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Authors: Ph.D Harville Hendrix

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On the surface Kenneth and Grace, like many couples, appeared to be polar opposites. Grace as the outgoing, angry one; Kenneth was the passive, pleasant one. However, underneath his superficial “goodness,” Kenneth was just as angry as Grace. The way his anger revealed itself was through criticism. This tendency showed up early in their marriage. “From the word ‘go,’ Kenneth never gave me the feeling that he admired me,” says Grace. “Other fellows that I had dated treated me much more kindly. Kenneth was critical of my housekeeping, my parenting, my moods, my lack of intellect. And he was always playing teacher. He would ask me, ‘Do you know such and such?’—some obscure fact that had no relevance to me. When I admitted that I did not, he would proceed to lecture me as if I were a high-school student. I was able to put a stop to that particular behavior in the first few years. But he never gave me the feeling that he cherished me. He never loved me the way I wanted to be loved. Gradually I think I lost much of the self-esteem that I had brought into the marriage.”
Today Kenneth can be quite candid about the way he used to criticize his wife. “I wanted a lot from her, and I was getting a lot. But I seemed determined to bite the hand that fed me. I needed to keep her unsettled, even though I knew how much this hurt her.”
Why was Kenneth so critical of Grace? If you will recall, Kenneth’s goal in life was to get tender nurturing from a dominant mother figure, but at the same time he had to stay far enough away so that he would not be absorbed. Unconsciously, he accomplished this delicate maneuver by giving Grace enough love and affection to keep her interested, but maintaining a crucial distance through the use of constant criticism.
Because Grace was getting so little affirmation from Kenneth, she was understandably insecure about the relationship. She felt jealous and suspicious of his outside activities, especially his contacts with women. “There are so many women who fall in love with their doctors,” she says, “I was sure he was having an affair.” Kenneth admits that for a very long time he had “one foot in the marriage and one foot out. Like maybe somebody better would come along. Like maybe I hadn’t picked the best one. It hurts me to say this, but I had only a partial commitment to Grace.”
It’s no wonder that Grace often felt angry. “The one thing I can’t deny,” Grace says, “is that there was a constant surge of anger in me.” But at the time Grace didn’t know where it was coming from. The time that she was most aware of her anger was when she went to bed at night. She would say to herself, “Why am I so angry? Why is this?” But she didn’t have any answers. Now, when she looks back on this period of their relationship, it is plain to her that Kenneth was the source of her anger. She remembers that he often had to put in late nights delivering babies or responding to medical emergencies. When she heard the sound of his car coming down the gravel driveway, she would have a rush of what she calls “romantic feelings.” She would be eager to see him and she would greet him with an air of expectancy. But within a very few minutes she would be angry. The romance would crumble. “I felt disappointed,” says Grace. “Yet I wasn’t even sure what it was that I wanted from him.”
Kenneth and Grace’s relationship went through many changes in those first twenty or so years. They raised four children, lived in three different cities, and had good years and bad years. But the emotional undercurrents were the same. Grace kept wanting more love, strength, and commitment from Kenneth. Kenneth kept wanting more love, softness, and, at the same time, more distance from Grace. The underlying tension was so great that, had they been born in a more permissive era, they probably would have gotten a divorce. “I was always threatening divorce,” says Grace. “After the first year of marriage, divorce was a frequently occurring issue. We were very different people, and we weren’t willing to accommodate each other.” One of Grace’s deepest regrets is that she shared her anger at Kenneth with her oldest daughter. “From the time she was old enough to listen, I would complain to her about her father,” she says. “To this day, I’m afraid she thinks less of him because of this.”
The lowest ebb of their relationship took place when they were in their forties and Kenneth was going through a midlife crisis. Until this point in his life, he had always thought of himself as a “promising young man.” Life was an adventure, and there were many avenues open to him. Now he looked around and saw that he was in a lackluster marriage, that he was a “mediocre” doctor, and that he didn’t have much enthusiasm for his profession. “I was just delivering babies. I could no longer maintain the fantasy of a promising future,” he says. This realization led to a long depression.
