What a delight to read Red Schwartz’s article on marital conflict and renew contact here. I met Ted one time 20 or so years ago. Now, two decades later, I find once again that we share similar views. I agree with Ted’s basic thesis that the client’s inherited marital patterns are a primary source of severe couple conflict. Having used an intergenerational approach for 10 years now, I am also convinced that it is not each client’s troubled relationship with one or both parents in childhood that interferes with his or her ability to live happily ever after with a mate in adulthood. The root of the problem is the troubled relationship that existed between the adult parents in the client’s childhood, not the client’s relationship with the parents then.
I appreciate the image of land mines that Ted uses to describe the highly charged marital introjects that are buried deep in the terrain of the current couple’s relationship. Still unresolved, these land mines stayed hidden under ground until stepped on. However, these inherited issues quickly become apparent, and I do mean “a-parent,” when clients begin to describe their parents’ adult-adult relationships during each client’s early childhood. For this reason, I have clients fill in a 10-point genealogical questionnaire before couple counseling sessions even begin. Exploring their parents’ relationships with them assists me in identifying three early imprints in each client: (1) the introjected Inner Adult role model parent, (2) the projected Inner Mate model parent, and (3) the Introjected Interactional Pattern (IIP) learned from this inner Couple pair. Written and verbal histories of their parents’ conflicts provide a map that helps me quickly locate each client’s land mines and pinpoint things that will go boom in the night. Revisiting their parents’ old battlefields with them helps us identify historic issues to be resolved so that, instead of being like their parents, they can become the happy couple they wished their parents had been in their childhoods.
For many years prior to this systematic approach, my couple sessions were based on the traditional belief that marital problems stemmed mainly from the projection onto a partner of the unfinished business with a parent in childhood. But I no longer think marital problems come mainly from parent-child unfinished business. The effect of the parents’ adult-adult relationship has too long been overlooked in couple counseling. I now believe that most couple problems are an introjection of the unhappy relationship between the adult parents in the client’s childhood and the client’s unconscious repetition of the adult role model’s feelings and behaviors with a mate. Consistently, I have found that each client’s Inner Couple interactional behavior is more reflective of the identification with one parent’s personality, and not based on a traditional same sex role modeling. Once I began having clients role play and express their adult role models’ suppressed feelings, like magic, my clients made comparable progress in their own couple relationships.
Like Ted, I had often wondered what triggered disastrous personality shifts in otherwise well-balanced mates. Many years ago, after what I thought was an exceptionally good third session with a young couple, I got the first clue. Two clients left my office in smiles, only to return 5 minutes later with the usually happy-go-lucky wife in tears and the usually reserved husband in rage. “I can’t take it any more. He doesn’t talk to me like a husband should”, she wailed. Not at all calm anymore, he was now red in the face. “I will, when you start acting like a wife should,” he yelled. All I could hear were the shoulds and all I could think was, “According to whom?” What unknown past stimulus had elicited such explosive reactions? Obviously, their responses were way out of proportion to losing their car keys and they knew it.
During the next few couple sessions, as I dug deeper into each client’s childhood looking for parent-child unmet needs, I discovered instead that these same unhealed emotional wounds and angry reactions had also erupted between their parents. Was it just coincidence that both clients had parents with similar couple interactions? No, it was just the first of many introjected repetitions I would find as I studied the negative behaviors learned from the parents’ adult-adult relationships.
Now after 10 years of using an intergenerational approach, I can definitely say from experience that the reason most troubled couples conflict the way they do is that their parents also fought like that, and often over the very same issues. The problem is not only, as Ted says, that troubled couples inherited different couple patterns that clash, but that they inherited similar patterns of how to clash from their parents and then found a mate raised in the same style to do it with. I began to notice how often both clients’ Inner Couple patterns matched; in fact, even previous generations of pairs in the family had one adult like this and one like that. Discovering matching Introjected Interactional Patterns (IIPs) led me to begin writing Why We Pick The Mates We Do, published by the Gestalt Institute Press in 1996.
But it wasn’t until months after that lost key incident that I began to understand why these disastrous personality shifts kept happening. Under the stress of misplacing their car keys, the young couple regressed to the same set of explosive feelings and negative interactions they had seen and heard from their parents in childhood. Rather than join forces to solve the problem, like their parents, they attacked and blamed each other when anything went wrong in their lives. Because their parents had never found a solution for simple problems in their own couple relationships, both my clients had unresolved conflicts handed down as is from their parents. Years later, their parents’ land mines were again being detonated on the field of this young couple’s relationship. If they were not deactivated, they could damage or even destroy it.
I often compare such couple explosions to PTSD, Post traumatic Stress Disorder. Indeed, it is as if one or both clients were having a flashback to their parents’ wars, reacting in shock, and repeating their behaviors in deep trance. Either way, these clients are no longer in their “own” mind. We might better label their flashbacks as PGMD for Previous Generations’ Marital Disorders. I believe that for couple work to be successful, clients must first dig up these land mines and role play their parents’ resolving these old couple battles. Practicing these new positive behaviors as if their parents had really interacted that way in the clients’ childhood memories, created new Inner Couple introjects.
By 1990, all my couple sessions began with interviewing both clients’ parents. Setting up three chairs, I had each client role play, first person, present tense; (1) his or her mother, (2) the father, (3) the child/self introjecting this couple relationship. Both clients role played their imprinted Inner Couple relationship once as it was and then once as each child/self had wanted it to be. Much to their surprise, while role playing, clients not only remembered long forgotten Inner Couple interactions but also released their role model parents’ long repressed feelings and withheld emotions as they resolved their battles.
During the next year, many clients eagerly created and practiced improvements in their parents’ old relationships, and made corresponding improvements in their own. As a result, all my clients now re-pair their Inner Couple introjects before even attempting to work on their current relationship problems. I write a case study describing the first time that I had used this Psychogenetic Model™ exclusively with a couple (Teachworth, 1994) and the lasting, amazing results achieved in only 12 sessions.
One thousand or more case studies later, I can state that Inner Couple “trance-ference” is clearly the answer to why so many otherwise intelligent, caring and well-intentioned couples who really want to improve their relationships had continually failed. Without any positive couple behaviors as precedents, under stress, they could only automatically react in pre-conditional negative ways that they did not understand or even like in themselves. Rarely did they or the counselor realize that these were the same behaviors their parents had exhibited with each other. Still hypnotized in childhood by their parents’ example, whenever they got in a similar situation with their own partner, they had regressed to these old PGMD battlefields. Methods that dealt only with their parent-child issues couldn’t fix their adult-adult couple issues.
I often describe my Psychogenetic Model™ as the Star Trek approach to couple counseling because I invite my clients to boldly go where no couple role models have gone before. The clients can then bring positive advances in their parents’ relationships back into their own current relationship. This intergenerational approach to re-solving their parents’ conflicts through role playing them is met with little or no resistance compared to the difficult ego resistances most often incurred while working directly with a battling couple. By becoming their parents, clients can actually feel the emotional release happening inside their own bodies as they begin genuine communication and solve their parents’ problems for them. Relationship land mines are deactivated and corrective couple memories imprinted to use in future stressful couple situations.
In conclusion, I agree with Ted that Gestaltists need to help couples complete their parents’ unfinished business. Lasting peace can only be achieved by going further back than the previous generation’s traditional counseling approach. When clients re-pair their introjected Inner Couple memories from the past, they are unconsciously improving their own couple interactions in the now. As author Tom Robbins (1980) says in Still Life With Woodpecker, “It’s never too late to have a happy childhood” (p. 277)