Wired for Love (2 page)

The early models of marriage counseling were based upon the assumption that a couple consisted of two independent, autonomous persons who could use their learning capacity and cognitive skills to resolve their differences by regulating conflict about their differences. This assumption shifted help from advice, instruction, and admonition—the method of parents and religious professionals before the development of professional counseling and psychotherapy—to conflict resolution, negotiation, and problem solving. This was helpful to some couples whose issues were not so difficult, but for others the conflict resolution process was a failure. These more difficult couples were advised to engage in depth psychotherapy to work through their long-standing personal problems independent of their relationship, and to separate from each other with the assumption that when they came back together, free of their personal neuroses, they could meet each others’ needs, current and past, and create a satisfying and wonderful relationship.

This model did not work very well. Most partners who were successful in their private psychotherapy tended to divorce rather than reconcile. The divorce rate reached about 50 percent, and there it has held steady for the past sixty years. The statistics on the success of marriage therapy has held steady at around 30 percent—not a shining success for this fledgling profession.

In recent years we have discovered that the major problem with this model is its focus on the “individual” as the foundational unit of society and on the satisfaction of personal needs as the goal of marriage. Given that democracy gave political reality to the concept of the individual and Freud illuminated the architecture of the interior of the self, this perspective makes sense. It led Freud to locate the human problem inside the individual and to create psychotherapy as a cure for the ills of the self. Since marital counseling and couples therapy are the handmaidens of psychotherapy, it makes sense that marital therapy would focus on healing the individuals as a precondition for a satisfying relationship. It also makes sense that therapists would assume that the problem was unmet needs “inside” the individuals and that relationships existed to satisfy those needs. This all give birth to this narrative of marriage: If your relationship is not satisfying your needs, you are married to the wrong person. You have a right to the satisfaction of your needs in a relationship, and if that does not happen, you should change partners and try again to get the same needs met with a different person. To put it in more crass terms, your marriage is about “you” and your needs and if it does not provide you with satisfaction, its dissolution is justifiable no matter the consequences for others, even the children.

This narrative has birthed the phenomena of multiple marriages, one-parent families, shattered children, the “starter” marriage, and cohabitation as a substitute for marriage, as well as a trend toward tying the knot at later and later ages. Since, as was stated above, a society reflects the quality of couples’ relationships, this focus on the self has also mirrored and fed a society of abuse and violence ranging from endemic negativity to domestic abuse, addictions of all kinds, crime, poverty, and war. These huge social issues cannot be changed until a different narrative about how to be in an intimate relationship emerges.

I believe a new narrative that shifts the focus from the self and personal need satisfaction to the relationship began to emerge in the last quarter of the twentieth century. In the seventies, a new view of the self as intrinsically relational and interdependent began to challenge the reigning view of the self as autonomous, independent, and self-sufficient. This paradigm shift was fomented by developmental psychologists who began to describe the newborn child as “social” at birth rather than becoming social at a later developmental stage. Humans beings, they began to say, are inherently relational and relationally dependent. At the same time, other students of the child-parent relationship began to say that there is no such thing as an “individual,” there is only a mother-child relationship, thus making relationship foundational rather than the individual. The isolated and autonomous self was exposed as a myth. The origin of the human problem was relocated from the interior of the self to the failure of relationship “between” caretakers and their infant children. These failed relationships, the new researchers said, are the source of suffering in the interior soul, and its relief requires participation in a relationship that is the antithesis of the early parent-child drama. Since these students of the human situation tended to be therapists, they assumed the optimal corrective relationship was with a therapist.

In the past twenty years, these insights have become the theme of a new marital narrative and the fourth incarnation of marriage, which I refer to as the “conscious partnership.” In this new narrative, commitment is to the needs of the relationship rather than to the needs of the self. It goes something like this: Your marriage is not about you. Your marriage is about itself; it is a third reality to which and for which you are responsible, and only by honoring that responsibility will you get your childhood and current needs met. When you make your relationship primary and your needs secondary, you produce the paradoxical effect of getting your needs met in ways they can never be met if you make them primary. What happens is not so much the healing of childhood wounds, which may in fact not be healable, but the creation of a relationship in which two persons are reliably and sustainably present to each other empathically. This new emotional environment develops new neural pathways flowered with loving presence that replace the old toxic pathways that are filled with the debris of the sufferings of childhood. Couplehood becomes the container for the joy of being, which is a connected relationship. And, since the quality of couplehood determines the tenor of the social fabric, the extension of that joy from the local to the global could heal most human suffering.

In my view,
Wired for Love
by Stan Tatkin is more than an addition to the vast literature directed to couples. It is more than a brilliant integration of recent brain research with the insights of attachment theory. It is an instance of an emergent literature expressing a new paradigm of couplehood. This is no small achievement: this book will help couples flourish in their relationships and it will aid the professionals who want to help couples be more effective. Since the author has provided a thorough guide for those on the journey to lasting love, it requires no summary here. It speaks for itself, and I encourage you to begin reading now. Your view of how to be in an intimate relationship and of the potential of marriage for personal and social healing will change forever!

