a worse affront than usual, you don't have the patience for it, and you let your anger loose. Even as you act on your emotions, you're aware that you're being self-indulgent, but this time, you don't care. Your partner doesn't care either and let's loose, too. You both dig your heels in, and you and your partner, usually loving, sensitive, and gentle, can't talk to each other because all you both want to do is complain, accuse, and defend with a vengeance. So, you're in for a longer bout than you'd like.

The ironic thing about familiar and repeated episodes like these is that they are set off by behaviors, or even personality styles, that you both know about and basically, have accepted in each other. Chances are, that these very qualities infuriating you both right now are even what attracted you to each other in the first place. You've talked about the dark and the bright side of these differences, these ongoing problem patterns, and learned how to handle them when they come up. And, here they are again, but this time, totally out of control.

Take me and my husband, for example. One of the recurring conflicts we have has to do with the level of activity in our lives. I tend to want to be on the go constantly; I need chores, action, people, novelty. It's probably a way to cope with the existential anxiety of life, and I might be extreme in this way. My husband is content to stay put and tends toward the other extreme (really extreme if you ask me). I'm sure that one of the reasons we were drawn together was an unconscious realization that by joining our lives, we'd find a middle ground that would be healthier for each of us. With me, he'd have more action in his life; with him, I'd be able to find contentment without running around. Sounds good, and it is good when it works, but it's a very tricky balance to maintain. If the balance veers too much in either direction, the other partner begins to panic and revert to old behaviors. I become demanding; he withdraws. I feel he's not going to be a good partner to accompany me in the world; he feels it's hopeless to try to satisfy me. If we really were to explore the panic, it would go back to our families of origin and fears about relationships that we still carry from the past.

So what is a loving, committed couple to do during the times when they just cannot stand how the other is acting and feel that their hopes for a happy relationship are being dashed? What comes to mind is: "First, do no harm!" In relationships destined for the long haul, partners develop the ability to contain their reactions rather than act on them. Containment means that you allow the space for your partner to go through moods and old, dysfunctional behaviors without getting pulled into them yourself, almost as though you were the understanding parent, patiently waiting for your child's temper tantrum to pass. That each partner can and will do this for the other is an indispensable ingredient to a successful marriage. But when you both are having temper tantrums, and no one is in control, it takes much more will to contain those hurtful impulses. And, ironically, the impulses to act out predominate at the same time that you know that good times will surely return.

When the storm has passed, which means that one of you makes a conscious decision to let go of the anger and soften up, its time to make an appointment to have a talk with each other about how to anticipate and handle the next episode in a more successful way.

Marriage Encounter Weekend

A couple of weeks ago, with some of my colleagues, I spent the weekend assisting at an Imago Relationship couples retreat. One hundred pretty advantaged and motivated, mostly married couples were there to learn the Imago theory about how they had picked each other in order to finish childhood business; how their partner somehow had the power to finally provide the kind of love that would heal some old wounds; how the qualities that drew the couples together would also be their undoing until they were understood and harnessed; and how, with lots of work, each partner actually could help heal the other and in the process, experience their own growth toward wholeness.

On Friday night, all day Saturday, and Sunday, the couples sat in a large hall and heard about this new perspective on married love. They watched other couples as they volunteered to demonstrate new exercises, and then tried the techniques themselves.

I saw powerful confirmation that people want their relationship to be a place of healing from the first pair who volunteered to learn and demonstrate a communication technique called the 'couples dialog'. The wife, a beautiful, young redhead tried to communicate to her husband the experience of losing her mother at age 5 and growing up with a father who soon remarried and tried to put the past behind him. She talked about how it felt, as a child, with no one to help her deal with her emotions and how now, in her marriage, she wanted, above all, a partner who would tune in to her feelings. Her husband, a handsome guy, foreign born, struggled mightily to reflect back this need, and why it was so important to her. Yet, whether for language, cultural, or personal barriers, it was striking to the observers how hard it was for him to grasp the essence of her meaning. How could this be? The very thing she wanted, and yet she chose a mate who, like her father, was having great difficulty giving it to her.

