When You Can Never Be Content If You’re Contented

 

I could find somebody   new somebody who'd be true

But honey I'm stickin' to you just to torture myself

Say it out loud I'm sick and I'm proud

~ Kacey Jones, “Just to Torture Myself”

Way back in March of 2012, I wrote a post about members of couples who complain about a lack of affection from their long-term partners, and in response quoted advice columnist Amy Dickenson: "In relationships, if you always do what you always did, you'll always get what you always got." I opined that, because these people continue to either put up with or needlessly inflict frustration on their partners, then each member of the couple believes the other member of the couple really wants the relationship to continue in its current form no matter how much they may complain about it.

Each member of the couple discounts their own compulsive behavior as indicating that they, too, want the current parameters of the relationship to continue because they are playing a role in their own family of origin that requires denying that they are playing that role. For a fuller explanation, see this post. In actuality, both members of the couple are highly ambivalent about making any changes. They really do hate the current situation, but this negative feeling dwarfs in comparison to their fear of having a better one, due to anticipated consequences to their respective families-of-origin.

Does this state of affairs also pertain to relationships that are chronically and significantly neglectful or abusive, or to those characterized by repeated infidelity, rather than just to those that are merely chronically frustrating? Absolutely. The ability of people to put up with ongoing pain in these situations is impressive. People who do that often act as if they are too stupid or evil to even know that this is what’s going on, but those appearances are con jobs.

This can easily be seen in two letters recently published in the Ask Annie advice column:

6/4/21. Dear Annie: I have dated a guy for the last six years, always long-distance. I have loved this man with my whole heart. The issue is we have not met each other's families. He has never met my kids and doesn't even want to. He will not acknowledge our relationship on his social media profiles. His parents know nothing of me. We do not spend holidays or birthdays together. We do not go on dates. The last time we saw each other in person was two years ago. He barely even texts me. There is always an excuse as to why he is unavailable. Yet he claims that he loves me. I just don't get it. I want to leave, but I care about him so much. What do I do? -- Mixed Signals

6/5/21. Dear Annie: I met a man about four years ago. We started dating a week after we met, upon his insistence. Well, after we were together a year, I found out that he was messaging with a girl online and had been for several months. She didn't want him. Then, a month after that, I heard he cheated on me with someone from work who was in her early 20s, the same age as his daughter. I confronted him, but he refused to admit he was guilty. However, I've caught him exchanging sexual messages with a couple of other girls online since then. He says he's never actually hooked up with them in person. I guess my question for you is, is it worth trying to keep this man in my life? I love him, and he says he loves me, but part of me is no longer in love with him. If I'm being honest, I've felt this way ever since I heard of his cheating with that young woman. What do you think, Annie: Should I set him on the curb on trash day? My heart is telling me to stay, but my mind is wanting me to tell him to get lost. -- Confused Girlfriend

Of course, in both cases the advice columnist advised breaking off the relationship. In other cases, advice columnists have also recommended psychotherapy if the letter writer couldn’t seem to do that.

I submit that both of these letter writers already knew exactly what the advice columnist would recommend, but are just acting so stupid that they can’t see the obvious. In fact, I would guess that they both will stay in the relationship anyway, giving the partner even more evidence that that is what they really wanted to do all along! I mean, how could they not know what advice they would get. The way they word their letters practically begs for that ever-so-obvious advice.

If I were seeing them in therapy, hearing this would be the perfect opportunity for me to ask the Adlerian question: So what would be the downside of being in a relationship with someone who was actually there for you?

The Relationship between Marital Problems and Family of Origin Dysfunction

The essay In Consultation: Becoming a Therapist for Each Other: How to Deepen Couples Therapy by Ellen Wachtel Ph.D. in the Psychotherapy Networker from July/August 2018 answers a therapist’s question about a difficulty the therapist consistently ran into in his work with married couples. The question involved how to deal with the emotional difficulties of one of the members of the couple without derailing the work on the couples’ relationship issues.

Since in my experience both members of couples who seek marital therapy usually come to the relationship with pre-existing emotional issues – which I believe to be highly relevant if not crucial to their marital problem – that problem would come up no matter which member of the couple the therapist focuses on. Dr. Wachtel seems to understand this when she correctly points out that, “It’s common for one person in a couple to believe that the lion’s share of the problems in the relationship arises from the other’s emotional difficulties. As a firm believer that ‘it takes two to tango,’ I try to resist joining with that point of view.”

