It makes sense that if a relationship cannot achieve some sense of stability, the relationship will not be good or satisfying. Stability in relationships is like a foundation for a house. Although a solid foundation does not guarantee that the house it supports will be solid as well, if the foundation is unstable, it is impossible for the house itself to stand firm and strong. Likewise, a relationship in which conflict is handled in such a way that we do not harm each other and resolve issues successfully does not guarantee satisfaction. However, if we cannot achieve stability in the relationship and are constantly in conflict, then satisfaction is certain to be low.1 (The Essential Humility of Marriage Terry D. Hargrave Ph.D.)
Most of the research at this early stage in relational therapy has focused on conflict and dissolution as the standard of effectiveness. Stability is indeed essential to success. But stability is different from satisfaction. The fact is that the quality of surviving relationships is very poor. 70% of divorcing couples are not highly conflictual according to Amato and Booth. The lack of dissatisfaction lies in the inability to achieve reliability and by extension trustworthiness. This results in us attacking each other personally, which can cause relational stability to disintegrate, or perhaps more commonly, impels us to drift into activities that we can accomplish individually without relying on our relational partners. Alienation and the drift into islands of self-protection, initiates the slow collapse of emotional connection. For many of us, this serves as a justification in not risking the possibility of closeness in the first place; a kind of preemptive isolation, before the relationship ever has a chance to develop. This leaves us with a controlled loneliness. It is much easier to control my own dissatisfaction through self-imposed loneliness, than it is for me to control dissatisfaction through rejection or betrayal or insensitivity from a far more unpredictable outside source. The problem of course, is that through isolation, I am never truly present in any relationship. I may have contact with people, but it is always at a safe distance and void of my ever being truly present, ever truly being "here" and "now". In this position, we view others from a distance, like things, parts of the environment, forged into chains of causality, partitioned from the possibility of authentic encounter. My relationships become characterized as "I-It" relationships made up of one sided observations rather than intimate exchange. Trustworthiness is limited in this context. Trustworthiness is not something that descends upon us but rather rises up between people; it does not inflict itself upon reality in the form of rules to be followed but rather derives from the lived reality that exists between persons. 2(The Essential Humility of Marriage Terry D. Hargrave Ph.D.)
To quote Buber "In spite of all similarities every living situation has, like a newborn child, a new face, that has never been before and will never come again. It demands nothing of what is past. It demands presence, responsibility; it demands you." This is at the heart of authentic connection and is the path through which trustworthiness can be cultivated.
People in relationship expect a response. One person's failure to respond to the other, withholding responses or attacking responses, has consequences whether intended or not. Short of suicide or psychoses that absent a person from the everyday world, every human being carries a responsibility to respond. By response, I do not mean casual reactions to one another, I mean an active engaged fully present connected response that takes into consideration all of who you are and all of who I am and from that place of awareness, I respond. When two relating partners routinely abandon their respective responsibility to respond, they injure the order of their existence in common. When truth is withheld, trust is diminished, justice is ruptured, and guilt is incurred. My wife and I are a case in point. Both of us had a feeling of guilt, that was, we felt discomfited, burdened, regretful, even somewhat responsible. But neither of us was inclined to be responsible for responding to our painful situation. Blaming one another for the guilt feelings that we each suffered served to deepen our already considerable estrangement.
We met after being involved in a string of other relationships. In our early thirties, we felt ready for marriage, enjoyed each other-especially sexually-and quickly were at war. My wife wanted to have a baby, I wasn't sure. As a firstborn of a Protestant, middle-class family, I felt burdened by past and present expectations. My wife, the only daughter of a traditional Roman Catholic family, a successful behavioral expert, was mandated to success by her family of origin. Two years into our marriage, the two of us were at a dead end. My wife began therapy as a means toward getting pregnant, and I began therapy to find a sympathetic ear. I expected to be relegated to the status of sperm donor. Why would my wife need me once we had a child? My wife felt pressed by the passage of time and the demands of her biological clock. The death of her father heightened her commitment to produce a child.
