“With all due respect, DrDeb,” he started out, [Uh-oh, it’s trouble when they start out that way.] “I’ve known my wife for 25 years and I know what I’m talking about.”
Robert was trying to convince me that his wife was stupid.
As a Marriage & Family Therapist, I work with both people, either in the same session together, or when they can’t sit for three minutes without a war breaking out, then individually at first.
So I’d met with his wife, Jane, as many times as I’d seen him, and she didn’t seem stupid to me at all. His conclusion was odd; I couldn’t understand it.
“Let me give you an example,” Robert insisted and he gave me one. The story didn’t hang together; it had holes in it, so I found a way to bring up the story to Jane at our next meeting to see her “side” of things – there is always another side.
Jane looked me in the eye and said, “I’m afraid to tell Robert the truth so I leave out or switch parts of my stories. I’m afraid he will get angry if he knew what really happened,” she answered.
“So now he thinks you’re not as smart as you really are,” I replied. “How is that helping?”
“Well, I’m afraid,” she repeated.
“What are you afraid of?” I asked.
“He’ll yell; he’ll make nasty remarks,” she answered.
“But when he hears stories that don’t make sense and they don’t go the way he would have wanted or expected, he gets angry anyway, so what’s the difference?”
Jane sat in silence, absorbing this point.
“No difference,” she finally admitted.
“So here I am trying to connect the two of you. You’re totally disconnected. You say you feel alone. And he tells me he feels alone. What should I do?”
“Please don’t tell him the truth about this last thing that I did,” Jane pleaded.
“Then I won’t. But do I have your permission to at least tell him that you’re afraid of him and that’s why you don’t tell him the complete story most of the time?”
“Yes,” she said. “You can do that.”
So, of course, that’s what I did on my next visit with Robert.
Did it help?
What do you think?
It didn’t.
It didn’t change anything.
How could that be?
How is it possible that telling him this crucial piece of information wouldn’t make all the difference in the world?
Well, look at it from inside Robert’s head.
#1. He’s always thought of her as stupid. If he stopped thinking of Jane as stupid it would mean that he, the smart one, had it wrong for 25 years!
#2. If he had it wrong for 25 years, then it would also mean that he’d lost 25 years of possible happiness, connection, and friendship that could never be recovered.
#3. If he had to go through that awkward experience of getting to know someone whom he thought he already knew, well, it would feel really awkward.
#4. She was accusing him of making her afraid of him with his temper -- and that made him the bad one. Well, no one wants to be the bad one, and no one ever wants to be the one that caused all of the problems in the first place.
So Robert had some seriously good reasons to not want to change how he saw Jane.
This is the exact basis of stereotyping and hating others. It’s easier to not have to deal with that terrible feeling of having misjudged from the get-go.
There’s a name for this. It’s called cognitive dissonance.
If you’re a musician, you’ll get this – dissoance is that unpleasant sound when two sounds are put together that shouldn’t be.
Well, it’s the same thing with thoughts, ideas.
It’s why the New Yok Times decided that Israel had bombed a hospital when Hamas told them this “information.” Actually, another terror group had done the bombing. But the New York Times had already decided – decades ago – that Israel would be the bad guy, so it was easier to believe a lie than reconsider their take on things.
The resistance to that uncomfortable feeling of cognitive dissonance is to be found both in the larger culture and in marriages.
And it’s absolutely not helpful.
Not in society and not in families.
But there’s good news! There’s a way around this.
We think of our attitudes as coming from ourselves, not from some alien force within us; that’s why it’s so hard to question them.
Well, these attitudes are coming from a certain part of ourselves, for sure. But they don’t make up the totality of who we are.
Buried beneath these strong habitual ways of thinking is a pure soul, a spirit, a Self – a neshama – that is wise and open-minded. Open-hearted, actually.
Open to hearing, growing, connecting, and loving.
Even when it’s difficult. Even when the “facts” seem to redirect us.
And it’s unafraid to go into this strange territory. Our Self has so much self-awareness and self-esteem that it has the courage to willingly take in unknown information.
Our Self is confident.
It is that Self that we uncover and get to know in therapy. We then can help that Self value and appreciate – but not necessarily be swayed anymore by – the habitual ways of thinking that we have always had.
As we get to know our true Self, the automatic reactions can relax; the Self can take its proper place of leadership within us instead of us being led by automatic responses that don’t do us or our relationships any good.
Now, imagine that happening for both people in a marriage: Robert’s Self comes to shine, letting the family see that he is truly a kind and loving person who respects his wife. Jane’s Self comes to shine as well, bringing with it her courage to tell the truth to Robert about her actions and their reasons.
This is exactly the outcome that makes me, as the therapist, very happy: Two people are no longer run by automatic conclusions but rather have the courage to discover who they really are – and who the person they married really is.
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