A huge problem in marriages is… not knowing how to truly meet one’s own needs. That is, not knowing how to be truly responsible to oneself in interactions with one’s partner.
Most commonly, partners in marriage are only partially candid with themselves and their partners about what they need. By candid I mean, to truly relate to their partner about what they desire, and for their partner, in turn, to truly relate back about how that impacts them and their own genuine needs. Relating, of the type I have in mind here, involves a true going back and forth, which almost always leads to inherently creative win-win solutions in life.
Most of us in marriage expend much of our time relating to fantasies of ourselves and how we should be, and fantasies of how we imagine our partner to be. We then expend a lot of our daily effort to realize these fantasies, thinking that if I can be what I think I should be, then my partner will naturally become who I wish they were; most of this without hardly ever talking to each other.
This marital non-communication often results in terrible conflict, recrimination and self-recrimination at its worst. At its best, these marriages can be tolerable and sometimes content, but with little depth and little real emotional contact.
Note that this all happens because we do not ourselves know how to embody who we are, be clear about who we are to ourselves, and to take responsibility to bring ourselves to our partner, for the purposes of encounter. Our partner, in turn, usually struggles with some similar difficulty.
Shame has much to do with the sense of failing to fit in with the social group, a sense of social undesirability, or social exclusion/ostracism. It has to do with how we anticipate we are seen through the eyes of others. Almost always this feeling is fed by an unconscious tendency within us all to measure ourselves against our images of how we should be, or should appear, through the eyes of the outside world, how we measure up against ideal outside norms.
Almost always, shame lessens when we come into an awareness/acceptance of ourselves as genuinely different from the norms we have previously self-identified with and fused with. Differentiating ourselves in this fashion not only relaxes feelings of shame but also tends to sharpen and clarify our inner sense of personal reality. Note that over-identification with social norms and ideals tends to both blur personal reality and leave us especially vulnerable to shame; akin to leading our psychological lives as if standing on stilts.
Shame is often at the heart of the defensive tension commonly found in the marriage-of-opposites. It is often the threatened exposure of shame that sets off escalated conflict and polarization. However, the shame that each fears is commonly different.
The core-styled/maximizer/sensitizer often fear the evidence of their own loss of control, immature acting-out behavior, poor impulse control, and impaired personal boundaries. That is, that they will be seen as an impulsive, angry, acting-out child, forfeiting all right to their adult mature authority in the world. This quickly complicates into a feeling of public humiliation and the spectre of not being wanted by others, of having a “badness” that will lead to exclusion from the group.
The outer-styled/minimizer/leveler more commonly fear the evidence of their inadequacy, failure in the eyes of others, and inability to control their world. While the core-styled has often “stepped in it” and played “their feelings on their sleeves”, displaying obvious vulnerability suggestive of shame, the outer-styled’s ashamed feeling is generally far more hidden behind an exterior of sustained self-control and monitoring of social opinion. In essence the outer-styled fear/avoid/self-protect from “exposure”, resulting in a persistant “remove from self”, while the core-styled cannot help but end up in “exposure”, resulting in having to cope with the aftermath of vulnerability and loss-of-control highly evident to the outer world.
Perhaps at base both types fear the same thing, the unbecoming loss of control. The difference may live in the the two different areas of self-identification. For the core-styled the loss of control exposes “a feared truth” that they already know/believe about themselves; that “they really are” these primitive emotions that come pouring forth when threatened. In contrast, the outer-styled fear that they will fail to live up to their self-image of themselves as competent/capable or socially desireable. The emphasis is less on the fear of their primitive feelings and more on the fear of not sustaining positive outer self-image.
An example of this difference is often evident in the two types attitudes towards marital failure and divorce. The core-styled will typically be inwardly ashamed that divorce would reflect the “badness” of the primitive feelings within them and their inability to control them, the evidence of their “sin.” This is in contrast to the outer-styled who commonly fear divorce as evidence of their “failure to do it right” and their inadequacy, and that they are a looser in their own eyes and the eyes of society. Of course, each type partakes in both sets of feelings, it is simply that the emphasis of self-identity is different and opposite.
Most relationships organized along marriage-of-opposites lines are deeply energized by each partner bringing certain emotional elements to the relationship that are lacking or diminished in the other partner. One especially important area where this takes place is sexuality. Generally, one in the relationship drives sexual activity more than the other, and often this pattern has been existent since the end of the marital honeymoon. Often up to the end of the marital honeymoon things are not so clear, but generally as the honeymoon stage comes to an end one or the other partner assumes a more primary sexual role.
There is great danger, and the prospects for marital healing dim, when the typically initiating partner looses sexual desire in the relationship. Certainly, all relationships suffer without the infusion of fresh feeling that can come along with an active sex life. More importantly, however, is the high likelihood that the sexually initiating partner who is no longer initiating is also beginning to disconnect and be only partially present in the marriage. When this loss of interest stretches into several months, depthful marital healing and working-through of marital disappointments becomes highly problematic. For this reason, it is crucial to engage this issue early in marital treatment, lest the marital work have no genuine chance of long-term success.
Of course, how to engage the loss of passionate interest is a multi-faceted challenge. Emphasis, however, must be focused on where in the history of the relationship the more sexual partner gave up on the other partner with a sense of defeat. At this point “huge effort” must be brought to bear to heal the recurrent disappointment between the two that led to this massive shutting down. Of course, other issues may have to be engaged before such focused work can begin. However, it is vitally important to engage this issue fairly early on in treatment, because to not do so is to attempt marital healing without the more passionate partner fully present/invested in the treatment. Such work seldom succeeds.
One of the things that I have noticed with my own increasing aging (soon to be sixty years), and have heard from some of my older patients, is that surprising memories come up from the past, of this or that person long forgotten, that are wonderful and cherished. Often these are fond remembrances that were not recognized as such during the moment or their happening; yet thirty or forty years latter they emerge, in some fashion, as important and valued. Why is this? My own thought about this is that as we move into latter life some of the outer-self attitudes (eg. status, recognition, attractiveness, accomplishment, winning/losing, etc) that we have long protected ourselves with, and aligned with, begin to fall away, and the inner thoughts and feelings that we have long not recognized begin to emerge. One of the really big defenses that many of us have used throughout our lives is the attitude of devaluing. It is this attitude, in particular, that begins to dissolve as we move through the latter third of our lives. The bonus is the bitter-sweet recognition that people along the way that we self-protectively devalued, were and are, in truth, precious to us. While these past relationships are often not fixable in our outer world, their reparation within our inner world is an unexpected bounty to our aging selves.
