The Shrink’s Links: The Secret to Desire in Long Term Relationships
Bringing you the best of mental health and relationship articles on the internet.
Today’s link from the shrink is:
In long-term relationships, we often expect our beloved to be both best friend and erotic partner. But as Esther Perel argues, good and committed sex draws on two conflicting needs: our need for security and our need for surprise. So how do you sustain desire? With wit and eloquence, Perel lets us in on the mystery of erotic intelligence.
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Relationships, Part 29: Collusion versus Collaboration
Not all associations are collaborative. Some associations have no shared goals. Others form a collusion. Collaboration involves working together for mutual benefit; collusion permits people to escape their responsibilities and avoid difficult issues. One party agrees to look the other way in exchange for the other doing the same.
The wife who fakes orgasm so that her husband will believe he’s a great lover, is in collusion.
The husband who signals to not bring up certain things at the dinner table with his mother, is in collusion.
The wife who calls in sick for her husband when he’s hung over, is in collusion.
The husband who doesn’t say anything about his wife’s affair because she might say something about his, is in collusion.
The mother who permits her husband to molest her daughter, rather than break up her home, is in collusion.
A Bishop who transfers a pedophile priest, rather that insist he get treatment and take responsibility for the harm he caused, is in collusion.
Collusions appeal to the worst in people, rather than bring out the best.
Asking someone to overlook your shortcomings, while overlooking theirs, is collusion.
In collusion, I stroke your ego and you stroke mine.
At the heart of every collusion, is a secret, something we don’t want to get out. Something we don’t want to confront, because, if we confront it, everything just might get better.
Click here to go to the entire Relationships series.
The Shrink’s Links: Review of the Uses of Enchantment
Bringing you the best of mental health and relationship articles on the internet.
Today’s link from the shrink is:
The Uses of Enchantment
This a book that I have loved since it first came out in the 1970’s even though its author, Bruno Bettleheim, was later disgraced, his other theories discredited, and he suffocated himself to death with a plastic bag.
The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales answers the question: why do we tell terrifying fairy tales to kids? If you have ever read the Brother’s Grimm as they were originally written, they are, well, grim. There’s death and abandonment and kids getting eating by wolves and witches and everything we might want to shield our precious children from. Don’t, says Bettleheim. Children need those stories to work out their fears in a safe, bracketed, setting.
He goes on to interpret fairy tales along Freudian lines. Cinderella as you’ve never heard it before.
Bettleheim was also known for his theory of autism, which he thought was caused by children being raised by “refrigerator parents” who never show affect. This theory has since been disproven.
He ran a treatment center for children in which he tried out another theory of his, that of the “therapeutic milieu”. His milieu proved to be less than therapeutic when it came to light that he was physically and verbally abusive to the kids at the center.
So, you have a guy who preaches the value of scary fairy tales, who believes autism is caused by parents who don’t show their emotions, and who showed far too many of his emotions in a disrespectful, unrestrained way. I’m seeing a pattern here. A guy who privileges feeling over reason and uses his reason to justify it.
Still, I don’t believe we should discard one contributions of his just because the whole is too much to swallow.
The moral of the story: Don’t take yourself too seriously, believe your our theories too much, or take them too far. Especially if your name is Bettelheim.
Click here to go to the link
Relationships, Part 28: Collaboration
We could accomplish so much more together than we ever can individually, but often we don’t. Alliances fall apart.
At the heart of every productive human connection is collaboration: an implicit or explicit agreement to cooperate with one another and work towards shared goals. Collaboration is found in all human relationships: sports teams, work groups, orchestras, between parent and child, therapist and client, between spouses, between any two people having a conversation; wherever people come together for a purpose.
If you pay attention to what’s going on between you and the other person in the course of a conversation, you will find that sometimes you and your associate appear to be on the same page and engaged with one another. At other times, one of you stops paying attention, seems to be changing the subject, or is working against the other. You are seeing two people pass in and out of collaboration.
Collaboration comes and goes that easily. No relationship maintains it constantly, but when you generally have one, you say that you have a good relationship and can trust your partner.
We’re very good at scanning the other person with whom we are working, and can pick up pretty easily the moment the alliance is broken. It’s easy to see why we evolved this capability. If we are cave men hunting a saber-toothed tiger, I need to know the moment when you cut and run when we have it cornered with our spears. In fact our whole ability to work together depends on my ability to pick up on subtle non-verbal cues that alert me to the state of our collaboration.