Introduction: Wired for Love

Look around you. We live in a highly complex world. The array of devices, machinery, technology, and processes that make it tick is mindboggling. Just within the lifetime of many still alive today, humanity has come to regard as commonplace travel to the far side of the planet, the instant replay of events around the globe, and the ability to speak to and see just about anyone anywhere at any time, among many other things. We enjoy the advantages these scientific advances have brought us, and we curse them when they break down. And of course they do break down at times. For this reason, we turn to guidebooks—everything from a car owner’s manual that shows how much to inflate your tires, to the instructions that show how much batter to load in your waffle maker. We may hate the thought of consulting a manual (or calling for technical support, except perhaps in a pinch), but can you really operate all these things successfully simply through intuition?

Relationships are complex, too. Yet we often attempt them with a minimum of guidance and support. I’m not suggesting you should follow a standard set of 1-2-3 steps in relating to your partner. Relationships will never come with manuals that automate the process. We aren’t robots. What works for one couple won’t necessarily work for another. But neither does it work to fly blind, as many couples do, and expect relationships to fall into place.

Hence the need for well-informed guidance that supports your relationship.

And what might be considered well-informed in this context? In fact, a large and fascinating body of scientific knowledge and theory with the potential to influence how partners relate to one another has been accruing in recent decades. This includes revolutionary work in the fields of neuroscience and neurobiology, psychophysiology, and psychology. I believe couples can benefit from this wealth of research. You may find this idea intimidating, but don’t worry: I’m not suggesting you need to quit your day job and go back to school. I think you’ll find the basic theories quite straightforward when you hear them explained in lay language.

In short, it’s my conviction that having a better understanding about how our brains function—in other words, how we’re wired—puts us in a better position to make well-informed choices in our relationships. Scientific evidence suggests that, from a biological standpoint, we humans have been wired largely for purposes that are more warlike than loving in nature. That’s the bad news. But the good news is that recent research suggests a variety of strategies and techniques are available to reverse this predisposition. We can, in effect, take steps to assure we are primarily wired for love. These strategies can help us create stable, loving relationships in which we are poised to effectively defuse conflict when it arises.

So why not make use of them? In the first three chapters of this book, I provide you with general principles, drawn from cutting-edge research, to help you understand what makes a relationship successful and work toward that with your partner. The chapters that follow expand on these principles in practical ways. For example, if you have a clear sense of your partner’s relationship style based on the latest research, it will be easier for the two of you to work together and fix any problems that may arise. In essence, this book can serve as an owner’s manual for understanding yourself, your partner, and your relationship.

Now, you may raise your eyebrows at the notion of an owner’s manual. Your partner isn’t property, after all. I couldn’t agree more. However, I like this metaphor because it conveys the level of mutual responsibility and detailed knowledge of the relationship a couple needs to be successful. In fact, I would propose to you that all couples do in fact follow one or another set of rules and principles in their relationship. They may not be conscious of it, but they already have an owner’s manual of sorts. Unfortunately, many couples have the wrong manual. And in the case of distressed couples, they
always
have it wrong.

In my work with couples, I’ve noticed that partners tend to form their own theories about the cause of their problems. They do this out of distress and despair, and out of their need to know why: “Why am I in pain?” “Why am I feeling threatened or unsafe?” “Why is this relationship not working out as expected?” Partners work hard to come up with answers to such questions, and sometimes their answers provide an immediate sense of relief (“Now I know why this is happening”).

However, in the long run, these theories generally don’t work. They aren’t sufficiently accurate to help the relationship. They don’t stop the pain. They don’t alter our fundamental wiring. Ultimately, relying on such theories is one way of flying blind. In fact, at times, inaccurate theories further undermine a couple’s sense of security and happiness. More often than not, instead of ending the war between partners, grasping onto reasons and theories only creates more of a fortress. It only supplies more ammunition for the couple to throw at one another.

I’ve noticed partners’ theories almost always are pro-self, not pro-relationship. For instance, one partner says, “We argue because he doesn’t like the same things I like.” Another says, “She’s so inconsiderate; no wonder I feel hurt.” Or “This relationship isn’t working because he’s not the person I married.” In each case, the focus is on the individual coming up with the theory. One of the most important discoveries a couple can make is that it is possible to shift into a pro-relationship stance. Theories from this stance sound more like the following: “We have problems sticking to our agreements,” or “We do things that hurt one another.” To make this shift, partners must be willing to throw out their old theories and consider new ones. They must be willing to rewire.

Personally, I learned some of this the hard way.

For many years, my specialty as a psychotherapist was working with individuals suffering from personality disorders. I became interested in the early prevention of such disorders. As my practice began to focus more on adult couples, I found myself wanting to identify, earlier in the therapy, ways to prevent their problems, too.

Around this time, one of the great shocks of my life came to pass. My first wife and I divorced. During the period that followed, my need to understand why my marriage had failed led to a creative obsession, spurring me to more closely investigate the science behind relationships. I sensed that my fellow therapists and I must be missing something, something more we could do to help couples in distress. And could do earlier in their relationship. I might not have been able to salvage my marriage, but I could try harder to prevent failure for others…and for myself in the future.

Ultimately, I came up with several key areas of research I believed could point toward the difference between success and failure in relationships. I’m not speaking of research I conducted; these were the fields of study I mentioned earlier that have witnessed enormous leaps forward in the past few decades. The more I studied the latest findings and observed how they played out daily in my office, the more lights flashed in my mind. I realized this valuable knowledge wasn’t being properly synthesized for and focused on adult couples. Therapists working with couples had not begun to connect the disparate dots of various sciences. They were a bit like technical support people working with out-of-date manuals. Their advice only went so far. I became convinced the most important thing I could do with my time and energy was to find the connections between these areas of research and put them to practical clinical use.