Bernard Apfelbaum, PhD
ONE-SIDED INTIMACY:
THE SEX THERAPY OF DAVID SCHNARCH
My
testimonial on the jacket of David Schnarch’s The Sexual Crucible leads
people to assume that I share his view of sex and intimacy. I had offered it on
the condition that changes be made in the draft of the manuscript I read. Those
changes were not made, but more to the point, his view in that volume was
highly abstract and my reading may have been too hasty. Also I did agree with
his critique of other approaches to sex therapy and to couple communication.
Decades later I find his thinking to be point-for-point diametrically opposed
to my own, so much so that it makes a good foil for my own view. So here goes.
What finally got me moving on
this was the Jan-Feb, 2006 issue of Psychology Today, in which Dave and
his wife, Ruth, are interviewed. The article is “Staying in Lust; How to Feel
Infatuated Forever,” an over-the-top title for which I am sure Schnarch is not
responsible. I got it because it was sent in a huge mailing to all therapists
as a sales promo for the magazine’s booklet of therapist ads. Given that
audience, I think some perspective is needed on Schnarch’s conceptions of
intimacy and of sex and how the two are related.
Here is a rousing opening
excerpt from the article:
Schnarch considers the
ability, for example, to look into your partner's eyes while engaged in a
sexual act or in the midst of orgasm to be the height of intimacy. It's an act
of mutual self-revelation that cannot be matched almost anywhere else in life.
“Once people try it, they totally get what real intimacy is about,” he says.
This probably is what he
actually said, since I have heard him say it. Is this really what intimacy is
all about? Let’s hold that question. The piece goes on:
Eye-to-eye
sex is not for the faint of heart. Even Schnarch's wife, psychologist Ruth
Morehouse, who now works with him as a marital and sex therapist and uses his
techniques, confesses to having had her doubts. At the time that her husband
was developing his ideas in the 1980s, she says, she wasn't crazy about them.
…And the eyes-open thing, well. “At first, I was mad at him for even suggesting
that this is something that people were supposed to do,” says Morehouse. “It
was a stretch for me. At first, I literally couldn't keep my eyes open. After a
couple of times, I was able to do it, and it made sex more emotional and
meaningful. It's now a routine part of my sex life.”
On a panel, in response to this recommendation by Dave, my
late colleague Bernie Zilbergeld, also on the panel, exclaimed “I tried that
once and there was somebody looking right back at me!”
The journalist herself declared good-naturedly that
“I haven't dared bring up the idea of eyes-open sex with my husband yet,
for fear he'll take me up on it. I have a feeling I'd have to keep my eyes open
with pliers.”
She
put this in her last paragraph, a wry final comment. She knew she was not
making a big admission. No one finds this easy to do. As Ruth herself says, she
“literally” could not do it. If eye contact in sex is “what real intimacy is about,” why are we so
allergic to it? Dave’s answer is that real intimacy is terrifying: “The thrill
of connection opens us to the terror of loss and pain.” (This is a subhead in
an article I will get back to in a moment, one that heads up his website.)
This is pernicious nonsense, pernicious because it
is instantly convincing to most people. You have to think he must be right.
What other reason could there be for not looking into each other’s eyes—and we
almost universally don’t? But Zilbergeld
couldn’t take it seriously and the magazine writer does not seem to either.
They imply that it is not the neurotic avoidance Dave thinks it is.
HOW WE ARE NOT
AS NEUROTIC AS DAVE MAKES US SEEM
Dave’s argument should be obvious nonsense on its
face. If we really are terrified of the “mutual self-revelation” that eye
contact supposedly creates, how come Ruth was able to do it after a couple of
tries, and once she accomplished it, it became routine? Why wouldn’t this
always be a highly precarious accomplishment? If we avoid eye contact because all our secret feelings and thoughts
are exposed, it would not be so easily and so reliably mastered. Ruth’s experience with it is
typical. Like bicycle riding, once you learn it you never lose it.
There
is no arguing with the experience of eye-contact orgasm itself. I even published on it before Dave did (link
at end briefly covers this). I can vouch from personal experience for the fact
that when you can manage it, you can experience the intense feeling of intimacy
that Dave points to. But this does not necessarily involve any actual
connection; your partner may not share it. You can experience a transcendent
sense of union, a loss of ego boundaries, a merging. That is what we crave in
sex and we are so powerfully driven to feel it that many people require very
little evidence to have this experience.
Some people never have it. Many others have it a lot,
easily feeling intimate. I think both groups include different kinds of
people, so that being in either group does not mean a person will have a greater
capacity for actual intimacy or for its opposite, defensiveness.
This feeling of intimacy in sex, especially during
orgasm, does not require eye contact. But it can be intensified by eye contact,
and there is something special about eyes, phylogenetically—whatever you do, do
not look a gorilla in the eye. Those farther down the pecking order always cast
their eyes down in the presence of the alpha male. The fear of intimacy must be
rampant in prison since eye contact is so risky there.
This is also the place to look for the genesis of
shyness. When you feel shy you can’t look the other person in the eye, and a
lot of people always have trouble meeting another’s gaze. Are they afraid of
intimacy? Is fear even the issue?
