THE SECRET LANGUAGE OF RELATIONSHIPS

THE SECRET LANGUAGE OF RELATIONSHIPS

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© April 28, 2011

REFERENCE:

This was written thirty-seven years ago.  What is that the French say, the more things change the more they remain the same.  Our youngest daughter will be thirty-seven in November.  It would be interesting to see how she reads this ancient document.

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“Unhappy are they who struggle, to be persons, not machines, to whom the Universe is not a warehouse, or at best a fancy bazaar, but a mystic temple and hall of doom.”

Thomas Carlyle (1995 – 1881), English essayist, historian, biographer, and philosopher

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Carlyle captures the mood if not the essence of the modern dilemma of relationships.  Nowhere is struggle more apparent than in what is known as married love.  Such love has become incarceration for many role players.  Even advice columnists have seen the mystic temple give way to a hall of doom.

We shall visit some who operate in life consistent with the curious logic of such advisers.  One such adviser confessed recently that her husband of 36 years was giving her the boot.  My only reason for mentioning this is that married love has taken a quantum leap from logic.

Symbolic language may explain reality but it cannot become a substitute.  The word, love, unfortunately has more often replaced the deed, or accepted ritual to say “I love you” without proving it in action.

In this modern age of science, some of us have developed a rational lexicon to avoid commitment if not reduce our personal vulnerability.  Only today I had a client tell me in perfect Master & Johnson speak that he was sensitive to the needs of his wife, and committed to her sexual desires, but they were living together but not speaking.

They continued to have sex but she was over the top with his demands that she say that she loved him.  She claimed she loved him but was suffocating for his demands, which she felt personally cheapened her.  She confessed that she married him, an older man, because he was a good lover and she thought accepted her as she was.  But to her amazement, what she found she needed most, and he couldn’t give her, was a friend.  In an interview with her husband, he said, “I’ve never had a friend myself, how am I expected to know how to be one?”

Friendship starts with accepting ourselves as we are, or being a friend to ourselves before venturing beyond.  It is the key to accepting others.  Self-tolerance is conditional to the tolerance of others.  Self-worth is the gauge by which we measure the worth of others.  Words cannot replace the deed.  You cannot eat the word apple nor live a life on the word love.  Knowledge of self is not self-being.  Good intentions are no substitute for action. 

You cannot push the water.  To confine the water creates pressure, and pressure leads to disruption.  Human emotions are like that water.  If emotions are accepted, embraced and allowed to flow they will seek a natural level and state. 

We have trouble allowing things to flow, to exist as they are, given to tinkering with elements on the fringes while ignoring the gathering flood.  Our mentality is mechanistic, not humanistic.  We have elected to substitute humanistic symbolism to our mechanistic system and wonder why the continuing disruption. 

We have abdicated personal responsibility in our individual fate.  We have elected to have experts chart our course while we remain passively involved.  Experts can intellectualize our worse moments into money with the irony that we believe we are doing something because we are sacrificing our hard earned coin for personal commitment.  Marriage and relationships have become mind games, distraction which we welcome.  The last place husbands and wives look for answers are in one-on-one relationships with each other.  Small wonder problems are seldom resolved.

This is not the fault of experts.  They have surfaced as a result of demand and have been disabused as scapegoats for disenchanted couples.  They expect experts to solve problems that demand change, and change is not in their dictionary.  They are looking for self-justification.  They see love as a commodity like everything else with money the purchase price for a magic product ensuring happiness.

Family, society and civilization find married love as the first card in the tumbling house of cards in modern life threatening our collective survival.  It doesn’t help that married love has never been what it has been purported to be, romantic, but a struggle for equity and fulfillment of two disparate individuals, which are as much at war with themselves as with each other during the long struggle to reach what diplomats call rapprochement.

The case studies that follow are all true.  They deal with sex role identity and role reversal that are common in today’s world.

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BETTY AND BOB

Betty has attempted suicide three times.  Each time she has come closer to this final solution.  Her doctor insists each time was a genuine attempt to do herself in, not a call for help.

Prior to my working with her, she had been in group therapy for five years.  The group became a family substitute for love and affection and understanding not found at home.  She went through the usual emotional changes common to such therapy, falling in love with her doctor, propositioning him, being propositioned by other members of the group, finally involving herself in guilt-ridden petting, and latter remorse for her conduct. 

When she talks about the group, her face lights up.  That is not true when she talks about her own family.

She has two children, 21 and 25, the oldest, a son, and honor student at university suddenly became disoriented and was diagnosed schizophrenic.  He has been institutionalized, but has now been remanded to his parents. 

