“Men are from Earth, women are from Earth. Deal with it.”
-George Carlin
Very often, people seek therapy because of relationship problems, and these problems often sound something like this:
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- I keep getting broken up with / I keep ending relationships for eerily similar reasons; I fear that I’m destined to be alone.
- I’m in a painful long-term relationship that I can’t seem to get out of, and I don’t even know how I got into this mess in the first place.
- I want a relationship, but I can’t seem to even meet anybody.
We tend to rely on our friends for relationship advice and perspective, but when painful relationship patterns continually repeat, our friends eventually run out of advice (and time). When I start working with a new patient, he or she is often seeking a newer, wiser advisor. However, in my experience, whatever benefit can be obtained through external advice is generally short-lived and unhelpful in the long term.
As tempting as it may be, I strive not to give advice.
Actively seeking and finding your own truth in your own words is unquestionably more satisfying and rewarding than passively receiving packets of supposed wisdom from the outside. This active search often begins with my questioning the beliefs about men and women that the patient is bringing into every intimate relationship.
We often see ourselves as victims of a careless other, and we tell stories about men and women that justify this victimhood. Take a walk on any given afternoon in New York City and you’ll hear somebody talking authoritatively about the unsavory traits of either “men” or “women.” I hear these comments often in therapy, particularly in early sessions.
These stories about men and women presume that every man and woman can be reduced to a series of simple traits. As soon as we humans discover any generalizable superficial difference among people [man/woman, black/white, blonde/brunette], our minds seem to immediately group together constellations of traits that supposedly characterize the differences between these different groups. Everybody does this. There’s clearly something fundamentally human about this process of stereotyping, and the complex social function of these stereotypes is beyond the scope of this inquiry.
In contrast to whatever function or efficacy they may have in day-to-day life, stereotypes can be very destructive to interpersonal relationships. One-on-one relationships happen in a very granular, ungeneralizable space, where stereotypes about men and women break down. A relationship is essentially a conversation between two people, and the quality of the relationship depends on the openness of that conversation. When we bring these stereotypes about men and women into our relationships, we prevent ourselves from seeing the other person, and the conversation stops.
Through the therapeutic conversation with me, patients often discover the ways in which they are unconsciously participating in these problematic relationship dynamics. Once it becomes clear to the patient that he/she is not merely the passive recipient of some callous other’s careless whims, victimhood no longer fits as comfortably as it used to. When we are released from unconscious fantasies of victimization, we are newly free to create and discover richer and truer conversations with the most important people in our lives.