You and I both know that when someone is yelling at, criticizing, belittling, or ignoring a spouse, sex gets lost in the shuffle. No matter how much Person 1 apologizes, Person 2 is still hurt. After all, a smack is a smack, whether it’s physical or verbal: You feel the sting long after it’s over.
So the heartfelt apology just doesn’t do it. And then if you add in a cycle of years or decades of these “mistakes” and apologies, what you get is….nothing. Sex is dead and the marriage for all intents and purposes is also dead.
With that in mind, I’d like to do a review of David Schnarch’s book, Intimacy & Desire: Awaken the Passion in Your Relationship, 2009.
Obviously, it’s always nice to find another therapist who sees things as I do. The only way that sex can work is if there is trust and respect (words that are in the subtitle of my course which includes a book).
Here are some pieces that I underlined because they interested me:
On p. 37 he says, “The relationship in which you seek refuge pushes you to develop a more solid self, like pushing toothpaste out of a tube by progressively winding the other end. the love relationship you thought would make you feel safe and secure pouds your fragile reflected sense of self into something solid and lasting.”
Schnarch is a follower of the concepts of Murray Bowen. Bowen’s premise is that if a person has a “solid” sense of who he is, he will not be thrown by criticism. He will not feel criticized when his partner has a legitimate complaint. He will be able to listen and either make the needed changes or be able to meet his partner somewhere in the middle.
However, Bowen noticed that people marry whose sense of self is about the same as their partner. So if one is weak, the other is too, and that provides for challenges. What Schnarch does beautifully is point out that this is normal. Most people are like that. Our job is simply to work on that sense of self so as to get past it.
What’s more, Schnarch takes this into areas of sexuality which Bowen did not do. But this makes perfect sense: desire and interest are certainly dependent on how the relationship is going.
Schnarch also notices that in some couples, one person uses low desire as a tool to get back at the partner for not being warm and loving. On the other hand, to Schnarch, sexual desire problems are inevitable in a long-term relationship. “You can use it to help the two of you grow as individuals and as a couple. I comes down to how you go about solving your desire problem.” (p. 39)
When he talks about a “solid sense of self,” Schnarch compares that to a self that knows who it is from the Other — instead of from within himself. This is where the trouble begins. And the solution is to grow a strong sense of who one is regardless of what a partner (or others) say.
On page 212, he introduces a concept called “normal marital sadism.” It is NOT normal in the sense of being healthy. It is normal in the mathematical sense of being prevalent. Here are statistics:
He gave questionnaires to twenty couples who attended one of his retreats and “every one reported doing things deliberately to hurt their partner. Half the group reported really enjoying it. . . A quarter of the group added mind-twisting torture by denying they were doing it.”
He then put the same questionnaire to 100 therapists [uh-oh] and “88% said they engaged in normal marital sadism.”
That’s a good reason to be verrrrry careful when engaging a therapist, isn’t it?
But it’s also a good reason to be very sad and hurt in your marriage.
Here’s something to chew on: (p. 217) “Sometimes we hate our parents or mate because we love them. Beyond our vulnerability to what they can do to us, our love makes us vulnerable to what they do to themselves. What befalls them — and the ways they destroy themselves — impacts us. Watching your parents diminish themselves rips your heart out. and it’s not hard to hate someone you love who constantly diminishes you, lies to your face, and treats you badly in other ways. We deny our hatred because it punctures our reflected sense of self, offends our narcissism, and makes us feel unlovable.”
What does this mean?
If a person doesn’t have that solid sense of who he is, then he needs to get it from others. If that Other is also abusive, the he is stuck, isn’t he? By leaving the abuser, he leaves the one person who gives him any sense of who he is (what Schnarch calls the “reflected sense of self.”) The only solution must be to know who you are (as Socrates suggested nearly 2500 years ago).
In Chapter 10, he asks: What does it take to really change things? And his answer is Integrity, something you work on. It “involves self-imposed mandates and boundaries that define who you are.”
And then he said something else that I really liked because it is exactly what I’ve been saying: (page 237) You cannot get security from your spouse; only from yourself.
In order to be successful in a marriage, you must be secure within yourself.
WHAT I DIDN’T LIKE
There were only two things I didn’t like in the book, really.
The first is that he wants to sound like he has created some new idea when he talks about “Four Points Of Balance” that people should have to succeed in marriage. What he is talking about is the ability to withstand stress, to be calm inside oneself even when a spouse says challenging things.
He didn’t need to make it sound so complicated; the job of getting calm is challenging enough! But what I do like is that, the title of the concept notwithstanding, we are again in full agreement on what has to be done.
The second thing I didn’t like is that all the characters he creates to illustrate his point seem to be able to recognize their own feelings and report them when the time is right in therapy. I wish!
In truth, people are generally out of touch with their OWN SELVES and don’t know what they feel except in the most general terms of good, bad, happy, angry; something like that. The process of helping people notice changes in feelings as they are happening is hugely necessary so that people don’t lash out at each other.
(When they know the real reason someone made them angry, they realize that they themselves made themselves angry because they had certain thoughts about what the other person said.) This takes time for people to learn and he made it sound too easy.
But, like I said, these were small things. For the most part, I like the book. And he definitely gets into some very useful — and beautiful — sex techniques when the REAL intimacy issues are solved.
When people can engage their intellect in talking to their spouses instead of knee-jerk emotional reactions, they make room for mental intimacy. And that, of course, makes room for good sex.