On Intimate Ground
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On Intimate Ground

A Gestalt Approach to Working with Couples

Gordon Wheeler, Stephanie Backman, Gordon Wheeler, Stephanie Backman

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eBook - ePub

On Intimate Ground

A Gestalt Approach to Working with Couples

Gordon Wheeler, Stephanie Backman, Gordon Wheeler, Stephanie Backman

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About This Book

Couples therapy has long been regarded as one of the most demanding forms of psychotherapy because of the way it challenges therapists to combine the insights of dynamic psychology with the power and clarity of systems dynamics. In this exciting new volume, Gordon Wheeler and Stephanie Backman, couples therapists with broad training and long years of experience, present dramatic new approaches that at last integrate the dynamic/self-organizational and the systemic/behavioral schools of thought.

Building on the insights of Gestalt psychology and psychotherapy, the authors show us how a truly phenomenological approach, based on the clients' own experience and goals, holds the key to a dramatic increase in therapeutic power and flexibility. The fifteen engaging chapters demonstrate the application of this approach to issues of intimacy, self-construction, power and abuse, "resistance, " growth, and shame - and to such diverse and challenging populations as abuse survivors and their partners, remarried couples, gay and lesbian couples, and couples with "personality" or "character" disorders.

In the process, the authors offer a fresh perspective that will serve to re-energize the couples therapist's work in this challenging area. On Intimate Ground contributesnew insights to many of the most timely and provocative questionsin the field today.