Later, I saw it again: the awareness that your partner has something that you need, and how hard it is to get it. The husband, a lawyer in his 40's, recalled parents who always seemed to be disappointed with him. (He still remembered bumping into his father in the hall and saying 'excuse me' to which his father responded 'Excuse you? I've been excusing you for 14 years'). He coped with this constant rejection by retreating into his head and shutting down his feelings. The wife also recalled a difficult childhood where there were two messages from her parents: 'keep quiet', or, 'you're wrong'. She coped the other way, becoming a highly feeling person, but with an awareness that her emotional reactions were usually overblown. When the couple met, he hoped subconsciously that she would free him up emotionally, she hoped subconsciously that he would help her be more rational. But, not unexpectedly, now that they're married, he wants her to stop being so emotional, and she wants him to stop being so tight-assed. They still see that each has something to give that the other needs, but they're stymied as to how to get it.

In all healthy, committed relationships, after the euphoria stage of new love passes, partners will want each other to help fill the deep needs for which they subconsciously sought each other out. In this next stage, when reality hits, both partners may be surprised by who needs what from whom. More surprisingly, I, as the partner being asked to give, may even see that if I work to meet these requests, I'd be attending to a core part of myself that had been stunted and, with nurturing, could grow. I could be helping my partner and making myself more whole in the process.

Overcoming character styles that probably once served as protection from childhood pain is a tremendously hard and risky task. The ultimate rewards, in the relationship and in one's own life, are profound. Looked at in this way, relationships really can be places of therapeutic healing.

Personal Growth in a Committed Relationship

A client and I were talking about her past. She had married very young after losing both parents while a teenager. You can imagine how important it was to make sure nothing interrupted this new family she was forming. Looking back over the years, however, she feels that the sacrifices she made to maintain the marriage at all costs kept her from growing up and, emotionally, she stayed stuck as a girl. She put on blinders that kept her focused only on the relationship without any acknowledgment that both she and her husband had legitimate, independent needs for personal growth. Her health and self-esteem went downhill. Now, 20 years later, she is taking stands and tending to herself. She finds that her chronic health problems are subsiding and she is starting to grow and change. She is surprised at how likeable this new self is.

We wondered if you have to stay out of committed relationships during the passing years to achieve personal growth. My own history shows that I must have thought so. I allowed myself the comforts of relationships during the 20 years between marriages, but made the kind of matches that I subconsciously knew could never last and was never fully committed to them. I guess I needed to reserve, inside, the feeling that I was really on my own. I thought this worked for me, and on the outside it did. But as my client and I agreed, going it alone, whether in or out of a relationship, has some built in limitations. When alone, you can learn everything about yourself except one thing: how to build a committed, loving, safe relationship. After all, when it comes to personal growth, where else but in a committed relationship do you get to explore your most basic humanity; that is, your private hopes and fears for finding and trusting in intimate love, the vulnerability that accompanies openness and honesty, and your ability to be kind, gentle, loving and accepting of another flawed human being. This part of your inner world remains untouched. Yet, this is what we all want.

Not getting to know this part of yourself is a steep price to pay for autonomy. So finding ways to grow from within a relationship is the trick. The key, I think, is to recognize that the personal growth that can happen from within a working relationship may feel, at times, too limited, but it can actually be broader and richer. When in a committed relationship, not only can you learn about yourself in regard to the world, but at the same time, the part that can only be reached in connection with another is activated and begins to grow. Your outer world and your inner world develop simultaneously.

Both partners would have to want this kind of relationship. Safe and secure in the nest with each other on the one hand, yet with the freedom and attendant risks and rewards of going forth alone in the world on the other. To move a relationship toward this kind of love requires the balance between developing intimacy, safety, and gentleness with your partner while also feeling free to pursue your own satisfaction in hobbies, career, friends and neighbors, kids, and general self-care. This is a balance that my client feels she never had from within the committed relationship and I never had while avoiding it.

The freedom to pursue personal growth while also attending to the growth of the relationship would be an important theme for partners to discuss on a continuing basis if they don't already. The topic can be opened simply by choosing the right time and saying something like: "You know I'm dedicated to your growth and happiness while we're in this relationship. I'll just listen while you tell me of your hopes and fears for yourself," then, 'What do you need from me?' If both partners are committed to the relationship, and want it to last, they must constantly reassess that the balance is serving both partners. An ongoing conversation of this type is almost sacred.

