Do I Stay or Do I Go?
Managed separation, discernment counseling or couples counseling?
Written by Dr. Donna Gilman
Dear reader, what pain this is. Your heart feels like it’s breaking. You’re at the end of your energy. Your sleep is in the toilet. The kids are acting out, making the tension in the house even more unbearable. At work, you can’t focus. Thoughts of what to do run through your head as a constant backdrop to your day. Around and around you go in your mind: do I leave? do I stay? do I try working on it again? do I find someone new and start over? or do I spend the rest of my days alone? You don’t want to worry your parents, so you say nothing, leaving awkward gaps in your conversations and strained family gatherings. Half your friends suspect something is up, the other half know. You vacillate between wanting to throw your partner under the bus and wanting to protect him/her/them, in case things somehow work out. It’s hard to believe your life has come to this. You think back on the earlier, happier times and question whether it was all a mirage. Was that happiness real or was it what you wanted to believe? The fumes of that early love have burned out so long ago, leaving a ghostly imprint buried under years of resentment, pain, and hopelessness.
And yet, yesterday, watching your partner play with the kids, you saw a glimpse of the person you at one point chose and you wonder once again, could we somehow make this better? Is there a way through these cycles of silence and rage? Anything would be better than breaking up the family. Besides, how would you afford two households? No, the only way is to keep trudging forward, hoping for a better day.
As a couples therapist and director of a center devoted to helping couples figure out, how and if, their gridlocked issues can be resolved, I have so much empathy for how heart- wrenching these decisions are. I see many couples who wait until they are in dire straits before they try couples counseling. Other couples have seen multiple past therapists but have not been able to effect change in their relationship. By the time they enter my office, they are angry, demoralized, and hopeless. One or both partners may be going through the motions of couples counseling, while wondering if by leaving the marriage, their personal misery will end. What I see, upon assessing some of these couples, is that the level of reactivity and projecting between them has become too great for them to continue living together and think clearly about their own contributions.
I explain the origins of all relationship issues, and the path to resolution, always lie in our relationship to ourselves. Isn’t it ironic that we spend so much time and energy trying to get our partners to change while lamenting the entire time what a thankless endeavor it is? The only person we have control over is ourselves and yet, facing our own growth edge is so overwhelming, frustrating, or confusing that we avoid it. Unhappy couples are made up of people, usually both partners, who have either never defined, or lost connection with, their own values, needs and boundaries. Certainly, they also may be lacking the ability to communicate, compromise and engage in productive negotiation, without steamrolling their partner, or collapsing inside themselves.
Thus, the questions that couples bring into relationship counseling are often quite different than my own. The couple may ask, “Are we even compatible?” “Did I choose the wrong person?” “Do we stay together or divorce?” “Can this relationship be fixed?” “Do you see any hope for us as a couple?” “What if I’m not in love anymore?” “Does anyone move past infidelity?”
Whereas, I might ask “As an adult, do you know who you are?” “Do you understand the complexity of your own needs and emotions?” “How good are you at expressing vulnerability?” “Can you recognize when your partner is being vulnerable and how do you respond?” “What do you see as your own unique contributions to the problems?” “What work are you willing to do on yourself to change how you show up in your own life and possibly, to this relationship?” And “How rigid or permeable are your boundaries?”
For black and white thinkers, usually folks who also have trouble sitting with the intensity and complexity of their own emotions, trial separation may be viewed as an even more threatening proposition than divorce. The idea of a trial separation can feel like a gray void, one in which goals, structure and outcome may be murky and ill-defined. Common practical issues can feel almost insurmountable: who will stay in the home? what will we tell the kids? how will our friends and families react? how will we afford this? what do we do during separation, individually or collectively, to get clarity?
A mentor of mine once said, “Do not leave a relationship until some form of healing has occurred.” In a managed separation sometimes called a therapeutic separation, a couple has an opportunity to heal old wounds, learn to negotiate, set healthy boundaries, fight fair and end sabotaging behavior. If your partner isn’t interested in reading this with you, all is not lost. All it takes for a couple to change is one person changing the steps of the dance. I can’t predict what will happen when the steps of the dance change, but I can guarantee that once the dust settles, you’ll know how to create a happier relationship, hopefully with your current partner.