Psychobiological
explanations can only go so far. We also are allergic to eye contact in sex
because it can be a huge distraction. For example, there is the woman who
learns to be orgasmic by staying focused on clitoral sensation. To multitask,
that is, to also look into her partner’s eyes, would be a threatening
distraction, not because she is afraid of intimacy but because she is afraid of
losing her ability to hold her own in bed. The same is true of a man trying to
control an erection or an ejaculation—he is on a mental tightrope.
There
still is more to the explanation. As a very rough analogy, think of sitting on
the toilet. For people who are accustomed to keeping the bathroom door closed
it feels like a sudden and embarrassing invasion to have it pop open. But if
they decide to have an open-door policy it soon becomes routine, and it stays
that way.
Why isn’t Dave digging into the phenomenon this way?
Why does he not take a more critical look at why we resist eye contact? Why
does he spend no time on this at all? Because he thinks he already knows all
about it; Dave does not go there because he is an ecstatic visionary. He has
said that if you have what it takes, sex is “paradise on earth.” That is a good
description of one kind of sexual experience, but to think of it as the reality
we simply avoid is to get lost in an idealization. This is not just harmless
romanticizing. It seriously misunderstands what we have to contend with in sex
and what intimacy is about.
Which brings me to another, especially relevant reason
why we avoid eye-contact sex. It threatens to reveal how disconnected and
inward we typically are. What makes it possible to get comfortable with
eyeballing after a few tries is that we quickly learn to do the necessary
facial adjustments—to avoid looking utterly removed from each other as we focus
on maximizing sensation. If you are frowning in concentration, you do not want
to look as if you are frowning at your partner. Also, looking at your
partner interferes with your concentration, amounting to multitasking. At first
it seems impossible but it, too, can be quickly learned.
To paraphrase Zilbergeld’s
witticism, he tried it once and had a shock of recognition. There was somebody
else in the bed! What is so clever about his joke is that in a single stroke it
skewered all our unquestioned beliefs, speaking volumes about how we cope with
sex. It also should get the Guinness
record for irony.
Zilbergeld not only would have known there was
somebody else in the bed, he would have been trying to focus on a feeling about
her—typically, a feeling of intimacy. That is the irony. To suddenly be
confronted with the reality of her presence abruptly
annihilated this feeling of intimacy. This means there was no intimacy
to be afraid of. Moreover, we do not shy away from the feeling of intimacy;
rather, we are desperate to hold on to it.
What could better illustrate the different
interpretations generated by the analytic versus the inspirational approach to
therapy and to theorizing?
People are always frustrating us by interfering with
the relationship we are trying to have with them. Paying attention to what goes
in our sex lives—and here I am referring to all of us, not just particular
couples—is a key to our relationships in general. Our aversion to eye contact
is not a bad place to start doing this. But you would never know it, because in
order to appreciate how we act in sex you have to fight your way through the
conventional idealizations and commonsense verities that Zilbergeld so adroitly
exposed. It is no help to be focused on how things should be rather than how
they are.
But visionaries are repelled
by worldly reality. They want us to transcend it. To them, reality is just us
avoiding the ideal state they imagine. This is why Dave can think of intimacy
as right there in front of us if only we have the will and the courage to reach
out to it. We should force ourselves to
open our eyes, whatever it takes. And when we do, we will “totally get what
real intimacy is about.”
Since I do not see how looking at one another in sex,
even during orgasm, brings us to an understanding of “real intimacy,” I need to
consider what makes it possible for Dave to believe that mastering this
experience—overcoming, as he sees it, the terror it creates—opens our eyes in
this much deeper sense. I can only think he is speaking from the feeling
of intimacy that eye contact can create.
Since this feeling is something that you can
create on your own, not something you depend on your partner for, it must be
the experiential basis for his conception of “nonreciprocal intimacy” (see
next). You will
see that Dave has a bleak view of relationships that reinforces his belief that
you can only be genuinely intimate with yourself.
There is a good succinct
statement of Dave’s point of view and the grounds for it that appears in a
piece he himself wrote for Psychology Today: “Joy With Your Underwear
Down,” July-Aug, 1994 (links to the articles of his that I quote from are at
the end of this file). I have italicized the key parts:
Better
sex is not a matter of technique or dexterity. To get it, you've got to hold
onto yourself. That is the paradox: You have to learn to hold onto yourself
emotionally while holding onto your partner physically.
Briefly, for the moment, by “holding onto yourself
emotionally” he means not depending on your partner to feel okay about
yourself, to—in his terms—validate you:
While
other-validated intimacy has its time and place, marriage is not often one of
them. What is more often necessary and important in long-term committed
relationships is a nonreciprocal intimacy I call self-validated intimacy. It
involves self-confrontation and self-disclosure in the presence of a partner.
Period. It doesn't say what your partner does.
“Nonreciprocal intimacy!” In
other words, one-sided intimacy.
Dave’s most uncompromising
application of this idea appears in an article that heads up his website, “The Search for Intimacy
Inside the Sexual Crucible.” What follows is a long paragraph, but it needs to
be read in its entirety since it really gets across Dave’s conviction that
one-sided intimacy is the only genuine kind.
