Dr. Allen's Second Book Back in Print

My second book, Deciphering Motivation in Psychotherapy (which was originally going to be titled Ulterior Motives) is now available in paperback at a reasonable price on Amazon for the first time. It is actually my favorite of the ones I've written, but by far the least read.

It was out of print for a time, and then back out but at a ridiculous price. (A different publisher had bought out the original publisher, then re-published the book without even letting me know!)

It was meant for therapists but is written so lay people can understand it.

This book explains some basics about the theory behind Unified Therapy, including the core concept of dialectic causality.

The main topic is the use of language in dysfunctional family interactions, and how the true intentions and meanings of individuals who are being ambiguous or misleading can be discovered. If you want to see things that have been said to you repeatedly by difficult relatives in a whole new and surprising light, this is the book for you!

When and How Can a Parent Stop Parenting?

In her column of 9/13/09, a letter writer asked Dear Abby:  “At what point does a parent stop giving unsolicited advice? It is painful to watch my "child" repeatedly make choices that aren't in her best interest.”  The writer's daughter was 43. 

After describing some self-destructive behavior by her daughter, the writer added, “Although I am trying to keep my mouth shut, she tells me she "feels" my disapproval… Must I duct tape my mouth shut?

The relationship between parents and adult children is by its very nature a bit of a mine field. In order to rear their children properly, parents have to discipline them. Parents have to tell children what to do, what not to do, and how to behave in various social situations. Parents have to find ways to make their children follow these parental directives. Good parents continually set limits with their children.

The difficulty is, when is this supposed to stop?

Does the child suddenly become capable of making his own enlightened choices by virtue of having lived eighteen years? Should parents ignore the wisdom of their added years and never advise their adult children about anything? If the parents do persist in giving counsel, how upset are they going to be if the child chooses not to follow their sage advice? If a parent suggests a course of action over a particular issue, will the adult children feel infantilized?

Even with peers who are not relatives, the issue of when and when not to give advice can get to be problematic.  In Eric Berne’s psychotherapy model, transactional analysis, he shows how asking for and giving advice can become a “game.”  On the surface, two people may seem to be engaged in an “adult to adult” conversation, but the subtext may be entirely different.  One member of the dyad may be acting like, say, a helpless yet petulant child trying to frustrate the other member, who may be acting out the role of an exasperated parent who thinks he or she knows what is best for the other person.

A game people play

When the two parties actually are parent and child, the question of whether or not there is a hidden agenda being acted out becomes that much more complicated.  The parents may claim that they are “just expressing their opinion,” while the adult children feel like they are being told what to do as if they had no valid opinions on the subject themselves.  Is the parent’s advice merely an opinion, or is it a directive (a command telling the child how to behave)?

 

Unless parents and adult children are adept at metacommunicating about this issue (talking about the way they talk to one another), tension is bound to develop.

This situation becomes compounded exponentially in those situations where the parents themselves are highly conflicted about the advice they give.  They may be unsure of and unhappy with their own choices in life, but cannot admit that even to themselves - let alone to their adult children.

In such a case, two events frequently transpire: the parents bring up the issue involved rather often — because they are themselves preoccupied with it — and they give out a double message.  The offspring often interpret the advice to mean “Do it because I did,” but almost simultaneously, the way the advice is given may also have elements suggestive of “I hope you don’t have to do what I did and become miserable like me.” Whenever this chain of events takes place, a question about the motivation behind the parental advice giving is invariably created for the child.

The child must choose between two possible presuppositions. As mentioned, either the advice is meant as a directive or is merely the parent's opinion about a controversial issue. The frequency of the advice giving will most usually indicate to the child that how he or she behaves is a matter of grave concern to the parent. Therefore, the younger family member will presuppose that the parent's statements about the issue are directives or instructions.

But which part of the double message should the children heed? In situations where the advice is given ambivalently or is part of a double message, they will then make an effort to determine, using principles of ordering environmental cues that I describe in my book, Deciphering Motivation in Psychotherapy, which side of the double message to follow.

  

Consider the example from that book of a woman I will call Trudy and her mother. Trudy was having all kinds of anxiety symptoms over making a decision to really commit to her boyfriend.  Her mother had said on numerous occasions that "marriage is a mixed blessing: one has to take the bitter with the sweet."