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Publisher
Gestalt Press
Year
2013
ISBN
9781134897896
Edition
1
1
The Tasks of Intimacy: Reflections on a Gestalt Approach to Working with Couples
Gordon Wheeler
What is intimacy: Is it a luxury? A necessity? A kind of tyranny, as some authors have maintained? A sort of opposite pole to “self-realization” (see discussion in Miller, in press)? Or is it, as we will be arguing here, rather an essential component and condition of the growth and expansion of the self? In this essay we will attempt to offer a phe-nomenological, process definition of intimacy, distinguishing those processes and the tasks that go with them from some other, related tasks and activities of couples and other intimate pairings. From there we will move to a consideration of the Gestalt model of self and self-process, and develop the argument that intimate process is an essential component of self-development. Our thesis throughout will be that the Gestalt model itself, unlike other dynamic models, is inherently and necessarily relational in its theory and methodology and in its view of the self and human nature. In making this argument we will be consciously and intentionally dissenting from some Gestalt writing, which (like its psychoanalytic forerunners) has been implicitly or explicitly based on an “autonomy” or “separate self’ model of self and development. Finally, with our revised view of the nature and tasks of intimacy in hand, and with this clarification of the implications of the Gestalt contextual approach, we will consider the tasks themselves of intimate process, and what some of the differences are in couples therapy when we work out of this enlarged Gestalt model of self and development.
Exploring Ground: The Couple
The couple gestalt is clearly one of the archetypal human relational patterns. As far as we know, there has never been a human society not predominantly marked by long-term primary adult pair-bonding of some kind. Yet the maintenance of a healthy couple bond over time is plainly one of the most challenging relational tasks we face in human development. By the same token, studying, facilitating, and intervening in this relationship and its problems must be among the most challenging tasks for therapists, and one that is much less addressed and written about than are individual work and family therapy, within which couples therapy is often subsumed (see, for example, Wein-garten, 1991). As for the study of intimate relationships outside the couple per se, in psychotherapeutic literature this is so rare as to be a curiosity. People having difficulties with intimate friendships are commonly counseled to go into individual therapy, or possibly group therapy, to explore what ails them. The idea of seeking therapy or consultation with the “intimate other” (yet not couple-bonded) person they are having difficulties with seldom occurs to us, despite the fact that close, nurturing friendships are known to be predictors of practically all the other good things of life, from career success to successful marriage to physical health itself (see, for example, Miller, 1983; also Zinker & Nevis, 1981a and b; and other publications of the Center for the Study of Intimate Systems, Gestalt Institute of Cleveland, for attention to these and related issues).
Here we will focus largely on the intimate couple, while referring from time to time to other important intimate relationships (as well as to the nonintimate couple). For that reason it is important to point out at the beginning that establishing or living in a primary intimate couple relationship, which will be defined below, is in no sense whatever a prerequisite for a full, healthy, productive, satisfying life; and that if intimacy and intimate exchange are necessary for full human development (as we will be arguing that they are), then that intimacy and that intimate exchange can be found and nurtured in many other places besides a primary couple relationship. And finally, “longterm” does not necessarily imply “lifetime,” particularly in these times of longer and longer adult life spans, independent careers and incomes, and more and more attention and opportunity in our society for ongoing adult development and change.
Some Definition of Terms
With this much said, a few definitions are in order. What do we mean by “healthy,” and what do we mean by “couple”? A healthy life is one characterized by a sense of satisfaction, by growth of the individual, and by generativity, a productive connectedness in which the person is part of and enhances a larger social whole. The healthy person, then, has the sense of achieving significant personal goals, of continuing to generate new goals that are meaningfully larger, and of contributing something important to a community beyond the individual in a way that harmonizes with some larger whole of meaning (whether spiritually, politically, or otherwise conceived). At least these three elements, we would argue, are essential to a definition of health (and particularly to a Gestalt definition): take away any one of them, and we begin to think of unhealth (meaning not whole) or dysfunction, not just a problem in life but a second-order problem of some block or distortion in the processes of life and growth themselves.
By the same token, a healthy couple relationship is one that promotes those processes of health in both partners. The keyword here is promotes. To promote is to support, nurture, and enhance, something more than just leave each member free to live on his or her own while allowing for the pursuit of some goals in common (like business, child-rearing, or some other career or similar partnership goals). By this we do not mean to say that a relationship that merely allows separate growth or “space,” without intimacy in the sense to be developed below, is an unhealthy one; perhaps ahealthy or health neutral would be better terms. Nor have we yet spoken of intimacy: a healthy or a “health-neutral” couple relationship may be intimate or nonintimate, though it is very doubtful that a fully intimate relationship, in the sense to be developed below, can be other than healthy. Why we want to insist on all these distinctions, and their relationship to the Gestalt model, will be explored below.
