Existential Perspectives on Relationship Therapy

Emmy van Deurzen, Susan Iacovou

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781350305724
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychotherapy
• Index: Psychology

Human beings live in constant battle with issues that are fundamental to their existence and couples who seek relationship therapy are looking for a way to reconnect with one another and understand the existential predicaments that they each face. In this inspiring book, Emmy van Deurzen and Susan Iacovou bring together world renowned therapists to demonstrate how existential theories can improve therapeutic practice. Each contributor explores their own unique existential approach to relationship therapy, drawing on the great thinkers that have informed their work - from Socrates to Sartre - and revealing some of their most profound practice with their clients. Whether you are a student, trainee, or experienced counsellor, this a ground-breaking book will enrich and transform your work with relationships.

PART I

ADDRESSING THE CHALLENGES OF RELATEDNESS IN EXISTENTIAL RELATIONSHIP THERAPY

CHAPTER 1

The Challenge of Human Relations and Relationship Therapy: To Live and to Love

EMMY VAN DEURZEN

Introduction

Existential relationship therapy is based in dialogue. Partners are invited to explore what it means to them to live with another person in a loving way. They are encouraged to face their conflicts, doubts, fears and sense of failure. Relationships get better to the extent that we learn to calmly and confidently consider the contradictions, dilemmas and difficulties that inevitably arise in loving another person. While sharing some core assumptions about what it means to exist in the world and to be in relationship, each existential therapist tends to shape and fine-tune her own unique way of working with clients.

In this chapter I will describe my personal way of working with couples, which has evolved over four decades of reflective practice. Invariably, my objective is to help each person to get better at being close to the other by learning to respect, understand, value and love both self and other in a new way. In this process all aspects of life come into focus as partners become increasingly able to find their way across the divide, exploring the paradox of distance and intimacy, getting to know themselves and speaking about what matters to them most deeply.

What is love?

The crux of the matter is always the idea we have of love and the way this clashes with our actual experience of it. People come together because they love each other or believe they can learn to love each other. Their troubles begin when they realize that there are many different ways of loving and many layers of love in the world. When people find that to fall in love is one thing but to build a loving relationship quite another, they often give up or fall out of love. Lowering the expectations we have of each other and starting from scratch in discovering what is possible in living with an other are a good start to any existential relationship therapy. Partners need to accept that loving and living together is inevitably shot through with disappointments and problems. Though at the outset of the work they may feel that they are not loved enough, they may come to realize that they have also not been very expert at doing the loving. Many existential authors have written about intimate relationships and love. The classic existential texts on the subject are still invaluable (see, for instance, Fromm, 1995; May, 1969; Solomon and Higgins, 1991; Deurzen, 1998).

As human beings get better at understanding and formulating their experience of loving and being loved new ideas are being added and new insights are gained. Each of us sooner or later discovers the limits of love, even as we hope for a love that is deep and strong. To love another person is to be dedicated to knowing and valuing the other for what they are and can be, allowing them to live as fully and freely as possible, keeping their welfare at heart, as our own, in a full, attentive and uncompromising way. But this does not mean we can forget to look after our own well-being, for we cannot love unless we love ourselves first. Nor should we become complacent about the risks inherent in taking advantage of the other’s good will and availability, or indeed the risk we take when we allow ourselves to be taken advantage of. Love is the movement towards the other in the spirit of care, affection, commitment, generosity, kindness, intimacy, tenderness and attachment. But it is not blind. When love is blind, it is not love but craving for something that might save us from ourselves. Such craving may lead to love but it is not love in and of itself. Love is hard earned and continuously tested and tried through the challenges of life. It needs to be learnt and requires active engagement.

The paradox is that in order to truly love someone, you first have to learn to love yourself and that if you want to find real closeness with another you have to be able to affirm your freedom. If you want to live in peace with another, you have to be willing to face up to the conflicts between you. If you want to learn to communicate you have to learn to be in silence together and listen. If you want love to flourish you must recognize that love is a way of being as well as a feeling and that the feeling is fleeting and will wax and wane, whereas the attitude and active process of being loving is something that requires consistency, continuity and dedication. For it to thrive it also requires reciprocity.

