Giving and receiving revisited
In a previous post I reflected on some everyday experiences of giving and receiving. It is possible to become quite imbalanced within this complementary pair of activities, and to miss out on the pleasures of receiving as a dogged giver, or, on the other hand, to overlook the pleasures of giving as a chronic receiver.
One can think of a successful act of giving, among other things, as solving the puzzle of another person’s desire, if only for a moment. To be able to graciously receive something, in turn, one must feel full enough to be able to need something from another.
I mentioned in that earlier article the role of practicing giving and receiving in a standard form of sex therapy called Sensate Focus. As I have been doing more and more general couples therapy over the last few years, especially during the COVID pandemic, the principle of balancing giving and receiving has solidified for me to become really one of the cornerstones of my couples therapy practice.
In order to get much out of a couples therapy, it has been my experience that both members need to want to get something more out of the relationship than they are currently getting. They also need to be able to imagine giving something in order to make that possible (and this is where a lot of the work of the therapy may be focused).
Where one or more members claims to be completely satisfied and desire nothing more than, for example, ‘their partner’s happiness,’ a therapy tends to fizzle out pretty quickly. Without wanting to get something as a motivation, there is also little motivation to give.
It is sometimes possible to articulate dimensions in a couple’s typical ways of interacting with each other, from discussion of their arguments and difficulties, as well as from simply asking them what they want. For example, one person (A) may value order and fear chaos, wanting to get more of the former from their partner and correspondingly less of the latter. Their partner (B) may desire more warmth and less criticism, for their part. So, one can map out briefly what each might want to be giving and getting (amongst many other things of course). Note that the diagonals are identical:
— — Give — —Get
A —Warmth — Order
B — Order — — Warmth
These abstract dimensions need then to be operationalized, as we say, or turned into specific concrete actions, tailored for each couple, such as: offering verbal appreciation or gratitude at least once per day (more warmth), cleaning as you cook (more order), fully delegating a task without comment or correction (less criticism), putting all of one’s clothes in the laundry instead of strewing them at random across the room (less chaos).
This can all sound a bit transactional or trite at first, but, as my previous piece on this subject argues, the goal is reach a very intimate kind of relating, which sums to far more than these exercises in getting and giving worked on in the therapy. There are deeper kinds of connection and intimacy that couples can lose at phases in their relationship, or perhaps have never achieved, which may be found or refound through this kind of practice.
This has certainly been far more successful for me as a method in couples therapy than following along with the natural tendency of many couples seeking help, which is to try to explain carefully to me how reasonable they are being in their needs and wants and manner of relating, and how unreasonable their partner, with the wish that I will then somehow be able to persuade the other to change, and vice versa. This never works. If it did, it would have done so already. (If your couples therapy looks like this, you may have gotten stuck.)
What does seem to have a much better chance of improving a relationship is seeing if a couple can actually experience finding and meeting each other’s needs over successive variations of this kind of practice. We then troubleshoot and revise as we go, within the context of the couples therapy as a structure for the powerful desires and fears that are at stake. I usually suggest starting with some easy things in order to learn the method and build confidence, before tackling the really momentous issues that may even threaten the relationship as a whole.
(Please clap, comment, and share!)