Couple is trickier, though perhaps we can say with Wittgenstein that no one except a sociologist or a philosopher would have any difficulty knowing a couple when she sees one. It is common to use the social-psychological definition, which rests on the way a couple present themselves socially and are recognized by the community as in some important senses a single social unit: that is, to deal with one member, at least in some significant areas, is to deal with the other; to harm or benefit one is to harm or benefit the other. In Gestalt terms, we would say that this definition locates the couple in terms of their external boundary with the world and suggests some of the phenomenological consequences of that boundary. This last helps us to get at the internal experiential hallmark of couples that set them apart from some other kinds of adult dyads and partnerships. This is the sense of identification between the members: to enhance (or diminish) my couple partner’s welfare, across a broad spectrum and in a personal sense (not just financially, say), is to enhance or diminish my own welfare. If we come across a social pair who present themselves and are treated in some important ways as a bounded pair unit and yet do not exhibit signs of this identification, then we say things like “Well, they’re married (or dating, or living together, or whatever), but they don’t seem like a couple,” or other words to that effect. Something essential to our notion of couple is missing. Again, why this sense of identification, this internal or phenomenological hallmark, is central and crucial in our view is something we will try to clarify below.
The Nature of Intimacy
Now, what about the trickiest term of all: intimacy? Melnick and Nevis (1993, also in this volume), in their extremely fertile series of meditations and discussions on the interwoven topics of intimacy, power, and abuse, have this to say toward defining intimacy: “The experience of intimacy involves being in synchronicity with another person of equal power over a period of time—whether a split second or a lifetime” (1993, p. 18). The emphasis here is on mutuality, but the authors build on this to make some penetrating and often-neglected distinctions between and among intimate moments, pseudo intimacy, one-way intimacy, and intimate relationships themselves, which they would insist are extended-term, at least. By synchronicity, I understand them to mean, as their examples suggest, shared “figural process,” in the Gestalt sense of a mutually negotiated and agreed-upon direction or undertaking: that is, that process and capacity for wanting the same thing, or sufficiently overlapping things, importantly and repeatedly over time, as well as the ability to move together toward accomplishing and realizing those shared goals in some way that results in satisfaction for each. This is the Interactive Cycle of Experience model developed and taught widely by Zinker and Nevis (1981a and b; see also Zinker, 77, Melnick & Nevis, 1991), among others, which relates a Gestalt “experience cycle” model of healthy needs satisfaction to our real lives in relationships, and begins at least to talk about what healthy relational process looks like in Gestalt terms. The “intimate experience,” the authors write, “can only occur when one is in rhythm with another in terms of placement within the cycle.”
While this is no doubt true, and all these terms and distinctions are highly useful, I believe that something is left out here, and that something is of the essence of what we mean and experience as intimacy. In their emphasis on understanding intimacy in terms of shared goals, common figure, and a Gestalt model of interactive needs satisfaction, I believe these authors have given us tools for understanding any working dyad, but not necessarily for distinguishing the intimate relationship and the particular processes and tasks of intimacy from other productive dyadic relationships and their working tasks and processes. Specifically, I want to argue that intimacy has more to do with intentionality1 and state of mind (“ground,” in Gestalt terms) than with “figural” process at all, in the usual sense of action, plan, and accomplishment, mutual or otherwise. I also want to argue that the tasks of intimacy per se are different in nature from the other life tasks and decisions these authors and others often use as examples in illustrating their view. This is not to say that there are no “figural” actions or tasks at all in intimate process: there are, and we are laying the groundwork for discussion of those particular tasks and processes below, along with their implications for couples therapy under this approach. And certainly these tasks and processes, like any patterns of behavior, can be analyzed and influenced through the use of a needs-satisfaction rubric such as the Gestalt Interactive Cycle Model— but always with the caveat in mind that the goal of the activity of intimacy is awareness itself, and not some other more “manifest” action. Again, why we want to insist on this point will be developed at more length below, once we have taken a look at the Gestalt model of self and its implications for relationship. Meanwhile, an example may serve to clarify some of these distinctions.
Suppose that I work, as I do, in a clinic with other clinicians, in a shared enterprise with some shared goals having to do with providing mental health services to a client population. Now clearly, in the course of working together, in dyads and other configurations, we do have to use and nurture processes that permit and support “shared figure” and mutual needs satisfaction in this sense—negotiation, articulation of shared or overlapping goals, energetization, accomplishment, and so forth—as we try to realize individual and team tasks of designing treatment interventions, mounting a training program, dealing (unfortunately) with a larger health care system that is generally adversarial, managing our own boundary and exchange with clinic administration, other departments, and so on. And clearly, to do all that we have to do all the things that Zinker and Nevis, and Melnick and Nevis (1993), describe so usefully and clearly. We operate together over long periods of time with fairly equal power and a fair degree of synchronicity and satisfaction, at least much of the time. These things are all characteristic of any working dyad or functioning team, and certainly they have to characterize the lives of couples, or else the rent won’t get paid, the children won’t get raised, even (or especially) sexual joining in the couple won’t happen, or won’t happen with satisfaction (though, as we know, sex itself can be a subtle and effective defense against intimacy). All of this can happen, and must happen, and does happen, but it isn’t yet intimacy.