One could interpret this as sage advice on the wisdom of not expecting perfection and retaining one's equanimity in the face of unavoidable adversity. Nothing in the lexical content of the statement indicates that Trudy's mother was commanding her to behave in any particular fashion or make any particular choices regarding marriage or spouse selection. The statement can be viewed as an expression of the mother's opinions about life and as good advice - nothing more.

  

On the other hand, the fact that the mother seemed compelled to drive this point home by repeating it over and over again suggested otherwise. The statement began to sound like a warning: "You'd better watch out! If you get married, you'd better be prepared for all the bitter you're going to get along with any sweet!" Every time the mother would talk about the good points of relationships, she seemed to be throwing in a warning about it.

Not only that, but her frequent repetitions indicated to the daughter that the mother was very concerned about whether the message had been heard loud and clear by Trudy. Perhaps she was worried that Trudy had not understood it the first twenty times it was said.

  

Naturally, Trudy began to worry about the consequences of getting involved with men. She became concerned not only that she might be in for a rough time, but also, for some reason, that her mother might become very upset about it. What Trudy did not realize was that the mother's repetitions indicated that she was trying to convince herself, not Trudy. In any event, the motivation presupposed by the mother's statement was in question, and the patient had been forced to guess what was correct. A good therapist would be alert to the possibility that Trudy may have guessed wrong.

How to Disarm a Borderline, Part IX: Listen to the Lyrics, Not the Tune

Before reading this post, particularly if you are going to try this at home with a real adult family member with borderline personality disorder (BPD) (which is not recommended without the help of a therapist), please read my previous posts Part I (October 6), Part II (October 29), Part III (November 24), Part IV (December 8), and Part V (January 12), Part VI (March 2), Part VII (April 30) and Part VIII (June 5). The countermeasures described in this post do not work in isolation but must be part of a complex, consistent, and ongoing strategy.

This post will continue describing specific countermeasures to the usual strategies in the BPD bag of tricks used by them to distance and/or invalidate you, as well as to induce you to feel anxiously helpless, anxiously guilty, or hostile.

Today I discuss statements made by individuals which sound hostile or critical but which may or may not actually be as critical or hostile as they sound.  A lot of psychotherapists recommend responding to an individual's tone of voice and body language over responding to the content of what that person actually says. 

We all have a tendency to do that anyway - most likely because tone and body language preceded verbal language in the evolutionary development of the brains of primates like ourselves.  Chimps, for example, know whether another chimp is coming to fight with them or mate with them throught the approaching chimp's posturing and the noises it makes. (And if you injure a certain part of their brains called the amygdala, they completely lose the ability to make this call).

Nonetheless, I recommend precisely the opposite: listen to the words (the lexical content) and ignore the tone and posturing, as well as any seeming insinuations implied by what is said that are not stated clearly and overtly.

If you respond only to the words, the individual with BPD will usually change to a friendlier tone.

For example, a client with panic disorder responded to my recommendation for anti-depressant medication for her panic attacks with the sarcastic-sounding remark, "Oh, so you want to mess with my brain chemistry?" It sounded as though she was accusing me of being a devious, malicious mad scientist. Some anti-psychiatry types might agree with that interpretation of my recommendation, but I digress.

I nonchalantly responded, "Yes, anti-depressants do alter brain chemistry, although we don't know exactly how they work," and went on to describe their possible mechanism of action just as one might do with any other patient. She agreed to the drug trial.  (Of course she went off the meds the very next day, but that's another issue altogether).

The structure of all human language is such that ambiguity is extremely easy to generate. Any sentence in any language can refer to a multiple of unclear attributes or objects, or can be interpreted in exactly opposite (antithetical) ways. Negative judgments can come out sounding positive and vice versa through changes in body language, tone of voice, or even choice of synonym.

For example, almost any adjective with a positive or a negative connotation has a synonym with precisely the opposite valence. An optimist, for instance, can be called a Pollyanna. People can be described as stubborn or tenacious, loyal or as being lap dogs, and so forth. A complete discussion of the antithetical nature of language is beyond the scope of this post, but can be found in my book, Deciphering Motivation in Psychotherapy.

Another trick that people with BPD are especially adept at employing is to create ambiguity through the use of unvoiced implications, as I alluded to earlier. Individuals imply something without stating it explicitly, thusly creating opportunities for plausible deniability of having made those implications at a later date.

For example, a mother may admire her daughter in some way, but make it sound as if she were critical about the very behavior that she really admires.

A good illustration of this process occurred in a conversation between a nurse and her mother. The mother was discussing the daughter’s rather assertive (some might say even aggressive) stance towards the mostly male physicians with whom the daughter worked. The mother said, “I can’t believe you talk to doctors that way!”