What is existential relationship therapy?

Existential relationship therapists demonstrate a loving way of being through their attentive, fair and frank attitude towards both partners. They show the importance of matching a loving way of being with a wise, considered and considerate way of being. But they do not avoid confrontation, and they model the courage to be truthful and challenging in a respectful manner. They also show an optimistic view of human relationships by expecting (and sometimes predicting) difficulties whilst always stimulating and valuing the partners’ ability to deal with them creatively.

The start of every piece of relationship work is that of establishing where each of the partners in that relationship has come from, where they currently find themselves and where they see themselves going. We listen to the story each partner tells us and explore it from a number of different perspectives. By constantly checking each narrative from different angles, a natural process of verification is set into motion and new facets of the old stories are shown up, engaging partners afresh with each other. Partners will soon get the hang of this and start being far more open to different possible interpretations of reality, no longer feeling marred or hampered by their difference or by the old chestnuts that previously frustrated or bored them. They become encouraged to look at each other with curiosity and may even have a sense of exhilaration at the possibilities this opens up. This is one fantastic advantage of the phenomenological way of working: each aspect of what is under consideration has multiple angles and many doors through which to enter into new knowledge and new understanding.

Existential therapy uncovers the life expectations and values that each partner entered the relationship with and establishes how each had hoped that the other might help them to achieve these objectives and projects and where they feel this is failing. What this means in raw terms is that the therapist listens out for where the pain is, tracing how each partner feels hurt and identifying where their secret longing is. It is important to make each partner feel safe enough to speak from the heart, without attacking or reproaching but without holding back for fear of retaliation. We help them to bring their hopes and longings out of their darkness and into the light. What is it that makes them feel overlooked, or offended or upset or taken for granted or exploited? If you can hear what the partner cannot yet hear and bring it out into the open and if you can translate and give voice to what has been left unsaid, something entirely new will come into the room and the relationship that was shut tight, will slowly start to open.

Quite often the therapy is purely about helping people to find the concepts and the words to communicate their experience, helping them to stop fighting and start describing their sorrow and fear and begin to search for common ground. In this process it is important to pay attention to the way in which partners tend to place responsibility for disappointments in the other. As in individual therapy, each partner needs encouragement to find the strength to start seeing their own role in creating the misunderstandings and disenchantments. This is never about accusations of pathology or pointing of fingers, but always about helping partners to bridge their lack of insight or understanding about both self and other. As soon as a person feels enabled to take responsibility for what is going wrong, they can also take charge of what can be put right.

My starting point with relationship work

I began working with couples in the early seventies, when my ex-husband Jean Pierre Fabre (a psychiatrist, who was to become a psychoanalyst) and myself worked together in the Psychotherapeutic Centre, la Candelie, in Agen, in the South West of France. We worked together, with couples that were deeply troubled and confused in relation to the attempted suicide of the wife. Marriage in France in the early seventies was a very patriarchal institution in which men were dominant. Both partners in the twelve couples we worked with at that time, without exception, viewed the wife’s suicide attempt as a failure on her part. The husbands (several of them agricultural workers) typically considered their wife to be a domestic animal they had acquired and found to be defective. The husbands often dealt with their own despair over having failed to find the right woman to support their hard work on the land by acting aggressively to try to punish their wife or by abandoning her and taking on a lover, or drinking with their friends or otherwise withdrawing from the relationship and getting on with some hobby or task. They frequently felt deep shame at their wive’s suicide attempts. The women behaved in a broadly submissive manner, many of them feeling incompetent and incapable, using terms like ‘I am soiled goods’ or ‘I am no good’ or ‘I am nothing but a disappointment to my husband’. But the despair in both partners was normally dismissed by the psychiatric system as secondary to the ‘attention seeking behaviour’ of the wife. My direct contact with these women showed me that they were indeed seeking urgent attention and were desperate to find someone who would listen to their story and understand their plight and who could help them find some self-esteem, some hope and a reason to live in their own right. When I began to listen to the men, separately at first, I heard equally great despair in them. Though they were generally more strong-minded and angry rather than just desperate, several of them came to the edge of sanity and suicide themselves. I was shocked by the massive amount of misunderstanding and despondency about relationships that seemed to abound in both the men and the women and was determined to learn from it and tackle it in a philosophical rather than a medical manner.

