Common Ground for the Sexual Couple
Author: Granite 5
Author: Granite 5
by Helena Lvendal and Nick Duffell, couples therapy
An article similar to this was published in Therapy Today,Vol. 18 No. 8, October 2007. How great to have so much of Therapy Today devoted to couples and to sexuality - hopefully the beginning of an ongoing theme, since relationships are our universal preoccupation. And yet, reading the diversity of approaches we wonder how Julys issue might leave counsellors who are not familiar with couple-work, since some of the directions taken might feel too disparate to weave together. In this short response we would like to build on the work begun and address some of what we see as inconsistencies, in order to open a dialogue to find some common ground for couple-work. The adult sexual couple How should we understand the word couple? Couple-counselling is aimed at partners who attempt to pursue a sexual relationship together, whether they are currently engaging in sexual acts or not, whatever gender they are. It is not the same brief as working with a mother and daughter. Such a dyad is indeed a challenge for any worker, even a family therapist, but it is generally not what couples workers are trained for. Couples are therefore defined by their sexual contract, and - in the West - formed by the energy of sexual choice, desire and attraction. In Attachment, couples and the talking cure, Christopher Cullow and his colleagues Tavistock show that they have expertly refined and traced the patterns of attachment within couplesi. This is important, but only part of the story, since by definition attachment issues concern infantcaregiver dyads, or, in psychoanalytic terms, the pre-Oedipal world of the individual. The illustration congruently shows a toddler, but a couple is a sexual unit, which means they engage genitally. In other words, their issues are principally Oedipal and regularly involve puberty issues as well as early issues, and of course a plethora of adult existential, relational and everyday challenges. Of course, the flight from the difficulties of intimacy will often cause partners to regress, retracing well-worn paths towards isolation and safety, and the worker must follow them. The point remains that adult intimacy specifically involves sexual energy, and, in focussing solely on attachment issues, couple-workers risk colluding with the regressive tendency. Reductionism is something that we need to be particularly aware of, since in Britain our profession has tended to focus almost exclusively on the mother-baby dyad, unlike other more adult-oriented in Europe or Scandinavia. Winnicott, Klein, Bowlby, and others all did ground-breaking work, but shied away from the more embarrassing concerns of adult sexuality, and in consequence were unable to build on the pioneering (if crude) legacy of original Freudianism. The result is that even within the profession, rather than dealt with in an adult context, sexual issues became pathologised and split off, and thereby over-charged thus replicating the religious effect on sexuality. This is an all too real issue in society in Britain where, according to the recent Unicef report, we have the least happy children in the developed world and the highest incidents of teenage pregnancy to say nothing of the prevalence of child sexual abuseii. So in counselling we need to be alert to a tendency to continue this split. And in Britain we still tend either to talk about couples and relationships or we talk about sex it often seems too difficult to bring them together. Our teenage children would rightly smell a rat. Apart from the excellent piece by Esther Perrel, Erotic Intelligence, in which she provokes us to imagine we might even dare to have the sex we fancy within our own relationships, the way the articles unfold in Therapy Today does seem to place the reader quivering on the edge of this trap Such an approach risks misleading the reader, for sexual and unfinished Oedipal issues invariably crop up in relationships, and therapists have to face them. We have had people in long-term trainings coming to us to get help with Oedipal replays that their own therapists would not deal with. We suggest that all counselors need to get more comfortable with addressing such things. On examination, many of these issues come down to parental failure in allowing their children to be mirrored as sexual beings. After years of pondering this issue, we conclude that Freuds emphasis on the childs compulsion to possess the parent was misplaced. Most often it is the parents jealousy or sexual paralysis that gets played out and needs to reworked in the individuals own sexual relationship years later. Maturation and transformation If we dont have an adult model of sexual couplehood then we cannot have a model of development and health, and we cannot fully engage in the world in which todays couples experience themselves. Despite their long and important history, some of the Tavistocks recent publications on couplework defy belief in their persistent reductionism see the recent Oedipus & the Couple, 2005 iv. It is hard to imagine, in face of what we know today, that the great British psychoanalysts would have supported such an approach to sexuality. For sure the British public wont, now accustomed to the hands-on approach in the style of some of the excellent sex and parenting therapists who have currently materialised on television shows, like Maria Schopman on BBC3s Sex with Mum and Dad. In fact, there are good adult models and more inclusive ways of thinking about couples, for example in 1984 the Tavys own Stan Ruszinski clearly said that for him, while the prototype of relationships is the mother-child dyad, the purpose of life is maturation; maturation is the healthy trianglev So what does maturity consist of? And if we are unclear about what maturity is for an individual then what does maturation consist of in a couple? Is it the withdrawing of projections, the toleration of imperfection? Perhaps, like the Jungians, it is useful to think about individuation as well as maturation.The great Joseph Campbell asserted that marriage was about transformation rather than happiness, and that intimate relationships provide a supremevehicle for psychic completion. Harville Hendrix, as ably reported by Nick Willatt, in Prioritising & promoting connection, draws on this context and shows how the psychoanalytic idea of the couple marrying disowned parts of themselves becomes a field for disappointment and subsequent exploration by the curious and creative couple-workervii.viii This, he and other modern theorists assert, is the royal route out of the immature (but inevitable) field of projection. This potential is clearly an adult challenge, both for couples mired in the difficulties as well as for the worker attempting to help the couple make sense and manage the endeavour. But there is a bonus: common sense supports the notion that although intimacy in long-term relationships is invariably problematic, relationships encourage, even force individuals to mature, both emotionally and sexually. Current Affairs Experienced couple-workers recognise that commitment is a key element for partners wishing to grow together and individuate. But what should such commitment consist of? Can anyone else tell a couple what rules to have? Clearly