Within the year we had a little boy. In a weak moment, my wife explained, "I got Brent to have sex with me. It's a miracle that I became pregnant. We haven't had sex since." I felt exploited, my wife felt rejected, and our son had become the repository of hisparents' broken trust. My worst fears about what would occur between my wife and I once we had a child seemed to be coming true. Bound by heavy financial obligations we both had full-time jobs. My wife blamed me for "making" her go back to work. I resented how she doted on my son and blatantly disregarded me. I was used, I felt, to get my wife pregnant and then was discarded and dismissed. My wife felt unpursued, bereft of intimacy, ill considered. Neither of us could imagine our own contributions to what had broken down. Once overly responsible children, we were now depleted and vindictively entitled disregarded me. I was used, I felt, to get my wife pregnant and then was discarded and dismissed. My wife felt unpursued, bereft of intimacy, ill considered. Neither of us could imagine our own contributions to what had broken down. Once overly responsible children, we were now depleted and vindictively entitled adults. Both of us were convinced that we had given far more than we had received. We were justified then to take what we could get however we could get it. Neither one of us was able to take the single step of inner feelings, beyond the self's relation to self. Were we able to move from simply feeling guilt to use our feeling to prod us toward mitigating guilt, we could transform our almost automatic reactivity into response. Taking responsibility for response might have closed the distance between us. Taking initiative-whether or not it is reciprocated-could have mitigated guilt and opened up new options. In point of fact, my wife and I felt injuries were secondary to the guilt incurred by the fact that we did not address each other. Whether we withdrew into hurt silence or issued a barrage of blame was incidental to the fact that we were choosing to disengage. No responsibility here, only disappointment and a frightened thrust toward flight. Still, the threat of divorce had awakened us to the guilt of disengagement. And awareness of that guilt catalyzed our will to reconnect.
We used guilt feelings to substitute for an ethical obligation to respond. Both of us deeply longed to make our connection work. Failing the imagination to disclose our suffering without accompanying blame, we fell silent or attacked. Whatever residual trust remained between us eroded under the onslaught of our hurt and judgmental words. Ours was a never ending spiral of bitter lamentation. Our feeling had become the overriding basis for how we treated each other. The more we reacted to our own guilt feelings, the further removed we were from identifying our personal portions of guilt in this particular situation. A life devoted to compiling guilt feelings invariably obscured the way toward a stance of trustworthy response.
There is an uninvited presence that accompanies awareness of responsibility. That presence is guilt, the dark shadow of responsibility, which often trespasses into the process of relating and authentic dialogue. In this context guilt assumes a somewhat different meaning from its meaning in the traditional sense, where it refers to a feeling state related to a sense of wrongdoing-a pervasive, highly uncomfortable state which has been described as anxiety plus a sense of badness. An important distinction should be made between neurotic guilt and real guilt or, between guilt and guilt feelings. Guilt feelings emanate from imagined transgressions (or minor transgressions that are responded to in a disproportionately powerful manner) against another individual, against ancient and modern taboos, or against parental or social tribunals. Real guilt flows from an actual transgression against another. Though the subjective "feeling" experience is similar, the meaning and the management of these forms of guilt are very different: guilt feelings/neurotic guilt must be approached through a working through of the sense of badness, the unconscious aggressivity, and the wish for punishment; whereas real guilt must be met by actual or symbolically appropriate reparation.
As we become fully accepting of responsibility for our actions we broaden the scope of guilt by diminishing escape hatches. No longer can I comfortably stand outside of my relationships and rely on such alibis as: "I didn't mean it," "It was an accident," "I couldn't help it," "I followed an irresistible impulse." Thus real guilt and its role in our relationships require us to enter into actual dialogue unprotected; beyond the reach of disengagement through assumption or seeming.
But the concept of "real guilt" adds something even more important than the broadening of the scope of "accountability." Most simply: we are guilty not only through transgressions against another or against some moral or social code, but we may be guilty of transgressions against ourselves. We are guilty to the same extent that we are responsible for ourselves and our world. When the call of conscience is heard (that is, the call that brings us back to facing our authentic mode of being), we are always "guilty"-and guilty to the extent that we have failed to fulfill our full possibility. Guilt is a positive constructive emotion. It is a perception of the difference between what a thing is and what it ought to be. It is compatible with, even necessary for, mental health. When we deny our potentialities our condition is guilt. But how, then, are we to find our potential? How do we recognize it when we encounter it? How do we know when we have lost our way? Through guilt! Through the call of conscience! Through our relational anxiety! Avoiding this state through distance, through impulse, through compulsion, through blaming, through placating only underscores the guilt even more and chokes our own possibility and the possibility of "us." And as was the case with my wife and I, each time our essential core was denied or suppressed, we got sick, sometimes in obvious ways sometimes in subtle ways. Our core, our authentic selves, is delicate and subtle and easily overcome by habit and cultural pressure. Even though we may deny our core, it will persist underground, forever pressing for actualization. Every falling away, every crime against our nature records itself in our unconscious and makes us guiltier.