The Past is in the Present

I notice in my therapy practice, that it doesn't always occur to people that the present is a continuation of the past, and early life experiences still have power over our thoughts and behaviors, especially in intimate relationships. In my own case, I've had to think back a lot in trying to understand why the underlying fear that affects me in my marriage is fear of abandonment. I experienced it just yesterday. I came home from a long day on my own and my husband wasn't yet home from his. Right away I got worried, 'where could he be?' I allowed myself a cigarette reserved only for anxious moments, and by the time I smoked it, he was home. Sometimes when I'm walking up the block toward home, I'll think, 'what if something happened and he won't be there'. I could give many examples of tiny, unwarranted, pangs of panic.

Where do I come off worried about being abandoned? I was a first child, loved and secure. I picked a husband who is not the abandoning type. As a matter of fact, looking at the history of my adult years, if either of us has abandoning tendencies, it's me. Yet my worries didn't come from nowhere, so I've tried to figure out their source. I suspect that two events were pivotal.

When I was 10 years old, with a younger brother and sister, my mother's parents were killed in an automobile accident as they were driving to the Bronx from Scranton to visit us. I remember the phone call. My mother was 30 years old, and dependent on her parents. My sister remembers that Mom was unavailable and inconsolable for a year. I blocked it out. It was a first abandonment, and I reacted by steeling myself and refusing to care. As I got older, I watched my father succumb to the fatal curse of drink and fade away from us, slowly, but surely. An extremely painful abandonment, and one that has influenced my choice of men, I'm sure. So, as an adult, I look, and am, strong in my relationships, but even now, underneath, I feel scared that ultimately, things will take an unforeseen turn and I'll end up alone again.

People don't easily see these continuing patterns in their lives unless they look for them, yet examples are everywhere. A colleague friend had a very judgmental mother who never took the time to try to understand or appreciate her. Even after a successful marriage of 35 years, my friend feels unseen and unheard by her husband when they discuss problems. In her professional life, she has trouble appreciating how good a therapist she is. A man of 50 wonders why he has so little self-confidence. He was a middle child of six with a father who must have been suffering from severe depression or anxiety since he isolated himself almost totally from everyone, and a mother who valued the kids most when they didn't cause trouble. When he married, he didn't expect, nor did he get, much more from his wife. A young woman was brought up to be the center of the family's universe, lavished with anything she wanted, with a mother who agonized over her happiness and did whatever she could to solve her daughter's problems for her. Now, she has trouble keeping a relationship because her expectations of what a partner should be are unrealistic.

Once its recognized that patterns from the past are replaying in the present, however, they lose the power to cause unconscious, self-defeating feelings and behaviors. We become aware, and work on moving past them. Even better, we can explain to our partners how the past still sets off certain reactions in us, and ask them to be more sensitive to our vulnerabilities and find ways to make it easier for us while we're trying to grow. We, of course, will do the same for them. When partners are willing to care for each other in this way, the relationship is therapeutic. Love and appreciation grow.

Maximizer or Minimizer

As part of my graduate training in Imago Relational Marriage Counseling, my husband and I had to take a weekend couples workshop led by Imago therapists. Along with three other couples, we recalled that first attraction, tried to understand how early life experiences might have drawn us together, reaffirmed what we value in the other, described patterns that cause us difficulty, and learned how all of this could lead to what is called Mature Love. We were taught that the phase of romantic love always fades, how a power struggle always ensues, and how, just when things are feeling bleak, the opportunity to really get to know each other and strengthen the marriage presents itself.

One of the most freeing exercises of that weekend had to do with learning about a pattern that apparently is present in every couple: one partner is the 'maximizer' and the other is the 'minimizer'. The maximizer is the pursuer, the partner who initiates emotional connection in the relationship; the minimizer is the withdrawer, the partner who needs space. After this was explained to us in the workshop, all the maximizers were asked to go to one side of the room, the minimizers to the other. We all recognized our role immediately, and without a moment's hesitation, without even meeting our partner's eyes for confirmation, we each picked ourselves up and walked to our designated side. There we were, two men and two women maximizers, facing our spouses the minimizers, each side of the room invited to tell how hard it was to put up with the other.