Meanwhile, Grace was going through a religious crisis. The church had always been very important to her; suddenly the beliefs that she grew up with no longer made any sense to her. She began to search for new meaning, but the more she searched, the less she found to hold on to. She turned to Kenneth in desperation. “I would say to him, ‘Tell me what
you
believe and I’ll believe it!’ But he would only give me books to read. He gave me Paul Tillich and I would sit and read and cry.
I couldn’t understand it. I finally decided that I was going crazy. I was going insane. I was too smart to be taken in by the conservative evangelists, and I was too dumb to understand the liberal theologians. I was in a religious vacuum.”
Kenneth remembers Grace’s tumult. “She wanted me to sort out her moral and religious confusion,” he says. “I would try and fail, and there would be a storm of pain and rage from her. She was in anguish for her soul. I felt as if she had her hands around my throat, begging me for answers. I was supposed to provide something for her, and I was failing.” He was distressed that he couldn’t help Grace, but he was also aware that he was deliberately holding back from her something that she wanted. “She wanted me to be strong, to be decisive. And it wasn’t just about religion. It was everything. She wanted to be a little girl and have me be the daddy. But that felt like an unfair position to me. I didn’t want to be too strong. Then I would have to give up forever my wish to get what I needed. I wanted to be the child, too.”
Gradually the crisis began to diminish. Grace joined a church that was willing to accept her confusion and questioning, and she was deeply relieved to discover that her husband, a very religious man, stuck by her, “even though I was next thing to an atheist.” At the same time, Kenneth sought help for his depression by joining a therapy group. In the course of his therapy, he made some important discoveries about himself. One of the most important ones was that he was making Grace carry all the anger in the relationship. “I was projecting all my anger onto her. I was the good, gentle one. She was the bad, angry one. Meanwhile, I had a lot of unexpressed anger of my own, and keeping it inside of me was one of the things that kept me remote and made Grace so angry.”
Slowly Kenneth began to test out his capacity for anger. “It was while he was in therapy,” recalls Grace, “that Kenneth dared to get mad at me for the first time. I don’t even remember what it was about. But I distinctly remember that he actually
raised his voice at me. He was dumbstruck that I didn’t turn around and kill him. He didn’t think he was going to survive his own anger.” This was a crucial experience for Kenneth. He had challenged his internal prohibition against anger and lived to tell about it. He began to test his newfound ability. “I got mad at Grace four or five times in one week, just to prove that I could do it. Then I got so that any time she started yelling at me I began to yell back. Only I made sure that I yelled louder.” Even though she had always wanted Kenneth to be more assertive, once he started standing up for himself Grace found it hard to get used to. At times she yearned for the old, passive Kenneth.
Despite his wife’s apprehensions, Kenneth continued to become more self-confident and aggressive, growth that was supported and encouraged by his therapy group. One of the messages that Kenneth was getting from the members of the group was that he wasn’t asking enough for himself. “You act as if you’re not entitled to much in life,” they told him. Kenneth felt there was some truth to this observation, and he began searching for ways to feel more fulfilled. It was during this time that he had an affair. “I don’t blame the group for what I did,” he says. “They did nurture in me the notion that I was too self-effacing, but it was my idea to have this affair. I saw it as an opportunity to go for something for me. To spread my wings and fly. It wasn’t that Grace and I were at odds with each other. We were actually doing OK at the time—not great, but OK. It’s just that I wanted an exciting adventure. This was a way to prove myself.”
The affair lasted only a couple of weeks. Grace found out about it when she discovered a motel receipt that had fallen from his pocket. She knew right away what had happened. “I had been suspicious of him for years. Now it had really happened.” Grace reacted to the affair in a typical fashion: “I was furious. I yelled and screamed.” Two days after her discovery of the receipt, she arranged for an appointment with a
relationship counselor. “I wanted help dealing with this,” she says. “I felt like I was going to explode. Also, I suppose, I saw therapy as a way to take him to court, make him acknowledge the pain he had caused me.”
