DESCRIPTION:

The couple in this session have been happily married for 40 years. He’s been an attentive father and a loving husband. They’ve had a vibrant sex life, good marriage, a family and then the wife discovered that during those 40 years, her husband had been compulsively, serially unfaithful with one night stands and pay-for-play sex.

• The discovery was three years before their one-time 3-hour session with Esther Perel from which these segments are taken.
• Since the discovery, the husband been in therapy and is active in 12-step groups.
• The wife has chosen to stay but she is hurt, angry, confused and she endures shaming by friends and her children for staying. 
• They come to the session saying that they are stuck and do not see a way to move forward to reconnect and rebuild their marriage. 

OUTLINE:

What to listen for in the session. Notice how Perel moves slowly in the first parts of this session as she feels her way. Note also how she is disciplined about holding her own reactions in check. While there is much to react to in this story of serial affairs and the damage they caused, her initial work is to be open and curious. She says:

            If I stay anthropological not clinical, I am much better able to just listen

In this session, Perel calls upon many of the tools and approaches that characterize her work as discussed in Part 1.

• She moves between focusing on the husband, then on the wife—essentially doing individual work with the other partner present.
• She moves from the intra-personal to interpersonal.
• She is in the moment observing voice, body language, facial expression, patterns of interaction and how they react to each other.
• She uses interventions and then observes how the system reacts to get information.
• To create forward movement, she puts out storylines and asks partners to correct the statement and “say it in their own words.”
• She accepts the couple’s choices and frameworks.
• She uses her signature “say more” strategy to create space for detail, revelation and the intimate meaning behind a statement.
• She is not afraid to interrupt, redefine and be directive (firmly, nicely).
• She is disciplined about not over-engaging in background or conflicts.
• Her session goal is to work toward a moment where the partners can experience each other in a new way—leaving the session with hope, a sense of possibility and the beginning of a new story.

In the first segment, the couple tells their story and Perel listens, asks for “more” and does not react even when they disagree about whether his behavior is a compulsion or an addiction. As she says in the analysis, Perel initially felt the need for two things:

• to understand what the event—the husband’s serial infidelity—represented to each of them

• to give dignity to the wife’s decision to stay in the marriage—especially in the face of the shaming she experienced from friends and family for that choice

She confirms that she is going slowly, feeling her way. Because this is a one-time three-hour session, Perel is looking for an intervention that can make a difference, helping this couple leave with a different narrative than the one they came into the session with.  

In the second segment of the session, Perel focuses on the husband. He talks about his commitment to being a good husband and a good father and how he learned what not to do from his father. Perel’s use of “say more” allows him to expand and go deeper into his story, in his own words, with his own focus. That gives her insights into the deeper, intimate meaning of his story and ideas about where she might go with him to facilitate a new dynamic for the couple. 

In the analysis, Perel explains that, while he was talking, she was holding several things in her awareness:

• the swing between the grandiosity of his secret parallel life and the toxic shame and self-pity he feels now
• the facts that an abusive father, a victim mother and a sensitive boy’s adaptations is not surprising
• that his lifelong mantra and guiding principle has been: I will not be that guy (the father) and it reinforced the compartmentalization
• the need to dignify his good father, good husband parts, so she has something to work with as the session moved forward

Perel and Simon also discuss how there is much in this session that could be triggering. Perel asserts the need for the therapist not to be reactive but remain open, invite more and listen. Perel shares how she maintains this openness by taking an anthropological, not a clinical, stance.

Perel says she was clear at this point that she would address his toxic shame and self-pity as part of her work because they posed a real block to the healing in this marriage. She observes:

When someone is caught in shame they cannot access the guilt, which is connected to conscience. And it’s that guilt that lets him feel the responsibility for what he did and to speak from that place.

The segment ends with Perel challenging the husband around shame which he suggests is part of his new healing experience. Perel is firm with him: It’s not a new thing. It was there before…You made sure never to feel it.

In the third segment, Perel focuses on the wife and articulates a question that must be answered if she is to move forward. 

Does the fact that her husband has been unfaithful to her for their entire marriage invalidate everything that has been good between them for the last 40 years?...

Perel highlights the importance of the question—and the answer.

• Perel is dramatic—adding a detailed list of events, outing, celebrations that were good between the husband and wife and in their family life
• Perel asks the question rhetorically and then resolves it with this answer:

….does it change everything or does it have to find its own place?…because what you believed is true AND there was also another reality….This AND that.

Before moving on, Perel checks to make sure the wife is open to the fact that both realities are true—that one does not cancel out the other. She does.