In the case of my wife and I, we relieved our guilt by committing to dialogue, whatever its outcome. Our prior relational mode of relying on our personal monologues only underscored our guilt feelings and predetermined our outcome. We had been operating under the premise of "if I don't respond (using distance, blame, sarcasm, neglect, judgment, assumption and seeming as a substitute), I will never have to hear that I am not who you want me to be-even if I already know that in a given situation I was not who I want me to be.
Guilt feelings confined me to the boundaries of my own psyche, and eroded my freedom to take fresh soundings of trust. Even more, my guilt feelings made little room for my wife's differentiated life. As the bearer of constant guilt feelings I was unable to allow for the independent existence of a bond between myself and my wife. My guilt feelings were a statement of hopelessness over never being able to do enough to earn favor or merit. We were bitterly disappointed in each other and ourselves. I remember my wife's words echoing through the therapy room, "I love you, but you can't keep living this way. You have to be a real man, a real father and a real husband." My reaction was tinged with defensiveness, "I know you love me, but nothing I ever do is right. When we were dating you thought I was cute and adorable, but look at the way you see me now." My wife and I were so invested in proving each other wrong that we were blinded to the fact that each of us thought that something had gone askew. A husband feeling guilty for having failed his wife and a wife feeling guilty for having failed her husband, a relationship in which guilt feelings dominated and eclipsed responsible response.
The lesson we eventually learned was, whether a situation is significant, legal, accidental, or casual, we bring more to a moment of meeting than our own internalized view of ourselves or another. We bring a longing and expectation of due consideration. I began to see that each of us, my wife and I, deserved consideration and direct address by virtue of that fact I am and she is. She may do something that I object to. I may not act in ways that she can appreciate. But neither of our hurt nor our disappointment invalidates that fact that there is merit on each of our sides, merit that until this moment may have been obscured by a competitive press to be good or right. I had long carried the notion that if I am right, you must be wrong. Dynamically, we had tried to ,deny each other's side, and constricted our relationship on our own subjective untested unilateral terms.
Our marriage did not just result from the fact that there was reduced conflict or simply because the marriage had survived. Our marriage was not just because we found a way to work together. We dedicated ourselves to safety, and the ability to accomplish the tasks of life, and to committing to responding with all that I am and considering all that my wife is; by hearing her and giving merit to her point of view and her contribution, by making the sacrifice of unveiling myself and closing off my escape hatches and allowing myself to feel the constructive feelings of guilt that sounds from a call of conscience rather than the neurotic toxic pangs of shame.
For each of us, our lives and existences carry uniqueness, singular value, dueness, and entitlement. I am, therefore I deserve. How you and I address each other earns value and deserves consideration by virtue of the choices and actions each of us take. I relate, therefore I owe; I fulfill indebtedness and merit consideration for having done so. An entitled if exploited person is likely to be angry; an indebted if disengaged person is likely to feel shame. On a trustworthy level, however, uncredited merit results in an injured order of relationship, in skewed balances of give-and-take. Martin Buber puts it this way: "There are three principles in a man's being and life, the principle of thought, the principle of speech, and the principle of action. The origin of all conflict between me and my fellow-men is that I do not say what I mean and I do not do what I say."
Consider your relationship: How happy are the two of you? When something goes wrong, how quickly do you turn on your partner? Relationship expert and researcher John Gottman has proposed the idea of an emotional bank account to help people think about, keep track of, and manage their happiness as a couple. Just as you can make deposits and withdrawals from your traditional bank account, you can make deposits and withdrawals from your relationship’s emotional bank account. And, just as the balance in your traditional account affects how financially safe or insecure you feel, the balance in your emotional account affects how safe or insecure you feel in your relationship.
