Most marital therapists work with a vision of increasing marital health related to the taking down of enmeshment, fostering healthy individuation in both partners, thereby clearing the way for empathy, communication, intimacy, play, and mutual acceptance.  This vision of marriage can only happen if both partners are on the “relationship playing field.” If one in the marriage is avoidant, and does not show up for emotional connection, this picture of a positive evolving marriage cannot emerge.  

It is my current belief that the strongest hope for marriages troubled in this fashion rest with the establishment of outside structure that reliably requires both partners to interact/engage the emotional issues and differences in the relationship. Regularity and high frequency are central in the success of outside structure, at least until such time that the structure becomes internalized within both individuals in the marriage.

Couples therapy is probably the single most potent form of outside structure.  Couples groups are another. Religious or spiritual community is sometimes still another. In general, there is a terrible impoverishment of outside community support to support couples in showing up and staying on the playing field.  (to be continued)

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.