The three main sources of theories for couple therapy are behavioural, systemic and psychodynamic. These theories of human interaction are all trying to understand the same phenomena, but they are radically different from each other. They seem on the surface to be almost completely incompatible, but this is less of a problem if you realize that they are starting from different places. I will begin with an outline of the main differences and then go into more detail about each theory in the following section.
Behaviourally orientated therapists look at individuals from the outside. They begin from the point of view that the only behaviours worth investigating are those which can be observed and counted. They are happiest when they can predict the behaviour of their subjects, for example a pigeon in a cage pecking at a switch to turn on the feed chute, or a rat running a maze. The results that they have obtained from these experiments are remarkable, and have taught us a great deal about the psychology of motivation and repetitive behaviour, both in animals and humans. Behavioural methods have been very successful in training animals, for example those that perform in circuses, and behavioural methods have also proved effective in helping parents to reduce disruptive behaviour in their young children.
From a basis of behavioural understanding, but taking a more ‘interior’ view of the individual, they have also developed cognitive behavior therapy. This looks at the way that negative thinking can interfere with our self-esteem and our efficiency in dealing with life and its problems, and how we can substitute positive thought patterns instead.
Systems theorists also look at human interaction from the outside, but are more interested in the ongoing sequences of behaviour in couples and families. They observe human relationships and conceive of them as a series of ‘dances’, with family members learning the steps and repeating the dances, which keep the family together. Thus a father might be the apparent leader in a particular family, but the children interact much more with the mother, and she is the one who has the control of the children’s behaviour and can either back the father up or undermine his authority. There is much less experimental work to back the systems theorists’ ideas than the behaviourally orientated therapists’, but the test of common sense is one which they pass quite easily, and most of their theories are both understandable and convincing.
Psychoanalysts, and others who work psychodynamically, see life and relationships very differently. Based on the pioneering work of Freud, they see unconscious impulses as the central spring of human activities, and see behaviour as the result of these impulses. They use introspection (looking inside the mind) and interpretation as ways of understanding the pressures and conflicts that we all suffer. These are seen as springing from our ‘unconscious mind’, and the purpose of psychoanalytic therapy is to bring these unconscious conflicts into consciousness. Their contribution to couple therapy is to see the interaction of partners in a relationship as a series of unconscious communications, which determine the attraction that they feel for each other at first, and also lead to the conflicts that they experience. Although the psychoanalytic approach has considerable validity, there are few experimental confirmations of the theories. Its technique demands long-term therapy, it is less suitable for the brief couple-therapy that I have been practising, and does not lend itself to a do-it-yourself approach such as the one I am recommending here.
Figure: Behavioural, systemic and psychoanalytic interactions as they affect the couple
It may be argued that these three theoretical approaches are incompatible. The arguments might go: If behaviour is the only thing that matters, why bother to investigate the unconscious? If the unconscious is the only important thing to look at, the behaviourally orientated therapists are wasting their time. If interaction is all that matters, why bother with what the individual does or feels? My belief, however, is that it is possible to use the different theories to do different things. The diagram in the Figure shows how the three approaches all intervene at different levels of a couple’s interaction, and might therefore be seen as being compatible with each other. For example, a therapist might help a couple to behave differently towards each other (behavioural), and as a result they may be in a better position to understand the conflicts they suffer internally (psychoanalytical). Alternatively, a couple who see their conflicts with a new insight (psychoanalytically) may be able to overcome them in their actual interaction (behaviourally). If there is a change in the way two partners treat each other (systemic), there is probably going to be a difference in the way they behave and feel towards each other (behavioural and psychoanalytical).
In practice, I have found in clinical experience that the best combination of approaches is what my team and I have called the behavioural-systems approach. This makes use of the very practical ideas of the behaviourally orientated therapists (communication and negotiation), the cognitive therapists (positive thinking) and the more complicated thoughts of the systems theorists (boundaries, alliances, closeness and distance) to produce a robust method of working which will solve many of the problems found in couple relationships. It is also, unlike the psychoanalytical model, able to be used on a do-it-yourself basis, and is the main type of method to be used in this book. In the remainder of this chapter, I will be describing the various ways that the theories can be put to work in helping those with relationship problems.
