Watching the recording of Real telling me to shape up, I noticed for the first time that Jess is crying. She looks so sad. Real is confronting me but also testifying to what my behavior has felt like to her, how isolated and fearful it has left her. And somehow, and this is the art of couples therapy at its most sophisticated, it’s all one thing: his confrontation of me, his affection for me, his validation of Jess, his care for her, his hope for our marriage.
“It’s a sequence issue,” Real says a few minutes later. For so long, through so many rounds of couples therapy, in so many fights between us, I have been demanding equity. I’ll do this, but you need to do that. I’ll calm down, but you need to stop withholding. I’ll learn to hold your fears, but you need to learn to tolerate my anger. No, Real says. Anger blocks everything else and has to leave the stage first.
I need to go first. I get to go first.
Epiphanies are real, but they’re fragile. They are a one-leafed seedling, pushing up through the crust of the ground, or a blind hatchling waiting, naked and alone, for its mother to return with a worm. They are easily crushed under foot or done in by harsh weather. If they’re not protected and nurtured, they will crumble and blow away in the wind, as though they never existed.
Session 4 was an epiphany for me, but one that would need to survive the crucible of conflict, not once but repeatedly, to establish its reality. A few hours after the session ended, driving back from dinner, Jess and I got into a tiff. She said something that upset me, and I started to snap — but then I stopped. “I need to get out of the car,” I said to her, as calmly as I could. We were only about a half mile from our house, so I walked the rest of the way, stopping at the market midroute for a few things. By the time I got home, Jess and I had both cooled off, and we were able to stay connected the remainder of the night. It was a small but important victory.
Real has a bit he does when clients say they “can’t” control themselves in a moment of distress. “No one selectively loses control,” he says to me. Would I rage, he asks, if he had a gun to my daughter’s head? No? Then it’s not can’t. It’s won’t. It’s a choice. Every small victory over “can’t” is evidence that I’m not impotent before the whims of my adaptive child, even when I’ve already traveled a step down the road toward meltdown. I was starting to believe.
