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.

The problem with outer-styled organization is that this method of managing in life so effectively hides and shields against personal need/vulnerability that there is little inside to propel/motivate personal growth. The challenge for the therapist is to somehow penetrate the protections of an overused outer-self, in order to bring out more truly personal experience from within, but to do so in a way that “brings the patient along” rather than frighten/damage/or wound. This can only happen within a therapeutic atmosphere permeated by patience and support. Without patience/support and empathy for the underlying fear that often drives the outer-styled, the outer-styled will have nothing to hold onto during the moments of marital conflict, crisis and confrontation.

It is my experience that all individuals have, to varying degrees an empty place within. One of the most difficult things in marriage is the extent to which the relationship evokes “the empty” within each of the partners. In fact, assessing the degree to which this is the case in any given marriage is one way of describing the extent of the functionality of a marriage. Intervening with this process, and learning to come into a “mutual quality of presence” that counteracts it, is one of the central challenges, and most important goals of a healing marriage.

Of late, I am reminded that it is not only “what couples say to each other” but also “how they say it”, that determines the outcome of couple’s interaction. However, behind the “what” and the “how” are even the more important “inherent assumptions” that underly all verbal communication and interaction in marriage. When negative, “the mutual assumptive process” does more to undermine and destroy relationship than any other dimension in marriage.

In working with outer-styled individuals, whether in marital therapy or long-term individual therapy, the biggest issue that must be addressed, and the biggest barrier to healing, is the failure to come forward as a “truly personal individual.” Depending upon their “level of maturity/developmental level/personal evolution,” the outer-styled will tend to offer up various “over-identifications with externals” in place of a “full-spectrum self.” Why is this pattern so resistant to change? What are the barriers to the emergence of the full sense of self?

The evidence from my clinical work is that the barrier is some varying combination of fear/anxiety related to core-self expression on the one hand, and over-identification with/allegiance to the outer-self on the other hand; that the outer-self so feels like the “true self” that to shift to core-self expression feels like not being who one truly is, that loosing a sense of “familiar self” is akin to loosing the sense of self at all.

Turning first to the issue of the need to keep core-self experience at a distance… what does the outer-style fear about connecting-with/operating-from core-self? In the web document Healing The Marriage Of Opposites http://marriageofoppositesproject.typepad.com/chapter_one_marriageofopp/ I posited that it is the vulnerability that goes along with functioning from core-self that the outer-styled most centrally want to avoid. To add to that, it is not simply vulnerable experiences that the outer-style do not want to have, they also want to banish the awareness/knowledge that they have a fear of such experiences. In essence, they fear knowing that they have such fear; hence they erect defenses to ward off this knowledge (minimization, intellectualization, compartmentalization, isolation of affect, grandiose self-estimation, denial).

In pushing away much of core-self experience, the outer-styled tend to become overly attached to their self-image and their place of exterior value in the world. In protecting their self-image, and the image that others have of them, the outer-styled fear the intrusion of core-self images of themselves; of viewing themselves as helpless, weak, needful, confused, incapable, or dependent. Having aligned with outer self-images, the integration with the more vulnerable images from core becomes increasingly dissonant and anxiety provoking. Akin to this understanding, having already rejected core-self experience in favor of a safe/reliable/controlled outer-self, having set out on this life path with this self-identity, it is compoundingly difficult for such an individual to opt to function from core-self at latter times in their life. This becomes a matter of maintaining congruent identity as much as fearing the vulnerability of cores-self longings, fears and desires. Said differently, there is as much fear of loosing congruence with ones chosen self-identity as there is fear of the particulars of core-self vulnerability. In essence, core-self feeling is a threat to a self-identity based upon not having such feeling, and this dissonance is likely to compound with time.