Unfortunately, she also adds, “But sometimes it’s just too big a stretch to see both partners’ contributions as anywhere near equal.” Nonetheless, she goes on to point out that, no matter how clear that seems to be,  the person “chosen” for individual work invariably reacts with, “’Why me? Shouldn’t she (or he) get therapy too?’ Or ‘I react the way I do because he’s so provocative.’”

I must say I agree with the member of the couple who says that. While one member’s dysfunctional behavior may be far more dramatic or dysfunctional than that of the other, in my opinion both members of the couple have a stake in their relationship continuing in its current dysfunctional form. The way this goes down and the reasons it happens were discussed in my previous posts “I’ll enable you if you enable me” and “The Obvious Secret of Interpersonal Influence in Families.”

Briefly, each member of the couple is enabling the other member to maintain a role function that each believes necessary to stabilize their own parents, who are unstable due to an intrapsychic conflict that is shared by the entire family. I call this mutual role function support. Each member of the couple thinks the other member of the couple needs them to play this role because both of them compulsively act out their roles in the face of repeated and obvious drawbacks and negative consequences. Each person would deny this if asked for various reasons, so the other person has to guess why that person continues in their self-defeating or self-destructive habits, and they usually make the guess based on watching their partner interact with the partner’s parents (cross motive reading).

Wachtel comes very close to this formulation by recommending approaching the couple issues by saying, “We’re all stuck with some emotional issues from our childhoods, and even if we work on them in individual therapy, they’re still likely to have a hold on us. In our work together, we’ll try to find ways to keep these issues from affecting the relationship as much as they are now.” She also helps each member of couple construct their genogram to “get a window” into the source of problematic patterns. 

I would add that the emotional issues are not just from childhood but are in fact family emotional issues that are continuous and ongoing.

I have a lot of respect for Dr. Wachtel. She, along with her husband Paul, wrote a book called Family Dynamics in Individual Psychotherapy: A Guide to Clinical Strategies, the first edition of which came out in 1986.  This was one of the first books that attempted to integrate family systems ideas into individual psychotherapy.  (I must also admit I was a little annoyed when it came out because I was still trying to find a publisher for my first book, which attempted to do the same thing, and they beat me to it!)

Unfortunately, in this piece for the magazine, she falls into the exact same trap that Murray Bowen—the family systems therapy theorist who first started tracing dysfunctional relationship patterns through genogram construction—fell into. With his patients, as pointed out by Daniel Wile in his book on couples therapy, Bowen used education, logic, and collaboration to help educate his patients on the reasons for their self-destructive behavior. 

When he sent them back to their families of origin, however, he taught them to use the paradoxical interventions, therapeutic double binds, and strategic maneuvers that are part and parcel of Jay Haley’s alternative type of family systems therapy. In a way, he coaches patients to use this type of therapy on their family members instead of employing Bowen therapy. Wile asked why Bowen did not coach his patients on how to use Bowen therapy on their parents.

Wachtel starts to go down this route. She recommends to each member of this couple to offer support for, rather than merely challenge, the other member’s need to persist in each one's seemingly unproductive habits. In strategic family therapy, this is a paradoxical technique which often seems to have the opposite effect from what it seems to be intended to have: the partner might, in response to being given a green light, start to “be more able to hear his own internal voice that questioned the need to do the task.”

While this might help in couples that come from only mildly dysfunctional families, in my experience with more highly dysfunctional families, any good that comes from a paradoxical prescription will in fairly short order be undone due to the continued  and more powerful influence of the families of origin of each member of the couple. The parents and other family  member, as I often say, will invalidate the efforts of their adult child to step out of their dysfunctional family role with devastating effectiveness.

I find that members of a couple, with the right coaching, can move from the mutual role function support that attracted them to one another in the first place to becoming allies in the efforts of each to deal with his or her primary attachment figures. After constructing the two genograms, the therapist can help devise strategies for each member of the couple to stop dysfunctional interactions with each’s own parents. This can be done with the full understanding of the spouse so the spouse knows why their mate is suddenly trying to change things and understands how the devised strategies might actually work.

In fact, they can practice the strategies with each other. The spouse role plays the role of the other spouse’s targeted parent – and the spouse is usually well acquainted with that in-law and can do so very accurately – while the spouse practices the moves and countermoves planned with the therapist. This practice allows each one to stick with the script more effectively in the face of problematic responses from the parents.

I go into more detail about this process in my upcoming self-help book, due out November 1.

