Last week, a couple came into my office and the wife began complaining.
“My husband treats me like dirt” she said. “I left the breakfast dishes unwashed yesterday and when he came home from work, he said, ‘This kitchen is a mess.’”
After she described the problem, she looked over at him resentfully. He said: “Well, it was a mess. I like to come home to a clean house; it’s all I ask.”
This brought on a torrent of resentment and rage in his wife. “Who do you think you are?” she hissed between clenched teeth, “Do you think you’re my boss? What right do you have to speak to me like that?”
I have a problem, since I like to do family therapy, because couples sometimes want me to become their judge and jury, and proclaim who is right and wrong. The problem is, if ever I do take sides, one or the other of the party then no longer really wishes to speak to me, which totally defeats the whole point of therapy – to talk. I’m supposed to help people understand each other, not negotiate the terms of their marital relationship.
So I hear the story from all angles and finally, I am expected to formulate my decree, and I have to begin to unravel what, exactly, is behind this painful problem. Most often, the cap being left off the toothpaste, or a remark delivered in annoyance, is not the real problem.
And here, ladies and gentlemen, is a sampling of the real problem: feeling unloved, neglected, worthless, abused, enraged, demeaned, controlled, abandoned…and the list goes on and on and on and on.
These can be terrible, negative, painful feelings that can run very, very deep. So I know that whatever a fight is about, it is not going to get resolved by separating right from wrong. Deep, unmet needs and negative feelings usually don’t respond to right and wrong.
I like to believe, being exposed to this wealth of negative feelings that can result in screaming or sobbing in my office, that couples who are having these intense feelings are really engaged. They may not be able to hear each other yet, or ever for that matter, but still, they are connected. Often, all the feelings are in place to capitalize on that connection, which, when the negative aspects no longer endanger it, can become very intimate and passionate.
Like the couple who was in my office last week. These two people really love and depend on each other – both to vent their feelings and to get positive feelings. The answer to their problem was not whether I believe he should treat her with more respect or that she should allow him to vent and be critical. The answer to their problem is this: Who is in a better position to bend to the other first?
If she is in a better position to bend to him, she can allow him to vent unpleasantly and say to herself in that dreaded moment, “He is disgruntled, insensitive, hungry and demanding after a hard day.” If he can bend to her, he can keep his big mouth shut and know within himself, “If I say something about any mess, she will feel demeaned, insulted, worthless and put down.”
In the best-case scenario, they can take turns allowing the other to have what are, for each of them, unreasonable feelings and responses.
Couples, when a marriage is tolerable enough to stay together, often do change for each other. Sometimes, this change can be as simple as gaining an in depth knowledge of each other’s idiosyncrasies and deciding just to live with them. As they say: in sickness and in health.
Watching this process of concession and demand and trying not to take sides I realize this: There is no standard of normalcy in a real, working marriage. There is only the standard of what each person is willing to tolerate on the road to getting along.
Avoiding the role of judge and arbiter or bearer of righteous standards of normalcy, has confirmed for me more than anything else that we cannot always be reasonable, rational, sensible, compassionate or flexible people. Sometimes, we can be fools. Here is the real question: Can we still be loved?
Claudia Luiz, Ed.M., Cert. Psya., LMHC #6053, is a psychoanalyst in private practice with offices in Brookline and Westwood. She works with children, adults, couples and groups. She can be reached at cluiz@post.harvard.edu, at 617-947-4838 or via her Web site at www.claudialuiz.com.