A couple, for example, wakes in the morning having
had sex the night before and the wife remarks on the wonderfully intimate time
they shared. The husband brusquely comments that he didn't find it wonderfully
intimate or even sexually satisfying. The wife is shocked and wounded, but how
she allows the comment to affect her sense of herself reflects whether she is
capable of relying on self-validated intimacy or depends upon her husband's
attitude to define her view of their sexual encounter. If she has
"normal" beliefs about intimacy—or treatment by a "normal"
therapist—she will be thrown into a swamp of self-doubt, begin to mistrust her
own experience, and look to her husband instead for her sense of what happened
to her: “Gosh, maybe it wasn't so great, maybe I don't really know what good
sex is, maybe there is something wrong with me, maybe I didn't really feel what
I thought I felt, etc. etc.” In a marriage between two relatively
well-differentiated spouses, on the other hand, a negative emotional response
from one partner does not have the power to suck the other into a vortex of
anxiety and depression. The wife will trust her relationship with herself, her
own instincts and perceptions, and say something like, "I'm really sorry
to hear that. I, and the man I was with last night, had a wonderful time! What
was the woman you were with like?" If the husband was trying to hurt her
feelings, or “play with her reality,” it no longer works. She is no longer
using him to validate her own experience.
No
more is said about this couple, leaving us with questions.
First
let’s notice that what Dave has this woman ask seems like a conversation
stopper. It does not seem like a light-hearted acknowledgement that they each
could have been lost in their own world. Rather, she would seem to be saying,
“This is what I experienced, take it or leave it.” It has her brusquely meeting
her husband’s brusqueness, rather than, say, asking him how come he is being so
huffy.
Notice
also that she does not react as one typically would, as by saying, “Wow! That’s
a surprise. It seemed so wonderfully intimate that I was just sure you felt the
same way.” Wouldn’t she want to know how she could have been so misled? After
all, it happens in sex all the time. Dave seems to think either that what
actually happened does not matter, or that if she thought their sex was
wonderfully intimate then it must have been.
But
suppose “the wonderfully intimate time they shared,” as the wife put it, was
all in her head, just as I mentioned is common enough in sex? Suppose her
husband sincerely did not share it? Then what? He just believes his experience
and she just believes hers. What are these people going to talk about?
I
somehow doubt that this man was supposed to believe his experience,
since he may just have been running a number on his wife. This looks like a
clue to how Dave sees the reality of relationships.
It
implies that relationships are so adversarial it would be pointless for the two
of them to brainstorm what really happened last night. This is the paper with
the subhead: “The thrill of connection opens us to the terror of loss and
pain.” We say that we want to be intimate but we really are afraid of it. So
when the husband brusquely says that sex was not satisfying, this apparently is
exemplifying someone who would have had to repudiate, to disown the intimacy
that had been present the night before. So his experience doesn’t count.
But
why assume that her husband’s response would throw her into “a swamp of
self-doubt,” a “vortex of anxiety and depression?" To escape this fate the
“well-differentiated” (Dave’s word for mature) woman goes to the opposite
extreme, dogmatically insisting that she just knows it was great. Dave even has
her conjure with the idea that they each were in bed with a different
person—but he just has her being sure that the husband she was with was her
real husband, not a wishful image of him.
The
implication of this snapshot is that it makes no difference what actually went
on between them the previous night. Is the mature person just supposed to take
his or her experience at face value? I can’t believe Dave really means to say
this, so if anyone has a different angle on what he is getting across here, do
let me know.
Maybe
the way to look at this is that Dave’s approach is ideological rather than
psychological. It doesn’t pay to dwell too long on Dave’s arguments; he is
trying to convince us to adopt an attitude. He doesn’t seem to expect us to
think too much about it.
“HE ALLOWED HIMSELF TO BE
TRULY, INDEED BRUTALLY, INTIMATE”
In
this same article Schnarch presents a case that demonstrates how he works (for
the full text go to his pages 8 & 9, using the link at the end of this
file).
After 30 years of marriage, Steve came in to see me
alone, complaining that, although until three years ago, he and his wife had
always enjoyed “wonderful sex” and great intimacy, he now suffered from
erectile difficulties and had little interest in sex, while she complained
about his “lack of communication,” his “lack of affection,” and his lack of
sexual desire for her. He said he thought his problem was that he no longer
found her aging body attractive, though he couldn't tell her this for fear of
“hurting her feelings.” Nancy was, he suggested, a very dependent, insecure,
demanding and emotionally reactive person, who might fall apart if he were
honest.
By now you should be able to pick up, from “who might fall apart if he were honest,” that Steve was supposed to realize that he needed to be honest anyway and not be so worried about Nancy. Dave goaded Steve to not be vulnerable to Nancy’s reactions. He “completely shredded” Steve’s view of the problem:
Now Steve was in a crucible. Having walked in
thinking he knew that the problem was both clear and insoluble, he had been
thrown into a quandary—his neat scenario had been completely shredded, leaving
two more or less intolerable options that cast into doubt all his
preconceptions about his marriage.