There is much confusion when a couple is in crisis as to what path to choose: couples counseling or a separation. Many couples do not know that facilitated separations are an option and attempt to navigate the complexity of separation on their own, without professional assistance. A managed or therapeutic separation is a great option for couples who are hopeful that reconciliation may be possible but need some physical space and process to attempt to work through gridlock.
Discernment Counseling
For couples who are unsure as to the best path forward, couples in which at least one partner is unsure whether it is in their best interest to continue in the relationship, there is a unique decision-making process available called Discernment Counseling. Discernment Counseling was developed by a therapist named Bill Doherty. It is a powerful process whereby each person is guided deeply into a decision-making process by the therapist to gain greater clarity and confidence in deciding what comes next for the relationship. The three possible outcomes, or paths, of discernment counseling are path one: keeping things the same (which typically is not desirable); path two: separating/divorcing; or path three: doing time-limited couples therapy in which individual, actionable goals are clearly delineated and then put into action during therapy.
Discernment therapy is not right for couples in which someone has decided to leave the relationship. It is for couples where at least one partner is leaning out but is unsure about the right next step. Discernment counseling is a maximum of five sessions, usually weekly which is meant to hold the couple in the intensity of the process. It does not involve working on dynamic though the couple’s therapist may say things like “If you enter into path 3, relational counseling, this may be an aspect of dynamic that we would work on.”
No matter what path a couple takes, each person will be stretched past familiar limits, as they are challenged to get themselves out of the painful rut they have fallen into. There will be moments of great doubt and sadness in this journey but trust in the wisdom of this enterprise. There is no by-passing the hard work necessary to evaluate the partner you have been, the person you long to be, moving forward, and the kind of relationship you’d like to co-create. No matter how angry, demoralized, or hopeless you currently feel, please plant both feet firmly in the soil and be willing to dig deeply into the concept of autonomous change.
Managed Separation
Couples often ask, given the hardships of separation, why would anyone choose to separate? What good could possibly come of it? In a long-term relationship, the long standing issues between two people resemble a ball of twine, impossible to know where one thread of pain ends and another begins. Each partner views their own pain as paramount; the crimes of the other as more detrimental to the stability of the relationship. Living in a toxic soup of projections, everyday misdemeanors take on epic proportions. Simple interactions wound and send partners scrambling to their respective corners. There is no escape from the daily chafing. The practical considerations of separation, both financial and logistical, as well as the obvious emotional risks, often keep couples trapped in misery and uncertainty. That is, until one person can’t see their way forward any longer and formally leaves the relationship.
A managed separation is not for the faint of heart. It’s like stepping off a cliff, not knowing what kind of landing awaits you, or who will be there when you do. It takes a willingness to admit that the relationship, in its current incarnation, needs to die, or, at the very least, undergo a major transformation. Just as entering the relationship was a leap of faith, the separation is a leap as well, challenging each partner to untie the rope that binds one to another, and take a journey deep into their own hearts. A managed separation can, however, prove transformational.
If you have children or are legally wed, there’s plenty of advice out there about how to tell the kids you’re separating, how to move through a divorce, how to heal post-divorce but not so much about the value of a thoughtful separation. Many people fear separation is the harbinger of divorce, and while it is possible that separation can lead to legal termination of a marriage, it is just as likely that a well facilitated separation can lead to greater responsibility taking, truth telling, clarity and even renewed love. To separate is to accept an inconvenient truth: that things are not working. It is to wave a white flag of surrender and agree to take space. The guidelines of the separation are important and both parties must agree on the terms of the contract.
Couples Counseling
In a longer-term relationship, the issues that exist between two people can start to feel like a sticky spider’s web. It’s sometimes hard to figure out where one person’s contributions begin and end. This glob of projections, blame, assignment of motive, cross-complaining, defenses, and maladaptive coping strategies often come to be the most practiced form of engagement, the glue, so to speak, that holds the relationship in place. While each partner may feel deep despair at each of their roles in this dynamic, they feel powerless to change the steps of the dance. In many forms of couples therapy, emphasis is placed on fixing the relationship, this third entity that needs to be nurtured. Many a well-meaning therapist will prescribe date nights and reflective listening to counterbalance the negativity and tension. However, often these measures come too late or fall too short.
