De-privatizing Our Relationships

“Creating Our Mental Health”: Welcome to a conversation between two social therapists who meet regularly to share and advance our therapeutic work. We hope these dialogues can support and stimulate others who are integrating developmental conversations into their therapeutic practices and personal growth. See the first post in the series for a brief explanation of what social therapy is and the perspectives we’re coming from in our dialogues.

A few months ago, we were both intrigued by an article in The New York Times Magazine entitled “I’m a Couples Therapist. Something New Is Happening in Relationships” by Orna Guralnik. Dr. Guralnik is a psychoanalytically trained psychologist who is featured as a couples therapist in the TV series Couples Therapy. In this Times article, she wrote of some profound ways that her practice was being transformed that we wanted to share with our readers.

A standout point for us was her comment, “The couples I’m seeing are talking differently these days—they’re telling me how much their values, attitudes, and ways they’re living are shaped by their class background, race, color, religion, gender.” She further emphasized, “As a collective, we appear to be coming around to the idea that bigger social forces run through us, animating us and pitting us against one another, whatever our conscious intentions. To invert a truism, the political is personal.”

Ann: Could you have imagined 20/30 years ago that we would see couples openly sharing what goes on “in the bedroom” on national TV? Or, couples and their psychotherapist opening up the privacy/confidentiality of the therapy session for public scrutiny? And what about the acknowledgement that “the political is personal?”

Hugh: No, and I find that quite exciting.

Ann: Yes, me too. So many couples hide what’s happening in their relationships, and many couples who are struggling compare themselves with peers who seem so happy and appear to have no problems. So much is happening in the realm of relationships. We’re seeing increasing numbers of bi-racial and multicultural couples, challenges to gender roles, redefining gender and sexual identities, open relationships, chosen families. Guralnik’s work with couples shows us how these cultural changes have impacted her practice which demands that she address social, power, and class dynamics in relationships.

Hugh: Guralnik shares some of her work with the couple James and Michelle. James is a white police officer from a politically conservative family, and Michelle is Black and works as a social worker. They came for help because they were constantly fighting. During the pandemic, one of the fights was about Covid protocols. Guralnik writes, “Michelle was aware of the way Covid was devastating Black communities and was more careful. James, along with his fellow police officers and his conservative parents, thought the concern was overblown.” When Michelle said she thought their argument was rooted in her attitudes as a Black woman and his as a white man, James responded by saying “I don’t see color” and abruptly ended the conversation.

However, the protests following the murder of George Floyd shifted their dynamics. With the outpouring of outrage about the murder and increasing calls for police reform, and with Guralnik helping them to explore their different attitudes and judgments, James slowly began to see Michelle’s point that Black people had a very different relationship and response to the murder. Their therapeutic work together helped James begin to let himself not be color-blind.

“In a meaningful moment,” states Guralnick, he said “‘I know it hits her harder than it does me…we can never truly know what each other goes through because we’re not each other. So all we can do is be in as much understanding as possible.’” He was able to become less defensive and to see that “she’s not directly attacking me.” Michelle, too, became less defensive and less attacking because, with Guralnik’s help, she was hearing for the first time James’s concern and fear about impending race war in this country. She said, “these are things I never heard him fully articulate…That’s helpful for me to hear because it makes me more conscious and aware of how he’s feeling.”

Ann: What moved me in this work was Guralnik relating to James and Michelle as people whose attitudes, values, and judgments grow out of their histories and social circumstances and are not reduced to intra-psychic phenomena. This is refreshing and a break from conventional psychology which often relates to the intrapsychic as separate from the world. I also thought it brought James and Michelle closer when they were able to see the other as different from themselves, with unique histories and relationships to what was happening in the world. This allowed them to see who they each were and get to know each other in new ways.

Hugh: Yes, we learn who we are in the process of building something together with others that can’t be known because it’s an evolving and becoming process.

Ann: Yes, and we build with these quite different histories, values, and attitudes something that’s qualitatively other/new than what “each” contributed. That’s the beauty of building with our contradictions and differences.

Hugh: While this was not in the Times piece, I really liked one of the episodes on her TV show. It involved a straight couple disagreeing and arguing constantly in the session. Guralnik, rather than remaining objective, brought herself into the conversation and talked about the impact that the man’s defensiveness was having on her. She said it made it harder for her to be giving to them. Guralnik said that she needed that to change if they were to move forward in their work together. I thought that was so important, to ask for what she needed as a condition to helping them. She was reminding them that she was in the room and that their arguing was having an impact on her. Often when couples argue or fight they become oblivious to the impact they have on others.

Ann: Yes, I think this could be seen as Guralnik helping to create a group of three working together and breaking out of the often impenetrable world of the couple. Couples can get trapped in their dyadic relationship with their own language and accepted norms including argument and fights. Couples need help to build a “we”—to relate to each other as a social unit, and the “we” can go beyond the couple to include the family, friendships, and community they are part of. Relationships are distinct from the “me” and “you.”

Hugh: I have found, in my practice, that one of the reasons people keep their relationships private is that they are embarrassed or ashamed of their own performance in their relationship. They hide not only from others, but sometimes from themselves, that they’re being abused or being abusive, that they’re making compromises they’re not happy with, or that they feel intimidated by their partner and don’t speak up.

Ann: Yes, all the more reason to celebrate Guralnik’s approach and be joyous about de-privatizing relationships and allowing others to see, respond to, and support relationships to grow. Two of our social therapeutic colleagues, Carrie Sackett and Murray Dabby, expand on this approach and offer social therapeutic tools for de-privatizing relationships in their just published book, Social Therapeutic Coaching: A Practical Guide to Group and Couples Work. They talk about the “groupness” of couples, that in a couples session there are three people in the room. Like Guralnik in her session above, social therapists and coaches work to break out of the trap of the dyadic isolation.

Hugh: You know, I’m glad we’re sharing this with our readers. I think Guralnik’s work, our work, and the work of many innovative practitioners are taking on psychiatry and the language of psychology which have us stuck in our private hells. We get stuck in our identities, social roles, the labels we’ve been given or that we adopt for ourselves. It’s common for people to say, “I’m stuck in my head,” and they’re right, they are!

Privatization isn’t just a problem for couples. Psychology and psychiatry teaches us that we are isolated individuals. I’m glad we’re chipping away at the cracks in psychiatry and psychology and de-privatizing our lives. As Leonard Cohen says, “There is a crack, a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”