Connection without self betrayal
My first introduction to couples counseling was toward the end of my first marriage, around two-and-a-half decades ago. Being in my mid-twenties with no clue how relationships are supposed to heal when things go sideways left me feeling pretty helpless. I had no understanding of what was happening inside my own brain and body, why I felt the way I felt, or why she was responding the way she was, and that gave neither one of us much of a fighting chance. Sitting with different couples counselors in my current marriage have felt less helpless and more intentional around specific topics we were working through. Having my own experience as the client with several couples counselors gives me plenty to draw on when couples come into my office expecting to work through their own issues.
Some weeks three of them come in on the same day, at three very different points in that process.
The first couple has been coming for about two months. Today it starts with a phone call he didn’t make. He said he would call when he landed and he didn’t call until the next morning, and by then she had been awake most of the night. She tells me about it and her voice is steady for about four sentences. Then she says that this is what he always does, and that it is exactly like the thing he did at her sister’s wedding three years ago, and I watch him mentally leave the room without ever standing up. His face goes blank and his eyes glaze over. He says okay, says she is right, he should have called, and he is sorry. He agrees with everything she says for the next six minutes and she gets angrier with every agreement, because she can tell there is nobody home behind it.
Neither one of them is lying about any of it. He really is sorry he didn’t call and she really was awake all night, and almost nothing happening in that room has much to do with a phone call.
There are at least four parties in this conversation and only two of them are visible. Something in her learned a long time ago that when people go silent it means something bad is coming, so it watches for silence and starts talking fast to get out in front of whatever is coming next. Something in him learned that a raised voice is the beginning of a long night, so it goes blank and waits the night out. Both of those made complete sense once, in the houses they each grew up in and where they no longer live. Now their parts run into one another at close range, and every move one of them makes proves to the other one that it was right to show up.
Richard Schwartz wrote a book about this called You Are the One You’ve Been Waiting For. Most of us come into a relationship carrying parts of ourselves that nobody ever took care of, and somewhere in the falling in love we hand the job of caring for them over to the other person. We don’t say it out loud and we would deny it if somebody asked us, and the arrangement is sitting there in the middle of the relationship anyway. I need you to make me feel like I am not going to be left, and I need you to make me feel like I am not a disappointment. The other person never agreed to any of that, couldn’t do it if they had agreed to it, and will eventually fail at it on an ordinary Tuesday by not calling from the airport. When they fail, our parts treat it as a betrayal and go after them for it.
So the fight is running on a thirty-year-old wound that got assigned to somebody who had no idea they were holding it, and the phone call is just where it came to the surface.
The second couple is further along and they would tell you so. They have been in and out of my office for a couple of years and most weeks are decent. They can name what happens to them now, which is real progress and also the source of their newest problem. She can tell you exactly which part of her takes over when he comes home late and goes straight to his phone, and he can tell you precisely what happens in him when she starts a sentence with “we need to talk.” They have the vocabulary.
And they use it on each other. He tells her that’s your abandoned part again, and he is right about it, and he has also stepped out of the conversation to stand off to the side with a clipboard. She tells him he needs to work on his shutdown before the two of them can get anywhere, which hangs the whole future of the marriage on a job she has assigned to him. Both of them have figured out that the other person has parts, and both of them are using that as evidence in a case they never stopped building. The insight turned out to be a better weapon than the yelling ever was, because it sounds like therapy the entire time it is landing.
Underneath all of it is the same arrangement the first couple has, dressed considerably better. I would be happy if you were further along. My healing is stuck because your healing is stuck. He is still waiting for her to make him feel safe enough to open up, and she is still waiting for him to make her feel wanted enough to settle down, and the two of them are waiting with a great deal more sophistication than they used to.