The key to relationship change only comes as a result of personal evolution and growth. And the vehicle for this growth is a commitment to one’s own change. There is no other mechanism quite as powerful as taking personal responsibility for one’s own unresolved stuff and unique contributions to the gridlocked problems in a relationship. Only by dedicating oneself wholly to the ongoing process of knowing oneself on the deepest possible level and understanding that lasting change comes through practice and time, can a person show up fully to their love relationship. This is the relationship that has the greatest potential for both risk and intimacy. And what a risk it is to embrace autonomous change! For in doing so, the very relationship itself is at risk.
Most people will prioritize the salvation of the relationship, at any cost, over their personal growth and development. It doesn’t matter how miserable they have become in the relationship, the risk of losing the relationship, of losing the love of the other, has the potential to keep partners stuck in an endless loop of frustration and attachment. The familiar, “can’t live with you but can’t live without you” scenario is one that plays out in so many relationships I witness. By focusing on the faults of the other and on the myriad ways they have disappointed you through the years, true vulnerability and self-examination are obscured. The risk of facing rejection and abandonment looms so large in the psyches of most people, especially anyone who has ever experienced past loss, that they will do virtually anything to avoid facing such a loss again.
Show me someone who longs for greater intimacy and I will show you someone who is terrified of encountering it. The very person who overtly demands or covertly pulls for the raw transparency of the partner struggles to create and sustain the kind of emotional and sexual intimacy they crave. So long as the focus remains on the other changing, showing up in a different way or demonstrating its now safe to be vulnerable, nothing changes. We call this spider web enmeshment. For the part in each of us who is afraid to be exposed, the partner’s inability or unwillingness to change is actually good news. That scared part of us breathes a huge sigh of relief because it means it gets to stay underground.
If you want to test this out, try an experiment. Watch what happens if you decide to take ownership of your own level of reactivity. Simply put, there are three main types of reactivity, both internally felt and externally expressed, and we all have a typical pattern of reacting that has been well conditioned by our childhood and well-practiced in our adulthood. If you think of a continuum of reactivity, escalation is at one end. Withdrawal or shut down is at the other and in the middle is compliance. Some people have a pattern of reactivity in which they get triggered and pull away. But they are like ticking time bombs until suddenly, one day, they explode. Other people will get triggered, escalate in tone or volume, and then shut down. Others just say yes, yes, yes, while inside they continually compromise their core values and beliefs. This person has trouble setting and maintaining boundaries and may simmer with unconscious resentment.
Back to the experiment: you wake up one day and you decide today is the day you are going to be the highest version of yourself. You vow that no matter how nasty or unresponsive your partner is, you are going to take the high road. You’re going to be sweet and loving. All goes fine that morning. You are tested a few times by “yesterday’s partner” showing up, but you are not thrown off your game. By afternoon, though, your partner looks at you the wrong way, and bam! Before you know it, you are reacting in your typical manner, flooded by familiar feelings of frustration and maybe hopelessness.
Two things have likely happened. One, your partner may have sensed you trying to do a different dance step, mistrusted it, tested it and ultimately sabotaged it. The other is that you yourself buckled under the pull of your well-established pattern of reactivity and negative thoughts or emotions about your partner. The part of you that is scared to face the risk of vulnerability, the risk of exposure, is delighted that the status quo has been maintained. But the part of you that longs for a happier life is thwarted once again.
When I mention vulnerability to people, the reaction is always the same, “Oh, I’ve tried that. It didn’t work.” Both partners can easily recount times they put themselves out there, either by self-disclosure or by asking for help and their partner ignored, criticized, or shamed them. I explain vulnerability as a two-prong approach. The first part is the initial exposure of self. But the second prong is the more difficult one; that is, in the face of a less than favorable response from the partner, what do you do? The knee jerk response is to protect the self, of course. What idiot would put themselves out there after being rejected or ridiculed? However, it takes a lot of emotional stamina to be able to say, “Hey, that was me asking for something. I’m feeling really rejected right now and can feel myself shutting down.”
