How a Young Couple Fell Back In Love Even With Violent, Rejecting, Unsupportive, and Dismissive Parents
Leslie and Gregory were a young couple who came to me in despair. Not only did they offer up the usual “we can’t communicate” but there was screaming, crying, or fighting nearly every day in a desperate attempt to be heard.
As Leslie said, “We got so defensive, that we had to fight.”
But when that didn’t work, they wouldn’t speak to each other for days at a time. Gregory explained, “Even when we tried to resolve things, it would escalate.”
Sadly, he said, “It felt like there was no place for me in the relationship. I was alone.”
Leslie admitted, “I was so unhappy, I felt suffocated. I couldn’t function. It was so pervasive. I was sitting in class and started crying in the middle of class and I wrote him a whole long email telling him how I was so lost and everything.
And his response to that was, ‘I think we should get divorced.’ All I was doing was expressing how I was feeling. I wasn’t saying, ‘You’re a terrible person.’ ”
“But, see,” Greg interrupts, “We never voiced feelings in my family, ever. Even now, if I’m having a conversation with my mother and I say something that makes her uncomfortable, she’s like, ‘Okay Greg, gotta go, bye.’ ”
“So I started crying a lot more. And I was still sitting in class,” Leslie continued. “Because his position was that if he made me unhappy, why should we stay married? But I told him I didn’t want that. So, on his own, he set up an appointment for therapy that very day.
There was another reason to make it work:
Gregory came from a family where his father could be violent. They both had families that fought a lot. There was a lot of pain. This went on for decades. And the divorced family members weren’t happy, either.
He knew, absolutely knew, that there had to be a better way. As he said, “If we tossed this relationship, we wouldn’t have grown.”
When Greg set up that appointment, he had found me by the weirdest route.
About 15 years earlier than that, some guy found me online because I’ve had a blog for over twenty years. He wanted to start therapy but I was living in Florida and he only would work with me face-to-face.
Fast forward ten years and my husband and I moved to New York and I started writing a column in a local newspaper. This very same guy found me there and started coming for personal therapy. Unbeknown to both of us, his wife was seeing another therapist and reporting on the great progress her husband was making with me!
So that therapist referred Leslie and Gregory to me. And that therapist was someone I’d never even met!
I wondered what my first advice was to Leslie and Gregory.
Leslie wouldn’t have remembered, but it happened that she was going through her things recently and came across a journal entry she’d made at the time:
“You said to go back home and hold each other. But you didn’t want to, Greg, because you said you were still unhappy and you couldn’t.”
Greg laughs, “I’ve changed a lot since then! Yeah. Like even this morning, we disagreed with each other but we said, whatever, let’s just kiss!”
I was curious why they even continued with me, then. Leslie admits that she was very hurt that Greg wouldn’t hold her that night. But this wouldn’t deter her.
In the past, Greg tried to break off the relationship “many times.” Why wasn’t Leslie listening to that? Was she so needy?
Not at all. Leslie clarified that when Greg wanted to break off,
“It always came from a self-deprecating place. This doesn’t make sense to me. Your not feeling good about yourself is not a reason; that doesn’t mean that we’re not meant to be together.”
So why didn’t Greg just drop the idea of therapy?
Simply, “Because I wanted our marriage to work.”
And what he found was that “every time things got bad, it was less bad.”
And Leslie felt, “I’m not alone in this. There’s someone else there that we have to be accountable to.”
So how are things today?
“You gave us tools” Greg explains. Leslie goes on, “When we started with you, it made me aware that Greg had no idea what a feeling was!”
But do they use the tools to this day?
Leslie: “They’ve become so second nature that we don’t think about it. They’re so much a part of how we talk in general. Our relationship is so different from where it was.”
Greg: “We have arguments about things, but we do communicate a lot more. Our days are planned and discussed.”
Leslie: “if we didn’t communicate well, it doesn’t mean we don’t talk for a week. We know we need to regroup. A day used to be walking on eggshells.”
Greg: “Walking on nails!”
Leslie: “Yeah, like walking in a minefield and you don’t know if it’s going to explode. And now, we’re walking through a field of flowers! At this point, we have a very happy marriage. We get along with each other.”
Greg points out that a lot of past stress came from outside the two of them, but it affected them.
But no longer. He relates that last week the a/c broke in the middle of a heat wave. To make matters worse, Leslie goes on, “it started a torrential downpour and we were in it. We looked like we came out of the pool.”
But here’s the thing Greg wants you to know: “We just looked at each other and we were laughing!”
Leslie: “And our younger baby had a dirty diaper and it exploded all over my shirt and we were laughing! Had this happened when we started with you, we would not have been able to cope.”
I was curious whether their past tendency to blame each other was part of the story.
Leslie answered that one: “No. We do it sometimes but not often. But we don’t look to blame each other. It’s not a knee jerk reaction. And the other person doesn’t have a knee jerk reaction either.”
So what was their biggest takeaway from their experience working with me? What do they want people to know?
Greg: “Each of us are human; we all make mistakes; we all have flaws. We try to understand each other. Respecting each other is super important.
Then every conversation comes out of a place of love and every argument comes out of a place where you really want to work with each other to figure it out.”
Leslie adds, “And to be patient. Because it takes people a while to implement new habits so it’s having patience while someone’s trying to learn that. And being kind to each other, being nice and thoughtful of the other person. And to let the defenses down a little bit.”
Greg: “Yeah. It’s been a journey. And we will never stop growing.”
Leslie: “And we see all the work we’ve done with you and we see how that comes out with our older child who will be three. Yeah, he was roughhousing with Greg and Greg walks away and he says, ‘Mommy I’ve got a bad feeling about this!’ ”
This with a father who didn’t exactly know what feelings were… They’ve created a happy and safe place to raise their children, unlike their own parents.
Greg concludes, “Without you, DrDeb, this wouldn’t be possible.” He waves his hand toward the bedroom where the three-year-old was sleeping and then at the newest Addition, sitting on her mother’s lap. He smiles.
If you want results like these, then my 12-week intensive group coaching program with 1:1 and joint therapy and an educational component may be just the thing for you.
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