The patient took this to mean that the mother believed that she should not engage in this behavior. In one sense this was an accurate assessment of the mother’s view, but it was only part of the whole truth. The mother indeed was worried that the daughter might get fired. Such would have been the case during earlier times, when the mother was younger.

As it turned out, however, the mother was also expressing covert admiration for the nurse’s bravery, assertiveness, and feminist leanings. What Mom had difficulty "believing" was that the patient had the audacious nerve that the mother lacked.

Her critical tone of voice obscured the admiration. The actual lexical content of the comment has no positive or negative valence at all.  She was merely expressing surprise. The nurse perhaps should have responded, "Well, is that a good thing or a bad thing?"

Changing the Rules of A Game That Will Not End

You can check out any time you like

But you can never leave

    -----The Eagles

Why is it so damn difficult for family members to stop engaging in repetitive behavior that is clearly driving them all nuts?  Back in baby boom lore, we used to refer to a big question like that as the $64,000 question, in reference to a TV quiz show.  But hey, there's been inflation, so now if we want to refer to a TV game show question, we have to call it the million dollar question.

One reason it is so hard to change was described way back in 1967 by Watzlawick, Beavin, and Jackson in a book called Pragmatics of Human Communication. It was the first book to look at the linguistics of family dysfunction.  That subject later became the main theme of a book that I wrote called Deciphering Motivation in Psychotherapy.  One of the most interesting and curious concepts introduced in the Watzlawick book was called the game without end.  The book describes what happens when someone in a family steps out of a role that they had, up to that point, always been playing in their family system, and tries to get everyone else to change the rules by which the whole family operates. 

What often happens is that no one else in the family is certain that said individual really wants the change he or she is requesting, because he or she had compulsively played the role all the time up to that point.  Leopards do not change their spots, after all.  They all suspect that the request is, in reality, just another maneuver in the same old game that had been going on up to that point. Therefore, no one else takes the request seriously.  This happens even when everyone else covertly would actually be happy with the changes.

The example Watzlawick et. al. used to illustrate what they were talking about was cute, but I did not quite understand exactly what it would mean for a real family.  They imagined a family where the rule was that everything anyone said really meant the exact opposite of what it seemed to mean.  How would anyone in this family go about trying to change this rule? 

If someone said, "Let's change the rule," this would naturally be taken by everyone else to mean its opposite, "Let's not change the rule." Therefore, the rule would stay the same.

Aha, you say.  Why couldn't the person requesting the rule change just say, "Let's not change that rule."  By the original rules of the game, this statement should be interpreted as a request to change the rule.  Not so fast! Remember, everything said under the old rules is supposed to mean the opposite of what it seems to mean.  The request not to change the rule would in fact seem to be a request to change it.  Therefore, under the old rule, it would be interpreted to mean the opposite of that, namely, "Let's not change the rule."

No matter what anyone said about the rules, it could therefore be interpreted to mean a request to go on playing the game with the original rules.  Every move to change the rules of the game could be interpreted as a strategic move to make them continue.

Clever, but what family would ever operate by such a bizarre rule?  It took me a while to truly understand the game without end, but let me see if I can explain it to readers. To understand it, let me describe some actual rules under which real families do operate, and how they can be devilishly difficult to change.  

I will start with a very typical example that you might just recognize.  Let's say a middle aged couple had always operated under traditional gender rules and roles, so that the man had always been the breadwinner and the woman had always taken care of the house and the kids.  After the kids leave, one of them, say the wife, decides that she is really bored being just a housewife and decides to get a job.  Her husband is actually really happy that he no longer has to be the only one responsible for making money, since that had been a real burden for him, even though he had guarded the breadwinner role rather jealously.

The wife tells the husband that, since they are now both working, she wants him to start to help with the laundry, the dishes, and maybe the housework.  He says he agrees, since it's only fair.

We know what typically happens next.  He never starts doing the housework that he promised to do unless she specifically asks him to each and every time.  Never shows any initiative.  She finally gets frustrated having to constantly nag him about the housework, gives up, and angrilly starts to again do the housework all by herself.   The husband is a typical male chauvinist pig, right?

Wrong.  What happened when he first started doing, say,  the dishes?  What happened was that she kept telling him he was not doing it right!  He was putting them in the wrong cupboard, he was missing a spot or two, he was using the wrong detergent, whatever.  The husband starts to think that maybe she really wants to continue to be in charge of the kitchen, like she always has been, and does not really want him there in spite of her request.