In the course of this work I may come to know some or more of my colleagues more “intimately”—in the everyday sense of moving beyond knowing, say, what this particular colleague wants to include in the training program, to knowing something more of why she or he wants this, where she or he is “coming from” (and note here the everyday use of the familiar Gestalt distinction between “figure” and “background”). In the same way, I may come to know that this one, let’s say, has just had a death in the family and won’t be pulling his or her weight for a while; that that one needs to be handled with flattery and reassurance; that the other one is not going to do well with alcoholic men, say, because they remind him of his father; and so on. If some of these colleagues are superiors, I may well feel I need to know them a good deal better in these ways than they bother to know me (and here we see the usefulness of Melnick and Nevis’s clarifications about the relationship of intimacy and power: the slave knows the master intimately; the converse is not generally true). If some of them are dysfunctional superiors, it may well behoove me to know them a lot better than they know me; this gets right to the heart of what we mean by the popular term codependent, which is a kind of one-way intimacy, taken on as a character style.
In all of this, the intimate knowledge that I begin to develop about my colleagues (and they about me)—even need to develop to guide and facilitate the shared figural work process—is largely instrumental to the accomplishment of those shared “figures” (or the furthering of my own agenda). The work goes better, as we know, if we’re comfortable with each other, not living in fear of nasty surprises, and generally able to accommodate regularly to each other’s strengths, quirks, and rhythms in reaching satisfaction (here again, the sexual metaphor suggests itself, but any shared goal will do), where there is enough overlap of goals in the first place to make the interactive cycle possible and worthwhile all around (what Zinker & Nevis, 1981b), have written of as “middle ground,” the nonconflictual arena of shared figures and processes).
But then something else may happen. In the course of learning things about other people instrumentally, as a ground for the work, I may well (indeed, inevitably will) come to know other things about them, their wishes and feelings and fears behind the acts, or “figures,” they offer publicly, and they about me. This “getting to know each other” may then start to take on a life of its own beyond anything instrumental for the work— though of course supporting the work, unless and until we run into a painful intimate difference. We may get to be friends— “work friends,” or “tennis friends,” meaning still that our knowing each other has to do with things we want to do together— or, not contradicting this, but moving beyond it, “real friends”—the difference between “I knew him or her pretty well at work” and “We were or are good friends,” even “I know her or him intimately.”
This leads to the first hallmark of what we mean by intimacy: intimacy is a kind of knowing of another person, and being known by that person, in a way and to a degree that is for its own sake, not instrumental to any other goal. To the extent that the knowing is in the service of some other goal, then we add qualifiers to the word, as in Melnick and Nevis’s “pseudo intimacy” or “task intimacy” or (as they are right to emphasize) “one-way intimacy.” (Note that such one-way intimacy may be perfectly appropriate and healthy, as between parent and child, where in the healthy condition the parent knows the child much more intimately than the child knows the parent; too intimate a knowledge of the parent’s inner life would burden and distort the child’s development, for reasons we will say more about below.) Intimacy, in this view, is not just a means to accomplish “figural” goals, shared or otherwise, nor is it only a sort of side effect of repeated “interactive figure formation,” though it may be all of those things. Rather, intimacy is a primary need, like growth itself, which may at times serve many other needs but cannot be reduced to them. Why and how this should be so are questions the Gestalt model, with its analysis of phenomenological reality, can answer perhaps better than any other. To begin to sketch those answers, let us turn to the Gestalt model of the self and development, and some of its implications for relationship, growth, and intimate process.
The Gestalt Phenomenological Self Model
I live, experientially, in two worlds. This duality, this sense of a boundary bifurcating my own experience, is at the innermost heart of experience itself, so phenomenologically basic that we don’t often think about this awareness condition, for the very reason that it is the condition of awareness itself: it is what we mean by experience, or subjectivity, or consciousness, or self. The one realm is private, known to me but not directly to others (though others may make useful guesses about features of that private world, inferentially, which were unknown to me— this happens all the time in psychotherapy, for example, where this kind of guess is called an interpretation). This is the world we usually call “inner” (though the distinction is imperfect), and includes all my memories, impressions, sense and interpretive data about myself and also about the “outer” world and its conditions, and thus includes my “map” or table of perceived possibilities for action and satisfaction, for me, in that outer world. In a certain sense this is a world of more power than satisfaction. I can imagine what I like, but making it happen is another matter, though the power has limits, and certainly the satisfactions of thought and imagination can be real enough.
The other world is ...

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