I'll Enable You If You'll Enable Me

Some enchanted evening
You may see a stranger, you may see a stranger
Across a crowded room
And somehow you know,
You know even then
That somewhere you'll see her
Again and again.
                   ~ Oscar Hammerstein II, from South Pacific

In Elizabeth Nelson's guest post on my blog, When Conflict Brings You Together… And Then Drives You Apart, she described how couples are often attracted to one another on the basis of having similar or analogous conflicts in their respective families of origin, the very nature of which eventually becomes an irritant in the marriage and drives the couple apart.  A very common occurrence indeed.

This brings up two related questions.  First, how to the members of these couples find one another?  Second, what is really going on here?

I must confess, when it comes to the first question, I'm not completely sure.  In some cases, it is fairly obvious.  A couple from families where alcohol is an issue is highly likely to have met one another in a bar. However, I met my wife-to-be in a singles bar, and neither we nor any other member of our families is an alcoholic, so that cannot be the whole answer.

The uncanny process by which mutually conflicted couples find themselves almost seems to be due to some sort of radar.  They can be at opposite ends of a room full of hundreds of people and yet gravitate right towards one another in the blink of eye, soon leaving the party together to go off and do some partying of their own.  I don't know how they do it.  Maybe they have some subtle signaling behavior, sort of like the way a gay person recognizes that another person is also gay.  Gaydar, as it is called today.

But however they do it, find each other they do.

Now as to the second question.

The answer to this question lies in the concept of enabling, or what family systems therapists refer to as a marital quid pro quo.  I use what I consider a more descriptive phrase, mutual role function support.

Most people are familiar with the concept of enabling from Alcoholics Anonymous and Alanon.  An enabler is someone who helps the alcoholic procure alcohol and negotiate the various problems created by the alcoholic's behavior.  This allows or enables the alcoholic to continue in his or her drunkenly ways.

What is usually not said explicitly in 12 Step Groups, but which is intrinsic to the entire "Let Go and Let God" concept of Alanon, is that the alcoholic is also an enabler as well as being one who is enabled.  The alcoholic's behavior enables the enabler to continue unremittingly in the role of the enabler.  In other words, an enabler needs an alcoholic as much as an alcoholic needs an enabler.  Each one has covertly contracted (the quid pro quo) with the other to behave in ways that allow them both to continue in their non-productive and misery-producing behavior.

But why?  Surely the couple is unhappy being stuck in this miserable dance.  If they deny it, I would be seriously skeptical.

This sort of "enabling" is not limited to families in which alcoholism is an issue, but occurs in all families that become dysfunctional due to unacknowledged but mutual ambivalence over the same exact issues (the psychoanalysts would say they both have the same intrapsychic conflict, while the behaviorists would say that they both share the same approach/avoidance conflict).

I think the answer to the why question lies in the concept of dysfunctional family roles, some of which I pointed out in my posts, Dysfunctional Family Roles, Part I and Part II. Each member of the couple has developed the problematic role they are playing in response to the perceived needs of each's own family of origin.  The roles are noxious, or what analysts call ego dystonic, so the people playing them enlist other people to give them much needed assistance in carrying out their distasteful "duties."

Interestingly, when one of the members of this sort of couple tries to back out of their enabling behavior, the other member of the couple feels betrayed.  They feel this way even though they may have been nagging the other person incessantly to drop the role they themselves had previously enabled.

A good example of this occurred in the case of a woman who, when she married her fiance, agreed to many things about which she was covertly unhappy.  She agreed to live in a house in the same neighborhood as his parents, use furniture donated to the couple by his family, and join his family's church rather than one of her own denomination.  She also dressed in a somewhat frumpy manner, because he seemed somewhat insecure about having an attractive wife, which she definitely would have been had she not dressed that way.

When she complained and even threatened divorce, her husband would talk on an on about how the couple's children would be adversely affected were they to get a divorce and start dating other people.  That, not surprisingly, was something the woman had heard frequently and quite vocally from her own mother.

Well, finally she decided to get a divorce anyway because she could not take this any longer.  For a while, the husband pouted, and tried hard to make her feel guilty about how the divorce was negatively impacting the children.

Within a couple of months, however, he sold their house and the parents' furniture, changed churches, and started dating another woman who dressed quite attractively.  He completely stopped guilt tripping the woman about the children and the divorce. In fact, he openly flaunted his new relationship in front of the kids when they were with him!

Despite the fact that her ex was no longer driving her crazy and had knocked off the guilt trips she had loudly complained about, she felt completely betrayed.  Why?

Simple. Because she had been making sacrifices for him that she thought he really wanted, and as it turned out, he did not really want them at all. The sacrifices were all for naught.