He will not tell her of this belief, because he knows she will get angry with him and deny it.  Unbeknownst to him, she is secretly feeling vaguely guilty about making him do the housework, because she was raised in her own family of origin to believe that doing so was the woman's job, and she is guilty of derilection of duty.  She will not admit this to her husband, because she really does want him to help with the housework, despite her overall ambivalence about it.

From her perspective, he keeps doing a poor job in order to get her to take over the tasks again because of his own selfish wish to avoid housework, not because he might think she really wants to keep doing it herself.  After all, she thinks, he actually does know what soap to use, where they keep the dishes, and that he is doing a poor job.  He just acts like he does not.  In actual fact he does indeed act that way - but only because he thinks she's just looking for an excuse to nitpick so she can take over.  When she does nitpick, that convinces him even more that the real reason she nitpicks is because she wants to remain in charge of the house.  Still with me?

This situation is all the more complicated because all these events, mixed signals, thinking about the motives of the other person in the relationship, etc. go on simultaneously.  They do not follow sequentially one after the other.  Understanding this aspect of human interaction was one of the most difficult problems I faced when I created my treatment paradigm, which I call Unified Therapy.  We are all used to thinking sequentially rather than seeing everything as simultaneous.  Systems theorists call this linear thinking.  A leads to B which leads to C, etc.

Systems theorists, on the other hand, see what's going on as a feedback loop - like a vicious circle - but that is not accurate either. The events in the feedback loop are thought of by systems people as sequential even as each even feeds back to the next.  A leads to B which leads to A1 which leads to B1, etc. The mutual (two-way) and simultaneous nature of human interactions is better accounted for by something called dialectical thinking, which I will not go into here.

But why do the people in this situation follow the "new" rules in such a half-assed, irritating manner, when they know doing so will almost certainly elicit criticism by the partner?  They do so because they already think they know what the other person really wants, so they are just providing him or her with an excuse to do what he or she seems to want to do anyway.  They allow the other person to blame them for what is actually a shared problem.  So very thoughtful.

Here are some more examples of the game without end from Deciphering:

1. A wife had been encouraging her husband to be more honest about his true feelings. Consequently, he began to express himself, but in a loud, abrasive, and embarrassing fashion - and in front of her boss.   (Not in the book: he's thinking about the girls he knew in high school.  Which type of guy got to go out with the most popular girls - the sensitive, touchy-feely guys or the macho football players?  Does she really want him to act like the former?)

2. A mother finally got her twenty-five-year-old son to get out of the house and find a job; he opted for a low-paying job at a fast food
when he had been offered a high-paying apprenticeship.

3. The same mother got the boy to fill out his own tax return; he then claimed himself as a dependent so she could not claim him, even though she was still supporting him.

4. A husband had been encouraging his wife to pursue her long-repressed desire to have a career. When she finally got a job, she chose one in which she had to work a different shift than he did. As a result, the couple never had any time to spend together. When he complained, she told him that he never really did want her to be more than a housewife.

5. A young couple encouraged the wife's mother to learn to drive after the death of the wife's father so mom could be more independent.  The mother indeed learned to drive.  However, she would never drive to visit the couple because, she said, they lived too far away. However, the mother would regularly drive a similar distance in another direction.  (She secretly believed that the only reason the couple wanted her to drive was so they could use her as a baby sitter).

There is relatively simple way for game players to end the game without end, but I will save that for a later post.

If You Comply When Everyone Around You Wants You to Be Oppositional, Which Have You Done?

In my post of April 17, 2010, The Language of Love, I discussed the idea from my book, Deciphering Motivation in Psychotherapy, that there are hidden aspects of language created by its inherent ambiguity. Any sentence in any language can have at least two different meanings.

Linguists refer to the way language is used to affect the behavior of other people as the pragmatics of language. In today's post I will give three examples of how language also reflects a basic split in human nature between what is called the persona or false self and what really transpires in the human mind.

We all keep many of our thoughts to ourselves in various contexts, because we must always negotiate the social order of which we are a part. In each situation, we must all decide: Do we say and do things because we really want to say and do those things? Or do we say and do what the groups to which we belong want, need, and/or expect us to do or say?

The false self is that image we project to the people around us, which may or may not be an honest reflection of what we really feel and believe. For example, we may be furious with someone yet act with nothing but sweetness and light around them - because we fear how they may react if we expressed our anger.

