what it’s for

I work with couples of every kind—and there are many kinds. In fact, there’s a huge number of permutations when you consider gender, sexuality, level of commitment, living arrangements, culture and cultural difference, ethnicity and diversity, time-of-life and age gap, monogamy and various alternatives, et cetera. This diversity can generate some special issues here and there, but most of what comes up in couple’s therapy is pretty consistent stuff no matter what kind of couple is on the couch.

People want to communicate better; they want to fight less, and get more out of it when they do fight. They often want to raise the emotional baseline of the relationship—in other words, to improve the average expectable experience of being in that relationship on any given day, month, year, etc. They want to clarify their goals for the medium- and long-term, bring those goals into sharper focus if they can, and see how much overlap there is between the two sets of preferences/hopes/plans for the future.

Couple’s therapy provides a reliably safe framework for some specially earnest discussions about your relationship. Sometimes both members of the couple are there for the same reasons; sometimes for opposite reasons; and sometimes, one or both of them may not be at all sure exactly what the point is, but they feel things can’t go on as they are. On the other hand, some very fortunate couples come to therapy to make a good relationship even better. Most book the sessions to find a way to stay together, but others are looking for a bearable way to break up. Still others haven’t decided what they want to do, and use the treatment as an arena in which to figure it out.

Rarely have I told a pair of people that, while a different therapist might see it differently, my own impression is that they just don’t really want to stay together, or they don’t seem to have what it takes to pull off, say, a successful attempt at an enduring monogamous commitment. One reason why that kind of starkly negative result is rare, is that most people who have enough self knowledge, resourcefulness (by which I don’t just mean the fee), and motivation to actually get to couple’s therapy, are also able to muster those same strengths in the service of the relationship itself.

growing together

People generally couple-up with someone who’s at a roughly equal level of personal development. Though that’s just a rule of thumb, it usually does apply. But once the relationship starts, there’s no guarantee that both people will grow (up) at the same rate, through each and every phase of adulthood. Examples: not everybody is willing to hang in there while their partner figures out that there is life after youth; that when one vocational dream dies, there may well be another one coming soon, with new merits; or that people can experience significant changes in their social, political, religious, or philosophical views without becoming a completely unrecognizable new being.

Everything is a trade-off. Some trade-off are so obviously a net loss that you don’t feel the need to consider them, while others seem almost undecidable because the gains and losses on each horn of the dilemma are so weighty, irreversible, and mutually exclusive. Dilemma-talk like that is usually addressed quite directly in individual therapy. But if the timing is right, and there’s some courage in the room, a frank and beneficial discussion of the real “live options” can happen in a couple’s session. It’s often helpful for the therapist gently to remind people of some things they already know but often forget—like the fact that this embodied life of ours lasts a century at most. Sure, couples enter therapy to improve their communication. But part of that involves cultivating perspective.

The “zoom lens” is an important metaphor. Your attention can be zoomed-in on the micro-question of who did the most laundry last month, or zoomed-out to wonder what kind of future you really want. Expanding this metaphor, you can think of the lens-zoomer as one among many instruments on an instrument panel. The reason I love this image is that it invites you to imagine some of the different variables in the relationship that you might turn out to be able to adjust. We raise and lower our expectations, we reallocate our time and energy, we direct the beam of our attention, and we turn the dial of our emotional arousal up when we’re bored and down when we’re anxious. Single people have to do all of that alone, for themselves; couples can find suitable ways to “co-regulate” their feelings and collaborate on the meanings of their shared experiences.

how it helps

How does couple’s therapy help? In several ways. You have some insights. The therapist has some insights. Your default interpersonal patterns present themselves in the room more or less automatically, and I interpret those (sometimes silently), using the results to guide the stuff I say to the pair of you. Issues under the surface emerge and become more explicit, so they can be addressed with clarity and respect. From time to time, each of you will probably choose to take some amount of responsibility for some of what went on in the recent past, or long ago. Sometimes an apology happens. While those can be quite meaningless (or worse, if used as a deflection or a manipulation), the gift of a sincere one can mean quite a bit to the person who receives it—so it can do a little, or a lot, for the relationship.

Notice that apologies, like promises, are verbal events, real actions whose medium happens to be words: they’re not “just talk.” Sometimes old stories are retold, and this time around (with a little help), they’re more clearly connected to the trouble you’re having today—which is not “just rehashing old stuff,” since it gives us a chance to change the meaning of those facts that we can’t change (which is called reframing). The experience of scheduling couple’s therapy, spending the fee, making the move to stop whatever else you’re doing and get yourselves to my office, and above all, the good faith efforts you make in the sessions—all adds up to a directly lived proof that both of you are deeply invested in the relationship. And that’s one of the several ways couple’s therapy can help.