Now, what are these two intolerable options? (By “options” Dave means explanations.) I found his logic hard to follow, so rather than quote him here, I’ll say how I think his reasoning went. He told Steve that there were two possibilities: that Nancy either knows what he is thinking or she doesn’t. If she doesn’t, then that means he never did have the “great intimacy” he claimed they had had for the first 27 years. If this logic seems strained, the other alternative is completely illogical. This was that she did know what he thought and she did not care—that since she was “being serviced by him,” she “would put up with his distaste as long as he kept it to himself and performed the job adequately.”
Say what? How could Steve possibly have thought this second explanation made any sense, much less that, as Dave claimed, it “shredded” his way of looking at the situation? This was the woman who “complained about his ‘lack of communication,’ his ‘lack of affection,’ and his lack of sexual desire for her.” It even looks like this is what got him to seek therapy. Here Dave’s approach seems even more ideological and non-psychological than in the previous example.
It
seems clear that Dave wanted to say, “Look, I think you should stop trying to
protect Nancy and tell her what you think.” Instead he presents Steve with what
he considers to be foolproof logic that indicates that Steve has no real choice
other than to confront her. Dave himself is enacting the take-it-or-leave-it
stance. It is somehow not open for discussion. It seems clear that he was not
about to ask Steve what he thought about this recommendation.
Just
as a quick aside for the moment: Dave’s readiness to “shred” what the patient
thinks has a long pedigree, but has largely fallen into disfavor. Current
thinking is that such unempathic interventions are antitherapeutic. Dave’s argument has always been that he is concerned
with what people should aspire to, that in challenging them as he does, he is
trying to call out the best in people, not just fix them. I would feel better
about that if he acknowledged that he risks shaming people and said something
about how he guards against it, or even how he considers it an acceptable risk.
I
also want to mention here, reserving it for discussion later, that Dave’s
approach to Steve seems entirely beside the point—looking highly concept
driven. Steve is a worried man, worried about having lost desire for his wife
and worried about his erection problem. I would want to tell him that his guilt
and attempts at a coverup are probably what most decisively turn him off.
I
would add that his dilemma is typical, even classic, and that of course he
would not want to tell her that he no longer finds her physically attractive,
because that kind of problem always makes people feel hopeless, and so it seems
like what’s the good of telling her? This would end up in the same place as
Dave—seeing that he needs to be disclosing—but I would come at it quite
differently.
I
would not recommend that Steve tell Nancy what is on the top of his mind, the
undigested, defended version of his experience. I will get to what I imagine
him saying, but I would at least suggest to him at this point that it is
perfectly natural not to want to expose her to what he thinks—although in
trying to hide it he has to be detached and hence more turned off. I would
certainly want to tell him that it is not only bodies that can be erotic and
that, after all, couples in their eighties still enjoy sex (Dave’s whole point,
although he does not let Steve in on it), but that, like most men, he has been
dependent on this one way of turning on.
Back
to our story. Steve should have confronted Dave, arguing that his points
did not make sense, and getting him to admit that he is advising him to
confront Nancy. Instead, Steve went home in a funk (having at least gotten the
idea from Schnarch that he was being foolish and spineless). Nancy was anxious
to know what the matter was, so Steve decided to take Schnarch’s
not-so-implicit advice to be “honest:”
Finally, he told her that he no longer found her
sexually attractive. Wounded and angry, she cried and said she knew she wasn't
so pretty anymore. He then changed tack and tried to console her, telling her
he “didn't really mean it,” but she refused to be consoled and became
increasingly distraught. She said she was leaving him and began packing her
bags. He felt angry and caught in a no-win situation—another little crucible.
So Steve was right; she did fall apart. But,
Finally, driven to the wall and thinking he had
nothing to lose—she was leaving anyway—he threw the whole story at her: how
their sex life had deteriorated because of her looks, how she was really
responsible for his erectile difficulty, how he now only tried to “satisfy” her
and got no pleasure from sex himself—every terrible word of what he really
thought. After a screaming fight, which lasted for hours, they had very intense
sex, which was repeated the following morning. The next day, Nancy called a
therapist for herself, and seemed suddenly much calmer, less emotionally
overwrought than she had in a long time.
Schnarch concludes:
Always before, Steve had “spared” Nancy, lying to
her to “save the marriage.” But when she was almost out the door, he allowed
himself to be truly, indeed brutally, intimate with her; he disclosed himself
to her. However unpleasant and unerotic the disclosure might seem, no matter
how much Steve believed his own diagnosis explaining his lack of sexual desire,
the experience of intimacy, of letting himself be really known by her, released
a reservoir of intense sexual feelings in him about the very same woman he had
found so sexually unattractive before. In other words, when he was intimate
with her, Steve felt intense sexual desire.
“He allowed himself to be truly, indeed brutally, intimate.” In Dave’s system there is such a thing as being brutally intimate. This is what is ordinarily known as being brutally honest, right? It really just means letting somebody have it.
What is wrong with this picture? Steve was not being
honest, nor was he letting himself be known (whatever explains their intense
sex is another matter, one possibility being having to abruptly face separation
after 30 years of marriage). I agree with Dave that “honesty” leads to intimacy
and passion, but I would not use the word honesty—just because it is always
taken to mean blurting something out, as Steve did.
