ROOTING OUT THE MORALISTIC ELEMENT IN OUR OWN THINKING

The task in Collaborative Couple Therapy is to become spokesperson for both partners—that is, to help them give voice to what they are struggling with. This task is made harder by our pathology-oriented language, prompting us to stand back in negative judgment rather than appreciate the client’s struggle. Many of the terms used for describing clients—such as “narcissistic,” “dependent,” “defensive,” and “passive aggressive”—are pejorative. We would not want anyone saying such things about us. They corroborate and legitimate our negative reaction to our clients and, by so doing, make it hard to see that we are having a negative reaction. We think we are simply seeing these clients for who they are.

In a way, we are seeing them for who they are. People do behave in narcissistic, dependent, defensive, and passive aggressive ways. But using such terms to organize our thinking about them means, from a Collaborative Couple Therapy point of view, that we are defining people in terms of their symptomatic behavior—their fall-back measures—rather than looking for the inner struggle and defining them in terms of that.

When I find myself thinking about clients in these professionally-sanctioned pejorative terms, I take it to mean that I am reacting to their symptomatic behavior—I have been drawn into an adversarial state—which means that I am temporarily unable to serve as their spokesperson. I use the following mental guidelines to shift me out of this state and back into a collaborative one where I again become capable of serving as their spokesperson.

1. The inner-struggle principle. When I find myself focusing on the maladaptive nature of partners’ behavior—thinking of them in terms of their diagnosis and focusing on their deficiencies, immaturities, character defects, and defensive patterns—I remind myself to look for the inner struggle, which immediately shifts me out of my adversarial stance and into an empathic one. When I find myself disapproving of a client because of his or her narcissistic grandiosity, I focus on the vulnerabilities out of which this grandiosity developed.

2. The heartfelt principle. When I find myself put off by a partner’s behavior, I look to see if there is a heartfelt statement that, because the person could not come up with it, led to this behavior. When I hear a husband impatiently tell his wife, “If work is that bad, maybe you should quit your job,” I imagine his heartfelt feeling that ideally he could have made instead: “It’s hard to hear you tell me about your problems at work because I feel so bad for you, and I feel so powerless to help.”

3. The fall-back principle.When I am thinking of clients as basically narcissistic, defensive, dependent, and so on, I remind myself that what I am seeing is fall-back behavior—their default position when things are not going well.

These first three principles form the core of my approach. Putting them together, I look for the inner struggle (Principle 1) and the heartfelt feeling (Principle 2) that, because the partner could not pin down and confide them (they suffer a loss of voice), led as a fall-back (Principle 3) to the symptomatic reaction. When a cat cannot find the litter box, he or she chooses the next best thing, which could be a shoebox or a rug. The next four principles help me discover a normality and appropriateness in behavior that seems abnormal and inappropriate.

4. The normalizing principle (or the capacity to find yourself in clients, as William Bumberry, a colleague, describes it). When I find myself pathologizing, I normalize and universalize. I ask myself, “What common couple or human issue is this person experiencing in a particularly intense form?” As Apfelbaum says, “Our clients are informants about the human condition rather than deviants from idealized norms.” I look into the corners of my life in an effort to identify with clients. When I find myself thinking of them in we-they terms (i.e., we are normal and they are abnormal), I remember times when I have had at least minor versions of the problems they are struggling with.

5. The hidden-rationality principle. When I find myself viewing partners’ reactions as not making sense, I look for hidden ways in which they do make sense—in terms of the present situation and not just as a carryover from their families of origin. The person is reacting, although in an exaggerated and distorted way, to something that is actually going on (i.e., to a hidden reality in the present situation).

6. The miner’s canary principle. When I view partners as infecting their present relationship with leftover issues from their families of origin, I look to see how their family-of-origin based special sensitivities might be enabling them to detect subtle difficulties in their present relationship. Just as canaries’ sensitivity to reduced levels of oxygen can warn miners of danger, so a partner’s childhood-based special sensitivity to abandonment can help him, for instance, detect subtle moment-to-moment disconnections between him and his partner.

7. The feeling-too-unheard-to-listen principle. When I feel critical of people for not listening to their partners, I look for the hidden way in which they also feel unlistened to, which is why they can’t listen. I look for the possibility that there is a fight (adversarial cycle) going on, which, by definition, is a mutually frustrating, self-perpetuating exchange in which each partner feels too unheard to listen.

The final two principles help protect me from my pejorative view of clients as resistant, that is, as hanging onto their symptoms because they are getting so much out of them.

8. The people-do-not-want-their-symptoms principle. When I view partners as getting secret (unconscious) benefits from their symptoms, as getting too much out of them to be willing to give them up, I remind myself that primarily people suffer from their symptoms and would love to get rid of them. As Apfelbaum says, “Whatever secondary gain people get from their symptoms is secondary indeed.”

9. The getting-too-little-of-what-they-seem-to-be-getting-too-much-of principle.When I see people as demanding, greedy, overindulging, self-absorbed, or taking without giving, I look for how, as it often turns out, they may be getting precious little of what they seem to be getting so much of. The following are examples.

• Hidden deprivation.When I see people as too caught up in their immediate pleasure to be able to take other people into account, I look for a hidden deprivation. Kohut describes the self-indulgent, drive-dominated behavior of clients as “breakdown products” of a failure to develop an adequate sense of self and meaningful connection with others. You come home after a depleting day and eat, drink, or watch more television than you ordinarily would. People who seem self-absorbed and unconcerned for others are, in a hidden way, deprived. Apfelbaum offers the example of the neglectful son who does not call his mother. We so quickly think of him as depriving her that we miss how he is deprived, also—of having a relationship with his mother in which he would look forward to calling her, get a lot out of it, and miss not getting the chance.

• Ineffective dependency.When I see people as dependent, I realize, as Apfelbaum says, their problem is ineffective dependency, that is, they are not good at it. They do not inspire a wish in others to comfort, reassure, prize, pamper, attend to, and engage with them—which Johnson shows to be among the normal attachment wishes everyone has. Were they good at being dependent—were they effectively dependent—their partners might feel more inspired to do these things, and even enjoy the opportunity to do so. Recognizing that their partners see them as clingy and burdensome, they feel unloved and unlovable, rejected, unnourished, and in even greater need of reassurance.
• Hidden compromise.When I feel critical of people for being unwilling to compromise, I look for hidden compromises that they have been making all along, that is, they have been compromising themselves away, which makes understandable their hesitancy to make yet new ones. In a couple therapy session, I felt critical of a husband when I heard about his unwillingness, on a vacation with his wife, to wait just a few minutes for her to buy some postcards. But then I found out that he had agreed to go on her type of vacation—lying on the beach —when he really wanted to go white-water rafting. In fact, he did not want to go on a vacation at all, since he had just started a new job, and had gone only because his wife had been so looking forward to it.

• Hidden powerlessness. When I see people as controlling, I look to see how such behavior might be a reaction to feeling helpless. I help a wife say to her husband, “You always out-argue me—you are better with words—so I get frustrated sometimes, like right now, and just demand that we do it my way.”
• Hidden unentitlement. When I see clients as behaving in a narcissistically entitled manner, I look for how this behavior might be a reaction to feeling unentitled. I help a husband say to his wife, “Since I don’t have a very good feeling about myself, it’s hard for me to believe that you might actually want to do things for me, so I just build up this big argument about how you owe it to me.”

For a therapist with a Collaborative Couple Therapy perspective, being in a collaborative state means adopting these principles. But adopting them, even just one of them, is a way to shift out of an adversarial state and into an empathic one. Using these principles is both the means to shift into an empathic stance and a sign of being in it already.