PsychotherapyHELP

Dr. Paul

Married People / Unmarried Minds

Most married people today enjoy the legal status of being married; but that does not imply that legally married couples possess married minds. If you or your partner are separated by a gulf of mental differences, you are not mentally married. It is easily conceivable for a male and a female to be joined emotionally, physically and sexually, but not mentally.

Are you a couple that frequently engage in verbal struggles with one another? Perhaps the problem lies in the existence of two minds that are separated by an avalanche of different thinking. This does not imply that you should or could think exactly like your partner. But, those couples who seem to get along the best are the ones that have similar thinking processes.

Have you ever said or thought, "My partner and I think so much alike. We are almost like one mind!" Perhaps, you have wondered why you and your spouse get along so well. Maybe, it's because the meeting of your minds has completely jelled. However, you may be one of those unfortunate couples who are locked in a perpetual struggle to attain a meeting of the minds.

Emotional Bonding:

Bonding to another human being is a very complicated process and too extensive to cover here. If you take an inventory of your most fulfilling relationships, you will probably find that you were emotionally bonded in a very positive way. When you look a little closer at those relationships where you were emotionally bonded in a positive way, you will probably find that you were also connected mentally.

If you take a similar inventory of those individuals that you have had the toughest time relating to, you will probably find that the emotional bonding was contaminated and invaded by alien cognitive forces. In fact, most falling outs in your life have probably occurred when two minds decided to go off into different tracks or journeys.

For example: Bob and Gilda were emotionally tied to one another in an abusive, addictive way. Emotionally glued to one another through their subjective claims of love, they could not resist tearing each other apart emotionally. He adamantly claimed that his wife Gilda was cheating on him. She staunchly denied and fought off his accusations. They both agreed on one point: they did not trust one another. They could not agree or see eye to eye as to how they were hurting each other. She perceived things one way and he saw the same events in the exact opposite manner. In his mind, she was cheating on him and betraying his trust. In her mind, she was completely faithful, while being deeply hurt by his accusations. It's easy to see that this was a pathological relationship.

Intellectual Marriage:

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to deduce that Bob and Gilda had different views of reality. Truth is a very potent force for uniting couples into a common view of reality. But, how do you arrive at a fairly accurate and conjoined view of reality? This is not an easy question to answer. It seems that if you and your partner had a common system or method for determining reality, you would share compatible thoughts and similar perceptions of real events.

Contradictory Thinking:

If you or your partner possess a phenomenon called contradictory thinking, you will be irresistibly drawn to sliding back and forth between one extreme or the other. This is sometimes called “Splitting”. You hold two diametrically opposed viewpoints in your mind and they constantly get you into trouble. For example, you are emotionally attracted to Jewish men who are devoutly faithful to their religion. At the same time, you are an avowed atheist and agnostic. Your partner is psychologically attracted to the Shiksa goddess that you symbolically represent.

It doesn't take a genius to see that the two of you need to integrate these seemingly contradictory thought systems. Where do you find the middle ground? Of course, you share many wonderful things in common, but faith in God is not one of them. The question arises whether the two of you can move to a very satisfactory mental position that's easy to live with.

One day, in the middle of your relationship, these seemingly incompatible contradictory belief systems come to a head and conflict arises. The result is that your contradictory thinking prevents the two of you from becoming more mentally intimate. There is something to be said that when the two of you come together that a new mental entity has been created. If integration of your contradictory thinking doesn't occur, your relationship will suffer from a form of splitting, whereby each of you emotionally and mentally move to your most consistent and stable identities. Those identities, if not melded into an integrated whole, will stress and fragment your relationship.

This dilemma of contradictory thinking and cognitive splitting addresses the question, "How much of myself do I have to give up in order to be intimate with you?" There are certain constructs and archetypes that exist in the very core of your being that cannot be given up without experiencing loss. This dilemma recognizes that when you and your partner do come together in the process of intimacy and marriage, you will, in fact, be creating a new entity and a new identity that hopefully builds constructively upon the core foundation of your very being. That is why successful marriages build people and make them greater than they were before marriage.

The opposite is equally true. If your initial core self is not solid and well formed, significant differences in marriage may cause the disintegration and fragmentation of a fragile self that has not been built on a solid foundation. If that is the case, the only way that the ego can go is down towards a more regressive and earlier stage of development. That is why there are so many emotional and mental breakdowns when intimate relationships threatened to crack the flimsy structures of the weakly bound self.

Healthy selves contribute to each other’s well-being and provide a marriage setting that epitomizes personal growth and peak, ecstatic, unlimited feelings of happiness and bliss. Unbounded selves, weakly constructed, will fragment and disintegrate under the intense pressure for growth that marriage pushes for. A weakly bounded self locked into a marital situation will have to disintegrate and withdraw in order to return to single life and do the necessary emotional and spiritual work that strengthens the ego for the demands and responsibilities incurred in intimate relationships, such as marriage.