The basic idea behind most of behavioural couple therapy is that the best way to motivate people is by reward, rather than by punishment or by persuasion. If a couple are in conflict, they are most likely each to be saying what the other person is doing wrong, and often this takes the form of a lecture. ‘I’ve talked to him and talked to him’ is something that all couple therapists have heard many times.
• An action that is rewarded will be repeated more often
• An action that is ignored (extinguished) tends not to be repeated
• An action that is punished is interrupted, but may be repeated or not in an unpredictable way
The behavioural approach says that you should motivate each other, not by lecturing, but by doing the things the partner wants in return for the partner doing the things that you want. So if a husband says that his wife constantly blames him, he should ask her if there is anything he can do to help her or make things better for her. Then he might ask her if, in return for him doing this for her, she might give him some positive feedback and affection. The principle is that a positive gesture can lead to a positive gesture in return, and that a more fruitful relationship can result from the change.
A second consequence from these theories is that if you don’t like something that the partner is doing, the best way to change it is not to complain or lecture them, but to ignore the behaviour (extinction) and try to encourage an alternative positive action which is incompatible because they can’t do it at the same time. Complaining and punishing the ‘bad’ behaviour doesn’t help to reduce it, because punishment involves giving attention, and that is something that people quite value, even if it is negative attention. So the unwanted behaviour may continue so as to increase the punishment (attention), and thus creates more problems if it is punished than if it had been ignored in the first place.
These simple ideas may seem over-optimistic and naive, but they have been proved time and time again in research to be a very effective way of helping couples. I will be following this up in Chapters 5 and 6, when we deal with how to solve problems.
Another behavioural idea for improving a relationship is positive communication. This will be described in more detail in the latter part of this chapter and in Chapter 5. Much of what troubled couples say to each other is in the form of complaints, and they get out of the habit of paying compliments and expressing love for each other. The behavioural approach tries to encourage the two partners to comment on it when something happens which they enjoy, and not to harp on the things they disapprove of. This means that they are rewarding the partner for the good things and ignoring or extinguishing the things they do not like. When they find that things they would like are not happening, they should request the partner to do these things rather than pointing out that they are not happening. Again, there will be further examples of good positive communication in Chapters 5 and 6, when I deal with how to solve problems.
Cognitive behavioral principles
• Negative patterns of thought keep depressive thinking going
• Positive self statements can be used to counter negative thoughts
• This can reduce depression and pessimistic thought patterns
The third aspect of this behavioural type of work is based on cognitive therapy as developed by Aaron Beck. He has extended behavioural ideas to the inner workings of the mind. So, for example, he points to the tendency of people who are stuck with a problem to use ‘negative thinking’, which means that they assume that there is no solution. They also tend to generalize, so that they believe that there is no answer to any of their problems, not just the one they are trying to solve. People in this frame of mind often suffer from depression, and it was in the context of the treatment of depression that Beck developed his ideas. In cognitive therapy for depression, patients are encouraged to argue with themselves and to try and look at the positive side to their experiences, thinking that if things have not been disastrous in the past, there is no reason why they should be in the future. In couple therapy, Beck emphasized the need for each partner to examine his/her own ideas and to see if they could alter these negative thinking patterns, changing them to more positive ones, and begin to work positively on the relationship.
These were developed in the context of work with families. They encompass a wider understanding of relationships than the behaviourally orientated therapists. One systemic idea is that around each person is a kind of invisible boundary, and the person will normally take measures to defend that boundary if someone steps across it. So, if a husband insists on asking his wife a lot of intimate details about her discussions with her friends, this may be seen by the wife as intruding into her private business and she may resent it. It is an example of the husband’s failure to respect the boundary around his wife’s life. If, however, she is happy with the questions, then this is not a boundary violation, and the couple might simply be said to be unusually close.