Should I stick with this person, out of love and loyalty and hope, since there’s a good-enough chance that growth may triumph over stagnation and fear of change? Or should I cut my losses and seize my option for (what could be) a whole new life? Suppose you leave. Without clairvoyance, you can’t know what would be gained, but your notions of just what you’d be losing could turn out to be quite mistaken (especially if there are kids involved). The more extreme the trouble is, the easier it is to make a stay-or-go decision.

Whether it’s a marriage or a commitment of a different sort, the goal is to improve it so much that you can be confident your sticking around is a free and informed choice that you’re unlikely to regret. Usually you get there by finding ways to open your heart—which requires plenty of safety. Intimacy is a kind of nakedness that is more than physical. Its price should include some humility, but no humiliation; some temporary changes of distance, without anyone entirely disappearing; some courage, which is (as Aristotle says in the Nicomachean Ethics) neither cowardice nor rashness.

As I also say elsewhere on this site: “Whatever is messing up your equilibrium now, whatever is most interfering with your flourishing at this point—that’s probably what we’ll be talking about. But it will be illuminated by your reflections on your past—and these, in turn, may come to make new sense in light of today’s experience… Change happens when you have the breathing-space to become more curious about alternatives than frightened of them.” A good sustainable relationship can provide enough novelty, stimulation, and renewal, and enough safety, continuity, and security.

sex & beauty

If you want to have a sex life that’s enhanced by commitment instead of diminished by it, you have to achieve an ongoing, stable baseline where both people feel not only accepted, but desired. And if that seems obvious (as it should), you might be surprised at how many people are currently unaware of it. If one or both of you has some dysmorphia—body-image trouble: you’re convinced you’re not beautiful, no matter what you actually look like—this can be pretty challenging, but the rewards of the effort can be correspondingly great. There’s usually a dammed-up river of desire and healthy lust behind the pain, and when the one who comes along and soothes that pain away is also the one who’s uniquely available for sex, the results can be superbly liberating. Whatever your shame is telling you, its toxic message just can’t be right, because last night’s fireworks disprove it.

When your partner tells you that you’re beautiful, or when you tell your partner, it’s not an opinion. Opinions can be wrong. It’s a fact about how you personally experience their presence, including the visual aspect. Aesthetic experience of a person is different from aesthetic experience of a sunset or a sculpture: the body, especially the face, especially the eyes, are the unique dwelling of a unique living soul (or if you prefer, a unique conscious subject) with whom you’re in a connecting relationship. You’re involved, from the inside out. Your feelings about that soul shape your feelings about that body, that face, those eyes. It is your brain’s right hemisphere that is capable of this.

Conversely, if you are thinking of people’s beauty in terms of a scale from 1 to 10, that’s the left hemisphere taking charge of a domain where it can only make things worse. Rating another human being that way is a sure sign that the left brain is in charge, because quantifying, measuring, comparing, and evaluating are some of its favorite things to do. Those are crucial elements in many areas of life, but love is not one of those. When “you’re beautiful” is spoken between people who share a sexual relationship, it’s not worth as much if it’s an opinion about how “conventionally attractive” somebody is. The full value of “you’re beautiful” blooms into being when it’s a direct report of your personal experience of the other person’s presence, no matter what numbers would come from a thousand random observers evaluating the person’s appearance, from “a dime” on downward into hell. And Beyonce’s song “Pretty Hurts” is about the way that even being called “a ten” everywhere you go is no solution to this problem I call the left hemisphere’s inevitable botching of the issue of beauty.

Suppose you’re out with your beloved at a party, or walking down the street, and somebody walks by whose appearance is just amazingly gorgeous in your perception. You know better than to comment on it, but what if your partner comments on it? If you’re both models, you may both be so accustomed to the impersonal notion of “conventional beauty” that comments on stranger’s looks don’t bother either one of you; it’s your stock in trade anyway. For almost everyone, however, there’s at least a tinge of risk that feelings might get hurt because comparisons might get made, silently or otherwise. How to deal with this? I suggest the words: “YEAH, THAT WAS IMPRESSIVE. ANYWAY…” followed by a change of topic. Why? Because sunsets are impressive, paintings are impressive, peacocks are impressive: it’s impersonal experience of beauty, that doesn’t involve affection for another person.

next step

You’ve just read a lot about my approach to couple’s therapy. There’s plenty more on this site’s blog, which I write myself. But there’s no substitute for the actual experience of couple’s therapy. If you and your partner would like to begin, call me at 917-873-0292 to schedule a session, either online or in-person at my practice in Park Slope, Brooklyn. The 15-minute consultation is free.