They also fall off. They will put together six good weeks and then have a bad night, and the bad night takes the whole six weeks down with it in their own estimation, and she will tell me they are right back where they started. From the inside it feels identical to the first month and it’s a different thing entirely, because in the first month they couldn’t see any of it and now they can see all of it and they are doing it anyway. That stretch, where you watch yourself do the thing you understand completely and can’t stop, is the longest part of this, and nobody ever tells people how long it lasts.
The third couple comes in every month or two and there’s no crisis. They want to talk through whatever happened recently, a layoff or a kid’s diagnosis or an aging parent, the kind of thing that used to level them for a season.
The first thing you would notice about them is how they talk. She’s describing something he did last week that hurt her, and partway through a sentence she stops herself. She says something like, hang on, I want to say this better. There’s a part of me that got about twelve years old when that happened, and it still thinks you walking out of the room means you are done with me. I know that is not what it means, but it’s still what I felt. And he stays where he is. He says he can see that, and that something in him heads for the door the second he feels like he is failing her, and that he is working on catching it before it gets as far as the driveway.
They are each describing something true about their own interior and handing it across as information instead of as a charge, and it sounds almost administrative, which is a good reason of why it works.
That is the distinction Schwartz draws in his book. There is a difference between speaking from a part and speaking for one. Speaking from it means the part has the floor, so the internal twelve-year-old ends up running the conversation while using your adult vocabulary and your adult income and your twenty years of knowledge about exactly where your spouse is wrong. Speaking for it means you stay in the chair and tell the person what is happening inside you.
Those are the two options most people know about, and there is a third one that a lot of us are actually using, which is where the self betrayal lives. You feel the thing and you say nothing at all. The part gets told to stand down because the evening is going well and nobody wants a scene, and we have a whole set of words for this that make it sound like character. We call it being mature, or picking your battles. Sometimes that is exactly what it is. Plenty of other times it is the same move you learned at eight years old, which is that your reaction is the most dangerous object in the room and has to be managed before anybody notices it’s there. Run that for twenty years and you end up in a marriage where two people are unfailingly considerate of each other and neither one of them has ever been met.
The third couple still argues, and they had a bad one in August. What’s different is what happens afterward and how fast it happens. Where it used to take four days of cold rooms and short answers, it now takes a couple of hours before one of them comes back and says some version of I overreacted and I know which part of me was driving the bus when I did it. They have both gotten good at recognizing, usually after the fact and once in a while during, when something has taken them over.
They were the first couple once.
Four years ago she talked fast and he went blank and agreed with everything she said, and I can remember sitting there thinking the odds were not good. What changed is that each of them took over the care of their own parts. She stopped waiting for him to prove she wouldn’t be abandoned and started tending to the one in her that is certain she will be, and he stopped waiting for her to make it safe enough to speak and started dealing with the one in him that goes flat under pressure. Each of them picked up a job the other person had been holding without ever consenting to hold it.
Twenty-five years ago I sat in an office like this one with my first wife, and both of us would’ve told you we were trying. We were. What neither of us had was any idea what was running us. I couldn’t have told you that something in me went blank the second a room heated up, or that it had been doing that since I was a boy and had never once checked with me first. And she had no more access to her own machinery than I had to mine. Two people can love each other and work hard and still not have a chance when nobody can see what is actually in the room.
What the third couple found is that connection and self betrayal had been tangled together for them only because each of them kept handing the other an interior they had never taken responsibility for themselves. Once they each picked their own back up, there was nothing left to betray. She can say the true thing now and stay in the room while she says it, and he can hear it without leaving, and that is as close to an answer as I have found to the question of how two people stay close without one of them going under.
The couple who could not get through a conversation about a phone call this morning already has something I never did in my first marriage. The parts are in the room where they can be seen, and being able to see them is where all of it starts. It is still going to take them a while. What it will not take them is twenty-five years of not knowing what they were looking at.
Peace my friends,
~Travis
Up next week: Boundaries as Acts of Integration
This essay is part of a year-long weekly exploration of how we become who we are, and why change often begins in places we were never taught to look.
