Monthly Archives: February 2013

My Two Big Beefs – Part I

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There are two subjects that always make me jump on my soapbox.  (I might even wave my hands around like the little guy here.) 

First, the court’s are an atrocious forum for resolving marital disputes.   After all, how are lawyers trained?  Law school is a three-year course in “the case method” of teaching law, which is over 100 years old and still going (fairly) strong.  In this model, students read written opinions from appeals courts and learn how to support each side.  Our legal system is based on this “adversarial method of conflict resolution” in which each side  promotes their side aggressively, secure in the fact that they don’t have to worry about the other side because they have their own representative promoting their side aggressively.  Well, suffice it to say, if I were ever charged with a crime, I’d want one aggressive individual fighting for me.  Yet, when intimate couples fracture their relationship, the intensity of individual vulnerability and wounding on both sides his breathtaking.  The triggers that caused each person to become flooded by anger – or fear during the marital fights are no less sensitive when they commence upon the road to divorce.  If anything, the vulnerability is even more exquisite.  How cruel, then, to subject these poor people to the violations that are inherent in legal advocacy.  Making the private pains public – subjecting individuals who are going through the soul-searing doubt of divorce to public revelations, criticism or outright attack is nothing short of torture.  Adversarial lawyers speak of protecting their client’s rights.  I would say, “protect from what?”   The answer can only be the other person who had been their intimate partner.  This is the individual who has seen us at our least guarded; with whom we shared sexual intimacy and who knows our deepest fears.  We thought this person would hold this information in trust and yet they become weapons to persuade a person in a robe to give them what they seek.  The minute we tell someone we will “protect” them from this other person, we have created an environment of paranoia which, in most cases, can only do ill.  Courts are a too-blunt instrument for the exquisitely sensitive task of helping people dissolve their intimate bonds.

Two Conversations

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I think couples in conflict often engage in two conversations.  One is overt, constantly repeated and endlessly frustrating.  The other is almost always unsaid – and unacknowledged.  If we can get to that second conversation, we can find the peace and connection we so desperately need in our intimate relationships.  Instead, we get all tangled up in the conversation that doesn’t go anywhere. Like birds flitting back and forth above us, what we see is that which transfixes us and grabs our attention.  I have seen it over and over again in my office – the sad, ever-so-discouraging dance of the upper conversation that almost guarantees that both people will just….feel….bad and not feel heard by the other.  This conversation is always about something.  “You don’t help around the house …..I do too help.  What about last week when you were tired and I vacuumed downstairs…..Oh great, thanks a lot – am I supposed to bow down because you vacuumed once?”   “How come you aren’t even trying to go back to work to bring in some money?…..I have tried.  You just don’t know what it’s like out there….You aren’t doing nearly enough….You have no idea what I have done.”  These conversations don’t go anywhere because they aren’t’ about what’s really going on inside for each person.

The real conversation – the one that can get somewhere – is the attachment conversation.  It is about our needs that are deep and tug at our hearts.  These are also needs that can be satisfied once there is a safe way to express them.  They can be the need to feel truly cared for – or to feel competent and valued – or to know your partner is not going anywhere.  They are almost always about the need to be actually seen and still loved and accepted.  This most critical and meaningful conversation can be very difficult to have without the help of a relationship professional.  My bias (and observation) is that Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy is a wonderful platform upon which these “conversations for connection,” in Sue Johnson’s words, can occur.