In no other situation is this phenomenon more pronounced that in our relationships with our families of origin. We are all biological inclined, although not predestined, to act out roles or scripts which help our families to function. However, sometimes, for reasons I will not elaborate on here, the family becomes confused or ambivalent about what they expect from us, putting us in a bit of a bind.

A simple yet deadly example of this occurred in the case of a woman of East Indian descent who was born and grew up in the US shortly after her parents emigrated here. As she got older, because of her English language skills and familiarity with American culture, her parents expected her to be the front person whenever they had to deal with the larger culture. She became quite Americanized, but in reality had one foot in each culture. She made the mistake of falling in love with an Anglo American. Her parents expected her to marry the man that they had, by their tradition of arranged marriages, picked out for her. She ended up committing suicide because she saw no way out of this dilemma.

If indeed we are willing to sacrifice our own personal inclinations in order to play our part in our family’s functioning, how do we explain all of the people who seem to be acting in direct opposition to what the family says they want? Could it be that people are oppositional only because that’s what they think their family needs them to be?
I say yes. With many patients who complain about other family members’ behavior, I find that there are some heavy duty mixed signals going on. They may, for example, leave money around knowing that their children will steal it.

Some parents make demands of their children over and over but never stop their children from disobeying. In fact, they may smile as they tell stories about how their children (and by children I also mean adult offspring) are so terrible. They may seem to have a compulsive need to keep repeating the same demands of them over and over, as if their children did not hear them the first 500 times they made the demands.

That brings us to the first common example of ambiguous language: the oppositional teenager who yells back, “Why do I have to listen to this?!?” when repeatedly lectured about what to do. Since kids like this rarely obey the instructions, a seemingly more appropriate response would be, “I heard you the first time, and I’m not going to do that.” After all, most people would reason, the kid does not have to listen to the lectures – all he or she would have to do to stop the demands would be to do what he or she was told to do!

Well, maybe and maybe not. Teens who go ahead and finally do what they are told are often then told that they are not doing whatever they were told correctly. They feel that no matter what they do, they will never be able to please their parents. I believe the correct translation of “Why do I have to listen to this?” in such a situation is actually, “Why do you have this compulsive need to keep telling me over and over again what to do? I will be oppositional so you can continue to indulge yourself!”

A somewhat similar statement came from a rather sexually promiscuous woman who told me, in the context of describing this behavior, “I am always afraid of disappointing my father.” The average person who heard this might come to the conclusion that this woman was deluding herself. Surely the father must be disappointed in her behavior, so how can she say that she is afraid of disappointing him?

Well, once again, maybe not. If it is true that the woman is not deluding herself, then the correct understanding of her statement in context would have to be, “My father would be disappointed if I were not promiscuous." Maybe the father was secretly angry at women who withheld sex, while usually pretending to adhere to his family’s belief that sexually open women are all sluts.

My third and last example came from a mother who screamed at her adult daughter with a disapproving look and tone of voice, “I just can’t believe you talk to your boss that way!” I believed that the look and tone of voice actually reflected the mother’s false self, not her real feelings. In fact, I saw evidence that her mother actually admired the daughter’s assertiveness! If we look at just her words apart from tone and body language, we can see that her statement actually contains no value judgment at all. It merely expresses surprise about the daughter’s behavior.

The tone and body language accompanying a statement are often reflective of a false self, while the words themselves can reveal clues to a person’s true feelings.

The Language of Love

At the beginning of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit, a normally unadventurous fellow named Bilbo is standing in front of his home when a rather mysterious looking old man happens by. Bilbo wishes a good morning to the stranger. To Bilbo's surprise, the outsider does not return the greeting in the expected fashion. Instead, the newcomer questions the meaning of Bilbo's statement.

He inquires whether Bilbo intends to wish him a good morning or to state that it is a good morning whether or not either of them wants it to be. Or does" good morning" mean that it is he, Bilbo, who feels good that morning or that it is a morning on which to be good? Bilbo, a bit perplexed, answers that he means all of those things at once.

Perhaps the old man had reason to suspect that the hobbit was not feeling so friendly as the cheery" good morning" might indicate. The old man was Gandalf the wizard. Unbeknownst to Bilbo, he was familiar with Bilbo and was also well acquainted with the tribe of hobbits to which Bilbo belonged. He knew about their mistrust of strangers and their dislike of the new and the unknown. He also knew that hobbits tended to be polite at times when they did not really wish to be.