not. Yet being in a couple is a difficult enterprise, and boundaries, as we know, ultimately serve safety. It is laudable to challenge normative ideas in order to relate to current culture, as Michael Shernoff does in Negotiated Monogamy & male coupleixs. So-called open relationships also challenge cultural stereotypes and may therefore be important. And yet, let us be realistic: most couples expect a contract which is monogamous, for the simple practical reason that in life you need somewhere to pitch your tent. Relativism cannot help us here. We have heard accounts of open experimentation from the psychoanalytic commune movement and communal experiments of Otto Muhl, Rajneesh, Findhorn and more recently Zegx. Many of these ideologies based themselves on the premise that ownership of another human being was politically odious, and that the erroneous jealousies arising from many-partnered sexual acts could be processed. In practice, this was always unsustainable, and there are good reasons why. The chief one is highly pragmatic: adult intimacy is already hard enough as it is. Try a simple test: Imagine that you are a child from an open relationship. And how would it feel if your parents had sex with multiple partners? Similarly, can the inner children of those participating bear it? In other words, at the attachment level is it likely to work? Does bringing in a third sexual partner help the cause of maturation? Perhaps very evolved beings can manage it, but can you as a worker? Is it not more human to realise our frailty, address our limitations? This does not involve judgement, as Shernoff seems to fear; it invokes compassion. Besides, if you have worked for long enough with couples as a worker you will see how the tendency to act out or bring in a third partner for support (better a couple-worker than a lover, perhaps!) crops up again and again. Inadvertently, Shernoff highlights one really important point. If the worker is over-preoccupied with his own ideological stance he may fail to properly see his couple. Sexual freedom is a fine notion, particularly for young people in the experimentation stage, but is it worth the expense of dropping the couples relationship? Here again we seem to have the same splitting choice: either sex or relationship, but not both. And which is sexier, the knowledge that my partner wants to have different kinds of sex, or that he wants have sex with ME? Instead of being busy fighting the notion of normalised sexuality, why cannot the worker in the case study quoted encourage the couple to embrace different stances (reductively deployed in the account as top and bottom) so that the couple explores and plays with the balance between masculine and feminine energies? These are issues that every couple has to contend with, whether same or different-sex. Its the relationship that is the client Adult sexuality is full of enormous polarisations like giving/receiving, initiating/retreating, mother/whore, etc., which can easily become crystallised and lose their dynamism, or become a field for selfexploration and maturation. In the same paper that we quoted earlier, Ruszinski demonstrates how working with a strikingly similar case in a heterosexual couple revealed itself as the polarity between the attractions/ repulsions to that which the partners had most feared in themselves. The couple could not bear this tension until the therapists helped them understand the history and function of these disavowals, rather than act them out in other sexual partnerships. This can be exactly the point where couples will present for counselling, since they need help in getting unstuck. To promote going outside their relationship risks forgetting the first golden law of couplework its the relationship that is the client. It is crucial for counsellors not to loose their couples relationship while trying to stay tuned into cultural differences. In fact, couple-workers we have spoken to seem on balance to note from clinical experience that same-sex couples share many more similarities to heterosexual couples than differences. This brings us back to where we started, since it is being in a sexual couple, being in an intimate relationship that is more challenging than the choice of partner. It is intimacy that provides the challenge, as well as its attendant skills that need to be learned balancing independence and dependence, autonomy and sharing, inner and outer boundaries, and so on. Such issues appear to be universal. We might go as far as saying that, once the crucial issue of social acceptance has been achieved, the only difference is that the same-sex couple does not have the added the difficulties of a partner with a gendered body and a gendered imagination that is other. But as Campbell reminds us, in an intimate relationship this can be a recipe for impasse or a lever for transformation. The choice is up to the couple, and, if in therapy, skill of their counsellor. Power and feelings If we stick with our definition of a couple as a sexual unit it implies that a couple is also a creative force. Even if the couple is not going to bear children they have generative power. Therefore, in working with couples, counsellors have the ability to affect what a couple creates together, which can have a knock-on effect through the wider family and thereby coming generations. This same power is also part of the difficulty, because workers have to be fully on their toes to be able to deal with tons of emotion, deep conflict and real life issues, which in individual work often are only referred to. In couple-work the worker feels it, and as the great Karl Whittaker recommended, has to charge of thingsxi In Emotion in couple therapy, Sue Johnston outlined an excellent methodological framework, and rightly prioritised couples emotional entanglementsxiii. Herstructured approach is just what a worker needs not to get lost when faced with the enormity of emotion either held, expressed or projected - that a couple brings. Particularly useful is the focus on the power dynamics often you see more power than love and have to work hard to bring back the love which can get stranded on the shore of lonely longing. Working to help the couple de-escalate Johnson demonstrates the skill in helping couples caught in what we call (after Winkelman and Stone) Bonding Patterns paradoxically helping individuals find strength enough to become vulnerable. The only point to ponder on here is again to think of the counsellor new to couple-therapy. Is the reader to imagine that a couple usually leaves their emotions outside the door and the counsellor goes along with this? No, the couple-worker usually has to learn brand new skills to manage the session with the amount of feelings in the room, so the EFT technique is welcome. But is this a distinct therapy in itself, or a methodology that needs to be incorporated as part of any couple-workers tool kit? The Authors Helena Lvendal Srensen and Nick Duffell founded The Centre for Gender Psychology in 1996 and train Creative CoupleWorkers in the UK and Scandinavia. They are the authors of Sex, Love, and the Dangers of Intimacy, which now appears in several languages. They can be contacted on: www.creativecouplework.com & info@genderpsycholgy.com 2007 The Centre for Gender Psychology 6 Find out more about couples therapyAbout the Author: