Response to “Thinking About Our Work: When Partners Grow Apart”

Abstract

Response to “Thinking About Our Work: When Partners Grow Apart” Justin Hecht1 issn 0362-4021 © 2015 Eastern Group Psychotherapy Society group, Vol. 39, No. 4, Winter 2015 355 1 Clinical Faculty, Department of Psychiatry, University of California, San Francisco, and private practice. Correspondence should be addressed to Justin Hecht, CGP, FAGPA, 3450 Sacramento Street #411, San Francisco, CA 94118. E-mail: Justinhecht@prodigy.net. Reading Lee Kassan’s essay “Thinking About Our Work: When Partners Grow Apart” made me think of two perhaps unrelated ideas. First, there is the idea of inviting the partner of a patient to come to therapy. When I was in graduate school, our family therapy teachers stressed the importance of “collaborative and supportive visits” with other members of the patient’s family. These visits had a number of benefits. First, “a visit is worth a thousand words.” When a patient brings his or her partner, family member, or parent into therapy, the therapist acquires invaluable information about the interpersonal and intimate dynamics of the patient. It’s a chance to acquire accurate and uncensored information about the patient and to provide a service to the couple. I was taught to treat the visitor as a guest and to essentially conduct a developmental interview with the visitor, while the regular patient quietly listened to his or her partner speaking. These visits almost always have gone well. As the patient listens to the visitor speak about his or her life and the events that formed that life, the patient not infrequently has a powerful, generally positive, emotional response to learning about his or her partner. These visits provide other benefits, as well. I think of a recent visit of the fiancé of a woman with whom I’d been working for some time. She was from Buenos Aires and was part of a sophisticated set where “everyone was in psychoanalysis.” He was from the rural Midwest and thought that “only crazy people see shrinks.” When he came into my office, he commented on how much it looked like a “normal” living room or study. He was surprised that I didn’t use an analytic couch and seemed relieved to have the whole process demystified. As I spoke with the fiancé, asking him to tell me about himself and his life, my client slowly began to tear up, as she 356 hecht heard him speak about difficult and painful aspects of his childhood, parts of his life he had never shared with her before. “Why didn’t you ever tell me about this?” she asked. “Well,” he said, “I guess you never asked.” This visit provided me with much useful information that I could use to help my female client see her fiancé in a more charitable and balanced way. I think that offering visits in this way might help to overcome some of the problems that Kassan describes. The other idea I consider is how many therapists are married to nontherapists. Each of us in this situation has to negotiate the challenges similar to those described by Kassan. We are constantly challenged to grow, as we work on issues of emotional intensity and depth and spend our days listening to the psychologically intense experiences of our patients. We are thus naturally forced to grow psychologically, while our partners, in different professions, are unlikely to experience the same call for growth that being a therapist provides. This requires us to identify and take responsibility for the developmental and growth tasks that are ours, while not asking our partners to do work that we should. This creates a dynamic that can help us with additional empathy for our clients. All of us, whether in psychotherapy or not, are existentially alone. And following our paths of individuation will require us to strike a balance between challenging ourselves, challenging our partners, and accepting the inevitable shortcomings of relationship, both ours and theirs. ...