We’re not so good at reading our own non-verbal cues, the unspoken messages we send out to the other. We’re usually paying attention to our own thoughts. I don’t have to monitor the expression on my own face as I am hunting the saber-toothed tiger; I know what I intend to do. I’m shitting my loin cloth; but that doesn’t necessarily mean I’m going to drop my spear and leave my buddy behind.
The trouble is, my hunting buddy doesn’t know what I’m thinking. All he has to go on is the terrified look on my face. Then, when I take a half-step away from the saber-toothed tiger, maybe to get a secure footing before I plunge my spear into the beast, he figures I’m going to take off. He reads that I’m going to break our collaboration, so he runs and leaves me there.
(Two cave men are running from a saber-toothed tiger. One says to the other. You don’t really think we can outrun him, do you? The other says, I don’t have to outrun the saber-toothed tiger. I just have to outrun you. They have broken their collaboration.)
Whether we are hunting saber-toothed tigers or arranging who gets up with the baby at 3 am, collaborations end when one party thinks the other is abandoning it or acting in bad faith. They often end before they need to because, at the first perceived sign of trouble, people get nervous about being betrayed.
Click here to go to the entire Relationships series.
The Shrink’s Links: What is Water?
Bringing you the best of mental health and relationship articles on the internet.
Today’s link from the shrink is:
David Foster Wallace on mindfulness
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Relationships, Part 27: Open to Influence
What do you suppose is the most common factor influencing divorce?
Infidelity? Poor communication? Abuse? Irreconcilable differences? Lack of commitment? These are the reasons most often given by divorced couples.
Marrying early in life? Living together before marriage? Premarital pregnancy? Having no religion? Coming from a divorced household? These are the demographic factors that predict divorce.
Observers who watch and listen to couples: marriage counselors, researchers, and the like, have identified an unexpected factor that most often leads to divorce: the lack of willingness of the male to be influenced by his female partner.
We’ve come a long way in the past fifty years or so. It used to be that a man ruled his home. I suspect that many women were able to exert considerable influence in their homes, even then, but they had to do be devious about it. They had to soothe the ever fragile male ego. They had to make him believe it was all his idea for the woman to have any power at all.
Today, it’s different, women have rights and they assert them more often. Men’s egos can feel bruised and battered. Men sometimes resist the ideas that their female partners bring to the relationship. Some men fight every battle to the bitter end. In doing so, they may win the battle, but they will lose the war.
Men who are willing to change their approach and give their female partners more of a voice in the relationship end up being more successful and happier in the end. That’s what the data shows. The times have changed.
The Shrink’s Links: Review of Missing Out
Bringing you the best of mental health and relationship articles on the internet.
Today’s link from the shrink is:
Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life by Adam Phillips
British psychoanalyst, Adam Phillips, must have had enough of writing about life as we actually live it. He’s the author of On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored; Flirtation, etc. Now, he’s come out with a book that explores the life we have not lived, the effect of what we believe could’ve been. In the process of examining our fantasies, he illuminates reality.
Missing Out is written in non-technical language, but don’t attempt the book if you’re not up on Shakespeare. He relies far too much on the Bard’s tragic heroes to provide us with examples.
Let me attempt to summarize his main points without resorting to King Lear.
I’m hungry. If I have nothing to eat close at hand, I have a choice. I can work this frustration and use my hunger to motivate myself to score a meal. Getting satisfaction might be as easy as driving to McDonalds or as hard as preparing beef bourguignon. The harder it is, the more I’m going to need my imagination. The more I’ll have to tolerate frustration and hazard the rigors and risks of desire. I’ll have to be clever. Successful people tend to be flexible. If they have no burgundy in their wine rack, they settle for beef stew.
If I can’t eat, the other choice is to fantasize about a delicious meal. This can only take me so far, however. One cannot sustain life on fantasies.
It turns out these fantasies bedevil us in other ways that we never would’ve imagined. We can see this clearly in the phenomena of craving. When I crave beef bourguignon, I form a picture of myself eating it. The rich browns, the pungent smells, the complex tastes become almost real to me. My mouth waters. In this picture, I’m an omnipotent, satiated hedonist. In obtaining the beef bourguignon, in my fantasies I leap over obstacles and evade frustration, rather than modifying it. I replace uncertainty with certainty. I’m triumphant. This triumph is a form of magic. The original hunger is still there, there is only an illusion of triumph over it. I enact a childish view of what it means to be satisfied. I seem to triumph over my need for food.