Betty is a small woman in her late forties with a petite body and a dark, sultry appearance.  Her lips are pencil thin that gives her a cruel look in contrast to her eyes that sparkle with warmth and intelligence.  Her appearance goes from unattractive to beautiful when she smiles, an incongruity that appears consistent with her personality.  She can be petty and cruel one moment, when referring to her husband or children, or warm and vivacious when referring to her past doctors or college professors.

This is how she sees herself:

I was a good Catholic girl.  I never did anything wrong.  I went to Mass and Communion every day, said my prayers, helped the nuns, helped my mother, helped my father, I was always giving, giving, giving.

My father never once held me.  He didn’t like that sort of thing, didn’t think it was manly.  My mother wasn’t very warm either.  She constantly waited on my father. I think he wished I had been a boy.  I’m sorry I disappointed him.

Bob came along when I was sixteen.  He was 22 and going off to war.  I didn’t think much of him.  He was too short, too stocky, and just not my type at all, don’t know what my type is though.  Never dated, can you believe that?  My father wouldn’t let me, then Bob came along.  I quit school and married him, just like that.

God! It was terrific, really fantastic, sex, God!  Do I love sex!  I couldn’t get enough.  I didn’t know what was going on.  I had never once touched my own body, or anything like that.

Well, he went to war, and I moved into an apartment, but I wasn’t make it, and had to move back home, play the little girl role again.  It was awful, still went to church a lot.  But that incredible sexuality of mine, it was there all the time.  But what it did to me, then having him go off like that leaving me behind to suffer.  Anything I would do, I knew, would cheapen me.  God! But how I wanted a man, a boy, anything, anybody. 

Of course, I wouldn’t do anything, but did I think about it, well, it was awful let me tell you. 

Then he came home, got this stupid little job as an insurance salesman, never could do anything right, wasn’t even a very good salesman, still isn’t. 

Now, after all these years, he doesn’t want sex more than once a month, imagine that?  Once a month.  After making me suffer all those years while he was gone, while he was probably fucking some foreigner.  I’ve got the screaming ninnies, I tell you, just thinking about it now, even then sometimes I have to rape him.

But he did give me two damn nice kids I’ll say that for him, even if he beats me sometimes.  Do you know he has beaten me so badly that I’ve had to go to the hospital, not once but several times? 

I hate him but I still need him for economic reasons.  If it wasn’t for that check he brings home every two weeks like a big dope I would have left him long ago.

But the kids, well, they are a drain on me, always taking, taking, taking.  I probably should have been a nun instead of a mother.  I am just not the sympathetic type, you know what I mean, I like to be left alone.  They have been very demanding of me in their very selfish way.

Take Ted now, he thinks of no one but himself, his precious mind has run amuck.  What about my mind?  What about me?  But I have to keep him happy.  There is no time for me. 

Every time Helen comes home from school she eats everything in the house (Helen is in medical school), telling me I don’t appreciate her and what she has accomplished. 

Bob only gives me so much money to run things.  I’m not a magician.  My aunt left me a few dollars.  Bob doesn’t know how much.  I’m going to buy myself a new Buick, some new clothes, and some sexy under things, and have myself a ball.  I deserve it.  I am so happy I am able to go to school (she is in junior college) to develop my intellect.  I love intellectuals.  They are so sexy.  I know I’m jumping around but I’m so happy talking to someone who understands, someone who is not so, well, common, you know what I mean….”

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Bob, for all I can gather, is a carbon copy of Betty’s father, not only physically, but also in attitude and philosophy.  Betty’s father sold insurance, and Bob, like her father, played things close to his vest.  He doesn’t trust anything that has to do with “ologies,” such as psychology and theology much less education in general. 

He came to therapy sessions with Betty but never commented about anything in the five years she attended the group.  He was even put into different groups and still refused to open up.  He would sit there and wait for the session to end to drive his wife home.  He saw the whole process a con game. 

Now, in a session with me, he was unwilling to discuss his boy, except to mention that the boy is a little feminine, thanks to his mother, and not willing to act like a man.  When it was suggested he might have a gentle personality, Bob’s face redden and he got up to go to the bathroom. 

When he returned, the suggestion was repeated making reference to the fact that man came from woman, that most of a child’s adolescent life was spent with a mother, so why the surprise that a child’s personality might display some mirroring of that fact?  He replied, “You shrinks are all alike.”