This exact issue had been an annoyingly recurring pattern in my own marriage, and as the maximizer, I just couldn't understand why my husband needed to be alone at times to mull over his life, more passive in managing our relationship, and didn't seem to need or want the same intense connection with me that I did with him. And here I was with three other people who knew exactly what I was talking about and had the exact same complaint. As a group, we were asked to try to describe the pain we felt to always be the one who wanted more. We got pretty vociferous about it and it felt great.

The freeing thing, though, was to hear the other side. Here was my husband, and three others, mixed personality and gender, explaining to us the pain that they felt to be pushed, nagged, found wanting by we partners who could be bullying and angry, when they, too, wanted the intimacy and closeness, just at a different pace and with time off from the constant attention we maximizers apparently demand. Hearing it from the four of them, admirable and likeable people in their own right, somehow legitimized the minimizer role as just different, not less evolved, as I had wanted to see it. Then, with the help of the therapists, we tried to understand how we had each come to our roles based on some wounds or worst-case scenario worries from growing up in our family of origin. Minimizers had the experience of over-protective, non-safe, suffocating relations with parent figures making too close connection dangerous. Maximizers had abandonment as their greatest fear, resulting in a greater need for reassuring connection In my case, every time my husband would detach from me, I'd think of my father and start to worry that this was the beginning of an ever growing detachment, whereas, in his mind, he was taking a short break and knew he'd soon be back as strong as ever.

So here we are with a greater understanding of at least one upsetting pattern. We can see it coming, because it still does, but most of the time, not all of the time, we can agree to some compromises and head off the worst of it.

Looking Back
(September 5, 2003)

Recently I completed a post-graduate training program in Imago Marriage Counseling, a technique following the teachings of Harville Hendrix. In that training group were two other therapists I really liked, and we declared our intention to stay in touch, professionally and personally. We're all about the same age and experience, and it just so happens, have decided to go natural with our gray hair without giving up our vanity.

During a meeting with my new friend/colleague Paula, we started chatting about how we, as therapists, could be most helpful to couples in early marriages going through the child rearing and family establishment years. We both felt intensely empathetic to young marrieds, because, as we shared with each other, we sure didn't know what we were doing during those years, and we both wound up divorcing. It was only in second marriages, hers earlier, mine much later, that we began to understand what it takes to give marriage a chance for success.

Looking back, one of the problems I remember as a young married, was a total lack of clear communication about the problems my husband and I were facing. I remember anger, I remember turning inward in looking for solutions, but I don't ever remember a calm, collaborative effort at getting agreement about what the issues were, any kind of empathy toward each other about the difficulties each was having, or any acknowledgment that each of our experience was just as legitimate as the other's. Instead, we began to shut down the part of us that had such high hopes, that needed the other, that was vulnerable to each other's disappointments. I remember thinking that I had so much support, I was so understood, but none of it was within the marriage. What's more, I had no idea that such communication could take place in a marriage. I had never seen it, heard of it, and certainly never experienced it.

If I had to pick one skill to teach young couples, it would be just that kind of communication: a communication without recriminations and rancor, where each partner's viewpoint and experience could be expressed, listened to, understood, and even validated. It would be a deeper kind of expression, after which each partner would know the other a little better. I picture it like a safe island, onto which each partner could climb out of the storm and spend a while in the calm, collaborating over weather conditions and charts, and figuring out what the hell is going on, before getting back in the boat and heading onward in the journey. (A description of this kind of communication is described in Hendrix's book, Getting the Love You Want, where it's called the Couples Dialogue).

Would my first marriage have been saved? I have no idea. But I do carry the regret that we never even got to the starting line in trying to understand our problems, a skill that every married couple needs. Perhaps if we were able to drop our defenses and understand the other's needs, fears, worries, the feelings that drew us together would have resurfaced, and we would have worked together to get past the problems which, now I see, are the normal stuff of young married life.