A blurt is highly condensed, just as Steve’s was. He
did not say anything about how he felt about what he did say. If
he were to accomplish being known by Nancy, he would need to have said something
like this:
The reason I’ve been so uncommunicative and
withdrawn is that I’ve been trying not to say anything about how affected I am
by any way that your body has changed. It seems unfair and even cruel, but I
can’t help it. I wish there was some other way I could have erections, but I
just seem to be stuck with this one way. I know if the roles were reversed I
would feel just the way you do, like you weren’t caring about me at all. It
even makes me wonder whether I really care about you, although having spent
these last three years trying to cover this up, just trying to satisfy you even
though I wasn’t getting that much out of it, must mean I do care.
It would not be that hard for Steve to say all this once he was helped to notice all these feelings and thoughts. It could even be immensely relieving for him to discover that he had them, because all he would ever have been noticing was the blurt that he had been brooding on—the angry, blaming thoughts that beat back these first level thoughts, which would otherwise threaten to undermine his sense of entitlement to his experience.
This is what ”honesty” would actually look like. It
would get across to Nancy that he was suffering from his thoughts, even that he
needed her help about them. This would then be likely to make her feel for
him—feel empathic—although if it did not, my guess would be that he had not yet
done a good enough job of getting himself across. When he was able to do that,
they would experience the kind of intimacy that not only can generate passion
(the objective I share with Dave) but is enjoyable for its own sake—anything
but terrifying. It also—and perhaps this is more vital—makes reality
discoverable, allowing partners to discover themselves in it, to become more
differentiated, if you will. Intimacy is powerful.
For example, if Steve had not blown Nancy’s mind to
smithereens, shorting out her feelings, they could have begun to discover what
really had been going on between them in sex. He thought of himself as
servicing her and getting nothing out of it himself. Little did he realize that
she probably was trying to please him by being responsive to his trying to
please her—especially given the kind of person she appears to be.
In any case, in sex it is more the rule than the exception
that no one knows who is doing what for whom. Not to go on about this; I just
want to suggest not only that there is such a thing as sexual reality—and not
only that discovering it is sexually enhancing—but that it also builds the kind
of differentiation that Dave prizes.
Let’s revisit Dave’s picture of the husband who, in
denying that sex was good, might have been playing games or wanting to hurt his
wife. I said it was a clue to Dave’s vision of reality. A similar clue is his
suggestion to Steve that Nancy might have known he no longer desired her, but
was willing to tolerate it as long as he continued to service her. This is a
surprisingly sordid explanation, all the more striking because it flies in the
face of the evidence. Why would it even come up as a possibility, since Steve
reported that she complained about his lack of desire for her?
What this seems to add up to is a kind of Sartrean
existential philosophy. Consistent with it is Dave’s belief that there is no
such thing as genuine empathy. Going back to “Joy With Your Underwear Down” (remember I added the italics), he declares that
It feels
good when our partners agree with and validate us, but you can't count on it. If
you demand it, you can land in the crazy conundrum that creates eternal
insecurity. We put a spin on what we reveal about ourselves in order to get the
response we want. Then we can never feel secure with those who accept us because
we know they don't really know us.
Obviously, if you
demand approval the best you can hope for is knee-jerk approval, but why would
you demand it unless you were desperate or in a snit? You can make sense of
Dave’s objections by recognizing that they are reactions to what he apparently
takes for granted as a rule in training in active listening, that your partner
is obliged to accept your disclosures, to respond empathically. He is arguing
that under those conditions people will only expose what they think their
partner will be able to empathize with. So we get phony empathy; since we never
expose ourselves, we can never be known and hence can never feel securely
accepted, empathized with.
This
is delivered in Dave’s take-it-or-leave-it style. He is not about to debate the
point. He thinks active listening exercises are futile; you can think what you
think. His experience with communication training either created or reinforced
his belief that to look for empathy from your partner will just get you caught
in the mutual conspiracy to avoid all the difficult parts of the relationship
that, as he sees it, characterizes all relationships—and he is, obviously,
against avoiding things.
But
there is no reasoned critique here. Compare John Gottman, writing from the same
viewpoint:
The most influential process theory of what is
functional in the context of the resolution of conflict in marriage may be
called the active listening model... [It] expects people to be able
to be empathic in the face of negative affect directed at them by their
spouses. Based on our analyses, we are led to the hypothesis that the
active listening model may be expecting a form of emotional gymnastics from
people who, at that moment in the relationship, are somewhat emotionally
disabled by conflict... [Harville] Hendrix has suggested that marital
hostility is the result of "childhood wounds," and he speaks of
training couples to "develop an X-ray vision" that allows them to see
the wounds behind the hostility.
Gottman believes that
partners are too disabled by conflict to be empathic. Similarly, Schnarch is
saying all you can ever get is pseudo-empathy. The question is why this
conclusion caused Schnarch, unlike Gottman, to give up on couple communication.
But first, a vignette from a well-known proponent of empathy training. Ellyn
Bader tells the story of a couple in a couples group:
The
husband takes the responding position and the wife says, “Every day I pray for
your death.” Everyone must have held their breath. The husband responded, “How
long have you felt that way?” Everyone must have breathed a sigh of relief and,
of course, the wife just melted.
That was a wonderful example
of someone who was able to be empathic despite being emotionally mugged. I do
not see how his response could not have been genuine. Why is Dave so ready to
give up on the possibility of empathic communication? It apparently just seems
to him self-evident, as in his declarations above, that if you allow yourself
to be dependent on your partner for approval you will not risk genuine
disclosure and, further, your partner will only go along to get along.
This takes us to his
solution, which is the concluding sentence in the paragraph above from “Joy:”
When you
are willing to validate yourself, you can afford to let your partner know you
as you are. You stop presenting yourself the way you want to be seen, and you
just disclose with no other goal than being truly known.
Thus,
Steve, rather than trying to present himself as interested in sex with Nancy,
was supposed to disclose that he actually had lost interest—his only goal being
to be truly known. Since for him to do this required Dave to goad him into
it—in effect daring him to do it—it looks like his goal, at least, was
to meet the standard Dave had set for him, to redeem himself—probably in the
wild hope that something good would come out of his blurting out his guilty
secret.
SELF-SOOTHING
How do you self-validate, as Dave puts it? On the
practical level he speaks of self-soothing. The most nuts-and-bolts account of
how that is to be accomplished is in an interview with his wife and
co-therapist that appears as a sidebar to the 2006 Psychology Today interview.
“It
[soothing yourself] can be as simple as regulating your body: deep breathing,
sitting in a less tense position, or taking a moment to reflect,” says
psychologist Ruth Morehouse, Schnarch's wife and office partner. Once you've
let some of your physical anxiety dissipate, you can address the mental aspects
of your emotional tension: telling yourself you've been through this before
and survived, reminding yourself that your partner isn't trying to drive
you insane. Essentially, you give yourself an extra beat between stimulus and
reaction so that you think before you act or blurt. You acknowledge the
feelings, but don't let them threaten your sense of self or determine how you
respond.
In the
longer term, anxiety-reducing habits such as Pilates, listening to classical
music, meditation, running or cooking also help increase your threshold. Most
people already have a number of self-soothing tools they use in their life,
says Morehouse—it's often a matter of recognizing what you already do and
learning to apply it to situations that make you particularly uncomfortable.
If you're doing it right, you'll feel calmer and more in control, says
Morehouse. And it'll give you greater freedom to be authentic around your
partner—come what may.
It would be easy to lampoon
this because it can seem like, in the end, all that their approach comes down
to. But it isn’t. They recognize, of course, that when you recommend
self-soothing, people are going to ask how to do it. They can’t duck the
question, although they try to. I think what Dave is actually getting at about
self-soothing, without puting it this way, is being able to take his message to
heart, really believing that you can only soothe yourself, since no one
else can do it for you. This means that you do your best to retract your
demands and expectations, your complaints and grudges, all your “if onlys”—and
of course, even if you can’t, you recognize that that is the problem, not your
partner.
So their answer to how to
self-soothe is a throwaway. Here it is not even answered by the main man. They
would never begin by saying “Here is how to self-soothe;” it never comes up
unless in answer to a question. They believe that it is a stance you must try
to take as best you can because there simply is no other that makes sense.
As Ruth reportedly said, it
means telling yourself you've been through this before and survived, reminding
yourself that your partner isn't trying to drive you insane. There are
whole therapies devoted to the task of helping you to see that your partner is
not trying to drive you insane, but the Schnarches apparently treat it as
something you just need to tell yourself.
And we have Dave’s story
about the husband who, in responding to his wife’s joyous exclamation about how
intimate sex was the previous night, is trying to drive her insane—Dave
says he may well be playing games or trying to hurt her. What to do with this
flat-out contradiction?
It looks like Dave and Ruth
will say whatever fits in the moment that will get you not to be dependent on
or blame your partner. This is being pretty casual about reality—because it is
what you believe that counts.
This approach is all about
exhortations, not reality. It actually is typical of nonanalytic (in the
generic sense), inspirational therapies to see reality as what you believe it
to be, and so the goal is to get you to believe something. Analytic
therapists, of which there are fewer, think there is an independent reality
that can be discovered.
Dave is not unusual in his
effort to promote a renunciation of demands and complaints. As Dan Wile has
observed, all couple and family therapists try to get partners to stop sniping
at each other (either overtly or in their heads), to give up the doomed
cross-complaining—perhaps, as in Imago Therapy, “to see the wounds behind the
hostility.”
My own view, along with
Dan’s, is that the reason partners get stuck in adversarial positions is that
they are each in conflict internally, and so their concerns come out as
accusations. Then they are aggressive rather than assertive—to appeal to that
familiar version of this point—which, in fact, characterizes Steve’s “brutal
intimacy.” They fail to be convincing because they themselves do not feel
entitled to their experience—as Steve clearly did not. They are suffering from
bypassed doubts (bypassed shame, guilt, self-blame). The doubts are overcome by
being turned into complaints, which provokes further doubts that are in turn
overcome by increasingly bitter accusations that obsessively dominate
consciousness (the shame-rage spiral), becoming potshots with sufficient
firepower to disarm your adversary. That is where “Every day I pray for your
death” comes from: not just the wound behind the hostility, as Hendrix has it,
but from an escalating internal struggle, as well as from a cold war—each
partner spiraling and counter-spiraling.
What they need to express is
not just their concerns but how they feel about them, rather than overcoming
doubt and feelings of lack of entitlement. Instead of trying to hold on to complaints
by amping them up, they need to try to get across their misgivings about
them—in effect, trying to enlist their partner’s help in this. (I indicated how
this might have gone with Steve.) The criterion of whether they have succeeded
in this is whether the partner feels empathic. This requires partners to be
free to not be empathic. Thus, empathy is a reaction, not
something you give. Eliciting empathy is the criterion for effective
dependency, for being able to mobilize the power of dependency. All of which is
to say, contra Schnarch, that there is such a thing.
What I am charging Dave with
is simply hubris; that is, that he vastly underestimates the riptides in
relationships that Dan so graphically identifies. My definition of hubris is to
not respect the problem, to not be realistic.
Dave maintains that in bed we
act out our doomed dependencies, our resentments and complaints, our
unwillingness to take responsibility for ourselves. This is not original, of
course, it being the same conception that informs dynamic therapy and the work
of not a few present-day analysts.
Freud is said to have reduced
everything to sex, when what he really did was reduce sex to everything else,
sex being just the stage on which we act out our level of maturity—exactly
Dave’s model, although he does not acknowledge Freud’s priority. Hence, Freud,
like Schnarch, never talked about what actually goes on in sex.
By now the idea is that we
act out our relationship issues in sex. What is original with Schnarch is
his clever way of putting it, that sex is a “language.” You just have to
translate it. Thus, not only like Freud but like almost all therapists, he does
not focus on what actually happens in sex—as we saw in his snapshot of the
woman who is supposed to simply believe she and her husband had good sex the
night before no matter what he thinks, and even without curiosity about how
come he did not agree.
To take the most common
example of what you miss when you ignore sexual reality—or even do not believe
in an independent reality—a woman who is passive in bed is seen as acting out a
grudge. Of course, she has a grudge; we all do. You can always find one and she
will usually confess that she was indeed unwilling to respond sexually because
of a grudge. What could be more convincing? But this is not the cause of her
problem. It is her problem. If she is willing to give up sex for the
sake of a grudge, that has to mean it never was for her anyway. People
who feel that sex is for them simply never have the idea that by limiting it in
any way they are depriving someone else. So this woman’s problem is not that
she has a grudge, but that she has experienced sex as something she gives, not
something she gets.
What I find to be the most
painful consequence of paying no attention to sex itself is the widespread
notion that one cause of sex problems is fear of intimacy. This interpretation,
like many popular interpretations, spreads like a rumor—even though, if a
therapist gives it any thought, it should be obvious that sex is typically
non-intimate. As Dave sees it, fear of intimacy is what causes sex to be
non-intimate.
HOW ONE-SIDED INTIMACY
REINFORCES EQUATING SEX WITH FUNCTIONING
Dave has, correctly, claimed
me as an ally in trying to reach his objective of rescuing sex from the focus
on functioning. Although we are in agreement on this, and as yet few others are
on board (among the others are Lenore Tiefer and Stephen Levine—anyone else you
think should be added?), I think he inadvertently reinforces equating sex with
functioning.
No one would disagree with
the idea that sex is not just about functioning. It is an easy sentiment. But
in actual practice no one believes it. Take avoiding eye contact, along with
dimming the light and maybe having a drink. We are paying no attention to our
partner’s emotional impact on us. This is putting it mildly; we are in our
heads, trying to work up an erotic ego state.
Ironically,
Dave’s whole focus on avoiding the relationship in sex—self-soothing, holding
on to yourself emotionally—can only reinforce this same internal focus. This
helps explain why he is so uninterested in what goes in sex—so that he
recommends that the wife in bed with her husband the next morning should have been
totally uninterested in what actually happened and what her husband’s
experience actually was. His internal focus also explains his use of porn as a
resource, about which he has been quoted as a special pleader (this is from a Psychology
Today story, under the heading “When Porn Is Good for You,” Sept/Oct 2005):
Porn can actually help foster emotional and sexual
intimacy, says Colorado psychologist David Schnarch, author of Resurrecting
Sex, who runs a couples therapy practice with his wife. He explains: “A
significant portion of our work in helping couples develop a deeper sexual
connection is through erotic images. Erotica, as well as couples' own
masturbatory fantasies, can be useful tools for helping them develop as
adults.” How couples intensify their sexual relationship differs radically
depending on the individuals and on the dynamic between them. But fantasy is
certainly a part of a healthy sex life, and porn does contribute significantly
to the archive of sexy scenarios in our heads. It can also inspire couples to
experiment more.
To be fair, where
the writer uses the word “porn,” Dave when directly quoted uses “erotica.”
Erotica, being a softer-core version of hardcore, is presumably appealing to
women.
Since for Dave
maturity means not depending on your partner, fantasy obviously accomplishes
this, “helping them develop as adults.” However, the pornographic scenario
helps by enacting an extreme dependency on a fantasy partner. This is a partner
who loves and abjectly admires everything about you and who “validates,” shall
we say, your every wish. What this reveals is the way his therapy relies on
fantasy to satisfy the dependency he decries.
Most women can’t
imagine a man being that slavishly responsive to them. They are all too
aware of the male imperative.