He became defensive when asked why he went to group therapy sessions with his wife in the first place.  He replied he didn’t like “the wife out alone at night.” 

He was then asked if he was threatened by his wife’s growing independence.  He looked at me curiously.  I mentioned that his wife was getting a new car, had come into some of her own, was going to school, and that she was turning her attention to new fashions in clothes. 

Rather than getting angry, he became nervous.  Finally, he confessed he had an urgent appointment with a client, and left without another word.  He never returned again.

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Betty and Bob display a growing concern in conventional society, especially as it is orchestrated by religion, in this case, Roman Catholicism.  Status role obligations once carefully defined and practiced are changing.  Role-playing in marriage is no longer a linear function with the man as the head of the house, and the women his obliging and loyal partner.  Nor is the sexual act any longer locked safely away as primarily the exclusive domain of procreation, but now for pleasure as well. 

It has been said that love was locked out of Catholicism as any deviance from sexual congress with birth control devices resulted in Mortal Sin.  There was no place for love and therefore no place for lust as the focus for Catholic guilt was a frontal attack on carnality.

Today, in 1974, a more permissive society has evolved in which sins of the flesh have taken on a peculiar character and identity for the Catholic over forty.  It is a conflict between the ways it was to the way it is today.  The sense of being cheated, mainly by women, is a common complaint today. 

Bob is unsympathetic to this disposition partly out of ignorance and partly out of malice.  He wants things the way they were, like Betty’s father.  The irony is that he was a convert to Roman Catholicism as was Betty’s father.  Neither of them fully understood, or were interested in learning of the anguish and conflict of the born Catholic and the Catholic mentality that vies between guilt and lust to find some traction and satisfaction in their sexuality. 

Betty had a great sexual awakening at 16.  Sex was found terrific but the nuptial role was devoid of romance and courtship, or fantasy that she later sought in group therapy.  At sixteen, her body was ready to be a woman but not her mind and heart.

Now, she is trying to regain this loss as a middle-aged woman, embracing the feminine movement while remaining prisoner to a morality that no longer exists. 

Bob uses her conflicting dilemma against her.  Betty believes she stays with him for financial reasons when she is more prisoner of her Catholicism.  Like a little girl, she says, “Bob has no idea what time I came in last night, or what I was doing.  He thinks I’m such a frivolous girl, don’t you know, so shameless and impulsive.”

Of course, quite the converse is true.  Bob knows she has a horrible fear of dying with moral sin on her soul, that she doesn’t believe in divorce, that his best watchdog is her conscience.  He knows she desires other men, how could he not know as often as she is reminding him?  In his quiet, and imprisoning way, he has her under control. 

The last two times she has gone to the hospital due to an overdose, a neighbor had to bring her, as he refused with the rationale, “She won’t kill herself because that is a moral sin and against her religion.”

Meanwhile, Betty continues to seek a happiness pill that does not exist.  She blames everyone for her pain but herself.  Since she has received some reinforcement from her doctors “as being sick,” this has become a favorite role.

This family is held together by mental illness and little else.  Helen, the sane one, is aware of this irony.  Helen does not date, has little patience with her family, much less with anyone else.  She hides in her studies. 

Last summer, Helen went to Ireland totally on her own with little money, worked her way across the country, and loved it.  She is cheerful but guarded, intelligent but suspicious, delightful but manipulative.  She finds older men more appealing than younger men, seems not to be restrained by religious morality, or the values of her parents.  She takes pride in being her own person, and being unlike any member of her family.  Affection is her weakest expression, and as intelligent as she seems to be, she is unaware she is damaged.

Ted has found a role for himself in his mental illness.  He did not want to come home.  When he told his mother this, she promptly took an overdose of sleeping pills.  He takes particularly pride in that his doctors see him as suicidal, which to him means he has escaped the dogma trap of his religion.

It is all a game to him.  His personality test data lack internal integrity suggesting an attempt to manipulate the results.  While showing no initiative, no active I.Q., and very limited attention span, Ted managed in the “Draw-a-Person” exercise to display a classical appreciation of the schizophrenic personality.  He produced a picture of his father in a business suit, drawing a picture of himself, which was the converse of this.

It would appear that in the shrinking of American society into a pill factory bazaar that the “ologies” have become “a mystic temple and hall of doom” catering to their every need.  This is but one example of what we most feared, becoming the soul of the machine.

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NOTE:

Thirty-seven years ago, I wrote on two other cases, which I may revisit again to give a perspective on LOOKING BACKWARD TO SEE AHEAD, which incidentally was the title of my 2007 book..