(Originally published in AAMFT Magazine, May/June 2014)
Six million years of evolution has equipped humankind with an immense capacity for survival. What has also evolved is the concept of survival itself as it went from the primitive bacterial cells’ symbiosis to early hominid’s insistence on lasting in the primeval landscape perhaps facing a saber tooth with a rock in his hand. The concrete nature of survival prior to modern times seems to be disappearing more and more each day; at least in the clinical environment the family therapist encounters.
As family therapists, we interact with the ever-evolving survival endeavors of relationships and systems in the abstract jungles of our modern times. The size or the shape of the threat is ever changing and is never stable. So when that initially faceless, size-less, volume-less predator enters my office with the couple whose relationship it is threatening, I find myself yearning for the “simple” fight of the early hominid with the saber tooth, whose presence can never be denied, neither can there be any misapprehensions as to what it actually is.
Working with couples therefore might require the therapist to think in more abstract and evolved ways. But how are we to do it despite the years of exposure to our respective dominant discourses about what marriage is and what it cannot be.
I would like to explore this matter by elaborating on two themes: Marriage and the therapist. Let us take marriage as a contract and look at it through the concept of regulation in economics. Regulation, in economics, gets in the way of contracting between parties (Coase, 1960; Smith, 2010). Yet, some degree of regulation is necessary to make sure that people don’t get cheated (Pigou, 1924). This kind of regulation can be reached by the safe space that can be provided by the therapist. Anything that goes beyond that, such as to the promotion of a particular kind of a relationship dynamic is excess regulation that can prevent people from exploring the open contract space between themselves. The therapist, along with the pressure of social norms, individual expectations etc. , can in fact become a force for distortion rather than clarification. Take two concepts that are parts of a marriage: love and commitment. The dominant discourse that surrounds us teaches us to think of these two terms interchangeably, as a result of which the quality of good marriages/relationships is measured by schemas such as commitment is the ultimate form of love. When this is the case, is anyone including the therapist allowed to think that “Love is not a commitment. Love is not a relationship. Love is not a responsibility” (Gordon, 1993, p. 28).
Lori Gordon furthers her argument, in a spirit of defiance of such dominant discourses, that love is but a feeling that is bound to wax and wane like all other feelings and that “the only promise that we can make and keep is to create an atmosphere between us that allows for feelings of love to continue to flow between us” (Gordon, 1993, p. 28). In the absence of such an insight, the process of healing/re-contracting can be hindered by excess regulation that assumes any discrepancy in commitment to be a reflection of either presence, absence, or even the quality of love. In such circumstances, the only clarity that the therapist should be providing is the light that allows the clients to explore and negotiate the space between them rather than how they may or may not fit in the schemas of dominant discourses.
When contracts fail, there are two approaches to help the contracting parties come to terms: (a) a regulatory approach, in which we either force or nudge the parties towards satisfying certain conditions; and (b) a deregulated approach, in which we facilitate the parties’ exploration of a solution space to the failed contract. As marriage and family therapists, we are supposed to take approach (b) to help marriages in crisis. However, in both practice and theory, we are often at risk of taking approach (a).
My clinical work with struggling couples begins from the premise that there is no normative solution that does not come from the parties themselves. Of course, couples carry others’ expectations into therapy; they carry parental, social, religious, and other kinds of ledgers. However, the most important stakeholders in this process are the spouses themselves. One of the therapist’s main purposes is to help the spouses interact with each other, and with the marital relationship itself, with a kind of authenticity that is unburdened by the expectations of others including the therapists’.
Ideally, the therapist should help couples in a struggling relationship to discover, express, and act on this authenticity. What happens, though, when the therapist also projects expectations on to a relationship? Such expectations are informed by the therapist’s own schema of a good relationship, which can prevent the couple from developing its own schema as part of the re-contracting process; the couple’s “mutual inability to define the relationship” (Karpel, 1994, p. 87) is perpetuated under this kind of stress.
Marriages can work, or fail to work, in innumerable ways. We should not take a standardized, check-listed approach in which a good marriage is reduced to a shortlist of desiderata prized in the dominant discourse. Of course, some marriages/relationships might possess each of these desiderata, but what should we do when we encounter a marriage/relationship that lacks or has lost various items on the checklist? Should we encourage or guide clients towards a utopian state of marital fulfillment or encourage clients to find whatever works for them?
As time goes on, fewer Americans are marrying. If people in struggling marriages feel that working on a marriage means to return to or build an ideal state of bliss, the pressure to drop out of a marriage is greater than if spouses are encouraged to explore unconventional but nonetheless mutually satisfying contract renewals. As marriage and family therapists, we cannot let the great become the enemy of the good. Continuing to promote or use utopian models of marital repair can drive spouses to prematurely give up on marriage altogether, instead of reaping the benefits that can come with redefining their marriage. Never mind what we think of good marriages, it is our duty to be aware of our own schemas for marriage, prevent these schemas from entering the room, and let clients define the marriage contract for themselves. To return to the metaphor of regulation, we need to do a better job of creating safe, deregulated spaces for spouses to renegotiate their marriage contracts, as free as possible from therapeutic pressure.
References
Coase, R. H. (1960). The problem of social cost. The Journal of Law and Economics, 3(1), 1-34.
Gordon, L. H. (1993). Passage to intimacy: A practical guide to repairing and rekindling your most important relationship. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster.
Karpel, M. A. (1994). Evaluating couples. New York, NY: W.W. Norton.
Pigou, A. C. (1924). The economics of welfare. New York, NY: Transaction Publishers.
