get your husband to love you again?
The media is full of experts giving advice. They tell people how to be good parents, good spouses, good friends. The press is full of tips for handling our aging parents, our difficult bosses. Most of this doesn’t work. There are reasons why superficial, impersonal advice doesn’t have deep and permanent effects. These generic recommendations are based on generalities: One size fits all, lowest common denominator. But for each situation, the advisor doesn’t know:
• What the underlying issues are
• What hidden purposes are being served by the problem situation
• The state of mind of the person being advised.
• Their attitudes toward the people they are trying to relate to.
• Their attitudes towards themselves. What if their own unexamined attitudes include, “I know what’s best for everybody” or “I don’t deserve to be happy?”
It is essential to consider what is the purpose behind our reaction, what are we trying to achieve in our reaction. In doing so, we reveal choices, that we didn’t know they had. This frees us to make new choices. I encourage clients to identify appropriate risks and take them, but we don’t broadly say, “Leave him. He’s no good for you!”
Before we can begin to reveal that people have choices, we have to do some preliminary exploration. The client may know what they would like to have happen, but they can’t bring it off. We say, “They can’t get there from here.” We want to identify the impediments first so we can remove them. For example, our client, Rita, asked:
Client: “How can I get my husband to love me like he used to?”
Therapist: “What has to happen first?”
Client: “I’ve done everything I can think of.”
Therapist: “First you have to love yourself on an appropriate basis.”
Client: “How can I learn to love myself on an appropriate basis.”
Therapist: “What has to happen first?”
Client: “I don’t have a clue.”
Therapist: “You have to know who you are as a person in the world so you can stop playing carryover roles as your parent’s child, your sibling’s sibling, your husband’s wife ‘what’s her name’. A role cannot be loved by anyone, not even you. And who are you?”
Client: “I give up. Who am I?”
Therapist: “Now you’ve got it. You’ve put your foot on the first rung of the ladder.”
Client: “What did I do?”
Therapist: “That’s the first time in your life that you confronted the fact that you don’t know who you are, that you don’t have a mature, independent identity of your own. You have been sleepwalking through life, playing roles, opposite roles just like everyone else. I’ll tell you who you are. You are the one who made that statement. You told the truth about yourself. It was a choice you made when you couldn’t play your two-dimensional role any more. You saw that it wasn’t getting you anywhere. It took courage to make that admission, to let go of a lifetime of attitudes and roles that have been controlling your thoughts and behaviors from the beginning. It is to your credit that you also had the courage to call for an appointment and even more courage to show up. Lots of people never do. Does that make sense?”
Client: “Yes.
Therapist: “How do you feel?”
Client: “I feel good.”
Like most of our clients, Rita started out by telling us the presenting problem that brought her into counseling. To get at the heart of the problem, we must first go back and find out what happened in the earlier scenes that set them up for the current difficulties in their lives. They didn’t get this way overnight. We have to ask more questions in order to go below the surface of the presenting problem. As Rita started to tell us about herself, she mentioned that she had wanted to get counseling years ago, but couldn’t bring herself to do it. This is a problem that is compounding all the others. We can use it as a point of entry into the galaxy of experiences, memories, hopes, and fears that make up Rita’s way of moving through life. It turns out that one of the impediments to winning back her husband’s love is that she can’t ask for help.
Before we can find out why Rita can’t ask for help, we have to put her difficulties into an appropriate perspective.
Therapist: “It sounds like you have trouble trusting others, and that includes your husband. What has to happen before you can ask for help?”
Client: “I don’t know.”
Therapist: “You have to trust the person you are asking, otherwise you can’t ask. It’s no use.”
Client: “I don’t trust very many people.”
Therapist: “Often people don’t trust because of some past betrayal. When has someone betrayed your trust?”
Client: “I’m thinking of my parents. I couldn’t count on them for anything. They weren’t there for me. They made everything worse so I gave up.”
Therapist: “What has to happen now before you can trust people?”
Client: “They have to earn my trust.”
Therapist: “That’s exactly what they cannot do. Your impediment prevents them from earning it. The impediment is that you trust them negatively, to make things worse for you instead of better. You trust them to say no in advance, so you don’t bother to ask. You are discouraged, you are afraid to try because you know you’ll be turned down.”
Client: “But they do turn me down.”
Therapist: “If you ask with the wrong music, the wrong intonation, they will turn you down. They hear it in your voice, as if you were saying, ‘You’re not going to say, “yes,” are you?’ So they fulfill your expectations. They say no. It’s as if they don’t want to disappoint your expectations by saying, yes.”
Client: “How can I get them to say yes?”
Therapist: “Do you see how you put the problem in terms of getting them to respond differently? “It’s not a matter of getting. It’s a matter of removing impediments from your past that keep you from living freely in the present.”
Client: “I don’t want people to think I’m weak and needy.”
Therapist: “That is an impediment, too. You are living on other people’s terms and not your own. You are afraid what the neighbors will think and you are trying to prevent them from thinking it. We want to find out where these negative attitudes are coming from. When else have you felt this way?”