Systemic concepts
• Boundaries between people, including the generation boundary
• Hierarchies (treating children according to their age)
• The decider subsystem (the two parents deciding for the children)
• Circular causation (an endless chain of cause and effect)
• Homeostasis (keeping the status quo, because change is risky)
Other areas of systemic thinking relate to the boundary which exists around the couple as well as the boundary around each partner. So, for example, a wife may be discussing many of the intimate details of the couple’s sex life with her mother, without the husband knowing, and this may be seen by him, when he discovers it, as a boundary violation, a kind of betrayal of him and their relationship.
Systemic theorists are also interested in hierarchies, which deal with the question of dominance and submission between individuals. So, for example, a mother may be in control of her five-year-old child to a greater degree than she is of her fifteen-year-old. She is not, however, in control of her husband’s day-to-day behaviour. The mother is seen as hierarchically above the younger child to a greater extent than she is above the older child, but not to be hierarchically above her husband. This leads to the concept of the ‘generational boundary’, which exists between parents and their young children. The parents have necessarily to be hierarchically above the children and to be a ‘decider subsystem’, making decisions for them. This will naturally become less so as the children get older and become more independent.
Another important idea in systemic theory is the idea that families unconsciously try most of the time to keep things as they were. Thus some parents refuse to accept that their children are growing up and that they might wish for, and deserve, greater freedom than before. This is sometimes called ‘homeostasis’, a word that derives from the ability of the body to keep its temperature constant in spite of fluctuations in the outside temperature.
Probably the most important idea in systems theory is ‘circular causation’. This is the idea that, when two people are in a relationship, they engage in a series of actions towards each other which are quite repetitive and which don’t start from one person’s initiative but can be seen as a continuous chain. The only way that one person could be said to be ‘causing’ a problem is if the chain of interactions is arbitrarily ‘punctuated’ in such a way as to make him or her responsible. Punctuation means starting your account of the incident from an action of Partner A, so that A seems to be responsible for what happened: it would be just as valid to start your account from an action of Partner B, which would make B responsible. The main consequence of thinking in this way is that, when problems happen in a relationship, they are seen by systemic therapists not as the responsibility of one of the partners, but as having arisen from the continuous sequence of interactions between them. So it is not a question of who is to blame for the situation, but of trying to untangle the sequences of interaction which lead to the problem repeating itself.
A simple example might illustrate the idea. A man comes in tired from work, and doesn’t say hello to his partner. She becomes angry because of this and shouts at him. He tries to pacify her by giving her a hug, which she rejects. He goes off to the bar. Both of them blame each other for the tension that follows the incident, because each has ignored their own contribution to the problem and sees only the partner’s unreasonable behaviour. If they had punctuated the scenario differently, they might have realized that they themselves had made a contribution.
Although I will not be going into as much detail on these approaches, and they are not very useful for brief interventions, they deserve some discussion because they can sometimes help to understand otherwise incomprehensible conflicts. For example, when partners have insecurities about themselves, one of them may treat their partner in a cruel or offhand way. These insecurities may have originated in earlier relationships, and the way they emerge in the present one may derive from the way the person related, for instance, to a dominating mother. It may then be helpful for the other partner to know that the problem is not entirely with the present relationship, and it may be easier to solve. Sometimes when relationship problems drag on without any improvement, despite other forms of therapy, you might think of a referral to a psychoanalytic couple therapist who will tease out the deeper conflicts that may be perpetuating the problem.
Psychoanalytic ideas
• Bringing the unconscious into consciousness
• Unconscious conflict (hidden resentments) affecting the relationship
• Defence mechanisms, including splitting and projection (e.g. putting all the ‘bad’ things into your partner)
• Understanding the ‘marital fit’ (what the partners have brought into the relationship from their own pasts)
An example might be provided by the case of a man whose mother was unable to show him love as a child. He is married to a woman who feels insecure because she was physically abused as a child, and she needs love. They were attracted because of the things they had in common, such as a feeling that the world was a dangerous place, but in the relationship he was unable to show her any affection, and she felt very much in need of that as a form of reassurance. They might need quite a lot of in-depth therapy to overcome the deep-seated insecurities that they both have, and which are causing relationship difficulties.