Work with the husbands involved listening questioningly to their sense of failure, showing them they could release themselves from their suffering by giving up a worldview that forced them to see their wives as dysfunctional live-stock or badly made vehicles. It involved helping them appreciate their wife’s sensitivity, her capacity for other things than keeping the house or minding the kids, the geese or the cows. With the women it often involved releasing them from a bitter sense of their malfunction: this could often be achieved by inviting them to think about themselves and their talents and abilities anew. Sexuality and religion invariably played an important role in these discussions. The women were frequently bound by catholic ideas about not being allowed to use birth control. The men were often hugely sexually frustrated and angry about having no sex at home and then being reproached for seeking it elsewhere. Some of the women had just given in to their husbands’ sexual demands, without any enjoyment and then had secret abortions, which they would feel terrifically guilty about. Many of the women bought into the assumption that they should be a good wife, mother and partner in the household (which often meant playing a secondary, supporting role on the farm or in the husband’s business) and satisfy the husband’s sexual needs as well.

Whenever they defaulted on any of these perceived duties, they began to feel incompetent and second rate. The women who had attempted suicide, without exception, felt deficient and condemned by their husbands for not being able to cope with all these demands. They felt impotent and bad for not being able to cope with absences, infidelities and unwanted sexual practices that damaged them whilst also struggling to raise their children almost single-handedly as their husbands dealt with farming issues or with other demanding jobs such as that of travelling salesman. Having been caught in a vicious circle of negative feedback and self-reproach they became embittered and gave up on life. They felt flawed and defective. And so too did their husbands, for having chosen the wrong wife, or for being unable to push their woman a bit harder or cajole her into obedience.

The first thing I learnt from working in this context was that interpreting other people’s difficulties through a theoretical model was not a very useful method for progressing. Applying psychoanalytic concepts would alienate these people and make them feel even worse about themselves. They felt offended and incapacitated by any suggestion that they were unable to cope and generally did not really want to be hospitalized or medicated. They just wanted to find a better way forward. They did not want expensive divorces. They did not want to lose their children or be the outcast in their community for having been in the psychiatric hospital.

The second thing I learnt was that each partner needed to feel equally important and fairly heard. Both partners had suffered greatly by the time they came to talk about their relationship to a psychologist and they often felt great shame at their failure to manage their family life. I began to see that assuring them of their ability to make sense of what had gone wrong was most important. In existential terms they needed someone to put things into perspective and to enable them to feel they were both in the right and that it did not have to be a fight to the death between them. They could both come out with their heads held high, if they could only just agree that it was life that was difficult and wrong and that they needed each other to make it all work out.

The third thing I learnt was that conflict was an inevitable part of relationships and an aspect of human relations that people are afraid of and try to avoid. My own tendency was, and is, towards peace making, even if it means fitting in and swallowing your pride. I learnt that this is not good enough and that people can and should demand more than that from life. We need to learn to stand up for ourselves and have our voice heard before we accommodate to the other voice. I realized that partners got much stronger as soon as they allowed each other to have and express different views without blaming each other for these different departure points.

And finally, the fourth thing I learnt was that couples were rarely aware of their own worldviews and way of being. Many people find it very difficult to begin to formulate or even imagine why they feel the way they do. Some do not even want to name their feelings, as they think of these as a nuisance. Even when they do speak about their situation they often have little real grasp of what they believe and value and what they assume as given or take for granted. I realized how important it was to show each partner what the other partner felt and dreaded and hoped for in private, creating a space where they were able to speak freely and with confidence of being understood.

My way of practising existential relationsh...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Table
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Setting the Scene – Relatedness from an Existential Perspective
• Part I Addressing the Challenges of Relatedness in Existential Relationship Therapy
• Part II Applied Existential Relationship Therapy
• Conclusions and Synthesis: A Developing Model of Existential Relationship Therapy
• Index