Knowing all of this, it would be difficult indeed for anyone to take Bilbo's friendly salutation at face value. As a matter of fact, the wizard was right on target when he questioned the meaning behind the statement. Bilbo was uncomfortable with the presence of a stranger and did not trust him at all. He was probably concerned that the old man's presence might indicate that the morning was not going to be good at all.

In my second book, Deciphering Motivation in Psychotherapy, I look at hidden aspects of language, and in particular its inherent ambiguity. Any sentence in any language can have at least two different meanings. Even a simple "I love you" can be interpreted on multiple levels, as I will soon illustrate. But first, some background information about how any sentence always has a dual reference.

The first of the two meanings is the literal meaning of the words used, while the second is the what the sentence means in the context of the relationship of the two people having the conversation. In order to understand this second level, one also has to understand that words can also be actions that do things that go well beyond talk. Linguists refer to this phenomenon as "speech acts."

For instance, if I go up to someone and say, "I hear you are having a party Saturday night," I am not only relaying information about what I heard someone say, I may also be actively fishing for an invitation. If I fish for an invitation in this manner, I am also indirectly acknowledging the fact that within this particular relationship, I do not have the right to simply ask the person directly to invite me to the party. I am most likely also not entitled to ask why I had not been invited in the first place. The way I fish for an invitation says a lot about the relationship I have with the person I am speaking with. Linguists refer to this level of communication as the pragmatics of language.

When it comes to language among members of a family system, sometimes family members must keep their intentions ambiguous. Language seems especially well constructed to allow individuals to keep their private thoughts and plans ambiguous. Ambiguity is especially handy if a person's intentions may or may not be at odds with the rules by which the family operates. In dysfunctional families, family members are often conflicted or confused about certain family rules. They may feel, for example, that they are in a "damned if you do - damned if you don't" situation. If so, they can make use of the inherent ambiguity of language to keep their intentions unclear.

Now back to "I love you." A man in couple's therapy loudly complained about his wife's jealously and insecurity whenever he so much as spoke to another woman. "Why do you raise such a big fuss?" he asked his wife, with obvious frustration. She replied, "I do it because I love you."

As much of language does, "I love you" can have two completely opposite or antithetical meanings. It can mean something selfish or something altruistic. Of course, it can also mean both simultaneously.

Most people who hear the wife's "explanation" in the example above will assume, because of her apparent insecurity, that the selfish version applies. In other words, they roughly translate the statement into, "Because I am insecure and dependent and need you so badly, I cannot stand the thought of anyone else having you even innocently, so I make a fuss even if it drives you nuts."

The meaning people often do not pick up on is the altruistic meaning. Roughly translated, the sentence might mean, "You're the one who is insecure. It really gives your ego a boost when I act so hopelessly dependent on you. If I did not act that way, you would be crushed! I'm willing to make myself look like the insecure one because I love you so much; I am willing to do that for you."

Do wives ever do this? My opinion: they do it all the time. And so do husbands, parents, siblings, and children.

Why would the wife need to be ambiguous about what she means by "I love you"? If the husband really knew that she was only acting insecurely for his benefit and did not really feel that way, her behavior would no longer boost his ego when she threw a fit. It might even deflate it even more. Therefore, she has to be deceptive in order to have her intended effect on him.

Unfortunately, this issue may make the pragmatics of the simple "I love you" even more complex. Suppose the couple is psychologically sophisticated and the husband starts to wonder if maybe the wife is laying the insecurity on too thick and that it might be put on only for his benefit. If his wife is correct about his being the insecure one, his ego would start to deflate.

If this were to happen, the wife might then start to act in ways that lead the husband to yet a different, third interpretation of the wife's original explanation: "She is rationalizing her behavior as being for my benefit to cover up the fact that she is really selfish."

If the wife succesfully made him think that, she would then be able to continue to provide the altruistic service. Linguistically, she would be acting out yet a fourth interpretation: "My behavior really is for your benefit. However, since you suspect it and I am trying to keep it a secret, I will let you think that interpretation #3 is correct. That way, you will not know that I am in fact acting this way for your benefit."

Are people really clever enough to come up with crazy and complicated schemes like this? As they used to say on the old TV show, Laugh In, you bet your sweet bippy they are. I see it all the time from patients in therapy. These motives are not, however, something people readily admit to. As therapists, however, we have ways of getting it out of them!