Client: “I was 10. We went to visit my mother’s family. They had a beautiful swimming pool. It was near Disneyland! They were so happy to see me. Then my aunt asked, ‘What do you want for dinner?’ I said, ‘Pizza!’ I’d never had it before. My grandmother was horrified. Suddenly, I didn’t ask any more. What I wanted didn’t matter. I didn’t matter.”
Therapist: “You felt invalidated. Once again, you can’t win for losing. You acquired the attitude, ‘I can’t do anything right,’ You even blamed yourself for not knowing in advance what to say or do. You went from being the happy Golden Child to being worthless and unhappy. You didn’t belong anymore. You didn’t deserve to ask for what you wanted. Your memory is bringing up recollections that are relevant to the problem of getting what you want out of life. These attitudes are the impediments that are in your way. Is there something you want today that you can’t ask for?”
Client: “I want to visit my mother in Wisconsin, but my husband, Al, won’t let me. We fight a lot.”
Therapist: “What has to happen first before you can go to Wisconsin?”
Client: “I have no idea.”
Therapist: “This is new to you. It takes practice. You haven’t learned how to ask Al for what you want.”
Client: “He says it’s too far; that I might have an accident and wreck his car.”
Therapist: “Do you take his reasons at face value?”
Client: “I try to explain that I’ll be careful. I’ve never had an accident.”
Therapist: “You are trying to make Al understand as if his reasons were rational, which they are not. They are a cover story for the real reason deeper down. He doesn’t know what it is himself, so how can he be argued out of it? Tell me about your husband.”
Client: “At our wedding, he had a fight with his brother and my father had to break it up. He missed our daughter’s confirmation because of too much celebrating with his bowling team the night before. We fought for weeks. I’m still angry at him. He has ruined every vacation we ever took with a temper tantrum about some nonsense he wouldn’t let go of.”
Therapist: “Do you see a pattern in these disasters?”
Client: “No.”
Therapist: “They were all supposed to be happy occasions, and he arranged to have them end in disaster.”
Client: “Did he do it on purpose?”
Therapist: “No. He is operating out of his attitudes, just as you are operating out of yours. He is allergic to happiness, just as you are. He brings about these disasters because it hurts less if he does it to himself.”
Client: “That doesn’t make sense.”
Therapist: “That’s why you can’t make him understand the error of his ways. These are not rational thought processes, these are attitudes and they predispose his behavior without his even knowing they are down there.”
Client: “Just like me.”
Therapist: “Just like you. As I said, you are compatible with people who will confirm and perpetuate your negative expectations of life. Would it make you happy to visit your mother?”
Client: “Yes. I haven’t seen her for three years because of him.”
Therapist: “His good intention is to prevent the disaster that happens when people get too happy at weddings and confirmations. You make him happy. He’s afraid that he’ll lose you and his happiness will end in disaster. These attitudes are causing terrible anxiety. He is out of control. His good intention to over control only brings about more disaster, not less. He doesn’t know how to solve these relationship problems at all.”
Client: “What can I do?”
Therapist: “We have taken the first step. We have identified some of the most likely obstacles to your visiting your mother. You need to understand his attitudes before you can secure his cooperation. Now, you can choose to stop defending, which is your counter productive good intention to make him understand your logic. You can choose to stop doing it the old way and start doing it a new way. You can validate his concerns, his doubts, his anxieties. You can say, ‘I know how you feel when I’m away for a few days, but I’ll be fine. I’ll call you every night and you’ll tell me how everybody is doing, and I’ll be back home before you know it.’ “
Client: “It’s not about me, is it?”
Therapist: “It never was. It’s about him. He can’t give you what you want because it would cause him pain. He doesn’t even understand what is going on below the surface. You can’t make him understand logically.”
Client: “So, I’ll validate him. I know what to do now. “
Therapist: “What’s that called?”
Client: “Confidence.”
Therapist: “Who gave you that confidence?”
Client: “ I guess I did.”
Therapist: “You guess?”
Client: “I did!”
Therapist: “Do you see why we ask so many times, ‘What has to happen first?’ We have to identify the damage so we can repair it the right way. We can’t just paper over it by telling you to be ‘strong’, or ‘stick up for yourself.’”
Client: “I could never take that advice. It only made me feel worse about myself than I did before. It proved I couldn’t trust my own judgment. There was no me here. How can I know what I want if I don’t know who I am? I know who I am now. I’m the one who made that phone call. I know what I want and I deserve to get it, no more and no less than anyone else. I am not stupid. I am smart enough. I don’t have to be any smarter than that.”
Therapist: “Do you see how all of this relates to the problem that brought you in here – to get your husband to love you again? He is allergic to showing love and affection because it might make you happy and there would be a disaster.”
Client: “He’s trying to keep things from happening, just like I did.”
Therapist: “These attitudes are all facets of our self-doubt from childhood.”
Client: “No wonder he couldn’t love me. I didn’t love myself. I didn’t even know who I was. I thought I was unlovable. My own relatives couldn’t love me. How can I turn that around?”
Therapist: “By doing your Homework, by strengthening your self-respect with each success. He cannot respect you more than you respect yourself. If you can outgrow your unhappy carryovers from the past, your lovability will increase considerably. Aren’t you glad you asked for help?”