Everyone communicates, even when they think they are not doing so. Two people sitting opposite each other in a doctor’s waiting room are in communication even though they don’t speak. There is eye contact from time to time, or a deliberate avoidance of eye contact, and an acknowledgement of each other’s presence. They may talk, or there may be a silent understanding that they don’t want to talk. There may be a power struggle, with one of the two wanting to interact while the other avoids interaction and keeps silent. They will probably be sizing each other up, and could make a good estimate of the other person’s age, social class and maybe what they are suffering from, without asking any questions.
Think then how much more rich and detailed is the communication between partners in a relationship. You already know a lot of things about your partner, and you can predict quite accurately where they will be in the house and what they will be doing at any time. There are probably some things which are problematic between you, such as resentment about not spending enough time together and being late for joint activities such as meals. There is much non-verbal communication, which can be in the form of eye contact, smiles or frowns, tone of voice, posture, touch and the distance between you.
The non-verbal communication between partners is a good indicator of the health of the relationship. Research has shown that couples with a good relationship make regular eye contact, while those whose relationship is troubled rarely look at each other. Deliberately making eye contact with your partner is one way of improving non-verbal communication.
Many of the everyday contacts between partners are made non-verbally. A touch on the shoulder may say more than a hundred words. Smiles can indicate positive feelings, and reassure the partner that they are cared for, although they can also be misinterpreted if there is tension between you. Frowns can of course have the opposite effect. The tone of voice is a further indication of how you are treating each other. This can vary between angry, cold, dictatorial, submissive, warm and pacifying. Couples can change their interaction quite quickly by moderating the tone of voice in their communications.
Another aspect of the non-verbal communication is how close the partners are to each other when they speak. The nearer they are, on the whole, the less they need to raise their voices, and the more their communication will be peaceful and positive. If they choose to sit or stand further away, then the likelihood is that they will have to shout to be heard, and the partner will think that the speaker is angry or impatient.
Their verbal communication is equally important, and may involve both positive and negative aspects. There is a tendency to make assumptions about the other partner, which may lead to misinterpreting what is said as being hostile or angry, when the speaker does not feel angry. This can lead to misunderstandings and misinterpretations, which can blight the relationship and cause friction and angry feelings. The partners then begin to cast blame on each other, and each sees him/herself as the victim of unreasonable behaviour.
One good general rule about communication is never to assume you know better than the speaker what he or she means! If in doubt, ask for clarification.
Good verbal communication. This is something which we all fall short of at times, but good verbal communication is the basis of human interaction, and without it we would live in a very confusing world. There are a few simple rules which couples should follow in communicating, which I will now outline.
1. Be brief and simple. It is better to say less in a sentence than more, and then you should leave a gap so that your partner can reply to the point that is being made. If you go on to mention other matters, the first point will be lost, your partner will reply to the last point only, and it is quite likely that the point that is responded to will be a controversial and provocative one, because the partner will only feel forced to respond to something which needs to be contradicted rather than to a peaceful or non-controversial point.
2. Leave frequent gaps. This gives your partner a chance to respond and comment on what is being said. In some couples it may be that the speaker doesn’t want to hear what the partner has to say: the monologue is a defensive strategy, but monologues don’t contribute to good relations. Good communication usually includes the possibility of reply.
3. Be positive. There is a world of difference between the statement ‘You are always undermining me’ (negative and critical) and the alternative statement ‘I would like you to back me up even if you don’t always agree’ (a request for help). The two are referring to the same situation, but the first one invites disagreement or defence and leaves little room for a positive reply, while the second one gives the possibility of complying with the request. The negative version is probably as valid as the positive one, but the negative one will probably lead to a long argument with no resolution, while the positive version will perhaps lead to some kind of forward movement and eventual resolution.
4. Always end with a positive, even if you have said something negative. This avoids what we call the ‘sting in the tail’, where someone has said something positive and then follows it up with something critical. This almost always leads to an argument, as your partner replies to the last (negative) part of the message. The trick is to change the sting-in-tail comment to one that ends positively. Thus ‘You are making an effort now, but you have been difficult for a long time’ (sting-in-tail) could become ‘You have been difficult for a long time but I see you are now making an effort’ (positive at the end). This could be further improved by starting it with ‘I’ (see below): ‘I have felt that you were difficult for a long time but I see you are now making an effort.’
