Toward Marriage - Family Therapy

Excerpted from
The Family Crucible; The Intense Experience of Family Therapy
By Augustus Y. Napier, Carl Whitaker, M.D.

There was a new quality in the next session. Carolyn was there-really there-not just sitting miserably, wishing the hour would end. She settled in her chair in a new way, giving the impression of wanting to stay for a while. She had risked showing a fraction of her pain, and we had responded with ordinary human concern. Nothing dramatic. But for Carolyn, it was not a small thing.

If you assume that psychotherapists are at least symbolically (and probably at heart) mothers, then originally Carolyn had to feel about us some of the things she felt about her own mother: it was dangerous to come near. If she revealed her real feelings to us, she might be hurt, as she often was by her mother. So she had stayed hidden.

Good old transference. Even though we know about it intellectually, we therapists keep being stupid about it, flattering ourselves that the patient is really reacting in the beginning to u-y-as real, individual human beings. To some extent that does occur, but we are deluding ourselves if we think that the patient isn't also struggling with subtle and largely invisible ghosts and images out of the past. The importance of what happened with Carolyn is that she expected us to respond like her mother-with criticism and blame. When we didn't, she was relieved and more than a little surprised. Suddenly we were a little safer, and she decided to risk getting involved. We were delighted on a number of counts, one of which was our greater freedom to move.

So we began to ask direct questions like "What's wrong with the marriage?" and waited to see what happened. At first, not much. Husband and wife sat there and simply tried to answer.

Carolyn was, as we knew, quietly furious with David because he worked all the time. Even when he was at home, he was constantly on the telephone or at his desk. The desk was in the bedroom, and Carl didn't waste any time making a joke about that. "At least you could insist that he keep a sofa bed at the office if he's going to have his desk in the bedroom!" Everyone laughed, but it wasn't really funny. This was a painful issue for David and Carolyn.

You might assume it isn't possible in family therapy to talk honestly about sex with children present. Actually, it's not only possible, but fun, once you get past the first awkward moments. You have to be a little bold, and you have to take lightly the out-of-fashion but still prevalent notion that children don't know anything about sex and don't need to know anything. One of the principal reasons that the Brice household was so tense was that Carolyn and David didn't have a very good sexual life. In fact, at the time of the family crisis, fifteen-year-old Claudia was probably having a good deal more sexual experience than her parents. And that, of course, is part of why Carolyn was so angry with her.

We didn't learn much about Claudia's sexual experience until much later in therapy, but we knew at this time what the parents knew-that Claudia was sleeping with several boys, frequently. It didn't appear to be a very healthy experience: it was casual, compulsive, and largely unloving. This kind of early sexual abandon in adolescents is a complex subject in its own right.

We assume that part of the agenda in Claudia's sexual life-a mostly hidden, unconscious agenda-was the search for that quality of tenderness and support which people usually call mothering, though it actually involves both parents. Claudia was, or had been, very dependent on her parents. When she and her parents began their war, she needed to transfer her dependency elsewhere. So she disguised it as sexuality, seeking in a series of apparently casual encounters a delicate mixture of freedom and cuddling which her life lacked. She needed to feel close, but she was frightened of real closeness lest it be constricting and enveloping. Her "promiscuous" approach to sex evolved as a possible compromise solution to her need for freedom and closeness.

Claudia was also responding to the family's anxiety and guilt about sex. Carolyn and David scolded Claudia indirectly about her affairs, but in the scolding there was a hint of intangible, covert encouragement. They said "don't" in a way that came out sounding like "do." The message which Claudia listened to was the one that urged her on.

David and Carolyn had every reason to encourage their daughter surreptitiously to have an active sexual life. After all, they couldn't talk about sex themselves, and at least Claudia confronted them with the subject. Just how children pick up hidden anxieties and needs in their parents and act them out is a fairly mysterious matter, but we have no doubt that it happens. Claudia's problems with sex were her parents' problems with sex. She was simply following her parents' subtle instructions that she "get herself into trouble."

If Claudia could simply have enjoyed herself, perhaps it wouldn't have been so bad. Her parents might have learned something, and this might have helped their repressed, anxious lives. But she was stuck with the same sense of guilt and inhibition as her parents, and her sexual life proved to be unfulfilling and self-destructive. Because her parents hadn't helped her grow up with healthy attitudes, she couldn't really help them with their attitudes. Still, she kept trying, and at least she generated some anxiety in the family. Anxiety is always helpful in therapy because it is often what motivates change.

So we didn't ask Claudia about her sexual problems. She felt hounded enough already, and we knew that her real problem was her parents. But because we guessed that they couldn't talk about sex, we asked Claudia about her parents' sexual problems. It was a tense moment.

Carl was smiling, as almost always, when he turned toward Claudia. "How about sex and your parents? You think they have a good time sexually?" Carolyn blanched, and David took a deep breath.

Claudia smiled wryly. "I don't know, but I don't think they do very much. At least Mom always looks frustrated to me." She surprised us by the ease with which she spoke, as if she had been waiting for a long time to address the subject. She may also have liked the sense of being one-up at being able to talk at all about the Great Taboo.

"What about Dad? Think he's frustrated, too?" Carl asked, always wanting to keep things equal.

Claudia was amused. "Well, he must do all that work for some reason."