Couples often use at least two different but related strategies to discombobulate each other . The first is mostly unconscious, the second not necessarily. The first one occurs when couples take turns colluding to undermine each other’s sense of well being. The other occurs when they undermine each other’s perception of reality; I call this gaslighting (from the classic movie of the 1940’s entitled, “Gaslight”).
For example, here is an example of the first instance. Karen and Alan, an upper middle class couple, have been married for many years. Both are accomplished professionals but Karen leads a sort of double life; at home, she lives the life of a child. Although, she earns a good income from her business, she turns it over to Alan who controls how she spends it. I said that she leads sort of a double life because she has a secret stash. She spends money on herself but lives in fear that Alan will find out. This is the collusion. She uses him to keep herself in the fixed position of a little girl that must ask daddy’s permission to buy things. She greatly resents him for this but is either unwilling or unable to stand up to him and have a honest discussion about her need for autonomy. She fears creating this type of healthy emotional separation lest he will be angry with her. Money is always symbolic. In this instance, a threatened man needs to control a child-like woman to bolster his low self-esteem. She colludes with him and gets taken care of but at the high cost of her self-respect.
Couples play out an unconscious game where the partners are polarized into rigid dichotomous roles like the spendthrift and the miser, the hysteric and the stoic, the beauty and the beast and so on. In the profession, this is called projective identification; it means that partners play out the disowned and denied side of their mate. For example, the spendthrift never has to acknowledge the need to save, the miser denies the need to spend. In the couple therapy, if one partner accuses the other of being over-sensitive. I say that they are under-sensitive and that they don’t have to experience the full intensity of the feelings because their mate acts out all the feelings for the both of them.