5. Be specific. This means trying not to generalize too much, and keeping the discussion as clear as possible. So there is a great deal of difference between ‘You are always putting me down in front of others’ and ‘I was upset when you criticized my driving when your mother was in the car.’ The first version will lead to contradiction, for example ‘No I don’t, it’s just your imagination’, or ‘What do you mean, I’m very respectful.’ The second at least makes it possible for the partner to address the issue and try to be less outspoken when a similar situation arises.
6. Suggest ways to act differently in the future rather than complaining about what has happened in the past. A proposed alternative is always more acceptable than a complaint which leaves it to the hearer to suggest a way out of the problem. The hearer can always accept the suggestion or may choose to make a counter-proposal, while citing problems from the past can often lead to defensive responses or denials, which can then lead to a stalemate with both partners maintaining that they are right.
7. If you can’t avoid discussion of the past, ration it so that your partner knows that it won’t last very long. This could be done by planning a discussion time and setting a timer so that you both know when time will be up (see Chapter 5).
8. Stick to the topic and don’t drift off into other areas. The temptation is often to extend the discussion into other areas of disagreement. It is almost always unhelpful to do this, and it usually makes it more difficult to resolve the conflict, since the discussion gets overtaken by other irrelevant topics. If there is no more that can be usefully said on the subject, the couple should stop talking about it and either change the subject or just go into separate rooms until things quieten down.
9. If you are talking about your partner, try not to ‘mind-read’. It is much better to ask your partner what they think about something than to tell them what you think they are thinking. It is quite tempting to do this, but if you are wrong in your guess this will irritate the partner, and if you are right it will put you in a position of power which it is better for you not to have.
10. Try to start everything you say with ‘I’ rather than ‘you’. This is not always easy, and I will give some more specific advice in Chapter 5. The key thing to remember at this stage is that if you start with ‘I’, your partner can’t claim that you are talking nonsense or that you have no right to speak for him/her.
This is in one way quite similar to communication, but it takes the process forward one more step. If you want to change something which has been causing problems, you should try to put it in a way that your partner can make use of. A simple complaint may be sufficient to solve the problem, but as often as not a complaint leads to a defensive reply or to a counter-complaint. It is much more productive to put the complaint in a positive way, in the form of a request.
For example, if a woman wants her partner to stop leaving his socks on the bedroom floor, it would be better for her to suggest, not that he stops leaving them there, but that he should put them in the laundry bag or in the washing machine (a positive request). If possible, this could be followed by an offer to do something in return, which might be requested by the other partner.
Requests should be positive, specific, future-orientated, repeatable and practicable. These will be dealt with in more detail in Chapter 5, but at this stage it may help to give one or two examples of the kinds of requests which work and those which are ineffective. An impracticable request might be to have an expensive vacation abroad, because this costs money, and is not something which can be repeated easily. Another poor request would be to ask the partner to stop drinking, because the request is negative. A better option would be to request a reduction in drinking, or to ask for a different pattern, for example to drink only on particular days of the week.
This type of therapy, involving negotiation, is the one which has had the most research done on it over the past 20 years or so, and it has consistently come out as being effective and quite simple to carry out. It works well for all kinds of couples, whatever their backgrounds.
In our lives we have to decide all the time where to draw the line in terms of boundaries. How close do you allow a new friend to get? How much of your personal life do you share with them? How much do you let them see if you are upset or depressed? Do you invite them home? Do you lend them money?
These examples are all issues which apply to the question of where you place the boundaries in a new relationship. But the same questions apply to the boundaries in a long-standing relationship. Howmuch do you disclose to your partner about your debts? Do you tell them if you find someone else attractive? Do you let them know about the fact that you have a serious illness?
Boundaries not only exist between people, but also between a couple and the outside world. The couple has to work out a comfortable arrangement for what things are treated as confidential and what may be discussed with others. Often a new couple will have difficulty in deciding between them how much can be discussed with other people, such as family or friends. For example, if a couple are having trouble with their children’s behaviour, is it right to share this with the next-door neighbour? What the couple decide to keep confidential may have to be discussed explicitly, or it may become obvious without any discussion.
