Missing personal presence is at the heart of most marital unhappiness. We cannot offer nor participate in true personal intimacy if we are not present with ourselves. Most of us live with an essentially self-rejecting or threatened attitude towards what is deep within us. Underlying depression, low self-worth, anxious/fearful insecurity, post-traumatic-stress-syndrome, interior quiet desperation, and emotional emptiness commonly occupy our emotional cores. Most of us… (cont)
When marriages are in a troubled way, both partners in the relationship typically function at their worst. That is, each in the marriage is at their worst and responding to the other’s worst. The tendency among couples in this situation is to very harshly judge and devalue the marriage, and to catastrophize any conflicts that do arise as further evidence of the marriage’s essential wrongness/badness. Hence, conflicts that do arise simply as part of normal life, are quickly framed within the context of catastrophe, once again leading both in the marriage to function out of deep threat, emergency, and fight/flight.
A first order of business in marital healing is to create some beginning confinement of those situations where each in the marriage is at their worst. Secondly, the cultivation of any positive, enjoyable moments/activities is important to fill in the openings created by the containment of the negative, and to provide a hopeful sampling of goodness/attachment that can begin to counter the inclination towards the negative. In order to be enduring, these changes must be accompanied by an unfusing/unenmeshing of the relationship, so that the urge towards reacting is increasingly replaced by two differentiated individuals responding.
When interacting within the marriage-of-opposites, each in the relationship is generally in an interacting calibration process with the other typically in relation to a variable sense of anxiety/threat. The core-styled typically calibrates outward… how much more do I need to raise the intensity/volume? The outer-styled typically calibrates inward… how much more do I need to pull back interaction/engagement?
Leaving unaddressed for the moment, the reasons why opposites so often marry, it is generally true that the most painful moments in marriage-of-opposites happen during “conflict escalation.” While the baseline differences in the marriage-of-opposites are discouraging enough, it is primarily in the experiences of escalation that the relationship begins to feel impossible and evoking of feelings of intense anger, hate, agony and fear. By the time most couples come into therapy they have already acquired a long history of destructive relating at this escalated level.
There are three initial goals that are worthy to keep in mind in the first half of the marital healing process, and they bear repeating over time. They are the marital version of “keeping the eye on the ball.”
These three goals are interwoven. The first is to learn how to reduce the frequency of marital escalations. The second is to reduce the intensity of the escalations when they do occur. The third is to recover from the escalations faster once they have occurred. Creating progress in these three areas is generally a prerequisite for the deeper marital healing to come latter in therapy.
A useful understanding for couples to meditate on is that the “escalated relationship” is not a true measure of the “real relationship;” that the value or lack of value inherent in the “real relationship” is only discoverable when escalation has been inhibited, and then and only then, is it possible to discern who our partner is, who we are, and the essential nature of our being together.
Nothing growing can happen within a couple until one or both in the relationship makes the shift from reacting to responding. It is only when two people are responding to each other that there are two individuals available to talk to each other. To be an individual within a couples experience requires a degree of self-possession and a degree of being able to bear the other. It is only when we can bear the other that we are then able to truly communicate, otherwise we are in some form of automatic reacting, some form of fight or flight, domination and control. To “bear the other” requires the presence of “potential space” within; that is, an inner experience where we can experience a range of possible responses to the other, rather than a singular reaction. The mature experience of “potential space” generally leads towards a “dual empathy” towards the experience of the other as well as the self. In responding rather than reacting, ones actions are then altered by this “knowing of self and other,” and are adjusted to some form of constructive intention.
Generally, life is sweetest when both in a relationship have grown the capacity to respond rather than react. However, it is not uncommon that one in a relationship has grown this capacity in advance of the other. Though not optimal, the presence of potential space within even one in a marriage can hugely facilitate constructive and positive relating in the relationship, though at some cost to the more capable partner. This is a “stepping up” process for the partner capable of “holding and bearing the other” that is often times painful because it requires this person to relinquish their own infantile longings in the relationship, in favor of “making the best of what is” in the relationship. To recommend it, the long-term benefits that can follow from such the “mature stepping-up” stance are huge, not the least of which is our partner’s eventual growth of their own capacity to bear, hold, and love the other.
As a practical matter, or perhaps as a kind of spiritual practice, it is a good thing for each in the marriage to practice “stepping up/holding & bearing the other” irrespective of whatever their partner does or does not do; that the covenant in the marriage is even more a covenant with the self within. Paradoxically this tends to create the best “interacting/relationalness/thereness” within marriage.