It should not be
necessary to point out that porn is an escape from reality—not that this means
it is bad. We need all the escapes from reality that everyone and every society
develops. But to think that it simply augments reality, as Dave does, gets us
farther from the passion he prizes.
WHY WE CRAVE SEX
If you do notice how we act in sex it becomes obvious
that it is all about our dependencies—about craving a sense of union, a
merging. As I mentioned, the need is so strong we can easily experience intense
connection entirely on our own, the prototype for Scharch’s nonreciprocal
intimacy.
Watch how we act. We avoid
talking, except for sex talk—which is rightly called sex hype, being all
flattery, all positive strokes. We avoid anything that even hints at
dissatisfactions or that has any kind of edge to it. We like or love
everything, and if we don’t, we still do. What is going on here? It looks like
we are trying to create the feeling of intimacy, by avoiding the slightest implication
of any differences between us—in order to create the experience that
there is no distance between us.
The word for this is bypassing.
It refers to that paradoxical effort to connect with one another by avoiding
one another—shutting out what turns us off and focusing on what turns us on,
much as in our relationships generally we are drawn to what we love and ignore
what we hate. This includes our relationship with ourselves, just as in looking
in a mirror we automatically angle for the most favorable view. When not much
about our partner is exciting or is even tolerable, bypassing refers to
focusing narrowly on sensation and on imagery or fantasy.
Eye contact would distract us
from the feeling of intimacy we are deliberately or automatically trying to
generate. We duck eye contact as soon as we begin to kiss. As I suggested, it
is hard to do two things at once, both to focus on sensation and at the same
time to keep our facial expression adjusted properly.
Dave is scornful about the
field of sex therapy (scorn is a characteristic feature of his expository
style, even more than it is of mine), most particularly the reliance on bypassing. He argues that it only helps
people to avoid each other better, and here I fully agree. But he does not
consider what I call counterbypassing, that is, countering the natural tendency
to bypass and training people to cope with anxiety by confiding in the partner.
Dave does not attempt to
justify his objection to bypassing, despite his own reliance on the use of
fantasy and on self-soothing. What he does actually justify is bypassing. If he
did not so vigorously object to it I would never have suspected that he thought
his work was anything but mainstream sex therapy, albeit with his own way of
prosecuting its goals.
Suppose his focus were
external—on counterbypassing, rather than internal, on bypassing; on two-person
rather than one-person intimacy. It might look like this:
He proposes that his wife
join him in eyeballing. Remember she is reported as saying, “At first, I was
mad at him for even suggesting that this is something that people were supposed
to do.”
Let’s imagine that instead of
trying to get her to do it anyway, as by arguing that she’ll get more out of
sex if she did it, he asks her what about it makes her angry.
She: I guess because I don’t
know why you want me to do it. You’re not making me feel like it doing it.
You’re just making me feel like I should want to do it.
He: It’s not up to me to make
you feel like it.
She: That makes me feel like
saying okay, forget it. I guess what makes me angry is that you didn’t begin by
asking me how I would feel about it.
He: Okay, how would you feel
about it?
She: It seems like it would
feel kind of embarrassing, but also like I’m not supposed to feel embarrassed.
He: If you can get over that,
this will be whole new way for us to connect.
She: But this—what we’re
doing now—seems like the way to connect [and, let me add, may even be a new route
to eros].
[fadeout]
___________
Links [in order of mention]
“Staying
in Lust; How to Feel Infatuated Forever” article in Jan-Feb, 2006 issue of Psychology
Today.
"Joy
With Your Underwear Down" Psychology Today archive: July-Aug, 1994
"The
Search for Intimacy Inside the Sexual Crucible" from his Website
Note:
My
testimonial for The Sexual Crucible (1991) How come I wrote such a glowing
testimonial? I find Dave impressive programmatically, in that he says
things no one else says, either in 1991 or now, and he says them well—but it is
in the execution that we part company. As an example of how neatly he can put
his ideas, he points out that in focusing on sexual desire, sex therapists
think about your desire for sex rather than for your partner. He declares that
marriage is “a people growing machine.” On the question of when you are ready
for marriage, he says that “marriage prepares you for marriage.” None of these
pronouncements is entirely true, but they capture truths otherwise ignored.
They are engaging, like the title of his second book, Passionate Marriage.
And, most important, as I discuss above, he comes down hard on the way—now even
more than in 1991—sex is treated as if functioning is what it is all about. I
think the general supposition is that feeling follows function, even though
this reverses the actual causal sequence. Finally, what brings this all
together is that Dave talks about passion. No one else does. Nowadays it
has vanished from the scene, along with romance.
I noticed some of the
tendencies I fault him for here, but did not recognize how central they are to
his approach, partly because his first book is highly abstract, with few
sharp-edged case examples—nothing like those I quote from here. However, there
are clear examples in his second book, one of which I cite in a four-page
section that I devote to his approach in “What the Sex Therapies Tell us About
Sex” to illustrate the same points I make here. As it happens, in these same
four pages I contrast his approach with mine, using how we each approach
eyes-open orgasm as the illustration. If you would like to look at that, click here.
____________________________________
Endnote: If anyone has something to add to this, either to
contest any of it, or clarify it, or elaborate it in any way, email it and I
may append it to this file.