Why Everyone Really Does Need Therapy

I'll qualify that. Why Everyone Really Does Need Therapy if they have any intention at all to be in a committed, long-term relationship.

Leah, over at Accidentally Jewish tapped me for an e-zine interview and I threw out a few couples/family therapy zingers, the short list below. I learned the short list at the Center for Family Studies/Family Institute of Chicago in 1981. The school is now in Evanston, IL under the auspices of Northwestern University.

If you really want to be a therapy doc, you should go there for awhile. Although the short list, condensed, is a la Bill Pinsoff (probably) the commentary below is mine.

Anyway, the 'zine is called SHEBREW and I'll let you know when it's on-line. In any case, it's not fair to you to hold back, I feel. So we'll take this slow, starting with the last question Leah asked me. She asked me a whole lot of questions but I only answered three, kind of like how I am with email and comments on a bad day.

But since question 3 triggered bad dreams for me on Friday night we'll start there. (We'll get to dreams, it was surely too much good food.)

3. What should people do to prepare themselves for relationships?

Somehow get to know yourself. Get therapy maybe, for sure do that if you can, even if you just focus on this one issue and this alone: Your intimacy fears.

Couples in trouble all have intimacy issues. We all do. We all have some kind of weirdness that makes communication (read closeness) harder than it should be.

My short list of reasons people fear intimacy includes fear of rejection/abandonment, fear of exposure, fear of suffocation, fear of merger (losing our sense of self, identity).

These fears are under our very own radar, unconscious. But they're not just issues for the books or "head cases." Everyone has them. Yet it's hard to talk about something you don't necessarily know you have.

So in my world, you get therapy, you know yourself, then and only then are you going to be ready to deal with your own intimacy issues and ultimately, those of your partner's

Oh, you want to know how intimacy issues can mess with your relationship? Those fears I mentioned interfere with our ability to talk, to express what we want and need, to say things with sensitivity, to think less about ourselves and more about our partners. They interfere with empathy, our willingness to focus on our partner, to get into his or her shoes.

So they’re huge, okay? You can't ignore them. They don't go away over night no matter what you do. They just make you cuter is all, and all the more interesting to get to know.

Copyright 2007, TherapyDoc