In marriage counseling and couples counseling I find that most people coming through my office don't know what they are feeling. Rage, or anger is the easiest emotion to experience, but it is never the primary feeling. Anger is always a secondary affect to hurt, shame or anxiety . Before a couple can be intimate with each other, they first need to learn how to be intimate with themselves. You can't share your feelings with your significant other if you don't even know what you are really feeling. Couples counseling from this therapist's perspective is about learning how to be in right relationship with yourself first, so that you can then invite the other into your emotional world.
When you lack clarity around your emotional experience, hurt, shame or anxiety typically get fused with anger. Instead of expressing the primary and more vulnerable emotion, couples turn to anger and rage. Anger is the ultimate separator. When one comes at another from a place of anger, what they are doing is unconsciously and often unwittingly seeking to push the other away. When you are hurt, you seek separation in an attempt to protect yourself. Unfortunately, pushing the other away is usually the last thing we want to do in a relationship.
One of the unique aspects of being human is that we have the capacity to think about thinking, to be conscious about consciousness. No other species has this capacity. Our philosophies and art are created out of this unique aspect of being human. This unique ability can also help us in our relationships. If we can think about thinking, then we can also think about feeling. In order to emotionally evolve, we need to be able to experience our feelings without reacting as if we are only just them. If you are hurt or angry, you are not just hurt or angry. There is another part of you that is able to witness yourself feeling hurt and angry. In the Samkhya-Vedanta model of the mind, our higher self, called the Buddhi, is our higher discriminating intelligence. It's the part of us that can witness our difficult feelings almost as if looking from an external perspective. It's this higher part of you that needs to be able to see your feelings and accept them with love and compassion. Only once you have accepted and are in relationship with all parts of you do you have the capacity to be in an intimate relationship with another person.
You might be asking yourself why we are not more aware of what we are really feeling? The reality is that as children our capacity for intimacy is formed by our primary caretakers' ability to see and take in our feelings and emotional world. If your father was unable to be with you in your fear or hurt, then you learn that these parts of you are unacceptable. Children need to feel their parents love and cherishment in order to grow and master their environments. They will do whatever is necessary in order to gain this love, including hiding the parts of them that their parents are unable to handle. This is a survival instinct and a drive to master our environments that is innate.
Of course, hiding parts of ourselves in order to grow and evolve comes with a deep price. Eventually, if we are emotionally fused with our parents, we will become so effective at disavowing parts of ourselves that they become invisible to us. As adults, the way we hide from ourselves is through avoidance and self-medication. Self-medication can take the form of alcohol or drug abuse , self-mutilation, excessive dissociative behaviors (watching too much television, general avoidance of contact), over-working, or any other number of behaviors that enable one to push difficult feelings out of consciousness. The result of this self-medication is that we end up feeling lonely because even our mates don't really know who we are and what we are feeling.
The goal of marriage counseling and couples counseling is to help a couple discover their inner truths. Many couples do this dance of co-dependence in order to protect the other from suffering. The result, often, is that this dance leads to resentment and further disconnect. Intimacy cannot happen unless both individuals can be real about what they are thinking and feeling. Without truth, real intimacy doesn't have a chance.
As a marriage counselor
Dr. Steinberg has worked with couples from all walks of life. His mission is to help people heal old wounds and move forward in their relationships in a healthy and loving manner. As a couples counselor, Dr. Steinberg has been practicing in New York City as a private psychotherapist since 1996. He extended his practice to the Mt. Airy neighborhood of Philadelphia in 2007. Dr. Steinberg is married with two young children, and understands the challenges couples with small children face as the nature of their relationship changes. For more information about his style of doing marriage counseling,
log on to davidsteinberg.com.