Through the therapy, Kenneth and Grace were able to come to a resolution. Kenneth agreed to stop seeing the other woman, and Grace agreed to try to rebuild her trust. In the process, Kenneth gained some important insights about Grace. “Her anger over the affair was threatening to me, but it was also very affirming. It showed me how much she cared about our marriage, and that she was willing to pick up the pieces and continue to work on our relationship. We had talked about divorce for so long that I was gratified that she was still willing to see if anything good could come of a bad situation.”
Understandably, it took Grace a long time to rebuild her trust. When Kenneth came home at night, she would ask him about his comings and goings in great detail. Kenneth patiently put up with her cross-examination for months, accepting full responsibility for betraying her trust. It was during this critical period of their relationship that the final crisis occurred: Kenneth had to have quadruple-bypass surgery. Even though he responded well to the surgery, Grace was more shaken by his heart condition than by the affair. “One evening,” says Kenneth, “we were lying in bed and Grace told me that, if getting out of my life would make my recovery easier for me, she would be willing to leave. She knew that our marriage had not been very satisfying to either of us and thought maybe my heart problem was a sign of my ‘disease.’ If living apart would be a benefit to me, she would agree to a divorce. She made it clear that she didn’t
want
to leave me, but she was afraid that living together was only making matters worse.”
Grace’s willingness to make this sacrifice was the turning point for Kenneth. “It was then that I decided to put both of my feet into the marriage,” he says. “I knew I wasn’t going to find a better woman than Grace. She was a remarkable woman.
She had been hard to live with at times. But, then, aren’t we all? I finally made a full commitment to our marriage.”
I suggested to Kenneth that maybe his decision to commit himself to Grace had something to do with her offering him an accepting, nonpossessive love, something that he had always wanted from his mother. He thought about it for a minute. “Yes. Yes. I believe that’s exactly what it was. My mother’s love always had strings attached. Grace was offering me a selfless love.”
Kenneth and Grace didn’t have an official ceremony to celebrate their remarriage, although there was one conversation in a restaurant that felt very significant to them. A pianist was playing the song “Someone to Watch over Me” and Kenneth took hold of Grace’s hand and said to her, “Let’s make a deal. I’ll watch over you, and you’ll watch over me.” It was a simple declaration of love: Let’s agree to be each other’s protectors, each other’s best friends.
Finally, after thirty years of an intimate love relationship, Grace was getting Kenneth’s full attention and commitment. Spontaneously, along with his commitment, Kenneth gained new appreciation for Grace’s good qualities. “I think he began to realize that I was intelligent. I wasn’t an academic, but I was a gifted artist. I began to feel for the first time that Kenneth truly admired me.” The anger that had consumed her for so many years became less intense—because, as Grace put it, “He truly loved me, and I knew it.”
It was at this advanced stage of love and acceptance that Kenneth and Grace first came to one of my workshops. On their own they had managed to work through their major impasse, but they still were able to acquire some new insights and skills. For Grace, the most significant part of the couples workshop was watching a demonstration of the Container Transaction exercise. She was deeply moved to see the couple learn how to handle their anger. It was, she says, the first time that her anger had made any sense to her. “I suddenly realized
that I wasn’t a ‘bad’ or crazy person to be angry. Anger had a reason and a purpose. I wouldn’t need to deny my explosiveness to be lovable, only channel it and make it a productive part of our relationship. It was a marvelous revelation to me!”
Since the workshop, Kenneth and Grace, like Anne and Greg, have developed their own version of the Container Transaction exercise. They both feel free to “rant and rave,” as they put it, when they have strong feelings. But they are very conscious of what they are doing and are careful not to hurt each other in the process. “We never call each other names,” says Kenneth. “We just express our anger and irritation. And the other person knows that this is an important part of keeping our relationship healthy. We don’t harbor grudges.” Grace feels that this process has dramatically increased Kenneth’s acceptance of her emotional nature. “It seems that his attitude toward my anger changed at that workshop. He had already learned to accept his own anger in his therapy group, but he hadn’t accepted mine. Now he has. I yell and I scream and I’m still loved. We go through it, and we come back together. It’s been a very important change in our relationship.”
BOOK: Getting the Love You Want, 20th An. Ed.
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