These questions will be taken up further in later chapters of the book.
Closeness and distance can be thought of as an example of the way in which people keep the boundary between themselves. A couple may be close in several different ways – in sexual intimacy, in sharing ideas and plans, in emotional sharing and in non-sexual physical ways.
• Sexual intimacy will be looked at in detail in the next chapter, so I will not deal with it further here.
• The sharing of plans and ideas is something I have called operational intimacy. This means acting as a team, so that one member of a partnership knows more or less where the other one is at all times. They telephone each other or use email to keep in contact. In couples where there is jealousy, one partner will often complain that they don’t know where the other one is or who they are in touch with, and in this case they are intruding on the partner’s space and abusing the idea of operational intimacy. In other couples, there is very little operational intimacy, and they live separate lives except for the times they are together (e.g. at weekends or on vacation).
• Emotional intimacy has to do with sharing feelings, and by and large this is something that women do more readily than men. The popular book by John Gray suggests that the two genders are from different planets, which he terms Mars and Venus (see Chapter 3). In any heterosexual couple, there are often conflicts as to the amount of emotional intimacy they have, and one partner (often the woman) may express some resentment because she wants more emotional sharing in the relationship.
• Physical intimacy refers to touching each other in non-sexual ways. A well-known sign of an intimate relationship (for instance if a couple have not declared that they are an ‘item’) is if one partner picks a bit of fluff off the other’s clothing. Other forms of physical intimacy are sitting close together, or putting one’s legs over the partner’s knees, or offering to massage the partner’s back. The lack of physical intimacy, like the lack of eye contact between partners, can be an ominous sign in predicting the future of the relationship.
Being close does not necessarily mean having weak boundaries, and it is possible to be close in any of the four ways mentioned above while keeping one’s boundaries intact. It is more a question of having a clear understanding of the limits of personal space. So a couple who are close in an operational and emotional way, may make it clear that their professional lives are their own, and will be kept apart from the relationship.
The other thing to mention about closeness is that the four types of closeness do not necessarily go together. It is quite possible to be close sexually but not to share emotions, and sometimes this causes problems for couples when one partner wants more emotional closeness while the other wants to be sexually close more often. Again, some individuals are very shy of physical closeness, while wanting a good level of emotional and operational closeness.
A further complication in discussing this aspect of relationships is the question of which partner is dominant. Obviously in some relationships the dominance shifts according to the setting: the wife may take the lead where childcare is concerned, while the husband may lead over financial matters. However, there are many areas in which dominance is disputed. For example, a couple might have repetitive arguments about who has the right to make decisions, and these arguments may threaten the continuity of the relationship.
There are some couples in whom the dominance appears to be in one direction, but in fact, it is the opposite. This may be associated with illness behaviour on the part of one partner. The ‘ill’ partner may be apparently much weaker than the other one, but may control the relationship because the ‘well’ partner spends much time and effort in trying, almost in the role of a servant, to please the ‘ill’ partner and make him/her feel better. In other couples, the situation may be less overtly connected with illness, but simply reflect the ability of the apparently ‘weaker’ partner to control the ‘stronger’ one (see Chapter 8).
Most couples reach a state of equilibrium on the question of dominance, and they both take the dominant role where it is necessary, while at other times being quite democratic about who takes the lead.
When a couple have young children, it is usual for them to make decisions about the children without consulting them. This is partly because the children are too young to be able to take responsibility, and partly because the situation would become uncontrollable if they left important decisions to the children. This results in a hierarchical pattern of relationships in which the parents become the ‘decider subsystem’ and discuss things to do with the children’s welfare without involving them in the process.
As the children grow up, the parents and children have to adjust to a new situation in which the children have to make some decisions for themselves. This can be difficult when the children and parents disagree on the degree of freedom and responsibility that the children should have. Teenage arguments and conflicts may arise, and in many families this is a healthy way to resolve the uncertainty. In other families, there can be a difference of opinion between the two parents about the management of the teenager(s), with the children beginning to take sides or trying to divide the parents. This is almost always bad for both the children and the parents, and leads to the teenager(s) having a sense of power associated with insecurity. It may also be associated with psychological problems and/or substance abuse in the teenager.