In the analysis, Perel explains why establishing both realities as true is critical:

The wife had a very coherent narrative for 40 years and then it was shattered. Now she not only doubts her husband, she doubts herself because her story, her history, what she knew— no longer made sense.

Perel continues, observing that the wife’s ability to say that her husband had demons and that what he did had nothing to do with her or their life together—is as much for herself as for him.

Her need to have some thread of compassion for him, to see some dignity in him is also for her—so she can have some dignity in staying and begin to write a new story for herself.

Finally, Perel observes that she was still moving slowly in the session, looking for the intervention that could get this couple unstuck and dignify the wife’s choice to stay.

The fourth segment of the session begins when the husband, speaking out of his relatively new understanding of himself and his behavior, says of his wife:

I would say that during the last four to six weeks, she’s finally started  to see my side of the story.

This was a key moment, Perel said, because she knew what she wanted to accomplish with the husband in order to help the couple move forward and the marriage to heal. He needs to learn to step outside of himself.

From that point, she observes, she was clear about how the session needed to unfold and so she began on a path that that would include:

• educating him about the impact of his self-absorption
• introducing him to the magnitude of his wife’s pain in the wake of his betrayal
• defining his role in healing the marriage as going well beyond his own personal healing
• coaching him in how to be present with his wife in her pain as she rebuilds her life with him
• alerting him to the fact that being present in this way is hard work
•  

“The question of trust is completely premature.” Perel’s words mark another important moment in this segment. With them, she firmly stops a debate that has gone on between the partners about whether she can trust him not to do this again. This moment also provides an opening for reframing the issue of trust. Perel goes on to

• make the point that the husband cannot promise he will never stray again
• deconstruct trust—trust for what?. You trust him to do some things…
• give the wife permission not to trust her husband right now
• affirm the wife’s right to be angry now

Again, Perel puts forward a storyline— what the wife really wants is to trust that her husband will be present with her in her hurt, shame, anger and love as she rebuilds her life staying with him As the segment ends, both the husband and wife agree with that proposition.

In the analysis, Perel and Simon expand on the subject of trust and betrayal. Perel introduces the concept of “primary naiveté” explaining that once that is destroyed, there’s no going back. Trust becomes more cautious, more qualified and more mature. And while it’s possible to achieve a place of “secondary naiveté” over time, it’s achieved by trusting with eyes open.

In the fifth segment, Perel returns to focus on the husband and begins the process of educating, challenging and laying the foundation for coaching him.

She interrupts a complaint by taking his word “honesty” and re-focusing it—away from him and onto his wife’s experience. …this is a different story of honesty. Perel explains that he must deal with the fact that the level of compartmentalization he has lived with his whole life is inconceivable to his wife and that she now lives with the question: Who was I with?

In the sixth segment, Perel is laser-focused on the stuckness. The wife confirms that her husband talks much more about what happened to him than what happened to her. I’m sensing that, Perel says. That is off-balance.

And she firmly cuts him off when he moves back into justification, explaining, focusing on self. She asks him to listen to what his wife says and to repeat it so they are sure he heard her. Again she nterrupts him when he “buts” or digresses into too much self-talk.

When he mentions his wife’s anger, she redirects again. While acknowledging how important it is to be on his own healing trajectory and experiencing himself as whole for the first time in his life, Perel makes the following points:

• your focus was all about you back then and it’s still all about you now
• it’s time to step outside yourself because your infidelity is two things—what it was for you AND what it did to her
• you are responsible for the pain and shame she is struggling with and you can only acknowledge that from the place of responsibility, not shame
• it is up to you to act first—ask her every day how she is, listen to her answer, notice when she looks sad, comfort her.

Then Perel makes a promise to him—If you can attend to her primary concern (the pain and shame), you will create the space for her to attend to your trajectory (healing and wholeness).

Perel explains that his work right now, if he wants to heal this marriage, is to be present with his wife in the anger, pain and shame that he caused.

He tries and practices with help from Perel, who suggests at one point that he try being present to her with the one thing that’s always been good between them—touch. Then he reaches for her and both start to cry holding each other. Touch. Don’t talk, Perel repeats as they experience this moment of hope and real connection that she has been moving them toward in this session.

OBJECTIVES:

Assess the difference between shame and guilt and describe how each affects a person as well as the couple or family system.

Articulate the long-term traumatic effects of the childhood dynamic known as “the unholy triangle” comprised of 1) a violent, abusive father 2) a victimized wounded mother, and 3) a sensitive boy caught in between them.