I’ve always been a bit skeptical of the concept of marriage counselling, for at least two main reasons. One is that the problems that couples have derive from two individuals who themselves have problems. While work on oneself may certainly help to see relationship issues in a new light, it was, and I guess still is, less obvious to me that there is anything specific to work on in the space between the individuals, the relationship itself. Symptomatic of this lack of real material to work on, marriage counselors have always seemed to me to come at their task with entirely unquestioning devotion to the inherited narrative of monogamy. Their task has seemed to me primarily to consist in assigning blame and soliciting repentance, with the blame invariably assigned to whomever it might be who has stepped outside the bounds of sexual fidelity. This sounds like an insane exercise in self-flagellation of the kind that powerful American men (yes, it’s always men) predictably resort to when their sexual dalliances enter the public record.
I have no idea if this is a fair characterization of the profession or if attitudes are changing, but I nonetheless found myself spellbound by the wisdom and compassion on almost every page of Esther Perel’s book Mating in Captivity – and this notwithstanding that, while not judgmental, the author remains to my taste disappointingly coy on non-monogamy. On page after page, Perel brilliantly deconstructs the meaning underlying how partners behave in relationships. Particularly refreshing to generations of men accustomed to being portrayed by feminists as untrustworthy sexual predators is her real insight into how men think and feel about relationships, which is expressed with a rare lucidity and a genuine compassion. Not only women should read it for this reason – men should too, for we are just as much a victim of the social stereotypes which, even if we do not entirely believe them, cloud us to an understanding of and pride in our real nature.
Particularly poignant and illuminating is her observation that, for many men, sex is a privileged language of intimacy. She notes that women expect men to share with them in ways which many men simply are not equipped to do, whilst at the same time failing to observe the messages of affection and commitment contained in the language which men do master, or at least where they feel freer, the sexual language of the body. “It is not sufficiently appreciated that the erotic realm also offers men a restorative experience for their more tender side… for a lot of men it remains the only language for closeness which hasn’t been spoiled.” She notes also that many women take refuge in words as a way of purifying their carnal impulses, an idea she finds disturbing. “Sometimes, the emotional weaving is done through talk; often, it is not. Building a bookshelf for your lover, changing the snow tires on your wife’s car, and learning to make his mother’s chicken soup, all carry the promise of connection.”
Another point she makes strongly echoes something I wrote in my recent article “Cycles of sexual history” about patriarchal biases in the evaluation of sexual practices. She puts it like this: “Taboo-ridden sexuality and excess-driven sexuality converge in a troubling way. Both lead us to want to dissociate psychically from the physical act of sex… What is missing is a sexuality that is integrated, in which pleasure flourishes in a context of relatedness. I’m not talking only about deep love; I’m also talking about basic care and appreciation for another person.” (emphasis added). Referring to compulsive casual sex within the college hook-up scene she describes it as “less an expression of liberation than an acting out of underlying insecurity“; for my money, exactly the same conclusion could be drawn in relation to much that goes on within the swinger community. Unless you have this kind of obsessive sexuality, it’s decidedly unsexy, and over time deadening for the erotic imagination.
At the end of the book, I still don’t know how enthusiastically I would recommend counselling to sexually estranged couples; I doubt there are many therapists exercising this profession with the wisdom and compassion of Ms Perel. But to all couples, regardless of how happy they are with their relationship and their sex life, the book is certain to be an enriching read.
Hello again.
I haven’t read Mating in Captivity, but it is on my shelf and my reading list. (So is The Passionate Marriage, by David Schnarch, which was recommended in similar terms: Implicitly monogamous but not useless for other kinds of relationships.)
I am writing rather in response your more general remarks about therapy, especially marriage counselling.
First, one of my own simplifying-but-not-useless distinctions is between therapy (and other kinds of personal development work) that support the emergence of the authentic, unconditioned human on the one hand; vs. work that helps the patient cope or adapt to the current culture, society, and his or her personal circumstances. The way marriage is currently constructed, couple’s counselling is going to be predominantly in the latter category. This doesn’t mean it’s wrong; the emotional price for trying to be a taboo-breaking authentic human in this society may be higher than the emotional price of inauthenticity; many kinds of coping and compromising might make sense for different people, and counselling might be part of a solution.