There may be further difficulties in the family if there are children of different ages, and the parents are caught between their wish to give the older children more responsibility while at the same time treating all the children fairly. There is no perfect solution to this situation, and each family will have to work out the best compromise for themselves.
Couples often find themselves repeating the same discussion or argument, and reaching the same unsatisfactory endpoint. The discussion might be one of ‘symmetrical’ responses in which one partner says something hostile and the other responds with a hostile comment. It is a bit like trench warfare, with artillery bombardment from one side and then the other. The main characteristic is one of repetition and an inability to get out of the habit of arguing in this way.
Another type of repetitive interaction is where one partner complains repeatedly of a negative feeling (perhaps depression or anxiety) and the other tries to help. We sometimes call this a ‘complementary’ interaction, and the couple seem to be acting like a nurse and patient or a parent and child. Once again it is difficult to get out of the habit of interacting in this way once it has become a regular feature of the relationship.
I should emphasize that there is nothing either good or bad about symmetry or complementarity in these sequences. All our interactions have some symmetry and some complementarity in them, but the problem in the examples given is that they are repetitively symmetrical or complementary, and stereotyped, leading to problems that are hard to get out of.
The symbols of a relationship may be quite varied. Generally they are more central to women than to men. The wearing of a wedding ring is one example, and it is noticeable that married women almost always wear one, while it seems to be an option for married men. Another symbol of the relationship is the giving of cards and presents at birthdays, Christmas, etc. If this is forgotten, it can send a very bleak message to the partner.
Perhaps the most important symbol, however, is the wedding anniversary. In couples who are not married, there is often a similar date which is remembered, for example the first time the couple went out together, the first time they had sex, or the first vacation together.
As the family grows in size and in numbers there are more dates to remember, to do with the children and grandchildren. There are also many different ways in which the couple can cooperate – over children’s activities, family events and matters to do with house maintenance. In all these areas there is a symbolic as well as a practical significance. In a male-female couple, the woman usually puts more importance on these issues, and may feel more aggrieved when the man forgets or treats them as being of little importance (see Chapter 3).
More minor ‘core symbols’ of the relationship involve regular habits that the partners may have got into, such as bringing a cup of coffee in the morning, eating together or sharing the bed. When there is a severe problem, some couples may feel that these rituals are unimportant and stop ‘performing’ them.
One thing that couples sometimes fail to realize is that attacking the core symbols of the relationship is a very risky thing to do, and it may easily lead to a complete breakdown in the relationship. When there are minor difficulties in a relationship, the maintaining of the core symbols can have a healing effect, for example when one partner after an argument brings the other one a drink or goes over and hugs them.
This is not a topic on which there is much research. However, in couple therapy, I have noticed many times that there is a kind of overall balance between the two partners, which persists in spite of inequalities in intelligence, status, strength or power. The ‘weaker’ partner will often do something, perhaps to make the other one feel guilty or to attract their attention, and this restores the balance to some extent. The level of attractiveness of each partner contributes to this balance, and there is often something unconscious which equalizes the balance in a couple where everything else seems to be stacked in favour of one partner.
In therapy, I have often been able to make use of this process to help a couple to recognize and maintain their balance, and in this book I will be trying to make it possible for the reader to see the problems in their own relationship and perhaps to use the balancing power of something that they haven’t previously thought of to restore the equilibrium of their relationship.
• The theories I am working with are behavioural, cognitive, systemic and psychoanalytic.
• They are not incompatible, but apply to different levels of the relationship.
• The main behavioural principles involve rewarding positive behaviour and ignoring unwanted behaviour.
• The main cognitive principles are to think positively and avoid generalization.
• The main systemic ideas involve boundaries, hierarchies and circular causation.
• The main psychoanalytic ideas relate to the unconscious and its influence in relationships.
• The approach used in the rest of the book is a behavioural-systems approach.
• Communication can be non-verbal and verbal.
• There are ten principles of good verbal communication (see pages 39–41).
• Other issues discussed in the chapter include boundaries, closeness, dominance, hierarchies, repetitive sequences and balance.