In addition to protecting ourselves, the reason we don’t broadcast this news is that we have a hard time accepting the reality of our situation: that whatever dynamic exists is one that we co-created with our partner and that it takes sustained vulnerability on the part of at least one partner to change that dynamic. Since we only have control over ourselves, it’s clear that our only chance of stimulating change starts with us. Imagine that each time you do both prongs of the vulnerability practice that you are growing just a little stronger emotionally. In this equation, the reaction of the partner is not the focus. Personal growth is. It’s an eyes wide open stance, where we really start to see our own reactivity as just as important in the dynamic as our partner’s.
This kind of awareness blasts through two misperceptions most people hold: one, that their partner has caused them more pain than they have caused their partner; and two, that their partner really has more emotional growing to do than they do. Realizing the event of your own enmeshed patterns really levels the playing field, no matter how evolved you may be in some ways. This brings me to the concept of differentiation.
Every time we feel a sense of frustration and hopelessness that our partner can’t change, we are really confronted by our own struggles to change. In this way, our partner is such a great mirror for us. Even though their stuff may be different than our own, they face the same uphill battle in trying to change deeply ingrained ways of protecting themselves. It’s sad but the very coping strategies we employed to help us survive childhood, adolescence and early adulthood are the very strategies that will inevitably keep us from thriving in the relationships that have the greatest potential for intimacy. Add to that the fact that the coping strategies we use often end up causing more pain for our partner (and vice versa) and you can see the complexities of differentiation.
Ideally a relationship is flexible enough to allow for the growth and development of both partners at the same time. There are many partners who support one another well when it comes to their careers, hobbies, or outside friendships. This is a different kind of growth and development than I’m talking about. That’s actually called individuation: the fact that I am a person in the world, with my own separate interests and activities. You can have two very individuated people in a relationship who are not very differentiated when it comes to the ability to self-define, reveal themselves and hold space for their partner to do the same.
Think of a rubber band that stretches around and between two people. As each partner flexes new emotional muscle, the relationship can flex and expand with them. As the partners practice taking emotional risks, they can lean into their own growth edges, as well as lean into each other, source one another, and create more energy in the relationship.
However, due to the level of enmeshment between most partners, the risks of threatening the symbiosis, or status quo, in the relationship proves too great. Instead of honest and full disclosure by partners, we see passive aggressive or acting out behavior. In other words, because the risks of intimacy are too great, partners may choose to lean out and away from the relationship to cope with pain or get their needs met. Many people, from an early age, learned to sooth themselves, not by leaning into others (for this may have been dangerous as a child) but in turning to the self. The self-soothing may take many forms: playing video games, excessively watching internet porn, spending too much money, drinking or even infidelity.
In this frame, even infidelity can be seen as a failed attempt at getting one’s needs met. This is no way meant to justify infidelity but to see it through the lens of differentiation; that is, the person has been unsuccessful at either expressing needs clearly, holding a boundary when needs are not, or both. The only path to sustained intimacy lies in turning towards the partner and exposing one’s desires and needs, exploring the complexity of one’s emotions and by practicing the creation and maintenance of boundaries. However, as noted, this is also the path of greatest risk. Thus, rather than facing the intensity of one’s own needs and the intensity of the partner’s emotions or preferences, the person turns to someone outside the relationship. Again, this is in no way meant to excuse someone’s decision to be unfaithful, but to understand infidelity as one more maladaptive coping strategy, one of many designed to obscure vulnerability and risk.
In the case of substance abuse, there is inevitably enabling behavior on the part of the non-abusing partner. This enabling is a sign of poorly defined boundaries. The preservation of the relationship has become paramount for both partners. It’s likely that the non-abusing partner has tried for years to appeal to the abusing partner’s rational side, with little success. The abusing partner may have tried for years to live up to a standard of behavior that, however much desired, lies outside of their current ability to regulate emotions or curb impulsivity. Both people may feel trapped by their own limited grasp of healthy adulthood.
No matter what the gridlocked issues are in a relationship, the most difficult situations can be when one partner is willing to do a trial separation and the other is not. If you feel separation is right for you, it can be incredibly difficult to stand your ground when your partner is begging you to keep things the same. Being able to search your own heart is critical. Are you asking for separation in the hopes that you will find your way back to one another? Or are you really done? Getting clear on your truth and sharing it openly is essential. Even if your greatest hope is to use separation as a path to relationship evolution, your partner may be too triggered by abandonment fears to believe you. In not backing down, you are taking a very painful step in differentiation.