Next, you say: “While work on oneself may certainly help to see relationship issues in a new light, it was, and I guess still is, less obvious to me that there is anything specific to work on in the space between the individuals, the relationship itself.” I’m not such an expert, neither in terms of study nor in the time I’ve spent thinking about it, but I have long suspected that “therapy,” especially psychoanalysis, works as anthropology, and a tool for discovering personal truth, but clinically speaking fails to heal people of their real or perceived pathologies; because it treats them as essential individuals. But we know that human beings are essentially tribal creatures, social primates, pack animals, communitarian beings. Neuroses, psychopathologies, anxieties, all exist in an interpersonal and social context.
My intuition is that healing would happen surprisingly quickly in a different therapeutic paradigm, of placing the person into a social context in which conditioned behaviors are not at odds with the person’s essential nature as a social and sexual being. In other words, I agree that the pressure-cooker of a claustrophobic, inauthentic, neurosis-hothouse of pathological marriage is an unlikely venue for healing, even if a counselor is involved; but I don’t think individual talk-therapy can do much either. With one important caveat: Some thoughtful patients might have gain intellectual insights from individual analysis, and thus see the material, external changes that they need to make in their circumstances. But real healing will not begin without those material changes.
PS Dan Savage writes this week about finding non-sexphobic therapists.
Thanks again F,
With your first point, yes I agree, but it is still hard when you see people pursuing tracks which you know are not going to help them just because they are afraid to look the real problems in the eye. Nonetheless I am not judgmental about that choice, as clearly only the people themselves know where they are, what they need and what they can handle. In practice, I think a lot of people are bullied into marriage counseling by the immense weight of social, emotional and financial consequences that society imposes on “failed” marriages and by their own internalized sense of shame.
I to a large extent agree with your comments on “therapy” as well, but only because you have constructed a straw man. I in any case wrote “work on oneself” deliberately, to cover the whole nexus of things one can do as an individual to become, for want of a better term, more authentic. Thus I refer to a self-piloted journey and not episodic sessions with a “therapist”. At most those are one part. It is certainly worth adding to what I wrote, that issues that come up in a relationship can be seen as a problem of the relationship or can be seen as a stimulus to personal growth. Unless one adopts the latter approach, the relationship is maybe anyway past its sell-by date. I mentioned this in a previous post.
For the rest, your critique is not one (and can hardly be one) of therapy, but only of method. It presupposes that what you describe as method actually is method, and with this I would take issue. Even talk therapy/CBT is not as simple as that. But I agree that one would want to embed therapy in a social context. The phenomenological tradition is well aware that being and society are mutually constitutive. The problem with an exclusive focus on “group therapy” is, however, that there is no non-neurotic community into which we can simply place people. So there is always a risk that what happens goes in the wrong direction. Therefore it is a good principle, but I would advocate caution in practice. A lot of people throw themselves into communal living to flee themselves and their social muscles totally atrophy in the process. There is, obviously, a dialectic between the individual and the community in which each pole needs its space to develop. In practice, many if not most communities have, it seems to me, found it difficult to achieve this balance. This is because our social sense is strong, but our egos are weak; it is the ego which really needs restoration and this tends to conflict with the ego-driven nature of spiritual communities. And I am sorry for using here ego in two senses – the healthy ego is strong but flexible; the unhealthy ego is unsure of its place in the world and compensating this in various ways. Those who set up communities typically compensate their ego insecurities by drawing adulation from the crowd; and those who join communities typically compensate it by abdicating personal responsibility in favor of a father-figure. So unless there is some serious attention to these tendencies, it seems to me indeterminate whether actual communities will help or hinder a personal’s spiritual development. Only the individual can be the judge of that.
Lastly, I would wish to stress that no form of therapy “heals”. This would be to subject therapy to the agency paradigm of conventional medicine. We heal ourselves – at best, a therapist only helps us to do this. This is different from swallowing SSRIs, for instance, which incapacitate the body’s serotonin reuptake metabolism and thereby achieve their effect entirely exogenously via the brain’s biochemistry. Anyone who goes into therapy expecting the therapist to heal them – and very many people do – is setting themselves up for almost certain failure. And any therapist who makes such a claim is without a shadow of a doubt a quack. But I think this is well understood in the therapeutic community and so I would caution against working with what seems more like a caricature of what therapy is.