Having celebrated Valentine’s Day earlier this week, a brief discussion of the section on “Love” in the late Scott Peck’s 1976 best seller, The Road Less Traveled, seems in order. I actually assign this reading to the students I teach in a Webster University graduate course called “Marriage and Family Counseling.”
I don’t know how much marriage counseling Dr. Peck practiced in his professional life. Typically, psychiatrists focus on the medical aspects of mental health treatment, leaving the various forms of outpatient psychotherapy to others of us in the field. That’s how I work–in tandem, and effectively so–with my colleague, Dr. Lucy Preyer, a psychiatrist.
But Peck’s insights into “loving relationships” certainly apply to the many couples I’ve counseled over the years. Since most marriages I’ve encountered haven’t been compromised by such “deal breakers” as physical violence, dishonesty or an addiction. Some have. But not most.
Rather, what I have observed far more often are married partners who, if unwittingly, have allowed themselves to become “defined” too much by one another, such that they present as mutually “reactive” to their spouse in rather predictable ways. As in, for example, “I’m this way because s/he’s that way,” and vice versa.
So I’m usually helping married partners become better “self-differentiated” so that they can then relate to one another less “reactively”–be it “attacking, defending, avoiding or withdrawing”–relating in healthier, more mutually respectful, secure and intimate ways. In other words, I help people better define and develop a more “authentic self.” Or as yet another psychiatrist, the late Murray Bowen, put it: “A self is more attractive than a no-self.”
As I wrote in a previous blog, a simple rule of thumb, applicable to almost any interpersonal relationship–and certainly a marriage–is this: “The more I’m trying to change you, the more you will be resisting me.” It is only as I change, that you will have to change; at least if we’re to sustain a relationship.
I say it this way because relationships, in however many different ways they may be defined, are most fundamentally “emotional systems.” And when one part of the system changes, the other part must adapt accordingly.
Hopefully, the sustaining of a relationship in the face of such change will be for the better. But not always. Often relationships fracture as the result of one of the parties changing.
Or here are some other patterns. One person’s change may lead to a healthier future with or without someone else; while her/his partner’s refusal to change may lead to a continued less-than-fulfilling future with or without whomever. I’ve even known couples who have divorced, and although they no longer “live together”: as an “emotional system,” they might as well still be married in the ways they continue to be “defined” by (and are thus just as emotionally “reactive” to) one another. They may even proceed to enter a new relationship with someone else that is just as “highly reactive” as the one they abandoned (even if disguised as appearing different in whatever way or other). Indeed, one might ask, what have they accomplished?
The hoped for positive outcome when one person in a relationship changes is not guaranteed. What is certain, however, is that “the more we’re trying to change whomever, the more they will be resisting us.”
What I’ve just explained, in fact, stands at the core of what is taught and practiced in the important program of Al Anon, the corollary of Alcoholics Anonymous.
Among Scott Peck’s important insights in the “Love” section of The Road Less Traveled is how he contrasts at least two different (and rather distinct) views of so-called “loving relationships.” One is common in our culture. It might be termed “secular.” It’s the view that the purpose of a “loving relationship” is “to get my needs met.” As if anyone could ever totally “meet the needs” of another.
This, Peck calls “the myth of romantic love.” Which he defines as a “collapse of one’s ego boundaries.”
The other view is inherent to Christian ethics. This involves the “strengthening of one’s ego boundaries.” Or as Scott Peck proclaims, the purpose of a “loving relationship”–and certainly a “marriage,” in the best sense of what that might be (some Christians call it a “sacrament”)–the purpose is that of “moral, spiritual and emotional growth.”
In this view, an optimal “loving relationship” becomes “challenging,” a healthy balance of “work” and “play.” If it’s too much “work,” something’s wrong; just as if one is deluded in believing it should all be “play.” The point being: when people are engaged in a reasonably healthy “loving relationship” (married or otherwise), they will be “growing” together; each inspiring the other toward her/his own “moral, spiritual and emotional growth.”
The theologian, Thomas Oden, speaks of this important “tension” in (what he considers) an “intimate relationship” as a paradox involving both “emotive warmth” and “conflict capability.” In such a relationship there is no shortage of authentic expressions of “affection” (including the grateful “receiving” of such) ; just as, in such relationships, when there is “conflict” and “disagreement,” the parties involved have learned (and practice) how to “fight fair” (in ways meant to solve problems rather than making them worse).
So then–as a “marriage counselor” (a “relationship counselor”?)–when I am helping persons engaged in (at least a desired) “loving relationship” become more “intrinsically defined” in relation to one another, and thereby less “emotionally reactive”: to use Scott Peck’s insight, I’m helping them “strengthen their ego boundaries,” rather than “collapsing” them.
This being Thomas Oden definition of “intimacy.” Since when people have greater “ego strength” (are more “intrinsically defined”) they can, mutually, get “closer” to one another without becoming “reactive” (“attacking, defending, avoiding or withdrawing,” or even “scaring each other off”).