The problem is, the more I crave beef bourguignon, the less I’ll be satisfied with anything else. I may not even enjoy the bourguignon, if I get it, because the actual dish can never compete with my fantasy of it, except for the fact that I can actually eat it.
I think I know more about the experiences I don’t have, my fantasies, than I know about the experiences I do have, the reality of hunger and cooking. The only time I entertain doubts about my craving, they tends to be about whether we can get the beef bourguignon, not about the nature of the satisfaction.
Craving begins as a flight from wanting, but it makes the wanting all the more problematic. Craving steals my hunger and pre-empts it with a ready-made, uncompromisable solution. The solution to hunger becomes more of a problem than hunger, itself.
I could go on, but I’m getting hungry.
To go to the book’s Amazon page, click here.
Relationships, Part 26: Positive or Negative Sentiment Override
If you dislike someone, the way they hold their fork may make you furious. If you like them, they can turn their plate over in your lap and you’ll overlook it.
Happy couples are a little bit brainwashed about their partners. They admire each other, even if there’s little to admire. They love how they look, even if they’re ugly and out of shape. They laugh at their jokes, even if they’re not funny. They’re convinced they can do no wrong. They give each other the benefit of the doubt.
That’s what we call Positive Sentiment Override. It can certainly improve a relationship. If you’re going to live with someone for the rest of your life, it sure helps if you like him.
If someone is in Negative Sentiment Override they appear to have a chip on their shoulder. Their partner can try to make nice and they won’t accept it. They see evil intentions in every natural mistake. They behave as if their partner is an enemy rather than an ally. I get lots of couples who come to my office in Negative Sentiment Override. They have no trouble bringing up issues, but they have a great deal of trouble recognizing when their partner tries to change.
No one wants to feel negatively about their partner. How do you get Positive Sentiment Override in your relationship?
Having positive or negative sentiments has almost nothing to do with your partner. It has everything to do with you.
I had positive sentiments about my Kodak stock for years, despite a steady decline. I always thought the company would come back. It would develop a good digital camera. It would find some more uses for film. There were too many smart people working there for it to do otherwise. I knew some of them, here in Rochester, and I had faith in them. Well, the company recently declared bankruptcy.
I had positive sentiments about Kodak, despite Kodak, not because if it. I had positive sentiments because of an investment strategy I’d adopted that, most of the time, yields good results. If you went and sold your stock every time the price went down you would never make a profit. Most of the time it pays to hang in there.
Similarly, you shouldn’t file for divorce after one bad day of marriage, or one bad week, or year. What does love mean if we don’t have faith in our partner?
This is what I mean when I say that having positive sentiments has everything to do with you, not with your partner. It is a decision, a strategy designed to get the most out of marriage. You can clearly have positive sentiments for someone or something undeserving.
Clearly, adopting this strategy has its risks. My positive sentiments overrode the objective data about Kodak in the same way that positive sentiments can obscure red flags in early relationships and blind someone to terrible problems in marriages. People will hang in there with horrible marriages, and bad companies, long past the point when they should give up. However, I still believe nurturing positive sentiments is a sound relational practice, as well as good investment advice.
To understand this, consider the alternatives.
If you have negative sentiments overriding anything positive your partner tries, how well do you think that’s going to work? Will you be happy? Will they feel affirmed? Will that chip on your shoulder keep the cold out? Why be with someone at all if you can’t stand the sight of him?
How about if you don’t have any sentiments about your partner at all, either positive or negative? Can you treat your relationship as a levelheaded investor treats his portfolio, buying and selling whenever a particular stop or limit order is hit? Can you love without sentiment?
Good luck with that.
The Shrink’s Links: In the Rooms
Bringing you the best of mental health and relationship articles on the internet.
Today’s link from the shrink is:
In the Rooms
Can’t get to an AA meeting, or NA or GA, or any of the other varieties of self help groups/ Experience strength and hope is right at your fingertips. Join In the Rooms and attend any one of their many online meetings. How much more anonymous can you get?
Keith Wilson - Counseling 